Category Archives: Piedmont-Triad

Better to Be Lucky Than Good

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I was a hair away from booking my next business trip on Independence Air out of Piedmont Triad International Airport, but I put it off until today because I wasn’t sure of my itinerary.  Today Independence announced that they are ceasing operations on January 5, 2006.  Sure, I’d have been able to get a refund, but what a pain that would have been.

So I’m flying United and it’s costing me about 50% more than it would have to fly Independence.  I would now like to officially nominate myself for the Piedmont Triad Discount Airline recruiting committee.  Unfortunately it doesn’t exist so perhaps I should just take the bull by the horns and start the darn thing myself.

Know anyone at JetBlue or SouthWest?  Personally I prefer JetBlue. Perhaps we could create an incentives package like we do for everyone else.

On another, slightly related note Ed Cone suggests that PTI offer free wi-fi.  I agree wholeheartedly.  How much can they possibly be making with their for-profit relationship with the company providing the service, and how many business travelers are they irking in the process of not making very much money? Dumb, dumb, dumb.

JetBlue Effect Missing the Piedmont Triad?

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There’s an interesting item from Reveries Magazine about
the JetBlue effect.  Essentially it says that many small communities
are becoming vacation spots because of inexpensive airfares offered by
JetBlue, AirTran, Hooters, etal.  One person interviewed decided to buy
a condo at Myrtle Beach instead of the Jersey Shore because the airfare
to Myrtle is so cheap and the property in Jersey so steep.

On the heels of the news that Piedmont Triad International Airport
is seeing a reduction in flights one has to wonder if the Triad is
missing an opportunity here.  Granted the Triad isn’t a traditional
second-home kind of destination, but PTIA is the closest airport to the
mountains of NW North Carolina and it could be an important part of the
push to bring economic development to the western part of the state. 

In fact the entire Triad could benefit from a push to be the gateway to
the beautiful, and pretty much undiscovered northwestern NC.  That
would also work nicely with the burgeoning Yadkin Valley wine region.

Just a thought.

Cross posted on Winston-Salem Business.

The Eakes are an Impressive Group

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I’ve been a long time reader of Patrick Eakes’ blog and the beneficiary of several email "conversations" over the past year and a half.  I finally got to meet him at the ConvergeSouth conference last month and that brief conversation affirmed what I already knew; he’s a quality guy and a great benefit to his community, even if he is an NC State fan/alum.

I think I know where Patrick gets it.  His uncle, Martin Eakes, is the CEO of Self-Help Credit Union
which is a group that makes loans to people who aren’t typically well served by traditional banks (women, minorities, rural citizens, etc.).  Patrick wrote a post about a negative and misleading report targeting Self-Help and the relationship that the report’s authors have with the predatory lending (i.e. payday loan) industry.

I know Patrick has a lot of readers and it’s absolutely fantastic that he has the ability to help debunk some pretty shady "reporting" by his uncle’s opponents/detractors.  Not that I think he or his uncle need it, but if I can add a few enlightened souls by linking to Patrick’s post I’m glad to do it.

This area is very lucky to have folks like the Eakes here and I just wish we had a bunch more like them.  Maybe then we could share them with the folks in DC.

Now I just need to get Patrick to wake up and see that Wake Forest is THE premier school in the ACC and all would be perfect!

Greensboro in the Limelight Again, Damnit

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The next big confab for bloggers will be this Friday and Saturday in Greensboro.  ConvergeSouth has shaped into a nice event, and I can only imagine the amount of effort the volunteers have put into it.

There’s a nice Quicktime video on the Converge South site that features most of the prominent Greensboro bloggers who were instrumental in pulling together this event, and more importantly, putting Greensboro on the new media map. 

It’s enough to make this Winston-Salem boy very jealous, but hey I’ll be there anyway.

Greensboro News & Record’s Hometown Hub Launches, Winston-Salem Journal Being Lapped Online

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The Greensboro News & Record launched it’s newest online endeavour, the "Hometown Hub."  The first hub is for the Summerfield community (never been there, but it sounds nice) and here’s how John Robinson, the paper’s editor describes the effort:

Today, we introduce a Web site of news and information about
Summerfield, created by folks who live there. Community news editor
Betsi Robinson describes the mission of "Hometown Hubs: Summerfield" on
the front page of this section.


Hometown Hubs represents another step of turning the model of
newspaper publishing on its head. We will publish the citizen
journalism online first, and then move the most interesting content
into the newspaper.

We have done this with YourNews,
our online citizen journalism site, but Hometown Hubs is our first
effort at building a site around a real community. As Betsi notes, it
is the first of many. It continues our effort to build a virtual town
square, where you can share your news, your stories and your opinions
with others.

