I don't see why they don't just better-optimize the website as an interactive news source. I can take the title of their top story and search google news... nothing... fail. They are poorly google indexed, and SEO seems like an afterthought - if a thought at all.
<meta rant>
Their title tag is static...like they're using a "website builder" Their Description tag is missing.
</end rant>

Not everyone thinks "I wonder what's in the newspaper today... let's check online.... now what was that web address for my local newspaper?"

More than half of my own site's traffic is through search engines, mostly google but bing more recently as well. Not to toot my own horn (too much) but my site generates a modest amount off of google ads, and has relatively low traffic considering I'm the designer, major contributor, and admin.
-also my site's google ads rotate against local ads, so they don't show every time on the home page.


I would think even a one-man-web-department could do better than a news director/tech admin/web-admin-on-the-side type like myself.

But hey, the domain expires in 2 months, maybe they're just trying to go out with a bang

Not to knock their new website and all, but dam... what I could do with 23k inbounds....

They are just using a poorly implemented Drupal install. Drupal is great if you know how to adjust everything to make it SEO friendly, but if you just slap it up, by default it has problems. With the switch to paid only they won't be helping themselves in the eyes of the search engines anyways, since they'll have less to index.

well I guess, but the nypost does the same thing and I'd have to wonder how many conversions they get by search engine hits that wanted to read "the rest of the ...article...online"

I believe nypost has enough articles where you get to read the full article without paying to keep the search engines busy. But yeah, I imagine they do get do get quite a few conversions from those that require payment.

Personally, I just take the title of the story and plug it into google and see if I can find it elsewhere first

HAHAHA a good point, and a great tip to use locally too. If it's any kind of "breaking news" odds are that someone else has reported on it. Unless the story is so local that no one else cares to report it, or someone had an inside tip - in which case they'll submit it to the AP anyway.

Is that why grass comes out fluorescent green in the photos they post?

Yeah, that is a bad example in August. Now, if it is October, with the high school-JC seasons in full bloom and there's more AP stories than local... (there won't be, but you get my drift)...

Some yrs ago TDW used to include police and fire calls. Don't know why they stopped, always thought it was a good thing. Kept us up on what's happening in the neighborhood.

You can get some of that from crimereports.com. Just enter an address or city. Doesn't have fire calls, however.

I don't remember TDW ever reporting police/fire calls at least not for Aberdeen, Hoquiam or the GHSO. The calls are so numerous for those three there is no possible way to put those into any kind of short form for a partial page in a paper. Granted on line would be easier but I'm assuming the data entry alone for those various agencies day after day would be a pain.