In my May 27 column, I asked readers what they thought about the Sunday Post. In response, I’ve received more than 100 e-mails, letters and phone calls. Many of them reflect a lot of time and thought.
The Post has slightly more than 1 million Sunday customers. So the respondents represent about 0.01 percent of the readers.
Nevertheless, what follows is an attempt to note some themes from this very narrow sample that might prove useful as the paper undertakes its own review of ways to make its flagship paper still better. All responses have been turned over to the top editors, who report they are being read attentively.
Many like their paper. “I delight in it pretty much as it is,” said one. Others said: “You people do a helluva job. Keep it up.” “My lifeline to culture and politics. Travel, Arts and Book World are must reads.” “A treat, a ritual.” “Stay the course, avoid the unusual suspects” when making changes.
But as you might expect after such an invitation, a larger number of views were critical, not uniformly, but in ways that identified areas where the readers felt the paper could be better.
Some described the Sunday edition as: “inferior to the daily paper . . . in a slow decline . . . too much fluff, too little readable content” and too much of it that “goes immediately to the recycling bin.” “I love The [Sunday] Post, but it’s boring,” said one caller.
Several of the sections came in for varying degrees of criticism — Sunday Style, Arts, Travel, the Magazine, Book World and the Business section. Some delighted in these sections and in the special quality of some of their stories and writers. But more often, readers expressed disappointment that contributed to their sense of spending less and less time with the Sunday paper.
There is a special factor at work here; the Sunday New York Times, which sells more than 50,000 copies in the area. Many respondents said The Post’s sections suffered in comparison. The Times does have a Sunday magazine and sections on Arts, Science, Business, Books and Travel that present a challenge to any Sunday paper in any big city. Whether this is simply a fact of Sunday life or a challenge that can be met by building on the base of good work in The Post’s sections is an interesting question.
Readers generally gave good marks to the National and Metro news sections and said they wanted news of all kinds, stories with local impact and relevance, in-depth reporting and analysis. The paper’s front section, one reader said, “carries the rest of The Post’s reputation on its shoulders.” But they said they wanted to see “more digging” by reporters, more breaking news, fewer very long stories, fewer feature-style or anecdotal introductions to news stories. They also spoke of “airing out” the paper with some new, less predictable, unofficial and younger voices in opinion columns and on pages such as Close to Home. “Give the geezers a rest,” is how one put it.
What was also interesting about the responses was that the news and commentary sections, rather than the other special Sunday sections, were what seemed to distinguish the Sunday Post. The New York Times, for example, does not have a commentary section analogous to the Post’s Outlook. Criticism of other sections was more widespread but mostly comparative. The comments of many readers about news and commentary, however, were more involved with The Post, offering ideas for improvement or support for current and broader efforts. In other words, there seemed to be more engagement of the readers when they talked about news, ideas, depth, breadth, commentary and relevance.
Having stuck my nose, uninvited, into The Post’s own review of the Sunday paper, I confess to being nervous about reporting publicly on the results for fear that they are a distortion. So thoughts are still welcome from the remaining 99.99 percent of you.
