Replies(20 - 39)

[NDReporter]

Please discuss.

Website publication time change

Published: Thursday, July 29, 2010 8:35 PM CDT
Out of respect to our print edition subscribers and their committment to using The News-Dispatch as their local news source, The News -Dispatch website will now be updated at 5 p.m. daily. While we value our online readers, it's only fair that our loyal, paying customers of The News-Dispatch print edition have top priority when it comes to reading the news. For subscription information, call 219-874-7211.

[Tim]

I'm a reporter, not a web technician. We did all we knew to do, and it still wasn't fixed. Give me a break.

I'm sure I didn't say you personally. Nor did I say YOU should fix it. Didn't you write "Discuss" at the beginning of this? And now when someone offers an opinion you either don't like or don't agree with you want them to give you a break.

Please.

[NDReporter]

I'm sure I didn't say you personally. Nor did I say YOU should fix it. Didn't you write "Discuss" at the beginning of this? And now when someone offers an opinion you either don't like or don't agree with you want them to give you a break.

Please.

I'm just sick of people railing on those of us in the trenches here when the real problem is elsewhere...

[Tim]

I'm just sick of people railing on those of us in the trenches here when the real problem is elsewhere...

NO ONE IS RAILING ON YOU PERSONALLY. WE ALL KNOW WHERE THE PROBLEM LIES.

Dangling Christ, I clearly said "The ND has an online edition...." Are you the ND?

I've said this before, but despite your childish outbursts - like this one - I'm sure you're one of the people fighting the good fight at the ND.

Lighten the fun up.

[NDReporter]

NO ONE IS RAILING ON YOU PERSONALLY. WE ALL KNOW WHERE THE PROBLEM LIES.

Dangling Christ, I clearly said "The ND has an online edition...." Are you the ND?

I've said this before, but despite your childish outbursts - like this one - I'm sure you're one of the people fighting the good fight at the ND.

Lighten the fun up.

[TSNSPYDER]

He needs to say it this way (in a Scotty voice)..."I'm a reporter, not a web technician, Jim. We did all we knew to do, and it still wasn't fixed. Give me a break."...see, much funnier.
I actually think the web edition is the best it has been. Still not great, but what do you expect for free. I actually enjoy looking at it now.

Do you know what a really neat local online paper is? Check out The Beacher. It's a weekly paper I discovered and has info for NW IN. Not sure how the print edition is (or if there is even one), but I like the online version. Lots of little nice human interest stories in it.

[Tim]

Just looked at the website - I notice they didn't print my comment but did print one by someone more complimentary.

Weak.

[Tim]

Which part of that didn't you get? I just read through the thread - not ONE PERSON is "railing" on those of you in the trenches.

You started this discussion. A lot of people here ARE on the side of those of you working hard to plug the hole in the Titanic.

[Tom Burns]

Which part of that didn't you get? I just read through the thread - not ONE PERSON is "railing" on those of you in the trenches.

You started this discussion. A lot of people here ARE on the side of those of you working hard to plug the hole in the Titanic.

Now that there is no local publisher, at least at this moment, where does the problem lie?
Corporate? There were some very good reporters at the paper in the past but many seem to have bailed out or been pushed out. That is a loss for the community.

In every market where we operate there have been cuts, but the most severe have been in Michigan City. In one market the publisher has just started charging for content and readers have responded with anger. It looks like there is no easy answer.

As I indicated some time ago we had an on-line newspaper project underway when the economy softened and we decided to postpone further development. (I know a broadcaster who has launched on-line newspapers successfully). In a normal economy we believe we could support it with advertising. The problem is that bloggers will cut and paste articles from the internet as they now do and that would reduce the value to us and to our clients. I suspect there may be means to protect from reposting, but I am not
certain as we did not look into that aspect.

[Tim]

Now that there is no local publisher, at least at this moment, where does the problem lie?

I'd think the problem lies in management above people like ND Reporter.

[Southsider2k12]

Now that there is no local publisher, at least at this moment, where does the problem lie?
Corporate? There were some very good reporters at the paper in the past but many seem to have bailed out or been pushed out. That is a loss for the community.

In every market where we operate there have been cuts, but the most severe have been in Michigan City. In one market the publisher has just started charging for content and readers have responded with anger. It looks like there is no easy answer.

As I indicated some time ago we had an on-line newspaper project underway when the economy softened and we decided to postpone further development. (I know a broadcaster who has launched on-line newspapers successfully). In a normal economy we believe we could support it with advertising. The problem is that bloggers will cut and paste articles from the internet as they now do and that would reduce the value to us and to our clients. I suspect there may be means to protect from reposting, but I am not
certain as we did not look into that aspect.

Yeah, free advertising sucks, doesn't it?

[edgeywood]

Yeah, free advertising sucks, doesn't it?

But how does the newspaper sell advertising? Ever wonder why they practically give away the Chicago Tribune and Post Tribune home subscriptions? Their ad rates are based on circulation. So they reap very little benefit from news aggregators and bloggers. Aggregators may drive some traffic to a paper's web site, but web ad revenues are minuscule compared to the print edition.

