In the past, newspapers only carried the news.
Today, the news itself is making headlines. Some major newspapers have folded, some have cut back their distribution, some have cut back their staff, and several report a loss in readership.
Outside of the big cities, the news about the news is not all bad.
Three weekly Athens area newspapers report all do report one effect of the struggling economy on their revenue, but three say their circulation figures have remained stable. One even reported that they were actually expanding.
The Oglethorpe Echo is a weekly newspaper in Lexington, Ga., that serves all of Oglethorpe County. Brenda Norman, bookkeeper for the paper, said that advertising has been down. The amount of subscribers, though, seems to be the same.
“I think that’s been pretty steady,” said Norman.
Norman said the paper’s circulation was 4,800.
The Oglethorpe Echo is only available to readers in a print format as it not available on the Internet.
Norman said there were currently no plans to go in that direction. She said that the newspaper currently lacked the staff to host the paper on the Internet.
“It’s like doing a completely different paper,” said Norman about the process of creating and maintaining a Web site.
Just a little further south, the city of Greensboro, Ga., is home of The Herald-Journal. This newspaper is also a weekly and it covers Greene County.
Like the Oglethorpe Echo, The Herald-Journal has also seen a drop in the usual amount of advertising. However, Jan Foster, general manager of the newspaper, reports that this is picking back up.
Also like the case in Lexington, readership of The Herald-Journal has not gone down. Foster estimated the paper’s circulation to be about 5,200.
The Herald-Journal does have a Web site at www.theheraldjournalonline.com, but only to a minimum degree. Only a limited amount of pages are available on the Internet for readers to view.
“We’re thinking about expanding online,” said Foster.
Foster said, though, that putting all material available on the Internet was not the idea business model.
“If you put all your pages online, you’ll hurt your subscription base,” said Foster.
Continuing south, the city of Eatonton, Ga., is seeing something strange for the current state of newspapers.
“We’re actually growing,” Judy Maxwell, editor of the Eatonton Messenger, said.
Maxwell said the weekly Eatonton Messenger had a circulation of 7,000 and its two associated magazines had a circulation of 4,000. While she said that advertising had been slightly down in the paper, they were currently expanding.
While Maxwell did not know an exact date, she said there would be a new newspaper coming along. Tentative plans had it had the first issue rolling off the press this fall. In addition, she said another magazine would start printing in spring 2010.
Maxwell also said the Eatonton Messenger was planning on expanding their Web site, which is available at www.msgr.com/meesengeronline.htm. In particular, she said the sports section was going to include real-time coverage of the county’s high school games. She said it was quite a change, considering that the newspaper’s Web site had only recently become operational again. She said it had not been online for about a year.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I edited Becky Taylor, and after speaking with her discovered that although she is an anxious writer, once she gets going, she can quickly develop a story. Taylor usually does not work from a plan or outline when writing, but does like to perfect her lead before she continues with the rest of her writing. Despite this, Taylor says the easiest part of the story is working on the lead and the hardest is going out and getting interviews. During interviews, Taylor does not take many notes, which means that about 80-100% of the notes she takes end up in her final story. Taylor said that her favorite part of writing this story was conducting the last interview, because the source was nice and very willing to talk. She said that her story and quotes did not flow as well as she wanted, and the ending of the story needed some extra help.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed Taylor's delayed lead, and thought that it was a nice touch to the story. I agreed that the ending needed a bit of work, and there were a few facts that I wanted her to re-check. I suggested that she also speak to a paper that had its entire content online and was utilizing a website on a daily basis. Other than a few minor grammatical errors, Taylor did a very nice job working on her story.