In early September the Toronto Star rolled out Star P.M., an afternoon edition in PDF format that is the first newspaper of its kind in North America. Michael Babad, 52, the Star‘s assistant managing editor, business, and Chris Carter, 37, senior editor, Internet, spoke with CJR Daily about the project.
Edward B. Colby: How did Star P.M. get started?
Chris Carter: At the Star we had had a couple of employees’ suggestions about bringing back an afternoon edition of the newspaper … but the problem always was that in a big urban center like ours, when our printing plant is at the far northern end of the region, how do you distribute an afternoon newspaper? And printing costs, paper costs, gasoline, traffic gridlock — it just seems impossible.
So in the spring, some of the people involved in the online edition of the paper — we’d been talking about packaging some of the material that appears on the Web site every day into a sort of one-stop package, like a convenience package, that would be easily downloadable, easily printable. And then we just mused about it … I had raised it at an editorial off-site meeting where the editors of the Star were sitting around and talking about new initiatives and the way we do things, and Mike Babad, the business editor who’s here with me, picked up the idea and ran with it, and came up with the prototype for Star P.M.
EBC: Still, at first glance the idea of a new afternoon newspaper does seem counterintuitive. Why create an entirely separate edition of the paper when you can already post breaking news articles on the Web site during the course of the day?
Michael Babad: Yeah, you ask a really good question there, and it’s one that obviously we kicked around. The idea is the Star‘s Web site gets heavy traffic, so we know in fact (as you suggest) that people are looking at it throughout the day, but a couple of things. Not everybody can look throughout the day because of whatever their work environment is, and there are some [features] you can’t necessarily find — so I guess the key thing here is that editors, who have for eons put together newspapers by picking the stories, editing the stories, and presenting the stories, are giving you something that is pre-packaged, where you can at a glance get the top stories of the day, what we feel you might be interested in, plus some special things that go beyond just breaking news, like lifestyle stories, entertainment stories, puzzles. …
EBC: Does the Star have any set financial or readership goals for Star P.M.?
MB: No, we never set a target because it was so new and we didn’t know what we were heading into, we didn’t set a target. But obviously we hope it’s widely read and commercially successful.
CC: On the advertising side, the way we presented it was that this was going to be an experiment, a test run, and we actually had huge interest by advertisers, ten of whom have come on board during this trial period. Actually, I think we launched with seven or eight, and since have added two more to bring us up to ten. They get the banner position that rotates through the 12-page edition. So we had huge interest in the advertising, because for them it presents a display opportunity where they can get an ad with decent display to a fairly targeted audience. … So there was a lot of interest in the advertisers, and they’ve been very keen to be in on it.
EBC: How many Star staffers work on Star P.M. each weekday? Do you have any reporters or editors devoted solely to it?
CC: Yep, we have one full-time editor and two part-time editors devoted to putting out the publication — to doing the copy editing and layout of the publication. We also have a rewrite reporter who works both for the Web site and Star P.M., to help write the copy through. But other than that, it’s an additional deadline or destination, however you want to say it, for copy that is coming through the regular print and online channels. Or taking copy that is going to go on the Web site or in tomorrow’s paper, maybe taking an early version of it, editing it down for Star P.M. Or taking copy that has been sent to the Web site and edited for the Web site, and putting it in Star P.M.
EBC: How does a typical Star P.M. production cycle work? Is it a rush to get this product out by 3:30 and 4:15 p.m.?
MB: No, I don’t think it’s a rush. We’re obviously only a month into it, and we’re still learning. They’re certainly able to get a really, really good — not just good but also good-looking — product together in time to post for 3:30 and 4:15. There was a day when we had the shootings at the college in Montreal where we actually kept going up ’til almost 6:00, we just kept updating it. So no, I don’t think I’d describe it as a rush to get it done.
EBC: Now that Star P.M. is off the ground, where do you hope to take it from here?
MB: One of the things we said going into this … is that we really want to learn from our readers what they like, what they’d like more of, when they’d like it. So we know that the existing model is going to change — I could just give you an example. In the main bundled edition, we put sports and entertainment on the same page, and then one of the specialty pages is sports extra. I don’t know yet what our readers think, but they may come back and they may tell us — and again, this is completely hypothetical — but they may tell us they’d like a separate page of sports and a separate page of entertainment in the main edition. Maybe they’d like a second business page, maybe they’d like another news page, maybe they’d like to see it at 2:00 rather than 3:30. There are things we understand and we know ourselves intuitively, but our research department is just now launching a discussion with readers to find the answers we’re looking for, so that we will be able to respond to what they’re telling us. So we do plan to change and tweak.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.