Things are still in flux, I hear, but the iTowns regional blogs are apparently among the casualties of the latest reallocation of the Courant’s remaining local news staff. As of Friday, most of the iTowns blogs will be shut down and their writers assigned to other duties.
The Greater Hartford blog has already put readers on notice that it is shutting down. Steve Goode, it reports, will be taking over as the Greater Hartford reporter, writing mostly news briefs for Bloomfield, Windsor, Rocky Hill and Newington. The items will be played on the iTowns Greater Hartford Regional Page and, presumably, wind up in the iTowns print section on Sundays.
Likewise, Peter Marteka will be writing news briefs out of the towns of Manchester, East Hartford, Vernon and South Windsor and taking some pictures. He will apparently be allowed to keep writing his popular nature /outdoors column.
Regine Labossiere and Monica Polanco will work out of the Middletown office covering Wesleyan, Yale, Middletown and the shoreline; and web hosts Melissa Pionzio and Ken Byron will function as news brief operatives in a few towns in their respective territories, Middletown and Greater New Britain.
I gather that this redistribution is an effort to keep some semblance of local news flowing on the website and into the weekly iTowns local news round-up.
These are tough calls being made by the editors. There will be no easy way to gauge whether they are well or poorly received by readers. For the sake of the communities, the iTowns experiment, and the writers, I’m mostly sorry that they have to be made.
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“There will be no easy way to gauge whether they are well or poorly received by readers.”
Readers could be tested with compact ThoughtStream™ biofeedback monitors worn on their collars. Another possibility might be to gauge readers’ thoughts with E-Meters (used in Scientology). And there are Tachyon Injection Tomographs, of course; they could be used to calibrate minute changes in the circumferences of readers’ skulls. And, you might well ask, what about the Hieronymus Box, which measures eloptic energy? Quiton energy emanations from iTowns readers (if there are any remaining) could be gauged with a Vernier dial. (The one drawback with this option is that the device doesn’t work well on subjects with negative thought patterns.)
These are all good, sensible, workable ideas, but there’s a simpler, quicker solution: Count the number of canceled subscriptions. When readers don’t find the news they expect in their local newspaper, they cancel their subscriptions. It doesn’t take quiton energy studies to figure that out.
To measure the fall-off on the web pages, they could use the Nocansium Ifilock forumula developed at the Rand Corp., but there might not be a large enough data stream to sample.
The Courant’s website is disorganized and needs a complete redesign, but I guess they know that.
You know when you walk through a junkyard looking for a part for your old Chevy? That’s what navigating through the Courant’s site is like.