Extra Problems

I notice that one of our local media firms is in trouble, Post on Eastcliff Richard (link on sidebar) articles on their own website and the BBCs so far.

I hope our Thanet Extra survives it’s a pretty good paper that I usually buy.

We used to get all of the free papers delivered something that petered out to the very sporadic, I am wondering if a lot of the fall in advertising revenue is due to the lack actual delivery as I used to advertise in them until they stopped coming through the letterbox regularly.

From an advertisers point of view I also think they could do much to improve advertising revenue by improving their internet sites. Your Thanet is the only paper to have an E-edition so the only one where the papers advertisements appear online.

None of the papers have feeds where they post our local stories, by this I mean that on this blog the latest stories by the other local bloggers appear on the sidebar soon after they are posted, but I can’t add the local papers new stories as their websites lack the technology.

The Thanet Extra site is the only one of the local paper websites where you can’t comment on the stories, although I have noticed that there is much less comment than one would expect on the other local newspaper sites where you can comment.

I think this is partly because it is so cumbersome to comment on them, no one likes filling in forms but mostly here in Thanet they haven’t joined in with, connected properly to and contributed to the local blogging scene, which is where Thanet is most alive on the internet.

The local journalists I speak to understand these problems, however solutions don’t seem to get up the management line quickly enough, if they are solutions, what do you think?