We are actually working on a program right now that will allow subscriptions, but I would not bill it as a pay-per-view model. With so many news outlets, and AP reprinting much of what we post online, I am not sure that a pure online subscription model can work anywhere. We are trying to develop something that brings readers added value (aside from 'just' news) that they would be willing to pay a small monthly fee for. Hopefully we can start a public conversation about that sometime late summer or early fall.

Thanks for reading.

Damon

Like I said at the start of my post, I think we are lucky that we still have a daily paper here in Nashua at time when not every town has that luxury.

Your take on the ads is interesting. Presumably your advertisers are getting some value from them since they are still there – like I said, I'm a huge fan of Adblock so I'm not normally confronted with them. Personally, I'd prefer to sign up for some kind of a subscription service than have to see the advertising. For example if the Adblock people said they were pulling the plug tomorrow unless everyone paid them $5 a month, I'd be reaching for the plastic right away – actually if they were smart that is what they should do.

Have you looked at a subscription model for the Telegraph site? I wonder if our market is too small for it to work, especially if the Union Leader and Globe continue to be free for on-line content.

Thanks for pointing out the Twitter users and the two blogs – I'll be checking them out for sure.

Oh, on forums, did you see this post from Jason Falls the other day? http://bit.ly/j6zTN I'm not sure he's totally right, but there are are wacky people around.

It really looks as though you are committed to making this whole on-line thing work. I think that's great and hope it works out well. I'm going to make a point of paying more attention and commenting on the blogs – I think if more people were to do that, the experience would get better for all concerned.

One last thing – even though I tend to use Yelp a lot, I really like the reviews in the Table for Two section. We've had a lot of nice meals as a result!

Cheers!
David

Interesting analysis. I wish we could do more and we continue to improve our efforts in these areas.

But, probably missing a few important points:

1) There are a TON of ads on the Telegraph pages, yes. That is because at this point in this market that is what generates revenue. We would all like to reduce the number and/or implement other revenue streams but that is something likely to bubble down from larger metro papers rather than the other way around. For the time being that mass of advertising is a sign of the health of the site.

2) The Forums are really owned by readers not the Telegraph. For better or worse we moderate very lightly and get involved rarely. When I do participate I do use my real name, The 'moderator' users you see are simply the names of the accounts that created specific forums. Our involvement in daily discussion is really just a factor of our staff size.

3) We have been using Disqus for (I think) two years. We have a fairly liberal approach and moderate only unregistered commenters. Anyone using a verified email goes live immediately. As a result there is some fairly good discussion on the site.

4) We have been on Twitter for 2+ years and consider this to be our most successful 'social media' effort to date. In fact we dumped our SMS alerts vendor a year back and rely on Twitter almost exclusively for news alerts. We do participate on Twitter as a conversation and not just as a RSS feed. Several other staffers do the same at accounts such as @NHcom, @TelegraphEncore etc.

5) Blogs. As we know blogs are only as good as the time and effort you can put into them. At a small paper it is tough to make that time. David Brooks has it nailed at http://granitegeek.org and Michelle Collins has it going as well at http://blogs.nashuatelegraph.com/livefreeordine Several others are doing well but overall we do need to reevaluate our approach. Our next step is likely to reach out to community members who would like to partner with us to host (and sell ads) into their blogs. But, overall I don't consider blogs a 'thing' to be treated differently then any of our other features. Everything we do should be engaging, interactive, relevant, timely, extensible etc.

6) Metadata – not sure what the question there is? We don't consider that content to be a major SEO factor, except for SERP. But – a lot of it is from a redesign 3 – 4 years ago. We are relaunching ALL of our sites on a new CMS this Fall and we will be optimizing metadata, html etc as we go.

So – other things: We use coveritlive.com to have weekly chats with editors and staff; we have been hosting weekly webinars focused on economic issues; we provided live streaming video of editorial boards with political candidates last year and took reader questions; we have been experimenting with platforms such as http://parentingnh.ning.com/ and http://livestream.com/nashuatelegraph and http://qik.com/nashuatelegraph

I think we have a pretty good track record for innovation but there is always more to do. I would be interested to hear what specifically you would like to see the paper doing more of. We are redesigning now so no time like the present to hear some new good ideas.

Thanks

Damon Kiesow
ME / Online
nashuatelegraph.com