Yesterday, the Argus Leader announced that they will be moving toward a subscription model for their online content. Readers no longer will be able to visit ArgusLeader.com and expect to be able to read all the content for free. I didn't visit the website too often, but I'll miss the freedom to come and go as I please without being an online subscriber.

By now, most of us and have seen this paywall subscription model being offered by various news sources. Until recently, subscriptions were required from some larger print publications but rarely were part of the local or regional online news ecosystem. When a paper from a relatively small city such as Sioux Falls, SD moves in this direction it isn't difficult to acknowledge this as the trend we'll be seeing followed by more newspapers in the coming years. The move toward a subscription model was inevitable, as research as shown time and time again that publications haven't seen the same revenue through online advertisement as they once did in the print media world of yesterday.

Revenue from online ads for niche sites like mine that have little overhead is enough. But real publications producing high quality content on a wider scope have genuine revenue concerns when providing you their content. Randell Beck of the Argus Leader acknowledged this in Sunday's edition of this paper.

My local newspaper, the Argus Leader, contains an article about Twitter fever finally arriving in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  The start of the article is interesting to read.

Following blogs online takes too much time. So Mike Vetter, 24, uses Twitter to keep up with friends and follow the short posts or "tweets" by people in his business.

"Twitter is called microblogging - small blogs - only up to 140 characters at a time," says Vetter, CEO of DataSync, a Sioux Falls software company. "If I were to follow 50 people blogging, I would be reading all day long. This way I can get the point, boiled down. It's blogging for lazy people."

Isn't that ironic?  When blogging first became popular some of the criticisms bloggers heard was that blogs were too short and not polished enough.  The thought was that blog posts would never hold the same attention by readers compared to real articles and stories written elsewhere.  Now we forward forward to the present and we find that blogs contain too many words which is what spurring the Twitter movement.  The length of a tweet is limited by 140 characters (roughly about the same as a text message in a cell phone).

Following this line of thought, I'm now convinced that by the time my five year old son becomes a teenager he'll call Twitter too inefficient.  Instead his generation and their even shorter attention span will require you to send messages at 7 characters or less.  What would we call this new service, Twit?

After three decades of embracing technology, I think I finally arrived between the old way and the new ways of doing things.  My case in point, I found this article in the print version of my Sunday newspaper.  At the same time, I'm ready to read what you think of the article via my Twitter account.

MySiouxFalls.com is a new and local online news source for the city where I currently reside, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  At first, I was not all that excited about the site and had not plan on mentioning the MySiouxFalls.com site here at CMS Report.  We've all seen these sites before, right?  In fact, I would say that many of the visitors to this blog likely have designed or participated in building sites similar to MySiouxFalls.com.  That's not to say that there are not some things from a content management perspective worth mentioning.
 

Open source fans likely would have interest in knowing that the site runs Joomla! for it's content management system.  Weather buffs who border on the geeky side also might find interest that much of the site's weather graphics are provide by HAMweather.  HAMweather provides weather-related products and services (some of it for free) and in my opinion produces some of the best "custom" graphics derived from the National Weather Service's NDFD.  While the site's software has caught my attention, for a change it is something else that has caught my attention.  After visiting the site a few times and a chain of events, I suddenly realized that sites such as MySiouxFalls, NowPublic, and The Register are slowly changing my habits as a news reader.