What have they done to our Ledger?

Slug for the Ledger's 'The Auditor' column.
What has happened to it?

In putting up CLIPS, links to online stories of interest to Plainfielders, I don't just rely on the website versions, but check over the print editions to point readers to stuff that doesn't always see the light of pixels, as in two items from today's print editions not online (a FOSH story in the Ledger, and a Literacy Volunteers of UC item in the Courier).

When I pulled apart the Ledger, it seemed that the 'Perpectives' section was missing. That's the Sunday section with the editorials, OpEds and regular columnists The Auditor, Paul Mulshine, Fran Wood and (occasionally) John Farmer, as well as the long-running conversation between former governors Tom Kean and Brendan Byrne.

Yup. It was missing.

And online, the front-page lead story about a failed -- and costly -- housing project in Newark was nowhere to be found. And there were NO stories from any of the county bureaus, though they appeared in the print edition.

To my surprise, the editorials popped up on page 2 of the 'New Jersey' print section, in the regular weekday slot. With an OpEd and Fran Wood on the opposite page. No Auditor column.

What is going on?

In the far right bottom corner of page 3, I spotted the following notice, under the spot illustration used for 'The Auditor' --

To our readers

The Auditor appears today on page 18.

Letters to the editor, which appear under the heading Reader Forum, will run Monday through Saturday on the editorial page, and may be found here (evidently OpEd's) and here (letters).

Paul Mulshine's column will rotate on Sundays with Fran Wood's column.

The Byrne-Kean Dialogue, which used to appear every other Sunday, will now appear every other Monday on the op-ed page.

What is going on? Did I miss some important -- but tiny -- previous notice? Perhaps.

But this probably goes hand-in-hand with other changes at newspapers of which the Ledger is only the largest local incarnation. (By the way, the book reviews seem to have been moved to the 'Sunday' section, where they appear in a decidedly LITE form.)

Is the dispersal of the 'Perspectives' section to the four winds another sign of cost control?

There is plenty of talk about costs at both local papers, including constant staff turnover, increased reliance on AP feeds instead of reporters on the ground, and tinkering with layouts and page placement.

The real story is that advertising revenue at both Gannett (parent of the Courier) and Advance (which publishes the Ledger) continues its downward spiral.

At least it seems that we can now find letters to the editor online (something that always stumped me in the past; you may want to bookmark the links above).

Progress?

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-- Dan Damon

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