Worcestershire Journal – New telegram.com – am I in Worcester?
by Karl - April 8, 2009 6:46am
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.
I wish to present an editoral about SMOC. Whenever I see something about the orginization in the paper it is usually something derogative. I have written a letter of praise to the people that helped me get my life back together. I would like to tell a better story of the opportunity they offer. Worcester is a great place to clean up your life if you take advantage of the programs that are offered here. If you are interested in an article such as this please let me know