Last week Thisweek completed its merger with Sun and became Sun Thisweek. and the combined forces revealed a revamped website which includes much of the same content everyone has been used to seeing over the past few years from Thisweek. However, a recent article about the merger speaks about this combination paper as if it were necessary for life, almost alluding to the fact that you wouldn’t be able to breath without it. While local media is definitely important, one has to wonder if Sun Thisweek is taking itself and it’s decade-old website design a little too seriously.
From the article:
If you haven’t ever considered how our newspaper and website can be essential, think of the information we disseminate about the things in your life – food, water, air, a place to live, a car to drive, clothes to wear, family, friends and community.
We write stories about healthy eating, water quality, pollution, new roads and housing developments, in addition to carrying ads for restaurants, car dealers and places to shop.
In 2012 it takes some real guts for a media outlet to take itself so seriously. They admit to having serious competition in the marketplace, competition which does many things far better than Sun Thisweek will ever do such as design a decent website which doesn’t have scrolling comment boxes, drop down menu bar tabs circa 1999, and have an option to share something on Pinterest (seriously, do you guys not get what Pinterest users prefer to pin?!)
The work that Sun Thisweek puts out certainly has value and interest in the community but for them to go on a 700+ word rant raving about how their readers cannot live without it is simply over-the-top. Their competition does it better, faster, and their content, in many areas, is more relevant to their readers. The only reason that they have the reach they do is because they’re free and, in some cases, delivered directly to the doorstep of the people they serve.
Sun Thisweek has a long way to go before they can start to proclaim necessity to their base. They need to get on top of their competitors and begin pushing out information faster, better, and in ways which better meet the needs of the people of 2012. While they’re trying and doing a better job than they have in the past, they seem to be playing catchup more than being so important that we’d be unable to breathe without them.
Lazy Lightning has been slipping lately and I’m sure you’ve noticed. While we’ve never taken ourselves (I can actually say that now that I have sent out another person to research and write an article!) seriously, we do strive to push out content that is relevant, interesting and fun. Unfortunately sometimes life simply gets in the way. A new job, another baby on the way and wrapping up a graduate degree on an accelerated time schedule takes away from the time I have to sink into the site the way I used to. There’s no time for watching 3 or 4 different city council meetings a week, scouring 1000s of different news sources carefully to build a wide-ranging knowledgebase and analysis of some ridiculous little tidbit, and certainly not enough time to put over an hour into each and every single post that comes out five days a week. These aren’t meant to be excuses, it’s simply a fact of life.
However, instead of blatantly talking up what I have going on here and telling you that it’s the greatest website on the planet with some of the best stories around, I openly admit that Lazy Lightning‘s content is suffering at the hands of external forces and I could do better. I think that perhaps Sun Thisweek should really take a step back and reconsider their most recent article which suggests we would all die of thirst, go hungry, and suffocate if it weren’t for their work and instead strive to develop something that’s faster, better, and above all filled with content that’s far better than it is. While they’re certainly getting there (see the extensive financial history background provided in their article on DanDan’s Rise and Whine food truck) they have a very long way to go to get me and everyone else to believe that we’d not be able to live without them.
What do you think? Do you think Sun Thisweek was a bit over-the-top with their article? Do you live for the next edition to come out so you can learn about which businesses about to go under who have entirely too much advertising money to burn? Do you think their newly revamped website could use a real web designer to give them a few pointers? Whatever you have to say about this one go ahead and comment on as I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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April 3rd, 2012 at 8:09 am
A while ago someone posted a comment on this site, related to an editorial in This Week. It went something like this: “As soon as I read, ‘as publisher of the largest newspaper south of the river,’ I stopped reading.”
That was my reaction at the time. And when I saw the headline that you’re talking about this morning, I didn’t even read beyond that.
Oh, I have browsed through both This Week and the Sun Current, and usually read two or three articles in either publication–either about a new business or some exercise in stupidity by this or that city council. But for some reason I’ve had almost zero interest in reading from either publication’s websites. Perhaps one reason is the horrible design.
April 3rd, 2012 at 8:21 am
ThisWeek I can live without. But if Patch shuts down, there is no hope for local media!
/sarcasm
ThisWeek can’t even manage to deliver to my house in Burnsville. While I appreciate that they’ve started to push content to the web immediately rather than always waiting for the date the paper drops, I still don’t think they take the web side of their business seriously (and I’m not sure if the decision to push content sooner has carried over to the merger). I’m not going to complain too much that a free paper doesn’t get delivered to my door. It’s free and their distribution route is their prerogative. But don’t be surprised when you slip into irrelevance as you A.) fail to deliver to a number of your potential readers and B.) don’t deliver the content in a format that many of them are moving to or have already moved to.
