Technology: Notice from Russell Viers

Greetings all….
– Russell Viers
I’m not one to get alarmed about things, but there is a new threat to community newspapers that I think you should know about.

Please do this: Click on the link below

http://www.americantowns.com/mo/lamar

Now after you get there, notice that this is a website for Lamar, MO that pulls information from other sources, like YouTube, Google and regional newspapers automatically. It also has a nice community calendar feature and ways for the community to present news to itself.

Now, in the URL, change the mo between the slashes to any state in the US.

Now, in the URL, change the Lamar to any small town in that state.

You’ll notice that this company has set one of these up for every city in the US, even the smallest towns. And if you look closely, you’ll see that these sites are being used by the community already. In the testing I did, I saw businesses, churches, schools all taking advantage of the site in getting information out to the citizens…instead of the local newspaper. What happens when these people start writing their own news stories?

So now your members in small towns who don’t think there would be anybody would come in and compete with them, therefore they don’t need a website, are wrong. If they wait too long, the citizens will begin relying more and more on these types of sites (there are other sites like this) and see no need for the local paper.

I am working on a solution for this…

Today I celebrate my 28th anniversary as a newspaper professional by announcing a new service for small community newspapers. I have been working on this for more than a year and it is now in testing and will be ready for release in June.

There are two parts to my initial product and they are very simple: They allow small newspapers with limited staff to build their print product in InDesign, then upload to the web directly from their pages…with little additional work. So as they finish the front page, they can choose a story, photo and headline a click…choose the page on the site, date it starts, etc., and boom… it’s done.

They can also use InDesign to build, schedule and upload all online ads. So when they are ready to build an ad for the local bank, they simply open InDesign, use my tool to set the start and end date, size, pages it’s going on and more. Then they build the ad in InDesign and when they are done, with the click of a button it’s on the web.

Simple.

I have spent my career committed to the small paper and I continue to do that. But now I go beyond training to building solutions that allow them to work faster on production, so they can spend more time collecting content. I have many other tools on the drawing board.

And it’s not expensive.

If you are interested in more information, or an online demonstration, I would be glad to do it. There is more to this product, but I’ve given you the highlights in this email…you have to see it to truly appreciate it.

Thanks for your time and I hope to hear from you soon,

Russell Viers
DIGIVersity.TV