 |
By Peter Weinberger
Publisher
A clear presentation
In last Saturday’s issue of the COURIER, we covered at length “Every 15 minutes,” a two-day event at Claremont High School showing the dangers of drinking and driving. The demonstrations were incredibly life like, showing wrecked cars, bloody victims, arrests, ambulances and more.
The difficulty in editing images for this type of event is some readers’ initial impressions may think it’s a true news event. In a time where credibility is so important, we want to make an impression, but not be sensational. As a father of two teenagers, I believe “Every 15 minutes” teaches valuable life lessons.
As we discussed what photo(s) would go on the front page, we all agreed that the student in the body bag was one of the strongest images. It also shows the main point of the demonstration, that drinking and driving kills. But did we need another image that shows the overall scene? Something that would reinforce it wasn’t a real event? When we designed a two-picture package, the size of the images was greatly reduced, lowering the impact of the cover. We decided to pick one photo for the front, several more with the story inside.
Our final choice was to make sure our headlines “DUI drill makes impact” and “CHS students participate in mock collision” clearly indicated “Every 15 minutes” was a drill, out to make an important point to our youth.
Claremont-Courier.com continues to grow
When we redesigned our website in January, there was a clear direction on how the content would work with the COURIER newspaper. The goal was to highlight several key stories, while posting more photos in a slideshow format.
What we’ve discovered in a short period of 3-plus months, Claremont-Courier.com has become a robust archive of Claremont stories and photos. This is especially true for non-news stories like weddings and obituaries.
Keeping a current, easy to read website of Claremont is largely a service to our readers and advertisers. To keep the website manageable, the information remains posted for 3 to 4 months. After that time, interest tends to wane. Claremont-Courier.com is not designed to replace or compete with the COURIER. Only complement the great stuff already printed in the newspaper.
More grim news for the newspaper industry
One would think that with a record number of readers newspapers and their websites would be in great financial health. But as people migrate to the Internet for information, advertising dollars have not followed. Plus for competitive reasons, large newspaper websites like latimes.com, post most of their stories before they appear in the newspaper, thus making subscription sales difficult.
For these reasons, overall newspaper advertising revenue had a 9 percent drop in 2007, the biggest yearly drop in the 57 years these figures have been kept. Even with a 20 percent rise in Internet revenue, it could not reduce this figure.
Community newspapers have been impacted more by the recession than readership changes. Most weekly papers have a small, if any, website. The bottom line is the traffic remains small, thus making the newspaper the most effective way to reach the public. It’s also a reason why newspapers like the COURIER, make sure a large part of the city news remains in print for subscribers.
Have a comment? Please send them to pweinberger@claremont-courier.com.
