Revised revised topic: Decatur (Ala) Daily buys the (Florence) TimesDaily

Decatur is my home. I worked for the Decatur Daily one summer while I was in college, and my job was undoubtedly the lowest on the newsroom totem pole. I uploaded the old Web site on weekends and paginated the weekly free shopper. It was a good experience. I had a chance to go back a few years ago, but I learned the hard way that couldn't afford to move across the country.

As far as the takeover goes, I guess we'll see.

 

A few people on the TimesDaily's forum were discussing the pay-for-content issue with several saying they'd have no problem paying $7 for a month for online content.....anything to keep the forums. Ugh.

 

what's wrong with people wanting to pay?

 

Nothing. I just found it funny (sad?) that people are willing to pay just for the chance to keep being awesome human beings on the forums.

 

I'm reliably advised that the DD is bringing in a new Web person and, as part of that effort, they're going to re-evaluate the paid-site model. If the paid site was booming, I doubt that would be much of a discussion.

 

Huh. Interesting. It will be interesting to see how sports coverage shakes down, as well as pagination and things.

RB

 

I wouldn't think sports coverage would change much, if at all. It's not like Decatur is over-staffed to the point where it could send its own reporters over to cover Florence-area sports.

Pagination....that's another issue all together, but I'd be surprised if anything changed there.

 

Disagree, respectfully.

This could have a significant effect on Alabama-Auburn coverage for the TimesDaily, which has been able to rely on NYT sister Tuscaloosa for Bama coverage and has used a stringer for Auburn.

Seems to me Decatur was using the same Auburn stringer, then quit using him, but I could be wrong about that. I can think of several ways to do a sensible division of labor there.

There was already pretty good sharing between the papers on Friday nights, and now they can work out ways of everyday shared coverage for the areas between them, such as Town Creek.

 

1) Decatur was in a sharing agreement worked out at the publisher level with Anniston, where Decatur's Bama guy was to cover for both and Anniston's Aubie guy did the same. I'm told there was some reluctance on the part of Decatur's middle management to devote their Bama guy's fulltime resource to Bama.
2) Town Creek won't have to worry about coverage. Consolidation is in the future.

 

I'm sorry, I misunderstood. You are right. The original point is funny and sad.

 

Luke Brietzke covers auburn and is an employee of the anniston star.
Josh cooper covers alabama for the DD. the two papers share content. the timesdaily pays anniston for Luke's AU coverage and gets the bulk of its alabama coverage from tuscaloosa, which will now go away.
my sources are saying they are not sure how the new DD-TD arrangement will work. I do know DD has five staffers and the TD, with the departure of that sonner guy, has three FTEs.

 

You're right. I wasn't thinking about the Alabama and Auburn coverage since the TD doesn't have a daily presence in Tuscaloosa. But the Auburn thing could be interesting.

I was thinking more along the lines of high schools. My bad.