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McMahon edits the Tribune‘s Perspective section and he’s a head of the committee assigned to reinvent the Saturday paper, which is one of several committees created to reimagine the Tribune from top to bottom. We’re supposed to see this leaner, hungrier newspaper in September, but McMahon’s work will be done a lot sooner. The end of the month? I asked, for I’d heard the new Saturday Tribune would be rolled out by then. “That might be a little ambitious,” he said, “but not far off.”
McMahon says that because Saturday readers are almost all seven-day subscribers, they tend to be “committed Tribune readers” who might be unsettled by change. On the other hand, the Saturday paper is the thinnest, least-read edition of the week, so “on balance, it’s a good day to try some things.” One thing the Tribune might want to try, I suggested, would be to drop the Saturday paper entirely and make do with a massive weekend edition, as papers do in other countries. After all, the Sunday Tribune hits the stands around ten o’clock Saturday morning. “There’s 5,000 things being discussed,” McMahon replied. “That’s one of them. But for readership and economic reasons — I don’t see that on the horizon.”
