ohryan.ca

A Web Developer in Winnipeg

  • How To Fix: The Newspaper Industry

    in ,

    I found this post sitting in my drafts folder from earlier this year. Seeing as I haven’t updated the blog in awhile, I thought I’d finish off some of the sentences and hit the ‘publish’ button.

    The newspaper industry is facing the perfect storm of declining readership, declining print ad sales, lackluster online ad revenues, the ever-present threat of blogs and the real-time web.

    I had a Eureka! moment earlier today when I originally started this post, it occurred to me – newspapers could learn a lot from the Nine Inch Nails distribution model. In a nutshell, the NIN model concedes that music is free, instead of trying to charge people for something that already free, they charge fans for limited edition tangible goods: things like special run vinyl, signed copies of things, tee-shirts, etc.

    A couple of ways I think the newspaper industry could add value to their dead tree version:

    1) NO ads
    2) ONLY distribute coupon type ads in print, don’t make them available online. Encourage advertisers to pay extra for these premium coupons.
    3) Free stuff – throw in some tickets to stuff, maybe a glossy photo of scantily clad firefighters. Whatever the audience would apprieciate.
    4) Allow subscribers to opt-in to receiving an email copy of their favorite section of the newspaper. An emailed copy would be easy to take with you on a mobile device like an iPhone without having to lug around a fat wad of paper.

    I have no idea how the finances work out for any of these ideas. I just really think that if the print newspaper needs to survive, then publishers need to inject some value.

  • People Suck at Email VII, Reply-All

    in

    If your reply does not pertain to everyone in the to and cc fields, don’t reply-all.

  • People Suck At Email VI, Topic Threads

    in

    This post is someone related to the part v in the series, subject lines.

    The subject of the email should reflect the topic of the body. When replying to an email thread, you should only reply with content relevant to the main topic. Do not ask an unrelated question, or start writing about what you had for lunch.

    If you have a new topic, compose a new email!

    It may not be entirely obvious why this sucks, I’m going to go into a little more detail than usual. This sucks because it makes it impossible to reference the email in the future. When I do a search for something, I usually ignore subjects that don’t pertain to my search. If I give the thread a label based on the content, when I reference the label in the future I will probably think it has been incorrectly labeled. It also makes it more difficult to resolve the email thread. It is also more likely to spin out of control, especially if there are a lot of CC’er in on the thread (see: PS@E IV).

    Lay off that reply-all button.