Eagle-Tribune Blogs: In the News

It was tough to hear the person who was at the front of the meeting room at the Quincy Marriott last Wednesday.

My colleague to the left was reading a newspaper on the sly, and the shuffle of pages made it difficult to hear the speaker who was attempting to address us. It wasn’t much better to my right, where a fellow journalist was tapping away at the miniaturized keyboard on his Blackberry, answering e-mail and surfing the Web.

For writers who are fond of metaphors, you couldn’t ask for more. Print and new media, feet apart, each oblivious to the other.

For those of us who also enjoy irony, there was a bonus. The meeting was the fall gathering of the New England New Media Association, and the speaker was Steve Yelvington, media strategist for Morris Communications and one of the chief architects of Bluffton Today, the highly successful, two-year-old South Carolina newspaper and Web site that rose from the ashes of the Carolina Morning News.

Yelvington was talking about the great divide between the print and Web “editions” of local newspapers. The Carolina Morning News couldn’t bridge that gap, and it died.
Bluffton Today, however, is one of the few outfits in the country that has a print edition and Web site that complement, not compete with, one another. The result has been a newspaper deeply in touch with its community, a vibrant Web site packed with photos, news and opinions from Bluffton residents and, to hear Yelvington tell it, a dedicated, engaged readership.

So why should you, the Salem News reader, care?

It’s simple: We’re traveling the same path.

The journey began this fall with the launch of RallyNorth.net, our high school sports site. While we were optimistic, we weren’t sure how it would be received.

The response has been fantastic. It seems people of all ages love being able to find their local team’s rosters, game stories and scores with just a few mouse clicks. They enjoy the give-and-take with our sportswriters on the site’s blog. They love seeing all the photos we couldn’t fit in the newspaper.

And that online community is growing. What started as a football-only operation now includes soccer, field hockey, cheerleading and band. Best of all, the site, through our blog, has our reporters and readers talking directly with one another.

There have been more modest successes as well. Just hours ago, online voting ended in the first Salem News Halloween Costume Contest. You, our readers, sent in pictures of yourselves or your children in costume, and we posted them on the Web and let you vote on the best.
We weren’t sure what to expect, but we got some great photos (the most frightening being the shot of a 76-year-old Salem man dressed as Paris Hilton), and hundreds of you voted.

Is a costume contest news? No. Is it valuable? Absolutely. We all enjoy seeing our friends and neighbors in the paper, be they on the football field or in a Tin Man costume.

There will be more changes at The Salem News | in print and on the Web | in the months to come, as we try to get more local news in the print edition and use our Web site to bring our neighborhoods and their residents closer together.

Even if that means running a picture of a senior citizen dressed as a celebutante.

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