DISQUS

Gordon, per usual, is absolutely right. The only way to attract the SMBO is to walk into his or her store and offer a value proposition. You need to be able to VERBALLY answer the question, "how will this benefit my business." And the benefit isn't always about how many pairs of feet you can get into the front door.

Local ad sales is all about relationships.

Automation can't replace that.

You've gotta love newspaper executives who are so clueless they think the only thing to Google is the content newspapers produce, effectively ignoring the other 95 percent of the content indexed by Google.

Kurt, great post ... but check out all the activity from users on The Batavian ... started a nearly 10 months ago, more than 1,000 registered users, not print-product support.

Yes, I would say social media works in small towns.

Frankly, you could cut staff more. Publishing online is more efficient than print, so a properly trained staff can be more efficient.

Even 30 seems fat.

That 9 percent of revenue that online gets now -- 80 percent of it is whole dependent on the print product, such as up sells from classifieds. It's debatable whether you would have to go to a free classified model. Even so, you're likely to see a huge disruption to online revenue once print is dropped. You could even argue that many of the advertisers buying banners now, even though not an up sell, do so because of the relationship with print. Once print's not around, will the relationship last?

So, while expenses could be reduced significantly more, there are still gaping questions about retaining sufficient revenue.

I don't think you can make hulu vs. YT with YT being nothing but a repository for UGC. YT is a heck of a lot more than UGC. It is also a great repository for professionally produced content, and that stuff gets lots of views, too. It is much more commonly found among most views now than it was a couple of years ago. Yes, UGC is still big on YT, but YT is much, much more than just UGC.

It's a pretty good bet that I've been doing online journalism, online audience development, longer than whomever wrote this misguided editorial. And my efforts to promote newspapers doing video goes back many years. So call me a corporate bean counter if you like, but what I say isn't some shallow "oh, gee, we should do video" position, but a strategy developed over many years of experience.

If you're not approaching your job with an eye how to help the online edition grow, please go apply for a job at Wal-Mart.

If you're not producing MULTIPLE videos per day, you're doing your employer and your profession a disservice.

The only way to grow online video audience is to "get the hits up." If that isn't a major concern of yours, then your part of the problem, not the solution.

Forget the NPPA awards, forget all of the awards. If you're making video win awards rather than win readers, you're part of the problem, not the solution.

Grab a camera -- any camera that shoots video will do -- and start producing lots and lots of video.

Otherwise, go start your own web site and see how well you do at supporting yourself with your "award winning" video.

Ever hear of the CueCat?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

http://cuecat.com/

Where you'll find this: "
The associated patents from Digital:Convergence, Corp. and technology behind the first-ever consumer code reader have been purchased and maintained by LV Partners, L.P."

According to Jim Buckmaster, nobody should try to make money.

Imagine where we'd all be if newspapers hadn't had so far to slide profit wise?

That last comment is presuming, of course, that newspapers would be in trouble no matter how well run. The internet is the internet. Kids are kids. Change is change. There'd still be a craigslist. A monster. A Yahoo! and on and on ...

You might want to submit some of your photos to the Bakersfield community photo blog. http://bakersfield.buzznet.com/.