I like the small changes that Gannett's flagship paper introduced this past Saturday, with an editor's note explaining what's new, and a handy link for reader feedback.But I'm stumped by the Online Degrees link, which sits smack in the middle of prime real estate (see circled spot in the screenshot, above). Click on that link, and you'll land on pages that look like paid advertising by eLearners of Hoboken, N.J. -- although the pages aren't labeled as such. ELearners says on its fact sheet for press that USA Today is one of its "marketing partners."
Anyone know what's going on? Leave a note, in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, use this link from a non-work computer; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the green sidebar, upper right.
Anything in that marketplace list is gonna be advertorial at best.
ReplyDeleteELearners, ELearners...ain't that where Phil Currie got his management degree? Or is that the place Jennifer Carrol taught creative writing?
ReplyDeleteHey Jim,
ReplyDeleteHere's something I really don't understand:
USA Today appears to be doing so many things right.
USAToday.com is a pretty darn good, intuitive, news website. A big thing on the multimedia side of things is that they very frequently graphically package their multimedia (videos, gallery, etc.) within the story pages... they don't link you to another section of the site and make you hunt.
And if I remember correctly, USA Today was recently one of the best when it came to advertising revenue and not having much of a print circulation decline. Or at least they weren't hurting nearly as bad as anybody else in Gannett. Either way, those are without a doubt two HUGE factors in survival these days.
So doesn't the logic follow that USA Today is – at least for now – doing the right things? Any why aren't those things being done at other Gannett newspaper sites? Why aren't those approaches trickling down?
At 12:52 p.m.: Good questions! I suspect a lot of it has to do with resources: USA Today has more bodies in hits newsrooms than just about any other Gannett paper. That means it has time to package stories they way they should be.
ReplyDeleteThe company's smaller papers no doubt see the value in that; just look at what the smaller Post-Crescent in Appleton, Wis., did with this package: http://tinyurl.com/5bprqq
Give the smaller papers the resources to do they job they want to do, and you'd see more of the trickle-down you write about.