First Draft by Tim Porter

Re-Patrioting the Patriot

Earlier this year I wrote about an experiment by the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Penn., to attract new readers by publishing both a traditional broadsheet and a newer tabloid, named The Patriot. [Read: Working at Change: How One Newspaper Created a New ‘Compact’ with Readers.]

The Patriot is no more. Publisher John Kirkpatrick announced the tab's demise last week, saying that "While many people did like the compact format, it didn't catch on the way we had hoped."

Too bad -- because I still like the way Kirkpatrick described how the paper came to launch the Patriot:

“So, how did we do it? It was easy. We came up with an idea. We ignored the common sense which called it impossible. We ran smack into a million operational issues that seemed intractable. We met as a paper and decided to suspend all sense of limitation. We solved every problem. We practiced a few times. Then we produced The Patriot.”

Some experiments succeed, some fail. It's the doing, the working at change, that's important.

(Via EditorsWeblog, from Newsdesigner.)

Tags: Journalism, Newspapers, Media

Posted by Tim Porter at October 3, 2005 09:02 AM