Numbed Again by The Morning News

We’re still wondering about that expensive redesign of The Morning News. Sure, there’s valuable information in there, but can anyone get past the Page 1 meeting stories to get to the interesting stuff? And has anything really changed except for the flag that screams “Fayetteville” (or “Springdale,” “Rogers” or “Bentonville”) atop Page 1?

For example, the main Morning News headline visible in newspaper racks around Fayetteville on Dec. 12 read, “Budget Mulled.” Well, who wouldn’t buy a newspaper to read more about that? Next to the story about the Fayetteville City Council budget briefing was a photo of University of Arkansas student sleeping in the library. We imagine anyone who tried to read the budget story was doing the same thing by the third paragraph.

How in the world does The Morning News sell newspapers out of the rack? It’s like fishing with a dirt clod on your hook.

We looked at the bottom half of Page 1, and the stories were equally mind numbing down there. The big headline on the lower half of the page was “Mount Olive Seeks Southeast Water Users.”

With last year’s redesign, The Morning News was apparently converted into four small-town newspapers. Management has always referred to it as a “paper of record,” which apparently means all meetings will be covered ad nauseam. Citing growth in the area, Donrey Media Group said it had produced a “regional newspaper” after merging its separate newspapers in Springdale and Rogers in the early 1990s to form what is now The Morning News.

But last year, it morphed into four newspapers that have a striking resemblance (except for the placement of front page news stories to cater to the four cities).

We’re not saying this kind of coverage doesn’t belong in a newspaper that supposedly serves a metropolitan area of about 312,000, but we think it would be better placed in the back pages somewhere so Page 1 could be freed up for more interesting stories.