Comments on: For journos and webheads: Growing Your News Website

By: Vox

Vox — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:49:17 +0000

I will so be passing this on. Thanks!

By: Rachel

Rachel — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:32:24 +0000

Gotcha–thanks for the clarification. So the WDT was behind a pay wall and recently took down both the pay and registration walls? (I just clicked around for a few minutes and wasn’t asked to register, so I assume everything’s FREEfree now, not just “give us your demographics” free.)

So the tragedy in this story is one of hindsight–IF ONLY they’d done things differently. Alas, I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more stories like this in the future.

By: Howard Owens

Howard Owens — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 13:25:56 +0000

Hey, thanks for the link.

Point of clarification — WDT went free only very recently. Being a paid site for a number of years is what gave NJ a foothold in the market. I doubt NJ could have succeeded in its present incarnation had WDT been a free site.

When you strip away the ugly design and bad usability, the core values of NJ are good pointer toward growing audience — hyperlocal content, aggregation of all news sources, reader submissions (participation) — are all tools news sites looking to grow audience should emulate.

Knowing Steve, and having read him for more than a decade, I doubt he’d disagree.