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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