Things are far from decided in the ongoing newspaper struggles here in the Northern Shenandoah Valley. Both The Winchester Star and The Northern Virginia Daily have, like most print publications, suffered immeasurably in the last year or so. Both have reduced the size of the paper (in terms of both articles printed and the physical size of the paper.) Both organizations have cut staff. Both are still here, but it looks like they are taking divergent paths towards the Internet, and I think their respective futures.
Before the recent quick decline began The Winchester Star beat the Northern Virginia Daily to the Internet. The Star was available free online, the Daily was and was not. They had a website, but it was really poorly designed and didn’t feature the content it does now. In the last few months, The Winchester Star has disappeared behind a paywall. The Northern Virginia Daily still retains a free presence on the web and has jumped into that game with both feet. Not only is it a free presence, but the NVD seems to be working hard to make it a viable web presence on all levels. The NVD also tweets its articles, drawing more traffic to its site.
Those are the basics of this story. Now, I’ll add a personal level to it. I am the Artistic Director of the Wayside Theatre. We serve the same communities both papers serve. Both papers are still major vehicles for helping us get our message out. But as economic times are tough and advertising dollars keep shrinking, we at Wayside Theatre, obviously look for more economical ways to get the word out wherever we can find them. When the papers print an article about Wayside Theatre, I use Twitter, Facebook, (Wayside Theatre has a Facebook Fan Page) and our email mailing list to send out links to those stories. We’ve got a small army of supporters who then do the same to their Facebook friends, and email lists. I don’t know how much traffic that drives to those articles and reviews, but I do know that it drives some. Our Young Ambassadors Guild (students who participate in our Educational programs) is relentless in helping us spread those links and they are spreading them to potential future customers of both papers.
At the moment with The Winchester Star behind a paywall, we can’t send them any traffic because our customers would just get stopped at the door if they followed the link. The NVDaily is obviously benefiting from this because our customers can click straight through. So, in essence the Winchester Star is content to only offer its content to its paid subscribers (there are various levels of this) and the NVDaily is more than willing to have links to its content spread far and wide.
Our area isn’t the most Internet savvy but that is slowly changing. When I look at the Internet advertising on both sites it is easy to see things growing on NVDaily.com and going the other direction on The Winchester Star.
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