Sunday, January 01, 2006

First week of Joplin Daily begins with a scoop

Joplindaily.com is already living up to its promise of constantly updating its website and providing breaking news.
The Daily website features photos and a feature story by Kaylea Hutson on the first baby of the new year, which was born at Freeman Hospital to a Goodman couple.
I haven't heard much reaction to the newspaper otherwise. It wasn't delivered to my place and I finally found it at about the 10th place I looked, the 15th Street Wal-Mart Supercenter.
It would be easy to count the way in which the Daily is a superior product to the Globe's weekly, The Joplin Herald, so I will.
-The Daily print edition has advertising. In fact, it has a lot of it, and it appears the website does, also.
-All right, I'm obviously prejudiced, but the Daily's columnists were far more interesting.
-John Hacker made a strong case for the existence of the Daily, something that neither Susan Redden or Dan Chiodo were able to do for the Globe's knockoff weekly.
-The design, thanks to Nick Parker and Rick Rogers, is far easier on the eyes than the Herald, which looks too much like the mother Globe.
The biggest problem the Globe has is it simply cannot make a reasonable case for its weekly. To say it was necessary because there is not enough room in the Globe for Joplin news has to be one of the most disastrous public relations moves a newspaper has ever made in this area. If there is not enough room in the Globe for Joplin news, then why should Joplin residents subscribe to it"
***
Today was also the unveiling, coincidentally or not, of the Globe's new look Sunday edition. I liked the Jobs section. It would have been nice if it had been formatted that way back in the days when I was looking for work. The real estate section is a waste of paper, a bunch of filler material surrounding very little local copy.
The Metro section appears to be the Globe's way of saying, "Hey, we have Joplin news in our newspaper, too, and if that is the case, great. On the other hand, there was a day when the Globe routinely broke major stories and had long, explanatory or investigative pieces in its Sunday edition. The last big story I associate with the Globe was the arrest and handcuffing of the 11-year-old by two Joplin Police officers and most of that story was centered around Globe editors crying about how the police wouldn't tell them anything. Perhaps if they simply had bided their time and worked their sources (if they have any) instead of immediately bellowing, "We're the Joplin Globe; we represent the people and you have to tell us what we want to know," they may have already had the information they wanted. Instead, they have made certain that city officials will dig their heels in until the bitter end rather than give Globe reporters a scrap of information.
A new news publication seems to be just what the Globe and the city of Joplin need.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The Globe's "new" Sunday design reminds me of the Sunday sections of the Pittsburg Morning Sun, Springfield News-Leader and other papers have had for years. If the Herald and the new design are such great ideas why did it take competition for the Globe to make these changes?