A 3G and WiFi compatible reader is being tested in France. It’s called Read&Go.
French telecom company Orange has announced a new e-book reader, entitled the Read&Go. While most such readers — like the Kindle — are meant to be universal devices, Orange’s machine concentrates almost exclusively on newspapers.
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.
The founder of Monster.com tinkered around and blew a bunch of VC money ($40 million?) on a website for the boomer crowd called Eons.com.
Eons.com is drawing it’s last breath, so now Jeff Taylor is after another bastion of newspapers - obituaries.
He’s entering a crowded field with a rather limited market. Legacy.com has been around a few years and has a very complete online obit package. There are other smaller players but Legacy.com is the market leader by a long shot.
Many funeral homes offer a “memorial website” as an upsell for their services. If Taylor’s obit site wants the information and thinks it will be free, he might have a rude awakening.
If a newspaper is publishing basic “death notices” ie: absolute minimum, and is charging for anything more, an alternative might be attractive to the families/funeral homes.
Once again, an entrepreneur has set his sights on taking away a probable revenue source and for sure readership generator.
Here we go again.
UPDATE: Winston-Salem, NC, editors strike a blow for “reader involvement.” They choose Pearls Before Swine comic.
More than 270 people wrote in about the comic, with about 70% of them giving it favorable comments.
Winston-Salem Journal has about 85,000 circulation.
0.00223529412% of the circulation decided which comic the newspaper should carry. Now divide that number by 2.25 (readers per copy.)
0.000993464052%
Nice going editors of Winston Salem, you really got the readers involved.
UPDATE: Ft. Myers News-Press editor gives up responsibility too.
An editor will get a wild hair and decide to drop comic strips when the creator is dead, (Peanuts, The Elderberries, B.C.) or the creator quits, or the editor thinks changes should be made for the good of the newspaper.
So a bunch of newsroom types gather a bunch of comic strips and look at them. Newsrooms are such a good focus group for comic strips! The potential strips are winnowed to a few.
Then the editor abdicates total responsibility and lets the readers vote on which they like.
Minneapolis is going through this now.
It’s a cop out. Editors read day in an day out how they need to be more responsive to readers. When it’s time to change comics they trot out the “need to be more responsive to readers” mantra, and put things up for a vote.
Editors think that readers care about the newspaper’s position on presidential candidates, and a myriad of other topics and stories, so they reserve the right to decide what gets published.
Editors know deep down, that they will get more blow-back from readers on changing a comic strip than they will from most front page stories.
Scott Adams says he started blogging regularly for the money, to build an audience for Dilbert, satisfaction, and to put his best posts in a book.
Since none of the four has worked out, he’s backing off his daily posts.
“Readership of ‘The Dilbert Blog’ is growing rapidly, but at about the same rate people figure out how to use RSS feeds to get the content without the ads,” he wrote. “So there’s no longer a correlation between how hard I work and the ad income I earn. It topped out at ‘trivial,’ even while the audience grew to substantial.”
He was also upset that people threatened to stop reading Dilbert because a blog post offended them. He explained that people couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not.
Adams said it didn’t make sense to knock himself out blogging when it wasn’t generating enough income.
“That’s why I will continue blogging, albeit less controversially. I’ll just do it less often, especially over the holidays. It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income.”
Adams often took positions opposite of the popular positions just to make for good humor. He said that they key to his writing often was to figure out what seemed to be just common good sense, and try to take the opposite approach with a reasoned and intelligent argument.
It’s too bad some people didn’t get it. I’ll miss his writing.
We will be num-chucking our way through the airport security to try and reach Ft. Myers, FL sometime on Turkey Day (if the plane doesn’t crash.)
I really like reading the Snooze Press print edition when we visit. My daughter and SIL are subscribers. Don’t get excited, they are both news junkies.
However, I also am reading a lot via RSS. I’m writing this now, because I’ll probably forget it later. That’s a good thing: then I won’t be aware if I am reading more RSS or more print Snooze Press and we’ll see how things go.
I’ll also get to see my granddog show off.
Jim Waters, former editorial writer for the Daily News, had an op-ed piece about the Kentucky Governor’s race in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.
Jim is now working for the Blue Institute for Public Policy. The Journal (subscription) called him for his take on the race.
Regardless of who wins in November, a campaign that turns on inflaming the passions of relatively few voters will produce little political capital to take on the pressing problems of the state. The Tax Foundation, for example, reports that only 14 states have a worse business climate…
An article in Southern Newspaper Publishers Association weekly eBulletin describes how a publisher in Chattanooga decided that attempting to appeal to young readers would alienate the newspapers appeal to its core audience.
It’s not tit-for-tat when publishers / editors make the decision to try to attract young readers. Boomer readers like a lot of the same things X’ers do. So to think that adding content that appeals to X’ers means you loose boomers is wrong.
I think we have to remember who our core readership is and how to reach them,” said Tom Griscom, publisher and executive editor. “You can still go after young people, but we are clearly focused on getting that group that grew up as readers.”
After hearing of the idea at other places, Griscom and the Times-Free Press did their own research and began to consider how, and if, the idea for news targeted specifically for baby boomers would work.
Here’s the fun part. The research was conducted among the newspaper’s staff. The publisher / editor asked the boomers in the NEWSROOM if they thought it would work.
The boomers initiative was launched after the first of the year, and every day since, Times-Free Press readers have been able to check the top of their front page near the masthead to see what baby boomer stories are in that day’s newspaper.
I’d love to see a story list that they have identified as boomer stories. I’m guessing they are general interest stories that would appeal to all of their readers. As a boomer, I hate the banner illustrated below: its condescending. Riding a roller coaster is the “ride of their lives.” C’mon.
Here’s another heads-up for you Chattanooga Times-Free Press. Boomers aren’t your core audience anymore. Sure, the top of the age 50+ still qualifies, but the lower end of 40-45 is vunerable.
I agree, a newspaper can’t take any age group for granted, but the future lies with X’ers. Spend more time trying to appeal to them and we boomers will keep reading. We don’t need labels to tell us what appeals to us.
After the number of pages are established (see previous post) the next queston is: where does the news go? Again, the answer is determined primarily by advertising.
Late, morning, the day before publication, the process begins.
There are certain pages that are off-limits for ads. Editorial, comic, sports agate, some section fronts, etc. As before, some ads have to appear on certain pages because of color capacity, advertiser request and aesthetics. The person who does the layout tries to leave enough space on the page so that the copy editors can design attractive pages.
If we chose, the paper will be laid out by computer, but we choose to do the procedure manually because in our case it has proven to be more efficient.
The newspaper layout with ad sizes place on the page are printed on a reduced version called a dummy. Each page has its own dummy.
The dummy is then distributed around noon to the production departments and the news departments and the next day’s newspaper begins taking shape. At 11:30, day of publication, the final page moves to the imager and plate-maker and at noon the pressrun begins. (This is our Monday through Friday schedule. Saturday and Sunday are different because we got to press in the late evening for morning delivery.)
So if you happen to be in the office and hear someone refer to the dummy, hopefully they are talking about tomorrow’s newspaper layout.
