Topic: Cincinnati Enquirer

[Cygnus]

I've noticed some bugs in the switch to Facebook. I've seen the comments from several articles disappear. Example is the article "Progess continues at The Banks" had comments yesterday but currently I see nothing.

I use Safari, Firefox, and IE8 daily and sometimes comments will show up in one browser but not another.

[jmecklenborg]

>well, the vast majority of people here are anonymous....


Well this place is moderated so if you use multiple user names you will be tossed.


Today's Enquirer had a feel good letter by Stan Chesley next to a letter about the smoking ban.  Then an article on page C2 about how Chesley is about to get disbarred.

[Blue Line]

My biggest complaint on the Enquirer site is how articles can disappear or be moved in less than a day.

[Quimbob]

What does the Enquirer owe Smitherman & Finney?

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20111218/NEWS01/312180027

[jmecklenborg]

I saw that.  Look at how Smitherman + Coast once again constitutes the ENTIRE opposition to something, and the reporter can't make the connection that the two are in bed. 

[Living in Gin]

The Enquirer's slide into irrelevance continues:

Cincy reaches final deal for smaller format; production closing by Q4 2012 could cost 200 jobs

At this rate, the Enquirer will soon be nothing more than a two-page pamphlet that gets folded into issues of USA Today.

[jmecklenborg]

Their deadline is going to have to be at least 2 hours earlier in order to compensate for driving all of the newspapers down to Cincinnati.  I can't wait for the first time I-71 is shut down by snow and no old people get their papers. 

[Sherman Cahal]

"Content will provide more in-depth coverage of topics that our readers are passionate about and provide information that can’t be found anywhere else."

How will this happen when there is very little investigative journalism that once defined newspapers? They were the watchdogs of the past.

[Blue Line]

Their deadline is going to have to be at least 2 hours earlier in order to compensate for driving all of the newspapers down to Cincinnati.  I can't wait for the first time I-71 is shut down by snow and no old people get their papers. 

Meanwhile, people like me will incur $5 charges against my paycheck for each missed paper complaint. Once the warehouse in Tobasco closes, I'll have to look for another job.

[jmecklenborg]

To illustrate just how deeply The Enquirer fails at its stated mission, take a look at this:


Back then the public had a better idea of how municipal finances functioned because of these annual reports in the city's papers.  Not only is there a useful description of types of debt, in the article on the right we see exactly where all of the city's cash is -- divided between any number of local banks.  Now the public is just plain superstitious about government, and easy prey for anti-tax groups. 

[GCrites80s]

Gotta have more room for Kardashian news. I remember that the local paper in my grandparents' part of the state (the Monroe County Beacon) was still publishing things like the financial reports of the local school districts in the '90s. I got to see how much all the coaches were paid, the costs of building maintenance, what they were spending on diesel, etc. Even though I was probably 15 at the time, I feel like I grew up a lot that day.

[JYP]

The information is still out there but its more likely tucked behind "read more on the web" or some other footnote to a larger story. There is nothing like opening up a paper and having all those numbers right there drawing your eyes to the sheer largeness of the numbers (Compare "roughly $3 million" with "$3,145,356.99" to see which figure gets the point across) . That type of presentation actually drew people into looking at what the city spent, how it got its money and how it all works. These days, people just get the pre-packaged spin summary from the media leaving those who are looking for something more to dig deeper to get the facts.

[jmecklenborg]

>Compare "roughly $3 million" with "$3,145,356.99"

Great point.  The average person doesn't know how many millions are in a billion. 

Just think for a moment what a nightmare it was to keep banking records before computers.

[jmecklenborg]

Enquirer getting smaller and smaller
01/20/12 at 4:50pm
Written by Letters Editor 2    Comments

Looking for my Enquirer this morning, I bent over to pick up what I thought was a crumpled Kleenex. Imagine my surprise when I carefully “uncrumpled” it and found that it was today’s Enquirer. As the paper gets thinner and has less news, it might be nice to have a week of daily papers delivered in a Kleenex-type box dispensing one each day. Progress!

Norman Bissell

College Hill

[Caseyc]

That's crazy, I've never heard of such a place, where's my lawyer?

