Billy Joel wrote a song that starts, "Don't go changing, to try and please me." I guess that sentiment applies to newspaper readers in many ways, at least if recent experience in any indicator.
A few months ago, I wrote that we were planning to drop the comic strip "Peanuts" because its author was long dead and all the strips were now reruns. I asked for ideas on what we should pick up in its place. Far and away, the most popular choice was .... "Peanuts." (Usually, the answer was somewhat longer, something along the lines of "Don't drop Peanuts, you knucklehead, unless you want me to cancel my subscription.") So "Peanuts" remains for the time-being.
My next venture into no-man's land (which I belatedly recalled is filled with land mines) came with our daily bridge column. It has long been rumored in the newsroom that the loyal readers of the bridge column are diminishing in direct proportion to the number of obituaries appearing elsewhere in the paper. Occasionally, we'll see a reference in an obituary to the deceased as an avid bridge player and wonder if we had just lost our last bridge column reader.
Well, apparently there are quite a few more than that and they are alive and kicking. In fact, some of them wanted to kick me during the past week, when we stopped running the bridge column. I got a flurry of e-mails and voice-mails that my bid had come up several tricks short (that's bridge talk, I think).
Some asked why we would drop the bridge column with no notice. The truth is, it's the best way to test the value of something you run. If nobody calls, it stays dropped. If a bunch of unhappy readers call, it gets "un-dropped." The bridge players called, so the bridge column is back.
A newspaper is many different things to many different people. Trying to figure out what all those different things are is the challenge.