I like this idea for many reasons, but the most obvious is that it creates a community dialog with the newspaper.  Or put another way, it keeps the newspaper relevant to its readers, because what’s more relevant to a reader than what’s happening in her own back yard?

Another reason I like the Hometown Hub is that it seems to reinforce my perception that the News & Record has an idea of where it wants to go online.  John repeatedly communicates the newspaper’s goals for its online initiatives via his blog.  In fact in the post from which I got the above quote he also writes this:

"More online." That phrase has become as common in the newspaper as "Today’s forecast."

That’s purposeful. The Internet gives us new opportunities to reach
out to readers. Because it is limitless, we don’t have to worry about
space. Because it is interactive, we can talk with and listen to people
publicly and easily. Because it is not made of paper, we can produce
audio and video. Because it iss free, it is accessible.

Each of these characteristics helps us in our efforts to deliver
news and information, and to build more of a sense of community among
people in both the Triad and the world.

John and his folks "get it," that’s clear.  They are way ahead of most newspapers and small-city newspapers in particular.

In fact this is just another example of the N&R pulling away from my hometown paper, the Winston-Salem Journal, when it comes to the online realm.  The Journal already has a couple of "hometown" editions that it publishes in the newspaper on Thursdays.  One is the Clemmons Journal which also incorporates my town of Lewisville.  As you can see by clicking the link the Journal has a dedicated page on its site for the hometown edition, but it is merely a "re-print" of what appeared in the print edition.  Not real dynamic.

I can tell you for a fact that on Thursdays the first section of the paper I read is the Clemmons Journal.  It’s where I find out what the hot topics are at Town Hall, what’s happening in terms of development, when the new highway will (or won’t) be built.  It isn’t hard to imagine a "Hometown Hub" taking off for Clemmons, Kernersville, Ardmore and other sections of Winston-Salem and the other Western NC communities that the Journal serves.

But why should the Journal care?  They still make most of their money on the print edition: in its latest financial report the Journal’s parent company, Media General, said that the Journal had revenue of $4,078,000 in August and $3,263,000 of that came from advertising.  That’s 80% of the revenue, so it’s easy to say, "Ah well, the online stuff is nice, but it’s just a small piece."

On the other hand the same report shows that the Journal’s web traffic has  grown 32% compared to last August, and the corporation’s interactive media revenue has grown 52% over last August.  Now interactive media still only accounts for about 1.25% of Media General’s overall revenue compared to 50% for publishing, but publishing’s growth was minimal at 1.1%.  So you don’t need to be a real business heavyweight to see things trending towards an increased contribution from their online properties.

And as someone who sells advertising I can tell you that a focused community site would be an easy sell to local retailers, and retail advertising is exactly where newspapers are seeing a decline in their print editions. I wonder if the powers-that-be at the Journal have been paying attention to the recent developments in advertising;  do they realize that online advertising is where the growth is?

And one last point: the News & Record is experimenting at a time when it is cheap to do so.  They do have some start-up online competitors like Greensboro101.com, and the local version of CraigsList, but because they entered the game early they aren’t playing catch up.  They are also making their mistakes while their readership is still relatively small, which means that they will be ready to serve all those new online advertisers as the online readership grows.

The Journal?  They’re sitting on the sidelines and are ripe for a start-up to shake them up.  Things will only get harder and more expensive with time, and they’re missing a golden opportunity to really exploit their local news monopoly.  Of course they still have time, but if they wait much longer they could end up playing an expensive game of catch-up.

 

Re-Design Gone Bad at Greensboro News & Record

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Well the Greensboro News & Record has launched the re-design of their website.  I’ve been out of town and haven’t been keeping up as much as I’d like with the Greensboro bloggers like Ed Cone, but I can’t imagine they have had nice things to say about it.

Now I know that any one person’s opinion about a design of any kind, whether it’s a website or a house, is a very subjective thing.  Some people like ranch style houses, others don’t.  But there are certain design elements that most people agree on:  with a house most people prefer that a doorway is high enough to walk through.

In the case of a website’s design you can look at several elements like color or font size and you’ll usually get some people that like it, and some that don’t.  But what most people expect from a website is a certain ease of use. They want to be able to find the information they’re looking for as quickly as possible and in this respect I think the N & R site fails.

Nr First you have the tab system on the home page, which is okay as a concept, but they have tabs in the middle and then other tabs at the top, and then other tabs on the left hand column.  What the hell is the hierarchy here? (See the picture at left; click on it for a larger version). That middle tab set goes away when you click through to articles, but since the home page is usually a site’s entryway I’d think you would want it to be a little easier to navigate.  One easy fix would be to get rid of the "Triad Marketplace" banner between the top tabs and the central tab window; that thing really screws up the eyes.

