D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
April
2008
Your Opinion, Please
Our annual reader survey.
This issue — the fifth anniversary of our taking the reins of Desert Exposure — contains our annual reader survey. Every year since we've been at the helm of Desert Exposure, we've asked you, our readers, to help us make "the biggest little paper in the Southwest" the very best it can be. What do you most enjoy in our pages? What elements each month are just a waste of ink and newsprint, as far as you're concerned?
We also like to know a little about your relationship with Desert Exposure. (It may sound silly to outsiders to talk about a "relationship" with a mere publication, but not if you know how fiercely loyal Desert Exposure readers are.) How much time do you spend with each issue? Do you share your copy with others or hog it all to yourself? Either way, we're OK with it — we even know couples who pick up two copies, so they can read Desert Exposure simultaneously and no one has to wait (or, worse, have the other person reading aloud all the best jokes from Desert Diary).
Every year, too, we try to get a sense of where Desert Exposure fits within readers' media universe. One year we asked about radio-listening preferences, which led us to the discovery that Desert Exposure readers don't listen to the radio much — with the notable exception of public-radio station KRWG-FM. Learning how much our audiences synchronize led to our annual "Summer Fling" with our friends at KRWG-FM, bringing those folks to Silver City to meet listeners/readers here.
This year, as usual, we ask about what other print publications you regularly read. It's not just that we compete with some of these periodicals for advertising dollars; it's also useful for us to know where else you're getting information — or not — so we aren't merely duplicating what you're getting elsewhere.
Readers' favorite part of each year's survey seems to be the opportunity to "rate" our regular columns and recurring departments. In addition to asking how often you read each of these standbys, we also have a question probing what else you'd like to see in future issues.
And new this year is a question about how long you've lived in what we like to think of as "Desert Exposure country." In watching folks snap up each new issue, we've been struck by the wide range of readership Desert Exposure appears to enjoy. It doesn't look as if our readers are only new arrivals, their worldly goods barely out of boxes, or just long-time residents who remember when the Grinder Mill spot on College Avenue was the Ranchburger. But we thought it would be interesting to see more exactly how our readership breaks out in terms of regional longevity. (With all the changes around here in recent years, we admit that — at five years and counting — we're starting to feel like old-timers ourselves!)
Whichever boxes you check, we hope you'll once again take a moment to share your thoughts and a bit about that "relationship" with Desert Exposure. We promise to use your responses to make a good thing even better.
We even have a solution for those of you who save your issues (and we know from past surveys that this is a significant fraction of readers) and would rather not clip out the form on page A7: Fill out the survey online. It's fast, it saves a postage stamp, and it's much easier for us to compile the results. Simply go to our survey page and tell us what you think, in a flash.
The Daily Press Skinny
The printing presses in Silver City go silent.
A funny little bit of publishing-industry "inside baseball" went on as our last issue was going to press. It all started when we noticed that the Silver City Daily Press, like many daily newspapers including such titans as the Wall Street Journal, had reduced its "trim size." Suddenly, on Feb. 11, the Daily Press that our carrier so efficiently rockets onto our doorstep (if the Diamondbacks need another pitcher. . .) unrolled to an inch narrower width.
What struck us as odd was not this cost-saving move, all too common in the economically hard-pressed daily newspaper business, but the absence of any announcement about it to readers. Maybe, being in publishing ourselves, we were the only ones who noticed — or cared. But it made us curious, and led to Business Exposure columnist Donna Clayton Lawder looking into the "shrinkage" for an item in her popular column.
Soon, however, her reporting uncovered a much more significant change than just shaving an inch of newsprint. As we broke the story in last issue's Business Exposure column, the size change was the result of the Daily Press outsourcing its printing from its own building and presses in Silver City to Signature Offset in Las Cruces (which also prints Desert Exposure). The family-owned daily, part of the community for almost 73 years, will no longer be printing its own pages.
The "inside baseball" bit (as a former boss of ours used to call stories that probably don't interest anybody but insiders) apparently sprang from Donna's phone calls to Tina Ely, publisher of the Daily Press, trying to confirm the news and ascertain any effect on jobs at the paper. Ely never returned Donna's calls, as we noted in our little scoop.
Suddenly, however, 18 days after making this significant change, the Daily Press decided to announce the move to its own readers — in a front-page story, with a color photo, on Feb. 29. We can guess what prompted this revelation.
Happily for us — and here we're getting really "inside baseball" — our March issue began reaching readers on the morning of Feb. 29, a couple of hours before the Daily Press' own announcement. When you run a monthly instead of a daily, you don't get to claim many scoops — even small ones — so we hope Ely and her hardworking staff don't begrudge us this tiny one!
The truth is, we wish nothing but the best for the Daily Press as it battles to remain one of fewer than 600 family-owned, truly independent daily newspapers in America. We hope that, as the paper assured readers in that page-one story, this move signifies nothing beyond a more cost-effective, better-quality way of printing the news. (Having once worked on an afternoon newspaper, though, the thought of the Daily Press deadline now being 10 a.m. makes us want to reach for the aspirin.) The last thing we'd want to see is the Daily Press joining the Albuquerque Tribune in publishing its own obituary one of these days, or being gobbled up by a newspaper chain more interested in profits than publishing great journalism.
The Daily Press has gone head-to-head with the deeper-pocketed Sun-News, when the easy route would have been to sell. The people of Grant County benefit by having not one but two daily newspapers — surely one of the smallest markets in the nation that can still make that claim. It's a good, old-fashioned "newspaper war" we hope never ends in a truce or surrender.
We're just glad that, once a month, this busy media marketplace also makes room for Desert Exposure.