I recently had a very interesting discussion with Jeff Gauger, the Executive Editor of our local paper The Canton Repository. From what I gathered, he’s been in the print publishing industry for the bulk of his career and clearly still is. One thing that makes him different, at least in my opinion, is that he truly realizes the collision that is happening between the off line and online worlds. News is no longer limited to the paper, the TV, or the formalities the we’ve all grown to expect in those mediums.
I was surprised to hear these words come out of his mouth, I believe he said “web-first publishing” was a major initiative, which I of course agree with. However, I was somewhat shocked to hear that come out of the mouth of the Editor of an almost 200 year old newspaper! Kind of refreshing.
Jeff made some great observations in this article, regarding coverage of the Bobby Cutts trial and a great effort the Rep made to focus on the fast pace that web users expect the content to be delivered as well as the style and format they want it in. It sounds to me like they made some great strides and learned quite a lot from this process. A high profile, national story gave them the perfect venue to try some new things and they had the guts to take the risk and give it a shot.
Jeff wrote this article for the audience of other journalists, but web marketers and site owners could certainly learn a lot from his observations! Take some time and read the article. He talks about the variations in the content, style and of course speed. Web marketers have known for years that regurgitating print materials to the web isn’t going to do the trick. This reinforces that fact in a great way.
Kudos to Jeff and the Rep for taking the web seriously, and making a good effort to serve the demands of their market. The next year or two will be interesting to watch.
March 27th, 2008 at 6:53 am
When compare to traditional publishing, publishers and readers will get mutual benefits through web publishing. Publishers can benefited by low cost production, can maximize circulations, increase their add revenue, etc… and reader would get the instant reach facility and there is no need to spend money on it.
In addition to circulate the publications through online, there are new technologies are also came and they are pod casting, RSS, Mobile, etc… Recently I found an e-publishing company called http://www.pressmart.net delivers the above services for all print publications. I saw their demo and I am much impressed by their services.