The Incredible Shrinking Virginian-Pilot newspaper. Is this just the first move in its eventual disappearance?

A front page story Sunday announced that the Pilot is going to shrink by an inch in the next two weeks and the tabs, such as the Beacon, etc., will also shrink in size.

Then on Page 15, the publisher wasted a full page of news space on an ad talking about what a good job the Pilot is doing, how it’s being responsive to the needs of its readers, how being smaller will allow it to keep the reporters who tell us everything we need to know.
This after a lead front page story this week – across the whole top of the front page – was about a couple whose wedding pictures were stolen. I didn’t read the story at all, but my wife tried.  “What was it about,” I asked.  “This couple who went on a honeymoon or trip and left their wedding pictures in their car and when they came back they found they’d been stolen.”

“But what was the story?” I asked her.  “I don’t really know, I only read a couple of paragraphs and it didn’t make sense to me.  Their wedding pictures were stolen.”  She said,  “Who cares?  90% of the Pilot’s readers?” I replied,  “Shouldn’t have been a front page story to begin with,” she told me.

In the full ad, the publisher, Maurice A. Jones, took about 1/3 of the page talking about swimming at the Norfolk Y with his 6 YO daughter and playing water basketball.  Why?

He said, “The pool game reminds me of a lesson that seems particularly relevant during these tough economic times; striving to be excellent is about eternally raising the bar.  This unprecedented recession is the longest on record since the Great Depression.  To remain competitive, most businesses have had to do more with less, reduce costs, eliminate waste and be more creative.  The Virginian-Pilot Media Companies is no exception.”

He talks about how revenue has fallen and the Pilot has to do more with less as he goes on to waste a valuable news page on a message touting what a great job he’s doing.

If there wasn’t any problem, if they public loved what the Pilot was publishing, if the people clamored for his product, would he have to engage in such irrelevant self-promotion?  No.  He has failed.  The PIlot has failed.

But the truth is the Pilot, like most other newspapers in the nation have abandoned the news policy standards of the past when they published all the news fit to print.  It engages in social engineering in presenting news content.   Now the print  just news  that shows  photographs of diverse races and phony news written to highlight it’s policies of diversity and the news be damned.

Like the other media, the Pilot has lost its way and wants to base its decline on everything except its own journalistic incompetency.

No full page ads or shrinking size will restore it to its former days of glory.  The problem is much deeper.

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