Free Republic

VIDEOWho out there would actually pay $4.50 for the weekday edition of a newspaper consisting of only 26 pages total? That is an even bigger mystery than how newspapers think they can get away with charging that much for their ultra-thin newspapers. Oh, and I would love to know the TRUE circulation numbers of the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. I've seen the "official" circulation figure and no way does the real circulation come close to what they are pretending for the benefit of the few advertisers they have left.

VIDEOI really haven't paid much attention to print edition newspapers for years but today when I went into a Walgreens I decided to take a quick look at the lone newspaper I saw on the rack and was SHOCKED by what I saw. Is this also the situation with your local newspaper? Are they as THIN and EXPENSIVE as the Sun-Sentinel? Let me know in your comments.

By Mr. Curmudgeon:Denial is not a river in Egypt. That in effect is the theme of the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel's Friday editorial endorsement of Mitt Romney for president. "When President Obama came into office in 2009, the economy was in freefall and though untested, he inspired us with promise of hope and change. Now, four years later, we have little reason to believe he can turn things around," said the Sentinel."... Rather than articulate a compelling vision for growth," continued the Sentinel, "the president falls back on the tired talking point of increasing taxes for the wealthy ... it's...

It's time once again to play America's favorite political game...Name That Party! This time the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel really had me stumped. It was their story about a former Broward (county) Teachers Union president who was arrested for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in union funds. What kept me scratching my head was that the Sun-Sentinel reporters wrote that some of the funds went to political campaigns but made no mention of the political party of the recipients. Here is the lead of the story that offered no real clues as to the political party:

Leave it to right-wing think tanks to tell the world that teachers are overpaid. Right wingers hate unions and they hate paying public employees, so keep that in mind as you try to digest recent surveys from The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation that say teachers just make too much money.

Holy Mackerel! This might come as a big shock mainly to people who live in South Florida but the Miami Herald Circulation has now dropped BELOW that of the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Here are the facts from a couple of reports:MIAMI HERALDThe Miami Herald has a average weekday combined circulation of 173,555, with Sunday circulation of 217,163. El Nuevo Herald has a combined circulation of 57,743 daily and 72,504 daily. ABC changed its reporting rules, replacing “total paid circulation” with “total average circulation,” which consists of a publication’s paid and verified print and digital circulation. Due to the change, ABC...

There is currently a huge corruption scandal involving public officials in Broward County Florida that is being investigated by the FBI. The local Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel newspaper, which has been dragging its feet until recently on reporting this scandal, has finally gotten around to criticizing someone involved in the scandal investigation...the informant who helped break the case. I kid you not. First let us look at the background on the Sun-Sentinel's reluctance to do what it is supposed to do, namely investigating local scandals. The reporter who has actually been writing about the breaking scandals in depth for weeks doesn't...

Your humble correspondent has frequently pointed out how incredibly dull his hometown newspaper, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, has become. Well, it appears that the online Sun-Sentinel is now desperately trying to counteract its dull and stuffy image by going overboard in publishing cheesecake photos. Specifically cheesecake photos of Hollywood actress Megan Fox. In the current Sun-Sentinel edition, Megan Fox photos are featured not just once, but twice on the front page. Just click on the picture links of Megan Fox on the front page and you are presented with a grand total of 72 photos of the heavily tattooed actress....

My first piece of advice to any editor who wishes to reassure his newspaper readers that things are going to improve at his newspaper is to not accompany such an article with the grim visage of a mortician as you can see in this photo of Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel editor, Earl Maucker. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence in his newspaper. And the words of Maucker, while trying to sound upbeat, are at odds with the reality of a newspaper which has shrunk to a shell of it's former self. Typically the the front section of the Sun-Sentinel weekday newspaper is...

This is a soap opera that is currently being played out in similar form at many newspapers around the country as they face imminent collapse. In this case, the melodrama is being played out at the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel but it could be happening at any of a number of newspapers. The departure of an employee, in this case one Pat Thompson who was the Deputy Managing Editor, along with a reshuffling of the personnel. This announcement, which was published in Bob Norman's The Pulp of the Broward-Palm Beach New Times, was described by him as "a heavily bureaucratic reshuffling...