Sorry JJ!  I didn't put two and two together!  Awesome site though

By the way, anyone else notice that the Enquirer scrubbed the mostly anti-Smitherman comment section clean from the "Letter: Smitherman has conflict" article?

http://news.cincinnati.com/comments/article/20120120/NEWS0108/301200126/Letter-Smitherman-has-conflict

Talk about censorship! Boycott the Enquirer!!!

It seems that the comments often don't last more than a few days. I have noticed a lot of other articles where this has occurred, although there is nothing in their formal policy or the FAQ's that explains why.  I would like to know what the policy is.

[Sherman Cahal]

Not to be a debbie downer, but the Facebook commenting platform has issues when:

a. The article title or URL changes. For the Enquirer, this happens quite frequently. For instance, when an article is breaking and more information is later added, the title and/or the URL changes which erases any prior comments.
b. Mobile versions can have different URL's than the regular online versions, which can have different comments. Not all articles have this issue and it seems to have mostly gone away.
c. Comments are moderated by generally on person (who has the developer ID), but it can also be policed by the community. So if enough people mark your comments as abusive, then they are wiped.

It's not a conspiracy theory. It's been like this on all of the Gannett papers (e.g. Courier-Journal).

[Caseyc]

Not to be a debbie downer, but the Facebook commenting platform has issues when:

a. The article title or URL changes. For the Enquirer, this happens quite frequently. For instance, when an article is breaking and more information is later added, the title and/or the URL changes which erases any prior comments.
b. Mobile versions can have different URL's than the regular online versions, which can have different comments. Not all articles have this issue and it seems to have mostly gone away.
c. Comments are moderated by generally on person (who has the developer ID), but it can also be policed by the community. So if enough people mark your comments as abusive, then they are wiped.

It's not a conspiracy theory. It's been like this on all of the Gannett papers (e.g. Courier-Journal).

Not saying there is a conspiracy theory however I am quite sure that none of those three reasons applied with regard to the countless articles I have seen where comments disappear in their entirety.  What I have observed is a simple wholesale elimination after a few days.  I suspect there is another technical reason stemming from the typically shoddy website operations of the Enquirer.

[Sherman Cahal]

Well, it only takes 5 reports of an abusive comment to get a comment removed in typical cases - so 5 fake accounts or 5 people who disagree (e.g. COAST) could have it removed fairly easily. For that article, though, I'm seeing only two comments, made 4 hours ago.

Were you thinking of the NKY version? It was located at http://nky.cincinnati.com/article/AB/20120120/NEWS/301200126.

There are also multiple variations of the same article, with different URL's that are now gone as the article URL structure was changed:

Today: news.cincinnati.com/article/20120120/NEWS0108/301200126/Letter-Smitherman-has-conflict
           nky.cincinnati.com/article/AB/20120120/NEWS/301200126/Letter-Smitherman-has-conflict
           news.cincinnati.com/article/AB/20120120/NEWS0108/301200126/Letter-Smitherman-has-conflict
           communitypress.cincinnati.com/article/AB/20120120/NEWS0108/Letter-Smitherman-has-conflict
           communitypress.cincinnati.com/article/AB/20120120/NEWS0108/301200126/Letter-Smitherman-has-conflict
           communitypress.cincinnati.com/article/AB/20120120/NEWS0108/301200126
           news.cincinnati.com/article/AB/20120120/NEWS/301200126/Letter-Smitherman-has-conflict

[Living in Gin]

Apparently Gannett has never heard of the idea of a permalink, which is routine for just about every other news website and blog in existence. Nothing like clicking on a link to an Enquirer article here on UO that's more than a couple weeks old and getting the dreaded "404 Not Found" error page. And of course, they'll scream bloody murder if you get around that problem by just copying and pasting the article in its entirety.

Sometimes I'm convinced that they're deliberately trying to make their website as worthless and unusable as possible in the hopes that people will rush out and buy the print edition. You know, just like how people rushed to buy CD's when the music industry did everything in their power to make downloading as difficult as possible. 

[CincyCapell]

The Enquirer routinely scrubs comments from an article, particularly from "controversial" topics. That's why I make sure that my comments also post to my Facebook, thus making it easy to cut & paste my comments back into the scrubbed comments forum, which I just did with the Slitherman article.

