Our Town Square

[Rush2112]

Ever since the TDR changed their online format, I quit going. It seems to hard to navigate but the biggest issue for me is not being able to post comments to articles. There have been so many lately that I needed to comment on. Especially about our so-called animal control. The PD wouldn't have to be shooting these dogs if we had an AC that came to work and responded to calls. Shoot.... getting side tracked. (pun intended) Back to my post....... oh yeah, the online issue. I just checked out the homepage of TDR and see they are starting to charge ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS a year! $10.00 a month and no discount paying by the year. I guess I will keep paying the cheaper way, subscription = $73.50. I cut and pasted from TDR's homepage. I can understand Bart having to do this but man, this economy sucks! If that fella in the White House continues to get his way, it's going to get worse!


Lower Rates Announced
Starting Monday, the online version of The Daily Record will be available only to those who subscribe to it. To subscribe to the online newspaper, log on to mydailyrecord.com and click on the image of the front page of the paper. Readers will be asked to create an account, after which they will be directed to the subscription page. The Daily Record also announces new lower rates for online access. Home-delivery customers can now add online access for less than 9 cents a day. The daily cost for the paper at the newsstand will remain at 50 cents. Home delivery rates also will remain unchanged: $6.40 per month, $19 for three months, $37.30 for six months or $73.50 for a year. The next level, a combination of home delivery and online access, will be available for $8 for a month, $24 for three months, $48 for six months, or $96 for a one-year subscription. For those who prefer the online-only option, the cost will be $10 for one month, $30 for three months, $60 for six months, or $120 for a year. Online subscribers can also sign up for e-notify, a service that sends them an e-mail notification when a topic they are interested in appears in the paper. Subscribers can even read The Daily Record on such devices as the iPhone, iBook, Amazon Kindle, Blackberry and Sony Reader.
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I refuse to participate in this recession!

[Traveler]

Now is the TDR Online still a separate charge even if you subscribe to the paper? I know some papers allow you to log on for free if you are a subscriber to their newsprint edition. That would seem like a complimentary type thing if you're already paying for one subscription.

[2BHonest]

I don't understand why the cost is higher for online only. Seems to me that is the most economical option for TDR as well. More environmentally friendly, no paper to discard. Oh well. Good luck. My time w/ TDR ends when they charge. I realize the economy is down, and they need to make money. However, I; along with many others, have been cutting out unnecessary expenses. I cannot justify $120 of my hard-earned money to read TDR online. Guess I will just purchase a paper when I need to.
Goodbye Dilbert comics, I will miss you!
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Hello again, everybody. It's a bee-yooo-tiful day for baseball.
- Harry Caray

[aliensquirl]

2BHonest said:
"I don't understand why the cost is higher for online only."


2B, I think it's because they realize most of the online readers are outside their delivery area and they've got 'em by the bxxxx.

Well, that's all she wrote for me. I've been tuning in to TDR for years to follow mainly the Erwin news, it being my hometown, but it seems everyone in my age range has passed on or doesn't make the headlines so I won't really miss it much. A little, but not much.

Well, I guess from now on I'll be grabbing the news from Fayetteville and Raleigh which should cover anything worth reading about. Anything else between Fay and Ral will just be drivel that won't make a difference if I do miss it.

Adios TDR.
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CMB Erwin High '47

[2BHonest]

Oh well, we got one extra day. Today is paid only. Guess you are right about the e-readers, I purchased an annual subscription for a friend who moved out of state. Continued until it became cost-prohibitive. Then I emailed her the link. If she wants to stay updated on Harnett County, she is just slam outta luck.
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Hello again, everybody. It's a bee-yooo-tiful day for baseball.
- Harry Caray

[chefterry]

You're going to charge me more because I don't get the print edition? $120??
I'm saving you money on printing, labor, paper and delivery. What do you think I am? An idiot? It's not the readers' faults that you have no idea how to sell online advertisement to the same businesses that blindly subsidize TDR now. I'm sure if anyone there could plainly state the benefits of online ads to your advertisers we, the public, who support you and your advertisers, could continue to read the paper online much as we do with every other newspaper that is threatened with extinction due to the onslaught of online news media coverage. I guess I will read the News&Observer, The Washington Post, The Daily Reflector, The New York Times, and every other "traditional" newspaper that has embraced the 21st century. Good luck with that.