Oh, and perhaps the most important point: the news reads like a community newspaper. Some people like this, but many more are looking for critical reporting. I find that sorely lacking in most of what I’ve read from local news outfits.
April 3rd, 2012 at 8:34 am
A few years ago I pulled the newspaper box off my mailbox because 1) I wanted the real paper, currenlty the Star Trib, to come to my front porch and 2) I wanted to stop getting the Sun and This Week because they were going straight to the recycle. Since I couldn’t opt out of them I took the proactive step of stop it. I’ve cracked one open once or twice in the last 20 or so years. There were no content worth reading and what content there was was sandwiched between so many ads that I just found them to be totally useless.
April 3rd, 2012 at 8:46 am
They are essential. Where would I get quality newspaper to start my charcoal chimney or fire pit? Delivered to my house nonetheless. You can’t expect people to use cardboard or glossy paper, it leave too much residual ash. Without Sun ThisWeek I would have to remember to grab a free Onion or City Pages at the store. We are not barbarians.
April 3rd, 2012 at 9:12 am
At least the new website dropped the damn pop-up ads.
I WISH I could opt-out of getting it delivered, it’s not worth the time it takes to pick it up & recycle it. Lots of townhomes in my neighborhood never even pick it up, so they’re laying around all over the place. I wish the kids who deliver them would notice that, and stop delivering them to those units.
April 3rd, 2012 at 9:13 am
I was just on vacation and THANK GOD I am back. I have no idea what I was thinking and I’m surely not going to do that again. Here I was on some beach without ANY information about what was going on in the water and the air. WHO KNOWS what might have been lurking in there, or what I might have breathed in!! I never had any idea if I should go with the SPF 30 or 25. It felt like a death trap.
And I almost starved my family to death. What….am I just going to wander willy-nilly into a restaurant without knowing what John Gessner thinks of the place?? Uh-uh…no WAY Jose. Luckily we had a bag of scones from Jojo’s to get us through the week.
Fighting all day with Mrs. MSPD about what clothes to put on the kids…..panic attacks not knowing the ins and outs of local sign ordinances…..never knowing what’s going on at the Lion’s Club…..
Hell I say. Pure, unadulterated hell.
April 3rd, 2012 at 9:58 am
When the General manager Larry Werner got behind the “We Need a Burnsville PAC”, this rag sheet final showed it self as a “house organ” for the self serving.
April 3rd, 2012 at 10:29 am
I don’t understand why they stated that the merged papers have been around for a combined 198 years, as if that meant anything. Plus it almost makes them sound like they were interviewing Josiah Snelling back in the day or something.
And don’t get me started on the inappropriate “quotation marks”.
In all seriousness, yes, they’ve done some good work and I think their coverage has improved a bit over the years. And I think they have what it takes to be better, if they commit to moving in that direction. I don’t see Patch as being much of a challenge to them — Patch might be faster, but Sun Thisweek articles tend to be better written and with more depth. Rather, I see their challenges coming from blogs, social media, and the increased South Metro coverage from the Strib and PiPress. I think people can and do live without them, and they need to remember that. In this day and age, simply being a newspaper doesn’t make you relevant.
April 3rd, 2012 at 10:32 am
Tim,
I think they’re talking about the Dakota County Tribune part. That paper has been around for a very long time.
April 3rd, 2012 at 1:32 pm
Well, I for one am glad that Sun This Week has competition from the Patch, otherwise we wouldn’t have gems like this
April 3rd, 2012 at 1:43 pm
N52, while I don’t think Patch puts out great content all the time and I’m certainly not going to defend them for paying someone full-time wages to post that sort of bullshit, by focusing on a single city it is very difficult to come up with daily content–let alone several times a day content. STW is at a distinct advantage being that they have a much wider area they cover.
Because of this wider coverage area if nothing is going on in Lakeville, they don’t have to use as much ridiculous filler as Patch’s corporate pushes down as mandates (which is what I believe that particular post is all about) and STW can instead fill up with stories from the other cities they cover instead.
April 3rd, 2012 at 5:49 pm
Everyone go and vote for Jensens as “the best brunch spot in Burnsville” so Ernie’s doesn’t walk away with it!!
April 5th, 2012 at 9:56 am
I got the e-mail below from SunThisweek’s New Media Director and he provided me with permission to post it publicly. I thought it was a very nice response to the critique posted as well as the community discussion: