Here’s the lead news story at The Albuquerque Tribune as of 9:00 Saturday morning:
DENVER — The second major winter storm in a week pounded Colorado, dumping more than 2 feet of snow in the foothills and forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights and the closure of highways and government offices today.
Yesterday was the snowiest day ever in Albuquerque and a newspaper website is leading with a day-old AP story from freakin’ Denver.
And, at the moment, The Albuquerque Journal website isn’t even working!
Here’s the top story currently on KOB-TV’s website:
Flights at the Albuquerque International Sunport sat on the tarmac through at least 3 p.m. Friday instead of taking to the skies because of low visibility.
Friday was yesterday.
And KOAT:
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A moisture-packed, slow-moving winter storm is hovering over New Mexico on Friday, blanketing a large swath of the state with snow, causing airport delays, and stranding motorists.
Friday was yesterday.
The third local television station, KRQE, is more current.
Albuquerque has been flooded during 2006 with news and magazine stories putting it in the top ten for this or that. Here’s a nomination for another top ten: Worst media outlets.
I couldn’t agree more. I just tried to get on each of the local media websites and they are not even updated! I did watch the news last night and I’m pretty sure they invited me (and everyone else…lol) to go to their websites to check on road and weather updates. I just checked the closures page and found that the road conditions hotline is closed. Lordy! How ironic is that!
Our trash pick-up was delayed a day from the holiday and there it still sits… full of Christmas trash with no hope for being picked-up.
It’s gonna be a day… I can just feel it.
Kids are restless, we are down to a half a gallon of milk, and the white fluffy stuff looks like about 15 inches outside my window.
Does the Journal even have reporters? News from the AP wire about Denver just, well… it just pisses me off.
I had to go to WGN for my news this morning. Yep, a Chicago website.
At least I know it’s up to date.
Have a nice cozy day, Ken…
🙂
Trade you milk for eggs Natalie.
Our apartment building (in Denver) was very stinky for a few days. They couldn’t empty the trash for the better part of a week, so residents were instructed not to put anything in the communal trash chutes. The hallways, stairwells and elevators smelled pretty gross for a bit.
We were also disappointed in our local news coverage with this most recent storm. At least it was local, but it was not very good quality. The reporters stumbled over their inaccurate reports and there were numerous spelling errors on-screen.
That’s what us bloggers are for, right Ken?
I agree, that is what us bloggers are for, but near Tramway and Paseo del Norte with two feet and rising (it’s snowing fairly hard as this is written at noon), I’m not really well informed about conditions around town.
And I still think the industrial media has an important role to play, including on the web.
Chantal has some cool (pun intended) photos at Duke City Fix.
It’s snowing buckets out here on the westside. I’d say we currently have over 18 inches of snow on the ground. It looks like this thing is taking another pass at us or just sitting on top of us, again. Ain’t it grand?
If we got our milk and eggs together with some tortillas and green chili (anyone?) we could have some breakfast burros together.
Alas… you are ten miles and some 15-18 feet worth of snowdrifts away.
Hard to believe that just the other side of town feels like Santa Fe.
😉
I also still have half a lime. 😉
I have no tequila! But I do have a huge (Costco bought) bottle of Grey Goose.
Why wait for the New Year?!
😉 back atcha!
Newspapers especially should put their web presence as their #1 priority. They need to move away from the tree pulp/print/truck distribution/advertising model. They should make THE NEWS their focus, not carbon dissemination.
Ken –
Sorry you couldn’t get through to the Journal’s web site Saturday morning. I’m not sure why that was. I saw it fine, and was using and reading it all day.
In any case, I was posting udpates throughout the day (except when I was out playing), and we had an unusually large crew doing likewise. And I’m not sure who the anonymous Gnome is who’s been posting today, but we’ve had updated airport and road closure info since sunup this morning (Sunday).
Thanks for your comment John.
The Journal site was down for about 10-15 minutes, but we all understand that happens. It just fit in nicely with my rant.
I did see that The Journal did a better job later in the day. And, while I still do think the site could be significantly improved, I apologize for appearing to disparage the hard-working journalists and photographers who were getting the story out.
The Tribune site remains way behind, with its lead weather story as of this writing late Sunday morning being an AP article that discusses the airport being closed on Friday. KOB-TV’s top storm news item is 20 hours old. Here’s the beginning of KOAT’s top storm news story: “A moisture-packed, slow-moving winter storm is hovering over New Mexico on Friday, blanketing a large swath of the state with snow, causing airport delays, and stranding motorists.”
