In the Sunday edition of the Argus, they finally made their ‘changes’ public. Well, somewhat.
They announced that they were going to hire some new people and some veterans were ‘leaving’.
While I will commend them for going public with the ‘changes’ that is not quite how it went down. Several reporters who re-applied for their jobs were NOT re-hired. Call it what you want, I call it layoffs. You won’t see anything immediate, but next month you will notice several veteran reporters will no longer be at the paper. I will keep those names to myself, but you will be able to figure it out.
They also re-titled some of the staff and management and are pushing for a bigger digital format. While that is all fine and dandy, I will tell you where the Argus is failing it’s readers and advertisers;
1) Get you freaking website to work. The videos continually crash or don’t work at all. Promised press conferences or shows get canceled or just stop working in the middle of them. If you want to have a larger digital presence, I suggest you learn how to go ‘digital’.
2) Stop charging for the online content. There is a reason why Stormland TV has the #1 news website in the state, they charge their advertisers, not their readers. While I will admit, the journalists at the Argus are of better quality then Stormland, people are really not willing to pay for online news, especially when you can go to different free news sites.
I wish the Argus luck, but I am not holding my breath.