NEIGHBORS ON DEATH WATCH

DMN’s experiment in “citizen journalism” (read: we’re too cheap to cover local communities, so you do it for us) is showing signs of flatlining. Badly conceived from the start, the weekly tabloids aimed at serving 16 different “neighborhoods” — I use quotations here because under the DMN’s creative use of the English language, “neighbors” are people who live as many as 15 miles apart — have spent more time lying unread in parkways and gutters than on the breakfast tables of upscale Dallasites in the target communities. Advertising has been woeful; in the last issue of the Park Cities edition, there was only one page of display advertising in a 28-page tab. That’s a recipe for disaster, and no doubt DMN accountants have already moved the project to DEFCON 4. You simply cannot afford to publish a TMC (total market coverage) product like this without at least 40 percent advertising and Neighbors is nowhere near that number. Under the guidance of DMN’s young editor Jason Heid (full disclosure: Jason is a former People Newspapers managing editor, and God help us, we still like him), the Neighbors sections are looking much better and are full of photos of kids doing what kids do, a proven formula for attracting moms. The problem is, there’s no meat on the bone (real reporting), just dessert, and that means no response for advertisers. If ad sales don’t dramatically increase this spring, expect to see DMN face reality and pull the plug — quietly, oh so quietly — on all under-performing Neighbors editions this summer.