On August 21, 2011, Scot Morrissey, publisher of The Athens Banner-Herald announced that the the newspaper would be embracing a "digital first" philosophy and focusing it's efforts on onlineathens.com.
It's no surprise that papers are turning their eyes towards the digital future. Last spring there was a lot of experimentation with digital content. The New York Times initiated a paywall in order to profit from online readers, The Daily was launched by Murdoch, a iPad only news app and Patch.com began to spread across the country to deliver local news.
But is the digital craze paying off? For these new ventures, it is too soon to tell. There are ways to get around the New York Times paywall and it doesn't take a computer hacker to figure it out (just clear your web history). Patch.com needs to work on the quality of content and The Daily is sending mixed messages to it's target market by offering low quality journalism on a high end product. The Daily might be fun, interactive and pretty but you have to have to be able to afford and iPad to read it.
Gannett, however, is making digital turn into dollars. Monday, Gannett Co. posted 10 percent digital revenue gain for the third quarter.
Though these numbers are positive, the majority of this revenue came from their CareerBuilder website, not publication websites.
In spite of this disappointing news, "across the company, USA Today and its local sites served over 1.3 billion mobile page views in the first half of the year -- up 107% from the same time period a year ago," wrote Gavin O'Malley for Online MediaPost News, "The company said its USA Today app has now been downloaded more than 10 million times."
Overall Gannett Co. is doing better than before and as companies experiment with different platforms and develop digital content, we will see this trend in other companies as well.
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