east village idiot

I talk a lot of smack about amNewYork each week, but there’s one section I have rarely (okay, only once) poked fun at: Friday’s Five-on-Five. Each week, their sportswriters put together an amusing - and even sometimes laugh-out-loud funny - wrap-up of the week’s sports news. And while it was a rip-off of a feature in their sister paper in Chicago, amNewYork’s version put a comical spin on even the most depressing New York sports news. Every Friday, I actually looked forward to reading amNewYork, and I would immediately open the paper to sports.

Unfortunately, I pretty much lost any incentive to ever pick up amNewYork again when I saw this article in last Friday’s sports section:

What I find most amusing is the paper’s reasoning for canning the feature:

The cause of death was four focus groups of regular amNewYork readers who indicated last month that the zany feature, with its five-question-five-respondent format, was not well received, especially among sports enthusiasts.

I’d love to sit in on a focus group of “regular amNewYork readers.” They probably asked for less coverage of news and business, and more Hollywood gossip and pictures of dogs. Those ”sports enthusiasts” were probably confused by the formatting of the Five-on-Five: a 5×5 matrix is far too complicated for the average amNewYork reader.

At first, I was finally willing to admit that - just maybe - amNewYork’s readers were even dumber than its management. But then I remembered: the newspaper actually took the opinions of readers of a free newspaper seriously.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 9:56 am and is filed under amNY Watch. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.