What's with the Courier?

You may recently have noticed the banner above on the Courier's online front page.

What's it about?

You are being invited to help contribute content to the Courier's online edition.

Faced with declining readership for the printed editions and pressure on advertising incomes, newspapers everywhere are scrambling to reinvent themselves.

Staffwise, papers are trying to do more with fewer people. PT has commented before on the impact on local news with the broadening of reporters' 'beats'.

Plainfield used to have a reporter who did nothing but cover Plainfield news full time. Now, Christa Segalini, who has the Plainfield beat, is just as likely to file a story on another community (see her Somerville story, "Judge dismisses Pathmark lawsuit", in today's edition).

The implications are that the reporter does not get the time to develop an in-depth knowledge of a community, its issues and its players, and instead must report mostly the surface action and rush along to the next assignment. It's not pleasant for the reporter. It's not helfpul to the reading public.

But if fewer people can only grind out so much sausage, what is a paper to do to fill the pages between the ads?

One tactic is to aggregate the news from other sources. By now you have noticed the growing number of stories that carry the (AP) designation. Generated by talented but faceless writers these stories often are about events at a further remove -- state, national or world -- or about odd, outrageous or weird topics.

Another tactic, adopted by the Courier's corporate parent, Gannett, is to syndicate the stories by writers at its New Jersey papers and share them. (Besides the Courier, Gannett publishes the Home News Tribune of New Brunswick, the Asbury Park Press, and the Courier-Post of Cherry Hill.)

Lastly, the Courier has turned to letting you, the reader, be both reporter and publisher. That is what the image at the top of the page is about. Clicking on the links will allow you to submit your own stories, photographs and event listings.

Will this revolutionize the Courier? Or will it lead to a new form of online 'refrigerator art'?

We will have to wait and see. Meanwhile, PT invites you to go check out the Courier's new gambit. Oh, did I forget to mention you'd be working without pay?

---

FURTHER READING

If you are intrigued by what is going on in newspapers' struggles to adapt to this new online world, check out ("Can We Be Friends? Local Papers Building Better Relationships Online") at EContent. And sample some other newspapers' efforts to adapt -- as at the Akron (OH) Beacon-Journal and the Wilkes-Barre (PA) Times-Leader.

-- Dan Damon

View today's CLIPS here. Not getting your own CLIPS email daily? Click here to subscribe.

ARCHIVED POSTS OF PLAINFIELD TODAY FROM 11/03/2005 THROUGH 12/31/2006 ARE AT
http://plainfieldtoday.blogspot.com/