Real news organizations are expensive. I believe they are essential for a democracy. How should we fund them? People are willing to fork over $$$ for cable television AND they are subjected to commercials. Is news as important as ESPN, HGTV, HBO?

[Southsider2k12]

Every single person in this town knows that the News Dispatch has by far the best organization in town. It is all anyone talks about. I talk about it and its reporters all of the time. Heck I would rather them charge for on-line content, or find actually take the time to have subscriber log ins, because it is obvious the organization running the News Dispatch has a date with self-destruction on this course. You can only use your typewriter so long...

Look no further than professional sports as a comparison. I can watch any baseball game on TV. I can listen to it on the radio, I can track it on the internet, and I can talk about it on a message board. Yet year after year two million people go up to US Cellular Field to pay tons of money to see that team in person. You can get that same product in any one of a bunch of different sources. At the end of the day, they are drawing more people than ever in their history, with more ways than ever to get the product for free. Why does it work there?

[Southsider2k12]

Let me just say this much... This will do nothing to change the News Dispatch's circulation numbers. Maybe I will be 100% wrong, but I think this move will serve to alienate more people from the news, than to bring them back to it locally.

I think the reason philosophically that this move isn't the right one is because it sends the wrong message. In this day and age, the most successful move you can make is to make yourself as active a part of the daily life of people as possible. Today that means being omnipresent. You should be able to track the News Dispatch and react to it anywhere, at anytime. You have to build that connection with people in the 21st century. If you can't be accessed as a seconds notice, you are dead. People want their news at their fingertips, they want to see people's reactions to a story, and they want to be able to leave their two cents, plus they want to be able to argue with the people they don't agree with. Now none of that is possible in Michigan City. Just reading the editors comments from the other day in the HA, they have not even made a real effort to create their own on-line community, instead taking the less effort road. They have no idea if a real on-line presence would work here or not, because they haven't done it. They have no idea if they could make money on-line or not, because they haven't put in the work to get people coming back to their website early and often. All they do it post stories, and that is it. As the kids say, that is a fail.

[Tim]

^^^

Excellent post, SS.

This statement is pretty much bullsnort -

"While we value our online readers, it's only fair that our loyal, paying customers of The News-Dispatch print edition have top priority when it comes to reading the news."

Why? The ND offers two products/services - one you pay for and one that is free. The News Dispatch offers its readers that option. Since it is the ND's decision to offer the paper for free why should one group of readers have "top priority"?

The ND should have the nads to tell it like it is - we're strangling here so if you want the paper before 5pm you have to buy it.

This is a sissy move.

[Tom Burns]

"Yeah, free advertising sucks, doesn't it?"

I am not sure I understand this comment and I may not be responding appropriately.

The earlier point is that no news organization can control the distribution of its internet content in that others can repost the content and not the ads which may have appeared on the same internet page. That renders the paid ads of lessor value. I can see the value of posting teasers about news content but not the content unless it can be locked down in such a way that it may not be copied. That is not meant to be a negative comment on bloggers and others, only that any news gatherer has to control the distribution of its product if it expects to cover its costs.

[Southsider2k12]

I would like to clarify something else here I just thought about, that most people here probably don't know. Citybythelake isn't my only website. As a matter of a fact, it is probably the smallest of all of the ones that I deal with. I started this one at the very end of 2006. I have worked with running similar styles of sites back into the 90's, but really picked up my most valuable stuff in this area starting in 2003. The biggest site I work with has almost 5000 members and a total of over 2,000,000 posts. That site has a membership that runs across five continents.

Judging by the comments here and on the facebook page, I don't think some people realize that I have a lot more perspective than a typical "blogger" as was brought up earlier. Of the dozen or so sites I have worked with over the years, all of them were started from scratch, either by myself, or with a group of about half a dozen different people who have worked together for years on this sort of stuff. Over those years we have all learned about what works, and what doesn't work in this arena. The first objective has almost always been to be completely independent of outside influence. That means here, as it has been with most of the projects, to be 100% advertising free. The very first thing I have found is that when people are willing to send you money, they want a certain amount of influence. They want to see things reported, and not reported, and/or they want them done with a certain spin. At very worse, the need for keeping those advertisers happy makes you do things that might not be in the best long term health of your product, whether it be newspaper, radio, or whatever it is. That is the reason this site has always remained advertising free. There is zero outside influence on the information here, which is exactly the format that has proven the best in my opinion.

Getting past that point, one the large site that I referred to in the first paragraph is an incredible work of pride for me and my buddies. The site is focused on our favorite baseball team. Because of the content and the passion of the fans who follow the site, we have been able to develop relationships with people in the organization that we follow. We have contacts with people all of the way up to Vice Presidents, and all of the way down to people who sell tickets and beer at games. At a certain point in time, we even spun off a site dedicated completely to the minor league teams that make up this organization. We have developed relationships with players as young as out of high school, agents, management, and the PR departments of each minor league team in the system. In both the major and the minor league sites, the growth has been big enough that people contact us for interviews, instead of the other way around like when we started the sites.