I recognize that the TV stations have done a better job with their main medium, broadcasting. But they’ll have to do better by the web, or as my original headline said, they might as well not even have web sites.
An additional response to Jon’s comment:
I realize that webheads think the web should be everyone’s number one priority, because it’s their number one priority. I, in fact, have devoted a lot of my professional attention as a content creator to thinking about how to make news on the web work. I believe that it’s an important part of my professional future. I’m a webhead too.
It is true that the audience for what Jon calls the “pulp/print/truck distribution/advertising model” is shrinking. But it is still vastly larger in a lot of niches than the audience for the web version, and local news remains one of those niches. It’s critical for us to get the web right, but the vast majority of local news readers are not like you guys. They’re still buying a newspaper.
All true John, but Albuquerque’s larger 2006 population is buying several thousand copies fewer of The Journal every day than a smaller population did a decade ago.
Ken –
I agree (as I said) that the audience for the print product is shrinking. But it’s still orders of magnitude larger than the web audience for local news (here or anywhere else). It would be silly not to try to increase the web audience, but it would be even sillier not to realize that the consumers still demonstrably prefer the printed product.
As huge a fan of the web as I am, and I use it daily to gather information of many kinds, it will be a sad day indeed to me when I can no longer have an actual newspaper delivered to my doorstep each morning.
John-
I always regarded you as an excellent “newsman,” not a “paperman.” I agree that customer tastes are changing…and I do believe the Journal’s website is great, except for a couple of minor things. In any event, while striving to come up with a better model to deliver the news and still make a profit, I would only offer this: Don’t try to make the website pay for the printed product. It seems to me that at this point the Journal is trying to use the web as a profit center to help bail out the rest of the company.
The Journal website is too expensive. It could not only be cheaper, they could double your salary and still make money (in the future) with a very low-cost product.
I think that the present situation actually is an opportunity for community-based online publications like the duke city fix and others to fill in the gaps the the Journal and Trib are leaving in terms of fostering an interactive community, very up-to-date and very local stories, citizen contribution to the news matrix, and the very public acknowledgement of news biases.
And this says nothing about the economic advantages, the no-cost video and graphics content, opportunities for futher instantaneous reading by way of links, and unlimited world-wide distribution.
Of course, presently, some readers still prefer 3 pounds of carbon delivered to their doorstep every Sunday. They, like SnoLepard, are willing to make that trade-off. Fine. But why should that be the preferred mode…it just makes no sense.
We find some of the same issues in educational publishing, too. There is a small, vocal group who wants everything digital and highly technical. We have to update our curriculum every time Microsoft updates their products. Adobe recently updated PhotoShop Elements so fast that we hadn’t released 4 when we had to start working on 5. It’s hard to stay up-to-date for these customers and not get too far ahead of those teachers with only one computer in their classrooms.
However, we find that most teachers still want to hold books in their hands. Almost every time we get a big ebook sale, the customer follows up later with paper copies of the products. Teachers just aren’t ready to get rid of books in their classrooms. But, I don’t think digital classrooms are very far away. In California recently, a new Web-based social studies textbook is being adopted in many places. These students have no textbooks. They will just use the Internet for access at school and home.
I agree with Mr. Fleck on one thing for sure. Publishers must keep their websites up-to-date and accurate, but the real audience is still in the paper copies for now.
Jon –
I wish the web-news-profit model was as simple as you seem to think it is. Newspapers make their money on the paper product. To the extent that they give their product away for free on the Internet, and that cuts into sales of the paper product, they’re losing money. Internet news site ad revenue has, in general, not made up for that loss in the local news niche.
You misunderstand the economic relationship between the Journal’s web site and printed product. Charging for the web site does make some money, but that’s not what it’s about. Equally important is the way charging halted the slide in sales of our print product. People really were apparently dropping their paper subscriptions because they could get the news on line for free.
Donn Friedman, the Journal’s on line editor, explained our rationale nicely in an Online Journalism Review article a couple of years back*:
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Since we closed off our site to all but paying subscribers two years ago, 35,000 print newspaper subscribers have signed up to use the site. Almost 2,000 people are now paying either $8 per month or $60 per year for online-only subscriptions. That’s more than $100,000 in truly new revenues generated by subscriptions.
Page views are up 30 percent; our advertising revenue is up more than 50 percent. And our print subscriptions are not falling.
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* http://www.ojr.org/ojr/business/1068080483.php