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For many of you, the day you were afforded the opportunity to post your own opinions and respond to the opinions of others at your local newspaper's website was a life-changing event; a coming out of the darkness so to speak.
It is likely that, ever since that day, hundreds of your fellow bloggers have read some or all of the thousands of written words you have presented -- and vice versa. |
It is likely that you and/or some of your fellow posters are read by more visitors at your hometown newspaper's website than are any of its paid bloggers. Certainly, on any given day, community bloggers are quite likely to amass a greater number of comments than the aforementioned.
Thus far, other than being required to endure daily barrages of pop-up and pop-under ads plus nightly ad-spam blog attacks and the onslaught of selfish, 
bandwidth-wasting blog hogs, exercising your right to rant at these Pluck-powered websites has been a walk in the park; a freebie, at that.
Though I am not privy to the precise date that your paper will suddenly require you to become a paid subscriber in order to blog at its website, I can tell you with first-hand certainty that at least two of the chain's major outlets ("major" judging by the logged number of referrals to this website that originate from them) The Greenville News and the Tallahassee Democrat, have already done so.
Here is a facsimile of what now appears at these websites when you attempt to log in to perform a blogging function. It is what you will probably see on that fateful day when your own favorite newspaper goes pay-for-play...
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As a capitalist and a strong advocate of free markets, I offer no criticism of newspaper companies that choose to do what they think they need to do to survive and thrive. However, as ostensibly advertising revenue-based businesses, it appears that the collective Gannett sales department may have dropped the ball.
Granted, our horrendous economy and the decidedly anti-commerce Obama administration have made it extremely difficult for advertisers to maintain or ramp-up their advertising budgets. In addition, as we have known for quite a few years, many people with Internet access no longer subscribe to the newsprint editions of their local newspapers.
Nonetheless, if management perceives that there are enough prospective-subscriber visitors at the user-participation pages of their websites to neutralize Internet ad revenue sluggishness, then one might logically deduce that there are also a great many untapped advertisers who would want their messages to be displayed before us.
| If the economy is essentially responsible for the Gannett papers' ad revenue crisis, will strapped consumers even be able to make up the difference? Would consumers consider paying for services that have, until now, been free -- especially with money being so tight these days? If, ultimately, you choose to hang up your newspaper website blogging shoes, where will you go as an alternative? Hopefully, it won't be back into the darkness. |
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Back into the darkness? |
Meanwhile, please do me a favor... << Bookmark This Page.
It won't cost you a dime and you'll always have a place to exercise the right to rant.