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For many of my readers, being afforded the opportunity to post their own opinions and respond to the opinions of others at their local newspaper's websites amounted a life-changing event; a coming out of the darkness so to speak.
Ever since that day, scores of their fellow bloggers have read some or all of the thousands of written words they have presented -- and vice versa. |
It is also likely that you and/or some of your fellow posters are being read by more visitors to your hometown newspapers' websites than are any of its professional bloggers. On any given day, community bloggers are likely to amass substantially greater numbers of comments than their paid counterparts.
Thus far, other than being required to endure a few pop-up and pop-under ads, those overnight ad-spam blog attacks and the even more annoying onslaught of selfish blog hogs, the exercising of 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 might 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, 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 strong advocate of free markets, I offer no criticism of newspaper companies that do what they deem necessary to survive and thrive. However, being ostensibly an advertising revenue-based industry, 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, let alone ramp-up their advertising budgets. In addition, as has been the case for years, many people with Internet access are no longer subscribing to the newsprint editions of 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, one might conclude that there are also a great many untapped advertisers who would be eager to have their messages displayed before multi-visit daily readers like us.
| If the economy is essentially to blame for Gannett's ad revenue crisis, could strapped consumers actually 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 you ultimately choose to hang up your newspaper website blogging shoes, where will you go as an alternative? Hopefully not... |
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...back into the darkness. |
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