August 6, 2007
This was one of those all-hands-on-deck issues where the newspaper team pulled together to get newspapers delivered quickly. Still, we weren't on the street until after 7 a.m. and did not have all newspapers delivered until after 9 a.m. As I have written before, delivery of the newspaper on time is critical to readership.
The Internet is one tool we used this morning to warn people about the delay. I posted a short story to alert people to the delay and then sent a breaking news alert to cell phones and e-mail to warn people that the newspaper would be late.
The other thing we did was to create a pdf of all 40 pages of Monday's newspaper and make it available for download.
Many newspapers provide such pdfs on a regular basis. I wonder what others think of the value of being able to download a pdf of the day's newspapers? It's a sizable download (48 MB), and I don't think it would work well for dial-up users. At the same time, I'm not sure that we should worry about features not being available for dial-up use.
I guess the central question is, "should the Web be a different newspaper experience altogether or should it simply provide an alternative delivery method? Maybe it should do both.
Let me know what you think. My e-mail and phone numbers are below.
Scott Stanford, Editor
sstanford@steamboatpilot.com
(970) 871-4221/(970) 291-9278
Comments
corduroy ( anonymous ) says...
Honestly at 48MB, the file is huge. For people like me with really fast high speed, its not too bad, but for dialup users or 256k DSL connections, its a long download. I can't see many people going for it. Maybe if you did it by section or article?
August 6, 2007 at 4:13 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
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