Dear Readers:
This piece represents a landmark, of sorts, Dr. Ink’s 300th column, and it arrives the same week that “Law & Order” celebrates its 300th episode. Almost 3,000 readers now receive Dr. Ink via e-mail, so the Good Doctor thanks you for reading and for offering your questions and insights.
In harmony with the numerology of the day, Dr. Ink offers these 30 ways to improve newspapers:
1. Run better photos, and run them bigger.
2. Run one feature obit per day, on an ordinary person.
3. Reserve a corner of a page, each day, for one terrific news feature, 300 words or less.
4. On Saturdays, scrap the op-ed page, and replace it with pieces written by readers.
5. Run one Q & A feature each day, in a predictable place.
6. Produce a one-page pull-out each day that is both a microcosm and an index of the rest of the paper. Consider providing these pages free to people who do not get the paper.
7. On stories of civic interest, use the second person (“you”), as in “Here’s what you need to know about this budget meeting.”
8. Once a week, write a story in which you ask readers what they think about an issue or controversy. Report back to them on what you find.
9. Republish in the paper the best responses you receive from your online readers.
10. Commit even more space to prep and recreational sports.
11. If a great feature appears in one section of the paper, promote it in the other sections.
12. On the most important story of the day, the writer and assigning editor should decide together where the jump should be. If possible, jump at a mini-cliffhanger.
13. Publish more short stories, and more long ones.
14. On Sunday, publish a classic essay (e.g. by E. B. White) or a famous piece of journalism or nonfiction.
15. Restore the serial, including the serialization of condensed versions of important books.
16. Run more photo essays with literary captions.
17. Create a “notes column” for local schools, with dozens of names mentioned each week for posting on the refrigerator.
18. Publish one short, off-beat editorial each day that is not about government or politics.
19. Publish a shorter version of the Sunday newspaper without advertisements that costs three times as much as the regular paper.
20. Have your hottest columnists read versions of the story aloud for your website, a la Books on Tape.
21. Give medical coverage a hard-core consumer edge, including critiques of doctors and their offices.
22. Get more sex into the paper.
23. Get more spirituality into the paper.
24. Make the paper a cornucopia of blurbs and sub-headlines.
25. Be plentiful with great informational graphics, especially on explanatory stories.
26. Occasionally increase the typeface on a story of special interest.
27. Cut a deal with the local Starbucks to imprint the association between coffee drinking and newspaper reading.
28. Promote the newspaper on television by promoting the journalists who cover the news, and by promoting the best work they create.
29. Establish book clubs with links to the newspaper.
30. Include one story a day that makes Dr. Ink laugh.
[ Share your thoughts with Dr. Ink on the occasion of his 300th column. ]
