The Sunday Journal Sentinel is carrying a lead, page-one story alleging a jaw-dropping scamming of state child care funding.
It's a documented story involving failed state oversight that may have enabled a child care provider to operate without a license and build herself a suburban mansion and buy a Jaguar automobile.
By publishing the story on Sunday, and keeping it off-line until Monday (and part two of the story Monday will be delayed online until noon) , the Journal Sentinel's publisher signals to readers and advertisers that people buying the hard-copy paper will be rewarded with content, and online readers (and websites) will be denied some of the news for a day.
Certainly this is management's call: prioritizing and channeling resources to subscribers or street sale customers.
Down the road, the paper, and others, may move to paid Internet access, say $5 or $10 a month, less for hard-copy subscribers. or not.
Make no mistake: this has to be a sign of things to come as media struggle to stay profitable in the Internet age.
But it's a bit odd having a news organization hold back from anyone its strongest reporting.
For more on this, see
ReplyDeletehttp://wisbusiness.com/index.iml?Article=164355
One of the multitude of reasons why newspapers are going out of business is the fact they are for the most part giving away thier product for free on the internet.
ReplyDeleteAnd their customer base that prefers a hardcopy version of the newspaper is slowly but surely dying off. They need to figure out a way to collect more revenue from their internet presence before they go completely bankrupt.
Not that I am going to lose any sleep when they do, they have already gutted most of their staff with more cuts to come. And I will live on just fine without their editorial bias.