Mark Van Pattern has written a piece on PBS's MediaShift titled, "How the Focus on Print Hurts Our Newspaper Site".  His story is a common story I hear time after time from those in the newspaper business.

It's definitely no tangled bureaucracy, but even within this simple system you find conflicts holding the website back. The problem is that the different people in that system just have different priorities. As general manager, I want to see both a strong online presence and continued healthy print circulation. In contrast, the managing editor doesn't want to "hurt" the print edition by making the online edition too strong, fearing that it could tempt subscribers to abandon print.

Ultimately, this conflict is what's holding our online edition back. Without a full commitment from the managing editor, the website will never reach its full potential.

The digital age remains to be a dillemna for newspapers.  Newspapers either have to ballance their resources between print and online media or put more focus on one over the other.  I think it becomes even more difficult for publications when they find a large readership online yet the higher revenue remains on the print side.  Although it may take some years, I still say that eventually online media will beat old media.  It is just a matter of time.

Nice reminder from The Content Wrangler on where the money:

Are you looking to drum up some new business? Want to get more dollars from existing clients? Are you a starving writer?

White paper expert Michael A. Stelzner, author of Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged, provides the following reasons white papers could dramatically increase your writing revenue...[more]

Over the past couple years, I've been asked by a few if I would be willing to write a white paper recommending a content management system. information system, or specific product.  For the most part, those opportunities always seem to arrive when I'm busy with other projects so I declined. When I wasn't busy, I was asked to write positively about a product I knew nothing about (I declined) as well as a specific information system which I believed could be better written within the company (the potential client had smarter people than me and they agreed).

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.