Mediaboss Marketing

I get this a lot: I want to see the story about my child/event/ church/self online and I have a subscription, but I can't access it.

My first question is "What do you have a subscription to, the print version, the website or the e-Edition?"

The answer is always some version of, "(silence) Wait. What?"

This January marks a year since former publisher Fred Hamilton announced the Facts and the Whittier Daily News would be having Digital Mondays.

This announcement was wildly unpopular.

People who weren't wired feared they would be left out. They're not, any more than they already were. The stories, comics and puzzles we would have run Mondays are in print Tuesdays, (with the recent exception of an online-only column about nature in Redlands), and those readers were already left out of the things online offers that print can't accommodate: video, longer stories, interactivity, immediacy, non-local news, reader photo galleries.

I know how intimidating it is to dive in. I still have to call my son at college when I want to put in a DVD. This Internet business is all magic to me.

But print is unlikely to make a big comeback, and our mission has been to convert several print readers into online readers, which we have achieved by thousands. Combined print and online subscribers put us at our highest readership in the paper's 122-year history.

Printing and distributing a paper is a huge expense. Also, making a Monday paper stretched my small reporting staff into compromising on quality.

Going back to six issues a week, which had only been undone a year prior, gave us all a little elbow room to put more time and resources into our coverage. It gets us out in the community a little more; it gets us cameras and laptops and overall, better hometown community reporting.

Continue reading here:
A guide to and a word about Digital Mondays, on the first anniversary