The Empire tries to be cool
the Empire is putting out The Hooligan in place of the arts & entertainment section that used to run on Thursdays called This Week. They claim it’s so they have something interesting for the 18-35 crowd and draw in new readers. But here’s a tip for you—the only time I ever bought the Empire was on Thursdays for the This Week section. A key to why they’re really changing it is in the linked article above—NO ADVERTISEMENTS.
But let’s play dumb and pretend that Morris Communications really cares about people in Juneau, and more specifically the dwindling “young” crowd that this city keeps trying to attract to town or at least keep in town ...
Why not ask us what we want? We might start with something like more interesting topics and better writing.
Tell us what’s happening outside of Juneau as well as in, but not with the AP Wire because we can read that in an RSS feed before your paper can be printed and distributed.
Tell us both sides to a story, not just the easy one. So there’s a huge debate going on in the political world of Alaska about gas and oil and pipelines—how does this tie to the rest of the world? How does this tie to alternate fuel sources and what does that mean for Alaska? Listening only to the legislators is like getting all your news from corporate press releases.
For local flavor, tell us what young people in town are doing, tell us about the businesses they start and the concerts they organize and why. Tell us why they all work more than one job, why they stay in Juneau anyway, what they’re doing to change the place.
Hell, get really daring and tell us how much we rely on specific cruise lines for our income and how we often bend to their will. Oh wait, if you did that we’d lose all our funding ... can’t have that. Bend baby, bend.
I mean, the Empire is cute and all with it’s Police & Fire section noting the garbage bears, but there’s no meat. And sure, we certainly need something in this town telling us the art happenings, but that’s only coming out once a week. We need real news every day.