Wednesday, January 04, 2006

The Case of the Vanishing Mall Scoop

With a lot of fanfare, the Joplin Globe sent out a bulletin earlier today revealing that Northpark Mall is going to be undergoing a major renovation. The information apparently came from a news conference attended by all area media.
The Globe was the first to send out the news, e-mailing bulletins with a link to the item on its website. The bulletin was about two sentences long and referred readers to the website. When readers reached the website, they had to go to another link, and then found the same two sentences...and nothing more.
Since that time, the Globe's newly minted competitor, The Joplin Daily, has posted an entire story, complete with an artist's sketch, of the planned renovations...and it appears that the Globe's scoop has totally vanished from its website. And if anybody could tell me the reason why, I would love to hear it.
The Globe may need to rethink its strategy. For those who check out the Daily, the mall story is going to be stale by morning. Providing a bit more for the web reader would have made sense. Directing the reader to the website, forcing the reader to follow another link, and then not providing even a scrap of extra information that was not provided in the e-mail bulletin, is not a user-friendly strategy.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any word on why the Glob is pulling coverage out of McDonald County, one of the fastest growing regions in the state?

Anonymous said...

Looks like the Daily scored an early-morning scoop on the fire at St. John's.