That's according to Tallahassee Democrat Executive Editor Bob Gabordi, who posted that information in a comment on his blog moments ago -- confirming a tip I received last week. The Utah paper is The Spectrum of St. George. A third paper is due to add a wall; its identity has not yet been disclosed, however.
The Democrat announced this morning that it would erect a paywall on July 1.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
11 comments:
Jim says: "Proceed with caution; this is a free-for-all comment zone. I try to correct or clarify incorrect information. But I can't catch everything. Please keep your posts focused on Gannett and media-related subjects. Note that I occasionally review comments in advance, to reject inappropriate ones. And I ignore hostile posters, and recommend you do, too."
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I must admit I have never been to St. George Utah, and on the map it does not look very big. Why would Corporate chose this as one of the three papers to experiment with the pay wall. I wonder if it has any competition there, or is this just a way of extracting more money from a community held hostage by a monopoly?
ReplyDelete9:03 -- I'm just guessing, but I suspect corporate is choosing a property like St. George because they don't think there's anything to lose.
ReplyDeleteIf they make money, great. If they don't Web traffic decreases in one of their smallest markets. That's the problem with almost all of Gannett's initiatives. They roll them out in different communities -- often accompanied by marketing campaigns -- just to see what happens.
If Gannett was truly invested in the communities where it does business it wouldn't do things like this because it would be concerned with public opinion of the paper. The way things work now, that's the employees' concern. The only thin that will cause GCI to make more prudent decisions is an indication that a property has stopped producing as much cash flow as it once did.
Couple of things to consider about these charming paywalls...for my $9.95 or whatever a month, is that the same as the price of a daily subscription to the print edition? Do I get all the content as I would get in the print edition? If the monthly online edition rate is greater than the print edition monthly rate, I had better get more content (And I don't consider the online comments of readers to be content.)
ReplyDeleteWell, 8:45, at my site you'd get photo galleries of drunks at Country USA, all with the same lame cutline. You'd see at least two headlines misspelled a day, one quite often the name of our fair city. You'd get staff and reader blogs, none of which hold any interest for me, partially due to subject matter and partially due to lousy writing. You'd get the most annoying popup ads ever; they're near impossible to get rid of and keep coming back mid-read of a story. You'd get a photo of a pool being evacuated with a headline that reads, Child drowns at pool. Then in the second line of the cutline it says, The child was revived. Woops. You'd get some of the most vile, racist reader comments on stories I've ever seen. I could go on but you get my point. Maybe I'd pay five cents for this site. Meh. Maybe not.
ReplyDelete9:39 is more than right complaining about the pop-up ads. They have some technology that overcomes my pop-up blocker and they come with annoying regularity while you are in the middle of reading a story. There is nothing more distracting, except my daughter putting her ice pop on my newspaper while I am reading it. Some say you roll them off the page, but if you do that, it takes you to their site and kerching, GCI digital gets money for referring someone to a site. It also drops a cookie in your cookie file, and then you get emails, which really pisses me off. Now I go out of my way to avoid popups by not calling up the site, but going elsewhere for information on sites that don't have them.
ReplyDeleteMaybe St George was slected because it is a high growth community, has an above average income level, has a well educated community and it has one of the highest percentage of web usage in the country. I wonder if that could be the reason? I've been to and worked in St George. It is one of the best kept secrets in the country.
ReplyDeleteSouthwest corner of Utah, 300 miles from Salt Lake City, 120 miles from Las Vegas. The only TV station is run out of SLC. Most everyone has cable or satellite to get SLC stations.
ReplyDeleteGannett might have a local monopoly on printed news in St. George. Are the Salt Lake Tribune and Las Vegas Review-Journal available there?
I never use my local Gannett paper web site - Westchester/Rockland. It's cluttered, hard to find things and for some reason it's real, real slow. And oh yeah, the popups!
ReplyDeleteThere are other local papers in the region with much better sites. I use them instead at least several times per week.
But would I be willing to pay $10 or so per month for local news? No. If I want to keep up, I can get it for free at the library.
8:54 you prove the companies' point. Its people like you who have contributed to the demise of the business. You have to support a free press. You probably spend more money on coffee each month than a monthly subscription costs, yet you would rather go to the library and get it for free than support the medium. So when the medium dies it is because YOU made a choice to do whatever you could to help with its demise. Forget Gannett, you are enabling the demise of the entire industry. What organization is going to supply the news and information you read in the library if there is no money to pay the journalists who write the material? The free model won't support future jounalistic efforts. Who will pay for it? Obviously not you.
ReplyDeleteMore evidence that Gannett just doesn't get it - or at least those operating in the field don't. We know now that Greenville will be the third Gannett paper to raise the paywall. Last night, the University of South Carolina and Clemson baseball teams faced off against each other in the NCAA College World Series. Huge local interest. At 11:35, the game was 5-1 USC in the bottom of the eighth inning.
ReplyDeletefor grins, I checked the greenvilleonline website. What story did they have? A set up story from the afternoon about who the starting pitchers for tonight's game were going to be! At midnight, when the game was over, they still had the same story. No updating on the website, no quick reports out to mobile devices, no tweets. And that, despite the fact that I know there there were three sports guys sitting in the newsroom with their feet on the desk watching the game.
Unfortunately, this is not a fluke. Leaving one to wonder why anyone in Gannett or at this newspaper would think that people would pay for this lackadaisical reporting either in print or online?
The News, like many other papers, is resting on its laurels and on its history. But the news product as it is today is barely a shadow of what it was 20-25 years ago. Those days are over and no one is going to buy into this paywall based on the glory days of the past.
People make decisions on what they are getting now. The evidence there - at least at the Greenville News - speaks volumes: Nothing.
Re 7:58 p.m.: I think the issue isn't so much not being willing to pay for local news, as it is not being willing to pay for the local news currently provided.
ReplyDeleteMy Gannett newspaper, Westchester/Rockland, offers nothing more than a skimming of the issues, except for two old standbys: the deterioration of the TZ Bridge and the status of the Indian Pt. nuke plant.
And the paper gives such indepth treatment of even the most trivial issues relating to the bridge and the plant, that I don't bother reading the stories anymore.
What I want is more expansive reporting, and not just the usual city council meeting/food store opening.
The issue is that Gannett, and I suspect other news companies as well, are unwilling to spend the money.
And so, like the other poster, I'm unwilling to pay for the paper.
And oh, by the way, the journal news pulled its full-time reporter from my area in north rockland and at the same time increased the price. It took me 10 seconds to decide to cancel.