The folks at the Winston-Salem Journal have generously provided us with an early nominee for the title of "Best or Worst Headline in 2011." Whether you think it's bad or good depends on your tolerance for very bad puns:
Textile tycoon's death stiffs IRS a century after grandfather fought tax
Death. Stiff. Get it?
News 8 cameraman Chris Weaver had an interesting day on the job while doing a story in Davidson County:
About 10 years ago I had the privilege of working with Anne Holland as she was starting up MarketingSherpa.com. I don't exactly remember how I met Anne, but it had to be through some activity in the premium newsletter business since that's the industry we both worked in during the 90s. She's one of the smartest people I've ever worked with and so I can recommend without hesitation, and without reviewing it myself, this free training video for newspaper execs. Anne has started a new site, Subscription Site Insider, that I'm fairly sure will become a "must-use" site for anyone in the paid content space, if it isn't already. From the page about the video:
During our research for the presentation we could not find one single example of a good newspaper paywall. Not one! Newspaper paywalls are — frankly — scary bad. They just ignore all best practices.
Why is that? My theory is that newspaper site design is really difficult – it’s a science in itself. You’re dealing with heavy text, complex navigation, and hundreds of thousands of pages… Plus, on top of making this dense content easily navigatible, you also have to deal with the demands of advertisers — get them enough clicks to keep paying while not sacrificing all your screen space.
Paywall design requires a completely different skill set. The goal is paid conversion, not free navigation. The content is focused, not comprehensive. Psychologically, the audience isn’t looking at the page because they want to be there, but because they’re forced to be there.
Other niches in the subscription site industry have been testing, researching and refining their paywalls for close to 15 years now. Audience development executives and web designers for newspapers can learn a lot from them.
If your business depends on getting people to pay for access to your "stuff" then you really should check out Anne's place. You wont' regret it.
Wachovia/Wells Fargo apparently doesn't require its branches to display Christmas trees and apparently that's a problem for ten people who marched in front of the Wachovia building in Winston-Salem. That was enough to attract some local news folks, but I don't think the "War on Christmas" story they were hoping for materialized. From the story:
Ten people gathered Tuesday in front of Wachovia's offices on West 4 ½ Street to protest a company policy they said doesn't allow branches to recognize the Christmas holiday.
Joyce Krawiec organized the event after she said the company banned the display of Christmas trees in its branches…
It should be noted that the Wachovia offices where the protests were held do display a Christmas tree inside. But, Krawiec said she's checked in branches throughout the area and found very few that were displaying Christmas trees…
Wachovia, acquired by Wells Fargo in 2008, said in a statement that the decision to display poinsettias in branches was to achieve a common look within the markets in which the company operates.
The statement from the company also said that company policy doesn't prohibit Christmas trees from being displayed.
Okay, I think we need to come up with a few news rules here:
If these kind of stories keep showing up I think I'm going to grab four of my friends, a six pack, a couple of hand drawn cardboard signs and head over to the mall to walk around and air our various grievances about saggy drawers, terrible Christmas music, terrible tattoos, nasty body piercings, etcetera, etcetera. See you on the 6 o'clock news.
A video farewell to the 18 copy desk employees at the Winston-Salem Journal who lost their jobs thanks to Media General consolidating the copy desk operations for its three metro papers. Not sure how a city newspaper is supposed to function without its own copy desk, but I guess we're about to find out. (Thanks to Scott Dickson for sharing this on Facebook).
Those of you who live in Winston-Salem may remember that we have a daily newspaper called the Winston-Salem Journal. You may also remember that the newspaper used to employ an editor by the name of Ken Otterbourg, and that Mr. Ottberbourg left the paper a while back after having a bit of a disagreement with senior management at Media General. When he was still with the paper I liked the fact that Mr. Otterbourg tried to take the online lead by penning a blog and I was also impressed that he was willing to take the abuse that comes with that territory. If nothing else his blog made the paper feel a little more personal, at least to me, so I was sad to see him and his blog go. I'm not sure what he's up to these days but I was happy to see his name pop up in my news reader as the author of this article, Alcoa and the great North Carolina power grab, in Fortune.
To power its operations, Alcoa (AA) built a series of enormous hydroelectric dams, four in all, along a 38-mile stretch of the Yadkin River as it cuts through the heart of the state. But with the smelter disassembled and the ingot room gone cold, the power is a commodity, sold into an electrical grid hungry for clean energy. Alcoa's federal license, received in 1958, has expired, and it operates the dams under an extension as it seeks relicensing for another 50 years' use of the river.
