Forbes Dud: Newspapers Still Clueless About Web Sales
Websites catering to niche markets are popping up and taking local content that newspapers should have owned. Like local search, high school sports, and college sports. A Forbes dud says…
Why do these sites even exist? The newspaper industry should have owned these local niches, especially anything pertaining to local sports and entertainment. And even when they had the foresight to get in early, they lacked the smarts to stay with it when the payoff wasn’t immediate.
We have local search, and local sports, and local college sports on our site. And for a two person operation, we do it pretty well, with occasional slide shows and video.
We have the Amplifier to supplement our coverage of Arts and Entertainment.
The two sports niche sites here haven’t been updated in ages. At least two free web only classified sites have launched and failed. Craigslist is pretty puny compared to our classifieds. There is no other entertainment site for this area.
Forbes also says…
Instead, the vast majority of newspapers own just one Web site organized exactly like a print newspaper with the expectation that readers want the same one-stop-shopping menu of local, national, international, sports and entertainment news that they traditionally got from the print paper.
I agree. But newspaper site traffic is growing, newspapers are recognizing the shifting of how media is consumed, so we’ll get there.
We agree on one thing: newspapers are not moving fast enough. Including this one. But we’re working on it. There still is a hesitation here not to put breaking news on the website. We do it, but not daily.
It will come sooner rather than later. Do I wish it would have happened a year ago? Yes. But I don’t run the newsroom.