[YellowBear]

They are totally shooting themselves in the foot with this move. Not only has every redesign of their site been worse than the previous, but they have no vision for their online product. Why would I pay a lot of money in today's economic climate for a clunky, difficult to navigate, poorly designed website? Just look at how awful the stories themselves look. No paragraph breaks, right in the middle of the story it will say "Continued on page 3" (um, why is it displaying that??) and photos are stuck at the bottom of the page. Web layout is just as important as print page layout. Hey Bart, your web edition should be MORE than the print edition. Offering specialized content on your site that readers can't get elsewhere is how you bring in more revenue. They obviously just don't get it.

[dragonfly]

will not pay a dime to read this paper(this language not permitted)it is a joke, and has been since I moved here 15 years ago. Important stories are often not reported....and what is reported is often biased. Not to mention the grammatical errors. Good luck trying to sell it online....

[dragonfly]

I did NOT say anything that required the inappropriate comment to come up! Jeez...

[jd]

DF --- anything beginning with an F and ending with -ing has been deemed inappropriate. Therefore you can not express any thing with (this language not permitted) while you are out (this language not permitted) for (this language not permitted) redfish on a marvelous summer day; nor can you tell us much about (this language not permitted) your camera or (this language not permitted) with your neighbors or (this language not permitted) with your significant other.

:D
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"Sometimes the only thing fair in life is a ball hit between the 1st base line and the 3rd base line"
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[falcon]

Yeah DF this in this forum you have NO freedom of speech. Seems to be going around more and more.
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Where did I put my beer???

[lukey]

Below is an interesting article. The Daily Record needs to read this and do the math.

March 04, 2009
Doing the Math on Online Newspaper Subscriptions by Mark Potts

There's a reason why most journalists–including myself–were liberal arts majors. It's because, well, as Barbie once said, "Math class is tough."
But some of us became business reporters and learned to read balance sheets and other financial statements. A few of us moved from journalism to the business side of the operation, and got comfortable with Excel spreadsheets and financial modeling.

Unfortunately, it seems to be the liberal arts majors who are doing much of the advocating lately for broad paid subscriptions for newspaper Web sites (or paid subscriptions' nuttier cousin, micropayments). Because if they'd sit down and do the math on such an idea, they'd realize that it's not going to save the newspaper business. It might even hasten its demise.

Let's look at the numbers, and I'll keep this very simple: Imagine that a good-sized metro daily can charge $20 a year for access to its Web site, and that it attracts 500,000 people to pay that much to read whatever the paper puts online (and this assumes that the content is so unique that those readers won't decide to take their business elsewhere when confronted with a pay wall). How much revenue is that? It's $10 million a year.

That sounds like a lot of money–heck, it could pay the salaries for a good-sized newsroom. But it comes at a significant cost.

Any paper big enough to attract 500,000 online subscribers is probably already making at least two or three times that $10 million annually in advertising revenue–$20 or $30 million or more a year. (Its print revenue is probably 8-10 times that.) But that online advertising revenue is based on traffic to the site. A subscription wall is going to drastically reduce traffic, and hence ad revenue. Some estimates put the traffic hit from a subscription model as high as 90 percent. Even if you only lost half the existing online ad revenue for that hypothetical newspaper site, that $10 million in subscription revenue won't make up for the loss. Oops. That's a problem.

