Corporate New Media

Wow. What a day. I went out a little before noon to cover the 10th annuel Character Counts celebration in downtown, Anderson. About three or four hours after returning from the event (with photos, video and information...) here's look at The Herald Bulletin's homepage and the Anderson Free Press homepage. Keep in mind that I'm one person and they have a lot of resources at their disposal.

Here's a cool story for you. The local newspaper was ordered by a local judge recently to give up the name of one of their anonymous posters or at least the name of the company the plaintiff needs to go after for the information. The forums for the CNHI run newspaper are handled by a third party - Groupee's HeyMartha forums.

By Mark Choate
Orig. Posted to Online-News

There is a fundamental economic law at work here: more competition means lower profits. Less competition means higher profits. For many years, newspapers operated in what economists would call an environment of monopolistic competition. Monopolistic competition is defined as a market in which there are only a few providers of a particular good or service, and these providers offer highly differentiated versions of these products. This contrasts with pure competition, in which there are numerous providers of a good or service, all of whom offer more or less the very same thing. Like corn farmers, for example. If you have a lot of competitors all of whom offer the very same product or service as you do, then you are working in an industry that has been commoditized. Corn is a commodity. So are classified ads.

One of the threads on Poynter's Online-News mailing list over the last week or so was Frequency: Our Toughest Challenge. Greg Harmon of Belden Associates had some good thoughts I want to share here (with permission.)

Greg Harmon wrote:

Ok, take a look at the screengrab with this post. The Herald Bulletin has the top spot (with whatever they're calling the extra links under it this month), plus a More results from theheraldbulletin.com », then *another* for www.theheraldbulletin.com, then *two more* for just www.heraldbulletin.com (which appears to be a mirror?).

If you didn't notice, the Anderson Herald Bulletin (a CNHI newspaper) recently dropped the ball by banning one of the long time members (for what appears to be political reasons.)

I came across this piece at Poynter today and it really upset me. I posted a response in the comments, but there are other things I want to add.

Random thoughts about Google News Algo tonight. Every once in a while MFP will pop onto the 'section front' (for US News, for example) and cause a burst of traffic for a short time before I'm bumped off.

According to URLtrends.com, I think Muncie Free Press (MFP) has a more 'natural' (not a closed, dare I say 'incestous' link pattern) and 'generous' (more links outbound...spreading the 'Google Juice' between more sites...) linking pattern than

I don't know when exactly, but sometime recently The Star Press' homepage was invaded by a slim banner for the Muncie Mega Auction, a thinly branded auction site of some type. Good luck with that.