In a great post over at Urbanagora, Kiyoshi Martinez uses the Huffington Post's impending arrival on the Chicago media scene as an occasion to examine the current state of the Sun-Times, the Tribune, and various online outlets. As he notes, Arianna Huffington picked a really interesting time to jump into this pond:
I think the decision to target this city in particular shows a shrewd familiarity of the weaknesses of the two daily papers and their online properties. It seems almost paradoxical that at a time when two newspapers face financial turmoil, one of the largest news and political sites decides it's a good time to move in.
Martinez also highlights how Chicago's two major dailies have utterly failed to embrace the new media environment:
Rarely does the Tribune or Sun-Times link outside of their Web site to local bloggers or other Chicago-media sites (i.e.: EveryBlock, Chicagoist, Gapers Block, Chi Town Daily News). Nor do they embed YouTube videos, make use of Flickr, be active on Twitter or actually understand the concept of creating a community on their Web sites through commenters. And we haven't even talked social networking yet.
Instead, they build walled gardens, which defeats the philosophy of the Internet. Making things worse is that most of their new media content, such as videos, cannot be embedded to a reader's blog or shared easily. And the Tribune removes its articles from the public view after little more than a week, meaning that search engines can't index it and send them more page views and more revenue.
Read the whole thing here. And also make sure to check out the comments section where, interestingly enough, an argument breaks out over ... whether Martinez's post was too lengthy for the internet.
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