Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Kudos Laurel Leader


Laurel Leader's Editor, Melanie Dzwonchyk, has continued her unflagging support of digital publishing to keep us informed during the storm.  Melanie has heroically filed online stories during the teeth of the storm proving that local journalism doesn’t need ink and paper to serve our community. 

The Leader has published early and online this week.  You can read the Leader’s latest snow story here.  Kudos to Melanie and her team at the Leader.

It's too bad the Leader’s publishers refuse to create a professional website for our much beloved Laurel Leader.  We are left with their absolutely horrible “explore howard dot com” website.  

The fact that the “explore howard dot com” loses the brand identity provided by the Laurel Leader is sad enough.  However, the technology that their site runs on must have been first deployed by Gutenberg himself.   There seems to be simply no commitment to digital publishing by this publisher. It appears to be only an afterthought and is certainly not being worked as an emerging profit center.

I understand that community newspapers are losing money.  But it's a damn shame that the people running Patuxent Publishing do not embrace the web and dedicate their time and energies to improving their digital editions.  If there is any way to stop hemorrhaging money, the tourniquet must be built from their digital product.

Community news is vitally important to every small town in America.  I have dozens of sources for national news.  There are thousands of reporters in DC covering the federal government.  But on a good day, we only have a precious few reporters like Gwendolyn Glenn and Melanie Dzwonchyk to tell us what is happening in our own back yard.  

Come on Patuxent Publishing please give us a real community news website for the Laurel Leader.  A website that lives at laurelleader.com and a website that carries a local brand and logo that we can identify with. 
 

4 comments:

Kim said...

I couldn't have said it better. I always think when I return to the Laurel Leader site, I'll see a new banner, but it doesn't happen. Of course, I most frequently read it in Google Reader anyways.

Anonymous said...

so very true - and trying to navigate their calendar section whether just for laurel or across their papers, is ridiculous. Lovely to see the up to date neighborhood reporting, though! Right down to the missing shovels and our trips to Lowe's.

Unknown said...

Hi Rick

Love the blog...Im a radio producer who wants to contact you ASAP about a show. any way to do that?

thanks!

Rick Wilson said...

You can contact me at g dot rick dot wilson at gmail dot com.