The Steamboat Pilot & Today: From the Editor: PDF of newspaper

PDF of newspaper

Posted by sstanford on August 6, 2007

As I'm sure everyone is aware, we had a major problem this morning with our press that delayed the newspaper's delivery.

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