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Bob Molinaro and Tom Robinson
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Old Dominion Offline
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Post: #21
RE: Bob Molinaro and Tom Robinson
For my money I'd much rather see Doughtery go.
10-19-2014 07:09 PM
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AdoptedMonarch Offline
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Post: #22
RE: Bob Molinaro and Tom Robinson
(10-19-2014 07:09 PM)Old Dominion Wrote:  For my money I'd much rather see Doughtery go.

I had no idea she wrote about Old Dominion athletics. I thought her only pet peeves were pit bulls and light rail.
10-19-2014 07:12 PM
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Maryland Monarch Offline
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Post: #23
RE: Bob Molinaro and Tom Robinson
I'm not at all sorry to see "Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy" Molinaro go. To me he had two faults. He wrote nothing but negative articles about ODU, and he sucked at it. What a hack.
10-19-2014 07:36 PM
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Mr.BigBlue Offline
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Post: #24
RE: Bob Molinaro and Tom Robinson
We didn't skew the discussion at all. The discussion was very relevant to why these columnist lost their jobs. We are all sorry they lost their jobs. However, NEWSpapers lost their way by thinking it was their job to push their opinions on others vs writing NEWS stories. After all they are a NEWSpaper and not an Opinionpaper. In this day and age of digital, real time, and multisource information, the last thing you want to do is piss off your customer base and columnist many times did that.
10-20-2014 07:18 AM
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bit_9 Offline
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Post: #25
RE: Bob Molinaro and Tom Robinson
Sorry they lost their jobs. Nobody likes to see that. That aside... that realm of "News" is what blogs have replaced. I had to delete a long rant about blogs and their detriment to modern science and the well-being of society... sounds like a thesis topic. =]
10-20-2014 07:28 AM
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Cyniclone Offline
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Post: #26
RE: Bob Molinaro and Tom Robinson
A point of clarification: Tom Robinson for some time was a columnist, but in the past few years he's been a more traditional reporter. He's done a lot with U.Va. football and basketball in the past year, for example.

The importance of opinion in a newspaper is somewhat overstated. It seems like more because the column writers (Molinaro, Kerry, Roger Chesley) are often the most divisive voices and generate the most chatter. But as it stands, the Pilot has those three columnists (no clue if they'll replace the sports column function), the unsigned editorial and whatever syndicated columnists they use. That's a fairly small fraction of the newshole. But because it's the most controversial and results in the most discussion, people define a paper by their columnists or where in the political spectrum the unsigned editorials land.

But this issue with print media has been, and will be for a long time to come, twofold and related: How to make up falling ad revenue, and how to monetize the Internet.

They've been taking a beating on that front since the Great Recession, and even when the economy stabilized, it never did for newspapers because at the same time, advertisers realized they could get more bang for their buck with highly targeted messages, and social media does that a lot more effectively and for a lot less money. Classifieds died a quick death when Craigslist became credible.

The initial reaction is to say "well then it's time to go whole hog into online!" And of course eventually that's where it's going to go. But the print product, believe it or not, is markedly more profitable than the online product. The gap is narrowing, and smart money is not wisely wagered on print, but newspapers as a whole are loathe to give up on something that makes money for something that potentially can.

Which leads us to the second issue: how to monetize the Internet. Internet advertising only is profitable if you get click-throughs. Having users just glance at the ads as they read the product doesn't do as much good as you'd think. Something like pennies per view, if that. Now if you're a huge site that can deliver millions of pageviews daily, you'll be fine, but then you'll also be getting clickthroughs and can charge higher rates for both. Print media sites that depend on internet revenue find that doesn't work. So then that leads to unpopular paywalls. Except those drive away readers who will trade depth and quality of coverage for the right price ($0.00), and often they're easily exploited by clearing your cookies or just logging into another network to get your free 5-10 articles per month.

It's going to be a tough road for the Pilot. They're going to lose a lot of good people (and in unrelated news, they're losing me too). The people that remain are going to work hard to make a good product, but when you lose nearly 25 percent of your newsroom in one fell swoop, invariably it will leave an indelible and significant impact.

As for how it affects sports: I have very limited interaction with them, and in a few weeks it'll be none, so take this only as the speculation of an occasionally employed journalist -- and even then I don't know much. But I'll say this: ODU is pretty important there. Once they dropped in-house coverage of the Redskins, NASCAR and Virginia Tech, ODU football became the section's bell cow. Local content is vital to newspapers, and they won't do anything to endanger that if they can help it. Expect them to provide strong coverage of ODU football and basketball for the foreseeable future.
10-20-2014 11:48 AM
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