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Tuesday January 09, 2007 | Parade Magazine vs USA Weekend | Entertainment |
My local newspaper, The San Jose Mercury News, recently removed Parade Magazine from the Sunday line up and replaced it with USA Weekend. Never has the expression "you don't appreciate something until it's gone" been more true. Parade was never the greatest newspaper insert, but USA Weekend was pure fish-wrapper.
Both are mostly full of ads, but at least Parade had a few features that I liked to read. USA Weekend had nothing. Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels this way. After writing a letter to the "feedback" email, I received this reply a few days later:
Dear Reader,
I apologize in advance for sending this out as a mass email, but several hundred readers had quite a bit to say about the switch to USA Weekend from Parade. Let me address the points that most people brought up.
First, the switch was not made because of cost cutting. In the weird world of newspaper economics, both Parade and USA Weekend pay us (and every other paper they appear in) for taking their magazine. So cost was not at all a factor.
Instead, it boiled down to this: We made the switch because the company that now owns us, Denver-based MediaNews, runs USA Weekend in all of their papers. It's really that simple -- that's why we stopped Parade and started taking USA Weekend. As far as I know, there is no way that we'd be allowed to run both magazines, which are enormously competitive with each other.
Most people who wrote mentioned that they like the "Ask Marilyn" feature in Parade; a number of others said they objected to what they felt was the cluttered look of USA Weekend. Please be assured that we'll pass those comments, and all the others, onto the editors at USA Weekend. It's important that they get the feedback. I talked to the editor of the magazine myself over the weekend, and suggested that if they could just hire Marilyn, that would make a lot of people happy. She said they'd look into that.
While I know that people tend not to like changes to their newspaper, I do hope that, over time, readers will come to appreciate USA Weekend's qualities, which I'd sum up as its currency and younger feel. I am sorry that you are disappointed by this necessary decision, and hope that you'll continue to read the paper for its unparalleled coverage of the Silicon Valley and our local communities.
Again, thank you for taking the time to write and for reading the Mercury News.
Susan Goldberg
Executive Editor
I apologize in advance for sending this out as a mass email, but several hundred readers had quite a bit to say about the switch to USA Weekend from Parade. Let me address the points that most people brought up.
First, the switch was not made because of cost cutting. In the weird world of newspaper economics, both Parade and USA Weekend pay us (and every other paper they appear in) for taking their magazine. So cost was not at all a factor.
Instead, it boiled down to this: We made the switch because the company that now owns us, Denver-based MediaNews, runs USA Weekend in all of their papers. It's really that simple -- that's why we stopped Parade and started taking USA Weekend. As far as I know, there is no way that we'd be allowed to run both magazines, which are enormously competitive with each other.
Most people who wrote mentioned that they like the "Ask Marilyn" feature in Parade; a number of others said they objected to what they felt was the cluttered look of USA Weekend. Please be assured that we'll pass those comments, and all the others, onto the editors at USA Weekend. It's important that they get the feedback. I talked to the editor of the magazine myself over the weekend, and suggested that if they could just hire Marilyn, that would make a lot of people happy. She said they'd look into that.
While I know that people tend not to like changes to their newspaper, I do hope that, over time, readers will come to appreciate USA Weekend's qualities, which I'd sum up as its currency and younger feel. I am sorry that you are disappointed by this necessary decision, and hope that you'll continue to read the paper for its unparalleled coverage of the Silicon Valley and our local communities.
Again, thank you for taking the time to write and for reading the Mercury News.
Susan Goldberg
Executive Editor
Since it doesn't look like the Merc is going to change anything, I am not going to hold my breath for USA Weekend to steal away "smarted person in the world," I'm going to have to go online to read her column. That's fine, but the answers to her puzzles are always there like they are in the printed version. Oh well.
Tags: parade magazine newspaper usa weekend
Tags: magazine newspaper parade usa weekend
January 09, 2007 12:20 PM PST Permalink | Comments [1] |
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Kevin Chu, Some Rights Reserved.
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