A New Jersey Newspaper Shuns the Web, and Thrives

Into the teeth of a historic recession, the  TriCityNews of Monmouth County, N.J., newspaper has just published the biggest issue in its history, NYTimes.com reports.

The product is double-digit profitable, and it has been growing at a clip of about 10 percent a year since it was founded in 1999, right about the time the Web was beginning to put its hands around print’s neck….

[The] TriCityNews of Monmouth County, N.J., is prospering precisely because it aggressively ignores the Web. Its Web site has a little boilerplate about the product and lists ad rates, but nothing more. (The address is trinews.com, for all the good it will do you.)

“Why would I put anything on the Web?” asked Dan Jacobson, the publisher and owner of the newspaper. “I don’t understand how putting content on the Web would do anything but help destroy our paper. Why should we give our readers any incentive whatsoever to not look at our content along with our advertisements, a large number of which are beautiful and cheap full-page ads?”

COMMENTS

  • http://mwurz1975.wordpress.com/ Matthias Wurz

    Same is true also for us, The Vienna Review, Vienna’s only English language newspaper. We have not yet put much focus on our website (www.viennareview.net), but the copies we print per month has increased five times in 2008.

    Matthias Wurz,
    Managing Director
    The Vienna Review

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