Want to try it with a higher subscription price, like $50 or $100 a year? Fine, but you're not going to attract anything like the same number of subscribers. You might get, say, 200,000 online subscribers at $50 a year–the same $10 million in revenue, and the same risk to advertising revenue. Checkmate.

Those are optimistic numbers, incidentally. There aren't many papers with 500,000 print subscribers; it doesn't seem likely an online edition could attract that many paid customers. The Wall Street Journal, famously, charges about $100 a year to about 1.1 million online subscribers, for more than $100 million in revenue. That's good money, but it's a unique circumstance, driven by the Journal's high-quality business-targeted content, expense-account-paid subscriptions and nearly 15 years with a paid model. It's highly unlikely that any other paper could match numbers like that.

So there's the math: The problem is that the holy grail of online subscription revenue isn't actually a significant addition to revenue, and the associated cost in lost ad revenue makes it a wash, at best. Oh, and those subscription numbers would take years to achieve–while the damage to traffic and ad revenue from a pay wall would be immediate.

There is potential for some specific pay models. It's possible that some newspapers will be able to charge for online subscriptions for specific, targeted, exclusive, high-value products, such as microscopic coverage of state government or a local industry. But the audiences for those are likely to be fairly small, and the revenue correspondingly modest. The notion that newspapers can get people to pay subscription fees to access most of their content online is just silly. There are too many alternatives for news and information online.

The place that those looking for additional online revenue should really be (this language not permitted) is advertising, plain and simple. As I wrote the other day, there's plenty of evidence that newspapers haven't even come close to maximizing the potential revenue from advertising on their Web sites, and they've been chronically unsophisticated about online advertising. Paul Robinson recently argued that publishers have consistently undervalued and devalued Web advertising, and that's about right. They just haven't taken it seriously enough–even as they whine that Web advertising isn't as lucrative as print.

Clamoring for a few pennies from online subscriptions is not going to rescue the newspaper business, and in fact, it could strike a fatal blow if it undermines what advertising revenue is already there. There's much, much more money to be had by maximizing online advertising revenue opportunities than there is by trying to coerce readers to pay to visit newspaper sites. What's needed is serious effort to make newspaper Web advertising a robust form of revenue that supports quality news organizations. Even Barbie could probably understand that.

[dmarie]

I thought I would not post an opinion on this matter, but then I had a "situation" that changed that.
My daughter came out of her room in a pissy mood the other night when she could not access TDR online to download a local current event article for school. Now you got the innocent school children by the a-s-s because the class defines "local" as Dunn- Erwin- Coats news.
looks like TDR new policy is going to be te current event of the day.
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ITs knuckin' futz here!

[aliensquirl]

Apparently someone believes the value of TDR is higher than the N&O.

Here is the info from the N&O:
"The N&O print edition now available in digital format
* View The N&O exactly how it appears in print every day
* Searchable, savable, printable
* Simple navigation tools for easy reading
Unlimited access for only $5 a month
ATTENTION N&O SUBSCRIBERS: 7-day subscribers automatically receive free access to the e-edition included with the cost of their subscription. Use login above for daily access. Weekend and Sunday subscribers can get the e-edition included with the cost of their subscription by calling N&O customer service at 800-522-4205."
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CMB Erwin High '47

[WestCoast]

I was going to go to the TDR after checking here. I used to look online about every other day but hadn't checked in since getting a new computer and not tranfering my favorites.

The best stuff was the sydicated columns anyway.

[WestCoast]

I almost broke down. I was thinking that I need to stay connected so I might go ahead and register for online. Low and behold there is no online version to do that for. I understand waiting until late in the day when it was free, but it seems they/you (If TDR people read here) should actually have a product to sell. I don't understand why it wasn't up this morning when I like to read news, and surely can't think of any reason it is not up for lunch.

Sorry Guys, I tried to support you.

[ron]

UMM, rest in peace TDR. myharnett.com is up and running and doing fine. no need in the world for this site anymore.
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-{In Stereo Where Available}-