Onward into the fog
As you may have heard, daily newspapers are going to hell in a handbasket. The Salt Lake Tribune's publisher, Dean Singleton, has laid out his strategic plan to meet the challenges of making money with online news, without alienating subscribers to the ink-and-paper thing.
You can read Singleton's super-secret scheme in detail here and know as much as I do about what's going down at the Trib.
Parental descretion advised: The memo contains impenetrable marketing gobbly-gook. For example:
We cannot continue to give all of our content away for free; we must consider, create and deploy new products and sites that both decouple our interactive revenue from our classified business and offer a compelling new experience for a younger (non-newspaper buying) demographic.Read it, put on your pointy media pundit hat and tell me what the future holds for the Trib.
In related news, Crawler and most Trib blogs will be switching to a new and sublime blogging system—which will make zero difference to most of you. But if you wallow in this or any other Trib blogs through aid of an RSS server, you will have to get a new link.
For Crawler that link is: http://blogs.sltrib.com/slcrawler/index.php?tempskin=_rss2
(If you have /index.htm in your bookmark, get rid of it. The url http://blogs.sltrib.com/slcrawler will still do the trick.)
10 Comments:
That link:
http://blogs.sltrib.com/slcrawler/index.php?tempskin=_rss2
came up as not matching any feeds in Google Reader. Is it not live, yet?
and what happened to the pic with this entry I just got an "X" in an empty square
Yo, Single-tone said:"Finally, we are not significantly extending the reach of our audience, as our online products too closely resemble the newspaper, and thus fail to meaningfully reach the next generation of readers."
well the ONLINE PRODUCTS don't look too much like anything off my porch, and didn't the NY Times try the pay route? Dean, it's a newspaper: FOCUS!
He goes on: "We will form four taskforces (News, local, premium and technology) to drive these ideas to market. They will focus on content, sales, marketing, research and build a business plan. We will also form a technical taskforce to evaluate the needs of a new content management system."
-- Oh well,never mind...
--anon the mouse
I'm not impressed with anything Tribune related. Last Friday, I e-mailed, following the plan under subscriptions, asking for the online annual version of the Trib, costing just over $43.00 a year. The notation said someone at the Trib would call me the following business day.
Today is three business days later and not a word from the Tribune.
You got one more day and after that I'm not interested.
hopefully with the new blog setup we'll be able to see the 50% of your photos that don't currently work.
"In order to execute this vision, we have agreed that these new strategies will be done with a template approach, using a menu of common tools and vendors."
--
The newspaper as we know it is toast. The only reason the Trib is successful is that it gets a lot of anti-Mormon people who are PO'd at the MO Church to post here. My guess is that most of them are 30-35 years old and up. Younger people could care less about the MOs - and they don't come here to "vent".
Hang it up Deano - the young generation isn't going to pay shit for your product. A "template" approach? - you're too cheap to even let each paper be itself. The Tribune will look like every other MNG website - and surely the "local" (newspapers' claim to fame) will be put together in India (as are some of your other papers).
"The only reason the Trib is successful is that it gets a lot of anti-Mormon people who are PO'd at the MO Church to post here."
That is entirely correct, I feel the same way. I think the trib and some of it's writers intentionally drag out issues or find insignificant stories that can be tied to the Mormon Church, to lay in feeding the trough of the anti-mo's.
I have to admit it is fun at times to read the foamy vitriol that anti-mormon post in the comments, but at the same time its disturbing to know that people are that out of touch. Damn hippies...
Yes (to the above) anonymous - from the anonymous above you :)
For a paper that's tries to pretend it's anti-Mormon, it surely survives as a result of the Mormon Church's existence.
If you need any more "proof", just look at their new "Green Gello" site :) I'd expect to see something like this on the D-News - and since "Green Jello" is a cultural thing "here", I would understand seeing it in the News.
However, the Tribune is trying to capitalize off the MOs by using this name (Green Gello) while at the same time trying to pretend they are the "loyal opposition" (to Mormon Utah).
I am not Mormon; however, I can tell when someone (Tribune) is playing both ends against the middle. If it weren't for the Mormons, the Tribune would be nothing. This was true under Shelledy - but even more-so "now".
Yes, brilliant thinking - stop giving away content for free. Um, like Google, er...wait, no...Hmmm...let's see, who's made any sort of subscription model work for web content in the last ten years? I can't think of anyone either.
Hey! Maybe you can keep using detested advertising forms like pop overs, pop unders, and flash cover banners. Wow, that makes a site usable! And quick!
Just one more step closer to making Google our overlord.
Glen, where did you go? I'm worried that this was your last post and perhaps you have met with foul play as a result (would they do that?). Just kidding about that, but we're used to such regular posts, we miss them when you're not here.
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