Whatever else it is the San Diego Weekly Reader is a winner when it comes to page count. I learned this yesterday while perusing its latest issue during my return flight from San Diego to Seattle following a family visit in Del Mar. In a short section titled “Thought you’d like to know” the Reader listed the average number of pages per issue in 20 alternative newsweeklies for the period February 9 to March 13, 2009. The Reader led the pack at 148, with the Austin Chronicle (136) and the Los Angeles Weekly (122) finishing second and third. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.
In the Reader’s defense, this particular “Thought you’d like to know” is the ninth in a series. For all I know the previous eight are all about matters related to good journalism. I checked their web site for more entries in the series but couldn’t find any.
However, even an occasional reader like me can grasp that as a free paper what the Reader needs to be really good at is selling advertising. They are. Ads for cosmetic surgery, ads for alternative medicine, ads for legal services, ads for night clubs, restaurants, concerts, and movies. Thousands of ads. And all those ads help the Reader be competitive in the page-count sweeps. Almost lost among the ads is the content: a lead story, letters, neighborhood stringer reports, an events calendar, entertainment and restaurant reviews, and indispensable columns like Straight from the Hip, which this week explains what to do when your radio reception suffers because you live too close to a radio tower. But, hey, it’s the ads that keep us coming back, not just the content.
Mud Bay Blog 
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