Someone really needs to inform Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel editor Earl Maucker that newspapers nowadays are in the business of delivering information, not just print. We just saw an excellent example of why print needs to be supplemented by video, especially if the latter is necessary to convey the feeling of the event covered. This was illustrated by the incredibly lame coverage the Sun-Sentinel gave to a very intense pro-Hamas demonstration on Tuesday in downtown Fort Lauderdale. As a resident of this area, such demonstrations seem to be rather disconcerting since this seems to be something that usually happens in other...

Hmm... Since your humble correspondent was the first to coin the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel Dueling Columnists with the highly accurate monicker of "Dulling Columnists," perhaps I would be justified in charging a royalty payment from Daily Pulp writer, John de Groot, for titling his recent column, "Dulling Columnists Score Major Snore." Here is what I wrote about the Dulling Columnists, Stephen Goldstein and Kingsley Guy, on the Ides of March: ...I do have a couple of solid suggestions for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. First you might want to consider ditching the incredibly boring "Blob." Secondly get rid of the equally...

If you are wondering why the stories in your local newspapers are starting to look so similar to other newspapers, it might be because they are following the new business model of South Florida newspapers: eliminating competition. All the major South Florida newspapers, Miami Herald, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel (now called SunSentinel), and Palm Beach Post have had big staff cutbacks recently. So who is left to cover the news? The skeleton crews still working at the newspapers don't have the capability so they came up with a solution: pool their resources and share their stories. A story in Friday's Sun-Sentinel,...

The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel yesterday bid farewell to their managing editor, Sharon Rosenhause, along with the very position of managing editor itself. One can only hope that the Sun-Sentinel will also abolish the unofficial post of "diversity queen" by which Rosenhause was also known. Many newspapers have a "diversity queen" which almost always means diversity of ethnicity or gender but not diverse opinions. Although Gregory Lewis in his Sun-Sentinel blog enthusiastically gushed that the departing Rosenhause was "the Queen of Newspaper Diversity," the comments on Bob Norman's Broward-Palm Beach New Times Daily Pulp reveal a rather bleak opinion about her...

It's pitiful to read the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. You are so pro-Obama that it is sickening. No such thing as an impartial paper.

Imagine if a comedy script is submitted to a movie producer. It would be about a major newspaper conglomerate so desperate to turn around the plunging circulation numbers of its various newspapers that it hires a wacky radio consultant as a Chief Innovation Officer to help turn it around. The radio consultant is so strange that he believes the way to improve the circulation numbers is to ensure that the newspapers have soul. He plans to do this by treating newspapers as the new rock 'n' roll.  The wacky Chief Innovation Officer announces his plans in a seemingly endless  e-mail message that wanders aimlessly for 5...

In yet another example of how the dinosaur media is completely unable to cope with the new web technology, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel's editorial blog (or "blob" as editor Earl Maucker described it accurately last summer via a typo), The Slant, continues to generate almost no interest from the readers. Out of 21 entries posted to The Slant from January 16 through February 28, only three comments were left by readers. Something of an underwhelming response. Of course, it might have helped if the Sun-Sentinel actually provided a direct link to The Slant "Blob" from its opening page. Here is how the...

In what seems to be an almost comical pattern among South Florida newspapers, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel has once again failed to apply the political party label to disgraced and imprisoned former Broward county sheriff Ken Jenne. Can you guess the political party to which Jenne belongs? I'll give you a hint. It is the big D. If Jenne had been a Republican, you can bet this fact would have been made known in the first paragraph of the Sun-Sentinel story yesterday about the former sheriff, convicted on corruption charges, being transferred to a more comfy prison. One feels like the late great...

With many newspapers in a state of free-fall as far as their readership numbers go, it is interesting as well as entertaining to watch how they attempt to combat that situation. In the case of some such as my hometown newspaper, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the effort to adjust to the new realities of the Web is both awkward as well as laughable. As I pointed out in an earlier NewsBusters blog, the Sun-Sentinel came up with the idea of a "blob" called "The Slant." Here is a description of this "exciting" new feature by editor Earl Maucker: To take...