Press Talk: It’s a crazy struggle out there

Cleaning up that in-basket:

I look at our “stop” list from circulation every month. In this business we always have readers stopping and starting the paper.

It’s called churn.

If we could figure out how to stop the stops, by extension the starts would build our circulation.

But stopping stops is no easy task. So we look at the reasons our readers are stopping and hope to learn from them.

Some make very good points that we try to correct. Others make points that we feel are more perception than reality.

And finally we have the marginally strange reasons.

Here are a few from the “close to out of this world” category:

* L.M. simply writes “We are a socialist pig.” Yikes!

Of course we’re no such thing. At least not the socialist part. But I wonder when socialism got such a bad name. Socialism, of course, is many things, but it includes some sense of economic equality. You think those big-shot CEOs are making too much money? You think us working stiffs should get a bigger piece of the pie? More … economic … equality?

See.

So give us another try, L.M. I’ll make my famous pulled pork and we’ll break bread.

* L.J. dropped us because we printed a review of Bravo! Vancouver’s “Messiah.” Well not exactly. Above the review — and not connected to it — was a photo of President-elect Barack Obama wearing a powder-blue tie. It was what we call a “tease” to a story inside the Life Section about how powder-blue might be the new red “power” tie.

But L.J. somehow put the two together and felt we were suggesting Obama was the Messiah.

I tried calling L.J., and left a message, but she never returned my call.

Now Obama can be called many things (and we’ve heard most of them) but “Messiah” is not in the cards. Well, if he creates a college football playoff, let’s discuss again.

Lord help us.

* S.F. said no to us because we endorsed Obama for president. This kind of thing is an annual occurrence for all newspapers that do political endorsements. Sad but true.

* Right next to the S.F. stop was the K.R. stop. Why? Well, in 2004 we endorsed George W. Bush for president, and I guess he felt it was finally time to react.

So we have one stop for our Obama endorsement and then one stop for our Bush endorsement from almost five years ago!

And you wonder why the newspaper business is tough.

As mentioned, we have many residents who also start the newspaper and that mostly makes up for these stops. And every start helps.

Dean Thompson, a buddy of mine in Chicago, shipped me this e-mail a few days ago:

“A friend just lost his job as a sports reporter at the Daily Herald and said the Sun-Times is about to fold. Have you heard anything? I gots ta have my paper in da morning.”

I told Dean if we had more folks like him out there we wouldn’t have many of the issues that newspapers are dealing with.

The Daily Herald is a Chicago-area newspaper and the Sun-Times is one of two major Chicago newspapers.

Like most newspapers, the Sun-Times is struggling but it has an additional problem in that it’s the second newspaper in a two-newspaper city. So it will struggle more than others.

Look, think positive, be supportive and we’ll all get through this mess.

Lou Brancaccio is The Columbian’s editor. Reach him at 360-735-4505 or lou.brancaccio@columbian.com.