Newspapers are a business, not a library

The aftermath from an exciting prep playoff game last night ...

Walking off the field, a parent/fan comes up to me and his first words are "I don't subscribe to your newspaper anymore, but I search out everything I can find on the web" -- uh, thanks, I guess.

Then this morning I wake up to an email request from a parent who doesn't just want that one photo of her kid that appeared in the paper. No, she's wondering if I could just pass along an entire album of her kid from the season. I didn't realize I had been hired to be your son's personal public relations director?

 

We've gotten those over the years too. It'll cost 'em....

 

Back in the early Internet days, we had a high school soccer team go deep in the state playoffs. In all the preview stories that week, we touted that we were not only going to update our web site several times (a big thing back then) but we also had a phone hotline with updates that our reporter at the game would do. We gave out the number at least a half dozen times in print with each soccer story/feature.

Wouldn't you know, but we got something like a dozen calls from people wanting updates. The hotline phone number and the web site were literally in a box in every story on the team. It's like, if these people care so much about the team, didn't they read the stories and see the info boxes?