Now I have to say that I really don’t like the graphic design of the banners I’ve seen, and normally that wouldn’t bother me so much, but since they’ve decided to moonch them all together I feel like I’m looking at some kind of kindergarten collage project.  Has anyone at the N & R heard of white space?  And how about a design consistency?  There is literally no flow from one design element to the next.  Yuck.

As a testament to the design issues I offer this:  The main reason I started reading the N & R are the blogs and it took me quite a while to find them.  They are in another set of tabs (along with columnists and editorials) on the lower half of the home page, right-center.  But when I click through on editorials I can’t find any links from that page directly to the blogs.  Huh?

It looks like they aren’t done with the conversion to the new system (I’ll check their blogs for an update), but they are close enough to being done that I can tell you I don’t think they’ve done themselves any favors.  I hope whatever they gained on the back end (i.e. administrative side) was worth it.

**Update** I’ve checked the N&R blogs and it does seem to be the case that the site is pretty far from done.  Actually I don’t think any site is ever really done, so the folks at the N&R can definitely count on working on the site ad infinitum. 

On anothernot I’m kind of regretting the tone of some of my comments above, if for no other reason than the folks at N&R have taken on a monumental task and are obviously doing the best they can. The last thing they need is some snarky Monday-morning quarterbacking.

That said, I really hope they re-work their design templates so that the site is easier to read and navigate.

Check out Billy the Blogging Poet

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If you haven’t been there yet you should visit Billy the Blogging Poet, and I’m not saying this because he recently gave me a lot of love on the Blogsboro blog.

Billy’s a true renaissance man and I’ve enjoyed reading his blog since I started this whole blogging adventure.  I’m also quite embarassed that I left him off my list of Smart People until now.

Billy’s also the driving force behind:
Blogsboro.com
LaureatesKids.com

From Zero to Launch in 3 Hours, or Behold the Power of Blogs

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First a little background:  I was looking for an index of publicly traded companies in Winston-Salem and I couldn’t find it anywhere.  I figured there weren’t that many publicly traded companies in W-S so I wondered if I could create one myself.  That’s when the fun began.

First I logged onto the Forsyth County Library’s research site, which is free by the way.  Then I used the ProQuest feed from Hoovers to look up all Winston-Salem companies that they track (about 30 total).  Of those I found seven publicly traded companies and I created my own little tracking index on my.yahoo.

I was going to leave it at that, but then I got to wondering if there was any way to get a script that would allow me to post the index on my blog.  Within a few minutes I found a free service called barchart.com. All I had to do was input those same seven companies’ trading symbols into their system and it kicked out a piece of javascript that I could post on my site.  Pretty cool.

Then I thought a little more about it and decided that I’d like to create a blog focused solely on business related information for Winston-Salem.  I’ve been in W-S for about a year and in that time I’ve been doing a lot of reading and research on the local business community and I figured a blog would be as good a way as any to keep track of this stuff.  That led me to create the Winston-Salem Business blog.

Over the course of about 2 1/2 hours I set up the template, built some link lists to local publications, business groups, etc. and wrote a couple of fairly generic posts.  Then I thought it might be fun to see if I could set up a newsfeed for Winston-Salem and Forsyth County business.

Back to my.yahoo I went.  I set up a news search for "winston-salem"+"business" "forsyth county"+"business", and copied the "rss.xml" link.  Then I found a free service called rss-to-javascript.com that allows me to put in any RSS feed and it spits out a piece of javascript.  I can then paste the javascript into my site and voila, I have my own customized newsfeed.

This is pretty amazing.  I’ve essentially built my own customized business news site for next to nothing (I use Typepad which gives me three blogs for a flat fee, so technically I guess it’s costing me about $4 a month).  If I wanted to I guess I could commercialize it with very little effort, although to build readership would take lots of effort and keeping it relevant and fresh even more blood, sweat and tears. 

I guess what I’m most amazed at is how quickly and easily I could physically pull together a business news site.  It just drives home the fact that a properly motivated entrepreneur could pop up almost out of nowhere and start eating the local business press’s lunch.

**Update** While Barchart.com seems to load every time, it looks like by rss-to-javascript.com service is worth what I paid for it (0).  It only loads about 20% of the time.  I’ll try and find a better feed at some point.

**Update #2**  It doesn’t look like it was the fault of rss-to-javascript.com for the non-loading. It seems that Yahoo!’s feed was iffy, so I went with Craigslist for jobs and the Biz Journal for the business feeds.  Only negative is that those "Triad" focus, not the more defined "Winston-Salem" focus I was looking for.  If I can get a more focused, customizable feed I will, but for now this will do.