“An aggressively bad website”

Local newspapers that survive on local content are justifiably slow to give their product away for free. You want to know who got arrested last night,what’s on the school lunch menu or what the appeals board is doing about the guy that wants to open a junkyard on the next street,there’s one place to read about it. Until local advertisers get the bang for the buck from web ads that bigger advertisers do they’ll continue to buy print and inserts. The E-T papers provide unique content; just because people who proclaim themselves “web saavy” think they are entitled to free content does not mean a private business needs to give away the store. As for the E-T generally, the quality of its reporting has plummeted markedly in the past two years. It does absolutely no enterprise reporting — for example, a recent meeting in which state Education officials brought a local school board on the carpet to ask why the schools were so bad, the E-T went ballistic over alleged but disputed of the open meeting law. The open meeting violations should have been pursued, but it’s a sidebar; there has been very little reporting of substance on the issue raised, just running commentary over whether the meeting should have been open. A good paper would have reconstructed the meeting, provided background, told its readers who was involved and why and what the future holds, But not the E-T. It filed a suit and rolled over and went back to sleep. In particular since it flipped to an AM (sort of), the paper’s reporting has been very thin and basically confined to quickand dirty on-deadline write ups on government meetings with no folo, one-day coverage of administrative decisions and fluff features that can go over to other papers in the chain.Fighting for the open meeting law is noble, but the Eagle Tribune doesn’t realize that’s part of its mission, not its reason for living. That fundamental misunderstanding probably expains its lousy job reporting on the issues raised when state officials called in the school board in one of its communities for a some brisk words about the lousy education it offers.Then there’s the paper’s obsession with admittedly “inappropriate” e-mails sent by a former mayor of Newburyport to a friend, which editor-in-chief Ketter wants to convert into public documents. What’s next, should we wiretap public employee’s phones so we can print transcripts of them telling the kids to make sure to take the dog out? It there wasn’t the hint of steaminess, Ketter would have no interest. Better he puts his energies into restoring aggressive reporting at his papers, because there sure isn’t much of it happening these days.

Liam — I agree with everything you say. I also know and like Karen. But I absolutely do not believe that giving the paper away free online would cost it more than 0.001 percent of its paid circulation.