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The Lowdown
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July 22, 2008 Post
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Here's the The
Lowdown from DNJournal.com! Updated
daily to fill you in on the latest buzz going
around the domain name industry!
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Compiled
by Ron Jackson
(DN Journal Editor/Publisher) |
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The
Incredible Shrinking Newspaper - like so many
others around the country my local daily paper, The
Tampa Tribune, continues to wither away before my
eyes. It has been like watching a death by a thousand
cuts. First the width of the pages was sliced, then whole
sections |
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How
much skinnier can newspapers
get and still be visible to the human eye? |
started
disappearing. When we got today's paper I remarked to my
wife that they would have to rename the publication the Tampa
Pamphlet as there are only a few pages left,
especially on Mondays and Tuesdays. It turns out that the
latest step in their irreversible descent into anorexia
was completely eliminating the local news section for our
suburban area the first two days of each week.
The Tribune
of course is not the Lone Ranger. As more and more
people get their news from the Internet the papers
grow weaker with every passing day, cutting both jobs and
content. In fact over the weekend, Editor
& Publisher Magazine wrote "U.S.
daily newspapers aren't shrinking just their newsrooms, an
extensive study (from Pew Research) finds stories,
page count, sections, international and national news are
all smaller too - and only a minority of editors think
online journalism will save their papers."
That's what you call up the creek without paddle.
As the print
publications scramble to find a way to survive, some are
rolling out new formats to |
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see if they can
find one that readers will rally around. Tomorrow (July
23) the 120-year-old Sporting News will
launch Sporting News Today, a daily
editorial product styled after a traditional newspaper but
which will be e-mailed each morning to a list of
subscribers - a hybrid format that the company is calling
a "daily digital sports newspaper."
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In covering that
development, Mediaweek's
Mike Shields wrote, "The product, which
utilizes technology licensed from the digital
magazine firm Texterity, has been designed
to reproduce the visual packaging of a newspaper
while blending the navigation of the Web."
Publisher Ed Baker said "Physically,
it looks like a newspaper, it reads like a
newspaper, and feels like a newspaper."
Whether or not modern readers will think that is a
good thing or a bad thing remains to be
seen. |
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Baker
told Mediaweek that Sporting News Today
will not carry any advertising until the company
builds up a significant subscriber base (it will
launch with approximately 30,000 subscribers). The
plan is to eventually feature video ads, standard
IAB units, and even "half page"
newspaper type ads.
I wish them luck, but
it looks to me like a half measure that
still won't be able to match having a rich content
website on a category killer domain name. With
respect to the predicament of local newspapers,
that's one reason I am bullish on geo |
Geodomain
owners who gathered in Chicago for the
GeoDomain Expo earlier this month may hold
the
upper hand in the new web-based local media world. |
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domains (see
our review of the recently concluded GeoDomain
Expo in Chicago), Names like Chicago.com
offer instant recognition and can deliver any kind
of media - print, audio or video - from a single
platform. That combination is going to be tough to
beat in the years ahead.
(Posted
July
22,
2008) |
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