The reputation for the sites actually got to be big enough that one of the two major Chicago newspapers approached us last year about folding our web minor league stories and reports into their website. If you read stuff from this newspaper about the major league draft in June, you read information that came from one of my sister websites. The relationship has actually worked really well as it allows us to maintain our creative independence to work our magic, but allows this news organization to use our work in its stories and its websites to keep it from spreading itself thinner than it already does in a day and age when traditional media are suffering. It is a situation where they recognized the power of the web, and instead of trying to insulate their organization from it, they embraced it. They have actually added to the multi-media experiences of their customers. Why? Because they understand that building the relationship between their brand name and the people out there who have embraced 21st century technology and the information age. They take advantage of the work we do for free, and offer their readers something the other print news organization in Chicago doesn't. We get a bigger readership than we could have ever hoped to get. Both of us also hold the rights to dissolve the relationship if it gets to a point where it doesn't work anymore.

I apologize for the long-winded reply here, but I wanted to clarify my perspective after seeing the way that the web is still viewed by some in the traditional media. This site isn't hear to steal traditional media as was inferred a little bit ago. The point of citybythelake has always been to serve as a supplement to information, and as a venue for getting additional information out there.

At the end of the day I believe that the News Dispatch has the best ability in town to gather information, even in its reduced form of today. The reason I have been so passionate on this is that I feel they are making a huge mistake that will do nothing to restore readership. Once you sever the relationship between your line of communication and people, they just go on and live without you. I do not believe that this move is going to do anything to stop the implied loss of circulation at the News Dispatch, because all it will do is show more people in Michigan City that they can get by with out it, instead of building the relationship of dependence on this group. I believe that relationship also goes a really long way towards keeping the reputation as the #1 news source in town. That reputation has also suffered in the eyes of many here as the paper and its staff has gotten smaller and smaller. Some very simple changes would go along way towards restoring that image, in my opinion. I outlined many of them earlier, so I won't bore people with repeating them. But I believe, through my vast experiences in this exact area, that putting the names and faces of a group like the News Dispatch as often as possible, is step one to putting the local paper back on the road to health. With its biggest news resources in town, they should never lag anyone here in having information in front of the general public. The great part of the on-line portion is that you can break a story, without having to have it complete. Adam Parkhouse's twitter should have broke the story that John Boyd was interviewing for other coaching jobs before this site did. The News Dispatch's facebook page should have had a picture of the bald eagle at the beach before this site did. Alicia Ebaugh should have had a breaking news teaser on-line breaking the latest Sanitary District story before the newspaper two counties over did. Instead other sources broke in the info, and anyone on-line knew that the information was out days before it was in the physical newspaper. That does nothing to inspire people to believe that the News Dispatch is the best news source in town, despite the fact that it is. The reporters in this town are suffering because of this. In this case, that means the newspaper itself is suffering.

[Tom Burns]

Audit Bureau of Circulation figures show the News Dispatch continues to decline in paid circulation to near the tipping point, where daily publication may not be viable.

[Tom Burns]

Gathering local news is not without considerable hours of labor. At many events locally we have the only reporter present. A few years ago there would be three reporters at most Michigan City events. I think it would be of value for bloggers to thus do more original reporting.

[Southsider2k12]

Audit Bureau of Circulation figures show the News Dispatch continues to decline in paid circulation to near the tipping point, where daily publication may not be viable.

Gathering local news is not without considerable hours of labor. At many events locally we have the only reporter present. A few years ago there would be three reporters at most Michigan City events. I think it would be of value for bloggers to thus do more original reporting.

Which goes to my point that people should be working together more in this town if the goal is really getting the information out.

The fact that there is little to no cooperation tells me that the goal is really short term profit at the expense of long term viability.

[Tom Burns]

Which goes to my point that people should be working together more in this town if the goal is really getting the information out.

The fact that there is little to no cooperation tells me that the goal is really short term profit at the expense of long term viability.

We have been approached repeatedly by various print publishers to work with them. but their plan amounts to their benefiting from our work and providing little of value. Example: Herald Argus a few years back wanted Michigan City news in exchange for LaPorte news and that ended the day there was a downtown fire in LaPorte early morning but they would not send out anybody until an hour prior to their deadline at 11 a.m. South Bend Tribune wanted us to virtually give them Michigan City news for a few cents a word, a fraction of what it cost us to produce the news. Since we were a half person short we offered to hire another full time person if they would share the cost. That meant providing actual dollars but that was not what they wanted. Nuff said? The publisher of the News Dispatch had some grand plan a couple of years back but then he never followed up on whatever that was, something to do with us jointly developing a series of articles about community improvement.

We get local calls from a print medium asking for details on news they lift off the air. Recently it was who do they see to get that information.

We do share information with both Network Indiana and Shadow/Metro and have in the past with WLS and WBBM.