For the last few weeks, the T&G has offered a free trial of their electronic edition, an online version of the paper that looks and handles a lot like a real newspaper. As I previously noted, it seems to be an decent offering if you’re into that sort of thing.

Now they’ve gone live with their paid version. You can get a week of free viewing before paying $6.95/month.

My two major gripes are still present:

• When a story is continued on an inside page, you don’t get a hyper-link to the next part of the story.
• The electronic version, just link the content on telegram.com isn’t available until 5:30AM. We still get the printed version delivered to our house by 4AM.

Another nit: four weeks does not equal one month. If you click on the subscription button, you’re brought to a form that tells you that your credit card will be charged $6.95 every four weeks. That turns out to be $90.35 per year. (13 x $6.95), instead of $83.40 (12 x $6;.95). To their credit, they offer an annual subscription rate of $69.96/year.

One last thing: on the subscription form, there is a link to online help that lets you send a message to the T&G staff. There’s a nice Dr. Phil touch where they ask you to tell them your troubles:

T&G eEdition online help form

The Telegram and Gazette is offering a free preview of its new electronic edition, cleverly titled eEdition. Basically, it’s a replica of the printed version of the newspapers, allowing you to see the pages as printed, search text, and move around page by page or skip to sections of interest.

The New York Times and Boston Globe have similar offerings.
A few thoughts on the T&G eEdition:

• If you are looking for the same experience as reading the physical, printed paper, this isn’t it. It’s an electronic version, giving you something more and something less.
• It works best on a large monitor so that you can scan the whole page.
• Being able to see the whole page, with photos in place, is quite nice. I typically read the RSS feeds from the paper and so don’t always get to see the pictures in the same context.
• It takes some fiddling to get the zoom level right to read large text, then small, then large again. A good, high-resolution computer monitor helps.
• It would be much better if the jumps (’continued on page A10′) were hyperlinks. As it is, you start to read the story, then go to the widget on top of the page, select the section and page you want to go to, find the continued article, and resume reading.
• The ability to search for text is nice.
• The print options are good, allowing you to print the portion that’s visible on your screen, the whole page, or the whole paper.
• The Preferences settings don’t make a lot of sense. The background selection, for example, doesn’t seem to work.
  

The free preview lasts until May 25, at which point, I assume, it’ll switch to some paid options, with some kind of deal for print subscribers. There is, however, no information about the eEdition subscription on the site.

In sum, if it’s free for print subscribers, I’ll probably use it in addition to the RSS feeds and going directly to the telegram.com site. If it’s a separate subscription, I’m staying away.

The New York Times corporation is reporting a 27% drop in its  ad revenue, leading to a $74M loss in the first quarter.

The Times said its New England Media Group, which includes the Globe and Worcester Telegram & Gazette, contributed to “significant losses” at its news media unit. The Times bought the Globe for $1.1 billion in 1993. The paper could lose $85 million this year. The Times has threatened to close it.

We should note that the story on the Times’ site doesn’t mention Worcester at all, while other wire service reports include our fair city.

	=		+		+		+
			What cats and dogs really think about hoomin

Where

Time
The amount of time that you are late

Equals

Speed limit
The number of cars doing the speed limit.

Plus

Cruisers
The number of police cruisers on the road.

Plus

School buses
The number of school buses you have to follow.

Plus

Work Crews
The number of work crews you encounter

Divided by

Importance
On a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the most important, what you were doing to make you late in the first place.

The newly designed Telegram.com site is clean, quick, and fresh. That’s good.

What’s not quite so good is the content. This morning’s news leads include no stories about central Massachusetts. Granted, opening day for the Sox is a big deal and we need to celebrate however we can. Nevertheless, we could also use some hometown news.

The one news staff story, “Reformers target ‘pay-to-play’ ethos, by John Monahan, focuses on the goings-on in the Great and General Court, but the last five paragraphs discuss ethics in Connecticut politics.

The other two front-page stories come from the New York Times and AP, good stories for inside the paper.

I wrote about this problem a few weeks ago and thought then, as I think now, that we go to the Telegram, online or in print, to find stories about Worcester and surrounding towns because daily local content isn’t available elsewhere. Google News, for example, shows just two stories in the past day about Worcester, neither of them terribly compelling.

Newspapers are in trouble for a variety of reasons, too many to review here. One way out of these troubles, for any paper, large or small, is to provide content that no one else provides. in the case of a small city daily, that means featuring stories about our city. (The buzzword for this is hyper-local.)  If I want stories about cyber-sleuthing from the New York Times, I’ll read the New York Times story about cyber-sleuthing. The T&G staff reporters and freelancers know this area. The paper should be showcasing that knowledge.

Thanks to Jeff for his review of the T&G site yesterday.