The future of on-line and other stuff
Mike Valley wonders if we are soon to start charging for on-line content. The answer is no. Our industry is convinced at the moment that charging will drive readers away. Especially readers in the 18-25 range that we are trying to attract to our sites, the ones that are less and less likely to turn to a print product any time in their lives. Having said that, the newsaper industry is also trying to figure out a way to make on-line pay us more. Advertising is certainly doing well and that will continue. Another avenue we are looking at (and by we I mean the industry, not the UDJ specifically) is getting search engines like Yahoo and Google to pay us for the content they are taking from our Web sites and posting on their own. Yahoo, for instance, now has its own news site, but all the content comes from traditional news sites, mostly newspapers. Yahoo has a contract with Associated Press which they write a big check to each month for its content . But newspapers get nothing for all the stories Yahoo posts on its site from us. Thus far, Yahoo has told our industry "We're doing you a favor, when they click on the headline to read the rest of the story, we send them through to your Web sites." That's how they have avoided copyright infringement lawsuits, because the newspaper industry has thus far bought that argument. However, studies are showing us that many people who visit Yahoo news, never get past the headlines and first graphs of those stories and hence, to us. Instead Yahoo is charging big bucks for advertising on that site and making millions from our content, while we get nothing. I predict that will change, that some sort of "partnership" between Yahoo and the print world will soon emerge.
As for not putting everything online in order to keep the print product valuable, that's not our strategy. We didn't put everything online simply because we didn't have the staff time to do it. Now that we have a full time online editor you will notice that more and more of our content is going online. You'll be seeing pet of the week, the Sunday Streets column, and births, marriages and engagements going onlne soon as well.
On the John Ball story, there are as many opinions as there are rumors about how this all happened. The op-ed piece in Sunday's edition by Jim Creland was just that. His opinion only. He is a retired real estate guy who served at one time on the grand jury. I called him to ask where he got his information, thinking perhaps he was a county employee or something but he simply said he talked to some people about it.
I have talked to some people about it too and even people who are in the know around here are largely unsure what exactly happened. Hindsight is usually 20-20 and it's easy to wonder now how we wouldn't have known about it, but it's one thing for people to talk about a thing, and quite another to get them to go on the record for the newspaper either before or afterwards. If employees leave because they are unhappy with John Ball, they're probably not going to say that out loud for publication. We sometimes get the "inside scoop" on something like that but it is often because one side or the other has an axe to grind and wants it in thenewspaper, or a reporter has a long standing relationship with t he beat. In her defense, Katie Mintz has been on the county beat for a matter of weeks and it takes time for new reporters to get inside their beats. I know people wonder sometimes why we have the turnover we do in the newsroom. It's simple. For the most part, the young people we hire are on career tracks in journalism. They know they have to start at a small daily right out of college and we give them great and needed experience to get to the next level. But - unless they fall in love with the town (or someone in it) - they are going to move on and it is my job to make sure they're ready and help them up the next step.
I think over the next weeks, we'll find out more about what happened with Ball - although I think it was indeed sudden. I heard the supes' excuse as to why they didn't review his contract in May is because he didn't bring it up - does that sound like five people you want in charge? But I also heard some supervisors didn't want to bring up the contract in May, because they knw how popular Ball was and didn't want to rock the boat just before the election - that sounds plausable and begs the same question.
On the other hand, at Schat's this morning here were some people who said, "So what? Business as usual, it doesn't really affect most people."