Watching the New England Newspaper & Press Association Continue to Develop New Ideas

News people from all over New England gathered in Boston last week to talk about the state of the industry and assess the future.

It was the annual New England Newspaper & Press Association convention and I enjoyed the chance to catch up new technology and old friends.

Our readers know the Milton Times has an e-edition that sits behind a paywall.

Obviously we aren’t the first paper to add digital to the menu. Did you know the Boston Globe has 16,000 paid subscribers? We are still learning the backside of our e-edition. And soon we will have our APP on the market.

A very knowledgeable vendor at the convention thinks we should add more content to the free first page of our web site. He was surprised that our web numbers haven’t declined now that little can be read without an e-subscription.

I’m not sure we’ll make any more changes online until we sort through what is working for our readers and find out whether our e-edition has the ability to be financially stable.

Anyway the workshops on advertising sales were sober reflections of the slow economy. Newspapers are seeing a slight uptick that appears to have begun in the fourth quarter of last year.

The convention themes were not new - an emphasis on tight writing, photos that tell a story, and more of the basics of good journalism.

This entry was posted on 13. February 2012 at 00:10 and is filed under staff notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.