| Publishers are just plain desperate. On one hand if you look at the Gannett newspapers annual report you would think the king is on the throne, the pound is worth a pound, etc. Look at a Gannett newspaper, like The Ithaca Journal, and it is a different story. I picked up a free weekly newspaper (not the Journal) the other day and got accosted by a witness who thought I must be brain-damaged to take an interest in daily newspaper which seems to be a page shorter every day than the day before. A few weeks ago we had a hotly contested school board election after the superintendent had asked for a 12.5% increase in the budget at a board meeting which was pruned to 8.5% after immediate public uproar. Well the upcoming school board election was highly anticipated after that and the morning after everybody in town wanted to know the results. All three weekly papers had the election results on their web sites that morning. The daily didn’t have results in paper the next day (though I’ve frequently bought a paper the next day to get election results) and didn’t post the story to their web site until 2:50 pm. Despite a lack of local news coverage (it’s not like they are sending around reporters to major public meetings like they did 20 years ago) the Journal has a few random stories of national and international news on the home page every day. Similar arrogance can be found at the first tier papers like The New York Times, WaPo, and such. Most recently post.news got shut down by its investors and one reason was probably that first-tier papers weren’t at all interested in engaging with a paywall alternative. |