TODAY'S PD - SKIMPY ON NEWS; HEAVY ON SPORTS

Today’s Plain Dealer is very instructive.

The Metro pages have little news in six pages.
Ironically, the major metro page ad is from bad boy Auditor Frank Russo. It is a listing of delinquent personal property taxes – smaller than usual since the tax is being eliminated. Even so, the Russo ad takes up the entire second page and four inches across Page 6, which is dominated by the weather report, not news.

Then paid obituary notices eat up two full pages and a bit more.
The front Metro page is dominated – not by hard news - but by a sports story out of Avon.
So local news space is really scarce today.
The business pages total six with only a single ad of four columns, 12 inches in length.

But then we go to the sport section. Ten pages! More than any other section.

There is almost no advertising in the 10 pages - only four one inch ads and one inch and a half advertisement. So five and a half inches of advertising supports 10 pages of sports “news.”

Worse, Page one is dominated by a four column, 9-inch photo of the new Browns coach, Eric Mangini. The entire Mangini article is four columns wide by 15 inches deep.

That’s called keeping the community informed. What, of free-loading sports, the narcotic to keep people from thinking too much about the state of their being?
Newspapers are committing suicide by failing to give news.

Two days ago, the PD, in its article on trying to parcel out its property, did cite the number of newsroom employees – 240, down from 372, a 35 percent decline in recent times.

Are they mostly sports reporters?