Monday, April 20, 2009

Wins and Losses for the Tribune

Congratulations to the East Valley Tribune for their Pulitzer Prize for local news for their 5-part story on Sheriff Joe known as "Reasonable Doubt" from last year. However, the thrill of this victory must be tempered by the fact that the Trib also announced last week that they are now dropping Saturday service.

For those counting at home, the Trib is only publishing on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. That means if they wanted to run another 5-part story in the future, it would take them nearly 2 weeks to do it!

ETA: In a bit of Irony, one of the Trib's winners is among the many that have been laid off. Now, he's writing for the Arizona Guardian, an online news source.

Also, despite their best efforts, its seems clear that without the deadline of a newspaper looming, the writing for the Tribune website has slowed quite a bit as well. It seems like almost all of their content is now provided by local feeds like Howard Fischer, the AP, or other sources. Also, though the tabs are nice, they don't always appear to work as they are supposed to.

If the economy continues to struggle and nothing comes along to move papers, how long until the Tribune is a weekly like the New Times?

1 comment:

Heath Reed said...

The trib is a decent and our home town newspaper and it is going to be another piece of mesa that will be lost and gone. they never had a quality website IMO, but I always liked when they had different stores on Mesa then the repub.