Working with the local press
24 March 2011 by fans64
Why are the ST so prissy and barring people who post lincs on their site to volunteer sites such as this?
I help out on a Scunthorpe united site( www.iron-bru.net ) and our posters regularly post lincs to Telegraph and other media stories they feel will interest our members or will add another insight to a story already under discussion.
It's a shame one part of our local media is so anti community in this way.
I will personally continue to highlight their stories if I feel they are interesting to our readers/members as it's the right thing to do . I will not hold a grudge that they won't support community projects such as this.
Perhaps for every plug we give them they will pay us,after all they are a commercial organisation and getting free publicty while stamping on the same volunteers who give them it.
Shame on them
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Comments
For the life of me I just cannot understand what this is all about. Surely the ET cannot be removing comments, observations or any thing either local or national that is fair and reasonable and not abusive whether it is linked to any other site in the wide world.
There certainly appears to be all sorts of changes to the ET over all which I personally have difficulty, but banning views linked to other sites is some thing else.
But I must say nothing surprises me in the UK of today and if I were some years younger in age I would upstakes, the problem would be where to go in this horrible wide world.
Its extremely short sighted and a definite shot in the foot. The last w of WWW is web, a linked and connected abstraction. The ET is barricading itself into a corner and saying no to the way the web works.
Like most newspapers they fail to understand how this works and why it works. They worry that people who go to their site will leave it because they found a link to elsewhere.
This is not how it works at all. People will come back because of the links to other interesting sites. The external links add value not take it away. The ET just doesn't get this point or accept it.
Their tagline reads something like the 'heart of the community' but a heart has input and output. The ET only has input. It is a black hole for information and doesn't serve us well because of this.
It should be embracing the external links as added value to their content, supplied to them for free and not removing them to further their own blinkered and or uneducated agenda.
I understand that some of the content that may be linked to from their comments may not sit well with them from a legal, moral or even political standpoint but a disclaimer that other sites are not controlled by them is all thats needed to cover the the first two. The political differences of other sites is nothing to be afraid of and allows for different viewpoints to be heard. I believe thats an important part of journalism and that would really allow the ET to call itself the heart.
Unfortunately the ET seems to be staffed by dinosaurs with no concept of the way the web works, it is aware of what the web is doing to its reader numbers, their reaction is to jam their fingers in their ears and sing nah nah nah very loudly in the hope that it will just go away.
It wont, the solution I think, is to employ a bunch of college students and let them show the ET how the linked web can increase value, increase readers, increase loyalty, further their brand and above all give the community it serves a real location for all and sundry to head to for all information about Scunthorpe. (sorry visitscunthorpe.com, no offence meant!)
This wont happen either you know, the ET will continue in its inexorable slow decline until its time to shut up shop.
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