[jmecklenborg]

Apology for online conduct
02/03/12 at 11:54am by Letters Editor   |   11    Comments

I want to publicly apologize for some of the silly and trivial comments that I have made on this site. There still lives in me the “so’s your old man” syndrome. I have not followed my mothers admonition in these situations to consider the source of comments before you respond.

The conduct that I have exhibited does not solve anything. It may give me pleasure but it doesn’t improve anything. I am truly sorry and I will try to resist the temptation in the future.

Dick Schladen

Aurora, Ind.

[Sherman Cahal]

^I saw that this morning and nearly spit my coffee out. That's a first.

[CincyCapell]

This will mark an end of the Enquirer's usefulness as a tool to pander to the exburbs. Who is going to pay to read the Enquirer's awful 'journalism' online? Fewer and fewer people are willing to pay to read the Enquirer in print, as evidenced by their declining subscription rates.

Cincinnati Enquirer, Gannett to add paywalls for its newspaper websites

Date: Wednesday, February 22, 2012, 3:06pm EST

Gannett Co. Inc. plans to switch its 80 community newspapers to a pay model for their Web sites by the end of the yea

http://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2012/02/22/cincinnati-enquirer-gannett-to-add.html

[FakeCinEnquirer]

This will mark an end of the Enquirer's usefulness as a tool to pander to the exburbs. Who is going to pay to read the Enquirer's awful 'journalism' online? Fewer and fewer people are willing to pay to read the Enquirer in print, as evidenced by their declining subscription rates.

Cincinnati Enquirer, Gannett to add paywalls for its newspaper websites

Date: Wednesday, February 22, 2012, 3:06pm EST

Gannett Co. Inc. plans to switch its 80 community newspapers to a pay model for their Web sites by the end of the yea

http://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2012/02/22/cincinnati-enquirer-gannett-to-add.html

Which means suburbanites will become even more ill-informed with AM radio .

By the way, Mark Miller just tweeted "Islamic extremists love streetcars".  These people are the 'experts' for 700wlw

[Gordon Bombay]

This will mark an end of the Enquirer's usefulness as a tool to pander to the exburbs. Who is going to pay to read the Enquirer's awful 'journalism' online? Fewer and fewer people are willing to pay to read the Enquirer in print, as evidenced by their declining subscription rates.

Cincinnati Enquirer, Gannett to add paywalls for its newspaper websites

Date: Wednesday, February 22, 2012, 3:06pm EST

Gannett Co. Inc. plans to switch its 80 community newspapers to a pay model for their Web sites by the end of the yea

http://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2012/02/22/cincinnati-enquirer-gannett-to-add.html

Yeah, uh Business Courier is worth paying for. NYT, worth paying for. Why would I pay the Enquirer just so I can read the AP articles they re-print? Those articles will already be online elsewhere. Even if I did pay, I'd just get bombarded with Furniture Fair ads. I really wonder how much longer they'll last.

[Living in Gin]

^ Exactly. A paywall works for the New York Times because it's the New York Times. The Cincinnati Enquirer is no New York Times.

[unusualfire]

Having it print in Columbus and now this will be their downfall. Rather quickly too. We need a  combined Cincinnati Dayton Newspaper to cover things like the Streetcar fairly.

[Sherman Cahal]

^ Exactly. A paywall works for the New York Times because it's the New York Times. The Cincinnati Enquirer is no New York Times.

Not doing too hot: http://www.boston.com/Boston/businessupdates/2012/02/times-reports-profit-drop-and-sells-more-its-stake-the-red-sox/CAddiW8auMI8YqzPeFKmDK/index.html

And Gannett (current owner of the Enquirer) is exploring a paywall option for all of its newspapers.

[Quimbob]

I have heard people griping about NYT delivery lately (in Northside)
That being said, I just started paying for the Bizniz Courier & so far am quite happy with it.
Dunno what my price point will be for the Enquirer. I skim the headlines & frequently find absolutely nothing. I almost always find something in the Springfield or Dayton papers.

[Quimbob]

this was posted on the Cinti streetcar thread which seems to have become a Cincinnati catch all thread.....
Cincinnati Enquirer, Gannett to add paywalls for its newspaper websites
Change to take place by the end of the year - USA Today will stay free
http://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2012/02/22/cincinnati-enquirer-gannett-to-add.html