Gannett's Butterfly Project is dead

I see several Gannett sites are posting today that the Butterfly Project, which was unveiled to much fanfare a few years back, and consisted of daily news, sports and features pages from USA Today included in daily papers, is dead as of Monday.

Now they are trumpeting the fact that all subscribers will receive access to the USAT e-edition, and saying national and international news will be included in the sites' A sections daily. So basically a complete about-face to what they tried to get people excited about when this was rolled out.

It will be interesting to see how small some of these papers will be, given the removal of 8-10 USAT pages every day. Which, I'm sure, is the point, to cut back on newsprint.

 

Odd. I would think giving advertisers access to a national circ. base with one buy would be attractive.

 

Coming up next, it’s News 2019!

 

Cutting costs while trying to ward off a takeover bid, interesting ...

 

In theory, these pages also reduced each paper's production burden. Now ...? It should, however, make it easier to put the proper stories on Page 1, since editors won't have to worry about duplicating something already on an inside, USA Network page.

 

What good is a free e-edition when the USA Today website doesn't have a paywall? It has got to be tough to be selling less as "new and improved" at Gannett. They used to be pretty good at it - now they don't even seem to be trying too hard.

 

Gannett: Where every 'game-changing' idea goes to die

*Or roll out new idea *change course after one month because no immediate results. That's enough time!