Gannett shuttering Mommy website

THAT, I fully understand. Frustrating.

 

Especially considering running a message board isn't that expensive, especially for Gannett. Volunteers would moderate and there are plenty of mommy bloggers out there. Echoing playthrough, the site could pay its own way. Scrapping at this point further illustrates Gannett execs don't have realistic goals for the future. You don't have to be great at everything, or even good. A news company can be decent at a lot of little things.

 

Do you know the site made money? How do you know that? I would imagine that, for all its faults, the one thing you could say about Gannett is that it liked making money and would continue to do the things that made money.

 

I do know they had to rebrand this site a few times. It started as an effort to attract mommy bloggers by making child experts (doctors, nurses, psychologists, teachers, etc.) available to answer their questions. I assume those experts were paid or received advertising trade. But then they learned moms would rather hear from other moms than hear from experts, and it took on the user-generated content format and domain name change. It's possible they never recovered what could have been huge start-up costs under the site's original model.

 

If they are truly that clueless on the idea of sunk costs, the deserve to go under faster than Ragu can say invisible hand.

 

It's not so much wishing that these ideas would fail. Rather, it's about the credibility of the company that is throwing those ideas out there.

It's well-documented about Gannett's obsession the flavor of the quarter. They come up with an idea, trumpet it like it's the greatest thing, browbeat their employees into implementing the idea, then abandon it a few months later.

Any successful company needs both a short-term and a long-term strategy. Gannett has no long-term strategy, besides the corporate people sucking out as much bonus money as they can. And their short term strategy is just throw shit at the wall and hope it sticks.

After a while, as an employee, you have to tune them out. That is, until you get called into the office because you didn't have a mainstream source, or you crowdsourced instead of using Passion Topics, which is the same exact fucking thing.

 

A question about the mommy site. If some mom took the advice of another mom from the site - and something bad happened - would Gannett be liable?

 

I would think there would be a ton of legalese involved with the user agreements when you visit the message board that would keep that liability to a minimum ... not to mention the fact that any mom willing to take important mommying advice from a stranger on a website needs to be donkey-punched in the first place.

Did Gannett buy the Moms site and software, etc., after it was already set up by a developer and in place? I could swear that was the case, and then they changed it to IndyMoms, CincyMoms, Des Moines Moms, and so on before doing the MomsLikeMe branding. Maybe I'm misremembering things and they set the whole thing up from scratch. Either way, I'm sure the start-up costs were not insignificant.

I have no idea if it made money or not, but at my former site, they put out the free monthly magazine with it that was bursting with ads. Each month, the magazine was sent to every school in the metro and suburbs and every single kid had it put in their backpacks to take home. That had to be a shit-ton of market penetration they could boast about (and charge for) when talking to advertisers.

When they announced a few months ago that the magazines were being discontinued, it should have been obvious to anyone paying attention that the Moms site would be getting the Old Yeller treatment, too. Just like when they laid off most (all?) of their MetroMix people at the individual sites a couple months back. That surely is the next to disappear completely.

 

"More pages in the paper" appears to be working a bit for the Chicago Tribune. Some papers are just way too thin and aren't worth the 75 cents or $1.