Crosscut Seattle, the upstart regional news site, goes on the attack against newspapers in Washington and Oregon. As it critiques newspaper sites in the land of Bigfoot, it brings up some great “why are you doing this?” points
– Many of the sites hold back the bulk of their print content until some arbitraliy set deadline. For some papers it is midnight – but in one example, stories from the paper don’t hit the web until noon! (that’s the Eugene Register-Guard if you’re keeping score at home).
– Other sites make you pay to view content if you aren’t a dead-tree subscriber.
– Most newspapers limit one of their greatest assets: photography. You get “postage-stamp” pictures or none at all in many cases.
– Some sites are getting agressive with blogs, but aren’t doing more than posting press releases and little irrelevant nuggets
One online editor, Mark Briggs of the Tacoma News Tribune battled back (Crosscut’s Chuck Taylor chastised Briggs’ paper for posting news late in the morning) – calling Taylor’s reporting “superficial.”