In another era Alcoa would already have its license. But North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue and officials in Stanly County, home to three of the dams, are asking federal regulators to do what they have never done before: say no. Their message is simple. With the smelter and the local jobs and much of the tax base gone, they say Alcoa's right to the license, its right to make money from the river, has vanished. They want control of the river — and the revenue it generates — returned to the public.
Says Keith Crisco, North Carolina's secretary of commerce: "Everybody's done a good job of making this a complicated issue, but to me it's pretty basic: There's an economic asset there, and it's our job today to get the best value for the people of North Carolina."
The battle over the Alcoa dams — and it is a battle, fought on both a grand and often personal scale by armies of lawyers, lobbyists, and neighbors — is about the control of a resource. But it's also about what, if any, obligations corporations have to the places like Badin that they leave behind as their businesses change. As Stanly County's manager Andy Lucas puts it: "They're giving us the crumbs off the king's table. That's our water. It should benefit us."
I just read an interesting interview with Evan Williams, founder of Twitter (and Blogger) that had a great quote:
In response to a question from the audience about Twitter empowering people to publish and act as journalists, Williams — who founded Blogger and later sold it to Google — said that “lowering the barrier to publishing” has been something he has spent most of his career on, and this is because he believes that “the open exchange of information has a positive effect on the world — it’s not all positive, but net-net it is positive.” With Twitter, he said, “we’ve lowered the barriers to publishing almost as far as they can go,” and that is good because if there are “more voices and more ways to find the truth, then the truth will be available to more people — I think this is what the Internet empowers [but] society has not fully realized what this means.”
I like Fred Wilson's take on this too:
When I started blogging back in 2003, I would tell everyone how awesome it was. A common refrain back then was "not everyone should have a printing press." I didn't agree then and I don't agree now. Everyone should have a printing press and should use it as often as they see fit. Through things like RSS and Twitter's follow model, we can subscribe to the voices we want to hear regularly. And through things like reblog and retweet, the voices we don't subscribe to can get into our readers, dashboards, and timelines.
If I look back at my core investment thesis over the past five years, it is this single idea, that everyone has a voice on the Internet, that is central to it. And as Ev said, society has not fully realized what this means. But it's getting there, quickly.
Last week I wrote about local mommy-blog Triad Smarty Pants biting the dust. Some commenters pointed out that the local writers for Triad Smarty Pants and flown the coop and were building their own site. Not long after writing that post I heard from Katie Moosbrugger, one of the folks behind the new site Triad Moms on Main, who wanted me to know about their new site. Now that I've survived my daughter's BirthdayPalooza (she turned 17 on Saturday) I decided to check it out. Obviously I'm not really part of their core demographic, as evidenced by an article titled "Got a Ladystache?" that I found during my highly random search of the site, but I will offer a limited opinion anyway: the site is very well designed and informative. In simpler terms, if I were a mommy in the Triad this would be my main online destination.
Best of luck to Katie and the rest of the folks over at T-MOM. Now I'm gonna see what I can do about that 'stache.
The Triad Smarty Pants blog is going dark. The announcement today:
Hi Smarties,
I'm sad to say that today is our official last post in the Triad. We've really enjoyed delivering all the Smarty Scoop for you for two years and appreciate the support each and every one of you has given us every single day! However, due to some recent changes in the direction of our brand and business, we deemed it necessary to discontinue the TSP site for now.
We wish you the best of luck with your journey through this crazy little thing called mommyhood and stay Smarty!
Come visit us in Charlotte any time - www.charlottesmartypants.com!
Sincerely,
Jen Plym
Chief Founding Mommy
http://www.charlottesmartypants.com
http://www.triadsmartypants.com
I wasn't exactly an avid follower since I'm neither a mom or particularly smart, but I kept an eye on the blog because I'm interested to see how "new media" fares locally. For that reason I'm sorry to see them throw in the towel in the Triad, but hopefully they'll thrive in Charlotte.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote an incredible cover letter to accompany his application for a job with the Vancouver Sun in 1958. You can read the full in all its glory here, but I offer this excerpt as evidence that journalism apparently hasn't changed much in 50 years:
The enclosed clippings should give you a rough idea of who I am. It's a year old, however, and I've changed a bit since it was written. I've taken some writing courses from Columbia in my spare time, learned a hell of a lot about the newspaper business, and developed a healthy contempt for journalism as a profession.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity. If this is what you're trying to get The Sun away from, then I think I'd like to work for you.
Befuddled 