(Update: Finally on the Flint Journal page at 8:12 p.m.)
One of the biggest annual events covered by the Flint Journal is the Buick Open. The Free Press picked up this news today about U.S. Open Champion Lucas Glover committing to play the Grand Blanc tourney, but it still has not appeared on the Flint Journal MLive site as of 4 p.m.
If you go down the site and click on a little golf link (cute, eh?) it will take you to a Grand Rapids story about Glover, but nothing on the local site.
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8 comments:
Channel 12 had something about it on the 6 p.m. news.
It was posted at just after 8 p.m. I think your critiques are getting more harsh ... yeah, you don't like the new product. A lot of people don't. But if there was a newspaper coming out tomorrow, the story still would have been in it. It still would have been online the night before. Quit with the doomsday stuff.
I think you missed the point, anonymous 01:15.
The news was up on MLive over on the Grand Rapids site, it was available on the general online MLive site, but on the Flint Journal site, the one where most of us have to go to get our local news, nothing.
What is the issue that someone, somewhere can't say, gees it's 12:12 p.m., Grand Rapids has this story, but it has a very local angle for the Flint Journal, we should put it up there?
The point also is, there ISN'T a newspaper today. My only point is that the paper is promising "More than the Score and We Mean It!" It's a bit of a joke when the desk (whereever it is) does not put two-and-two together and make the simple call that a story about the Buick Open might be of interest in the Flint area where the tournament is.
As long as you have a story, put it where it is most important.
That was the point.
P.S. It also shows the continuing lameness of Advance's MLive operation, which has been a joke since the day it opened.
Harsh?
Flint Journal management has said they are going to do X and are NOT following through. They told circulation management that the Thursday and Friday papers would be the size of the Thursday papers of "old", to make up for missed news Monday through Wednesday and the Friday paper hasn't been anywhere near that size. Last Sunday's paper was a total joke. Yeah I know the Fathers Day paper is always small, but the Flint Journal cannot afford to put out any papers that are not worth 93 cents per day to the former daily customer looking at all this and deciding whether to keep taking the paper or not.
Go out and mention you work for the Flint Journal in public and you'll get a ear full from people that don't like the look, the price, or the three day per week Flint Journal.
This Mlive thing Jim has mentioned here is the exact same kind of non thinking. If it's up on one part Mlive, why wouldn't that same person put it up on the Flint version too?
The people at mlive have always been out to protect their own turf (a reason it's a failure). When they finally turned it over to the newspapers a year ago, look what happened to the numbers: 3 papers in the top 5 for hits in the U.S. (including soon-to-cease Ann Arbor).
Yet even after that happened, producers were locked out of some content. For example, I got a call from a fellow editor that saw an egregious headline error on the opinion blog for mlive, but my user's access wouldn't allow me to touch that blog. I only had access to entertainment, business and local news. No sports either. Why? Didn't make sense. After calling the mlive overseer at home, I got access to opinion and all other blogs a week later.
This is the same thing happening at GR on the golf story. They (almost assuredly) have no access to Flint's blog, and thus couldn't (even if they thought of it) click one extra button to have it post in both places.
Hopefully AnnArbor.com sees the futility of mlive and develops a new model for the rest of the papers, b/c these restrictions are ridiculous. They only serve to alienate readers.
Wasn't there a promise to bring all the latest breaking news as soon as it happened? They're clearly not living up to that empty promise. You can't blame the people who are left behind for not this kind of stuff. Blame management for leaving them understaffed.
This really shouldn't be about who saw what when and who in GR should have let Flint know that the U.S. Open champ was committing to play the Buick Open. Although would it have killed somebody to pick up the phone?
The sports "editor" in Flint (or the Great Lakes Bay Region, or whatever they're calling the Tri-Cities these days), knowing that the Buick Open is coming soon to the area, should have been on top of this, either by keeping in contact with the Open folks or the PGA. It's not all that hard.
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