Real Worcester Blog
Worcestershire Journal – Telegram and Gazette eEdition (update)
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
Disclaimer: I write (without pay) a blog about Holden and Phillipstion for the T&G’s OnTheCommon.com site, but I am not an employee of nor am I otherwise affiliated with the T&G
Worcestershire Journal – The T&G Electronic Edition
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.
Disclaimer: I write (without pay) a blog about Holden and Phillipstion for the T&G’s OnTheCommon.com site, but I am not an employee of nor am I otherwise affiliated with the T&G
Worcestershire Journal – Blame Boston. No, Blame Worcester. … Aw, snap…
The New York Times corporation is reporting a 27% drop in its ad revenue, leading to a $74M loss in the first quarter.
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.
Worcestershire Journal – The math of getting there on time
 |
= |  |
+ |  |
+ |  |
+ |  |
|
||||||||
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.
Worcestershire Journal – New telegram.com – am I in Worcester?
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.
Worcestershire Journal – NYT 2 T&G – kthxbai
The Boston Business Journal is reporting that, even though parent New York Times is threatening to disown sibling Boston Globe, the Telegram and Gazette is free to go about its business. The Times has reportedly told the Globe, specifically the Globe’s unionized employees, to find $20M in savings or the Times will shut down the paper. (We’ve read that the Globe is losing $80M per year, so $20M hardly seems enough to save our local Gray Lady.)
Earlier today, Daily Worcesteria had provided a similar analysis, that the T&G’s finances, though no doubt problematic, are pretty much a rounding error for the Times.
Worcestershire Journal – So many roads and so much time
Two wrongs don’t make a right, but four lefts and one right do.
The other day, I needed to pick up a USB cable for my new cell phone. My errands put me on Goldstar Boulevard, so it was kinda, sorta convenient to stop at Best Buy at the Greendale Mall.
One of the reasons, in my opinion, that the Greendale Mall is faltering is that it’s tough to get out of there. When the mall was first built, back in the nineteen-ought-eighties, you could exit from the mall directly onto West Boylston Street. The city fathers, in the deep and abiding wisdom, decided that it was too easy,
A simple next-stop at the Greendale post office turns into an inspection tour of the underside of I-190.
| By foot, which includes the now-prohibited right turn onto West Boylston Street, it’s .4 miles. |  |
| To get to the Greendale post office by car, you travel 1.1 miles, nearly three times as far: |  |
Recently, I was driving with my granddaughter on West Mountain Street, when she asked me, “How come there are so many stop lights so close together?”
I spared her my thoughts on Nash Equilibrium and just said that no one has been thinking about the big picture. Each of the traffic lights, taken by itself, makes sense, giving controlled access to folks on the south side of the street. The result, however, is, at best, annoying, and, at worst, dangerous, as people try to keep track of the traffic and the state of the lights while talking on the phone and drinking their Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.
There’s old engineering principle: to optimize the system, sometimes you must suboptimize the subsystem. I suppose that was the case with the right turn out of the Greendale Mall, helping to improve traffic flow along West Boylston Street. It was almost a good idea.
Jeff would have a much better handle on all this.
For an interesting read about traffic and related topics, have a look at Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt.
Worcestershire Journal – Yesterday’s news this morning
As I write, it’s a few minutes before 4AM. Our newspaper carriers just delivered our Telegram and Gazette. On Sunday mornings, they arrive even earlier, bringing with them not only the Telegram, but the Boston Globe and New York Times. Pretty darn good.
Meanwhile, over on the T&G web site at this hour, they’re still showing yesterday’s news. The RSS feed from site won’t start showing up for a couple more hours.
Worcestershire Journal – Charter’s next chapter
Pick a number between 10 and 12.
The wire services have a number of stories about Charter Communications filing for bankruptcy today. Or, as they put it so elegantly on their web site:
Charter Communications Commences Previously Announced Pre-Arranged Financial Restructuring. (”I planned to fall down and I did. Now stop looking at me.”)
There’s no word yet on how or if the restructuring will affect Charter subscribers or contracts with Worcester or area communities. Charter serves approximately 30 communities in Massachusetts.
- Charter Files for Bankruptcy in Reorganization Effort
- Charter Says Bankruptcy Won’t Affect Speed Upgrades
- Charter Braces For Lender Fight Over Bankruptcy Plan
- Charter bankruptcy big debacle for Paul Allen
Oh, by the way, CNN Money also notes that Charter also had a poor customer service reputation that it has had to work hard to overcome.
Worcestershire Journal – Quality of life, we has it.
Why go to Provo when Worcester is so close?
A report in Mas High Tech lets us know that Worcester, Manchester, Bridgeport top ‘quality of life’ study. Mass High Tech’s parent company, American City Business Journals, published an analysis of 124 U.S.mid-sized metropolitan areas. Worcester ranked 29, the best in Massachusetts and third-best in New England.
The full report is available at the bizjournals web site; Mid-sized metros with the best quality of life
FWIW, Des Moines, Iowa came in 10th.
