In the Sunday edition of the Argus, they finally made their ‘changes’ public. Well, somewhat.
They announced that they were going to hire some new people and some veterans were ‘leaving’.
While I will commend them for going public with the ‘changes’ that is not quite how it went down. Several reporters who re-applied for their jobs were NOT re-hired. Call it what you want, I call it layoffs. You won’t see anything immediate, but next month you will notice several veteran reporters will no longer be at the paper. I will keep those names to myself, but you will be able to figure it out.
They also re-titled some of the staff and management and are pushing for a bigger digital format. While that is all fine and dandy, I will tell you where the Argus is failing it’s readers and advertisers;
1) Get you freaking website to work. The videos continually crash or don’t work at all. Promised press conferences or shows get canceled or just stop working in the middle of them. If you want to have a larger digital presence, I suggest you learn how to go ‘digital’.
2) Stop charging for the online content. There is a reason why Stormland TV has the #1 news website in the state, they charge their advertisers, not their readers. While I will admit, the journalists at the Argus are of better quality then Stormland, people are really not willing to pay for online news, especially when you can go to different free news sites.
I wish the Argus luck, but I am not holding my breath.
Argus who? And where’s Keloland? I live in Sioux Falls, the land of the jailed and home of the slaves. God I miss free press and democracy.
If you watch the press conference on the Argus site, Huber explains the mechanical and computer issues they had. Not to mention, if a vehicle is parked on the street in front of your home, the plow doesn’t have enough space to recover to use the snow gate.
I have several major complaints about the Argus lately. The home type articles by various staff members, such as telling about potty training her kids, the death of a family dog, having pet chickens in town, if these types of articles have to be in the Argus, they should be in the Home section on Sunday, instead of all the classifieds. Then there is the numerous delivery problems, such as production problems, delivery drivers that don’t seem able to tell time, the weather, etc. I have lived in three other cities in SD over the years and received their papers every day, that it was published, no matter what the weather and they never seemed to have production problems. Now if you don’t receive a paper, the only day of the week that they will bring one out to you is on Sunday. Oh yes! Since they allegedly improved the paper, the TV channel thing, and the comics are never in the same spot, two days in a row. For about 10 years I have paid my monthly bill on the same day, and the last three months I’ve been receiving past due notices. I have to pay monthly because I can’t afford to pay larger amounts. As of now, the only reason I haven’t discontinued my subscription is because of my adult mentally handicapped daughter.
The wrong staff were let go. Mr. Arrogance whose only topic is bike rides on a bi-weekly timeline is a big turn-off. He is the employee who should be looking for a different job!
I have “Mr. Arrogance” in the same category as the articles/blogs, whatever they are that I previously mentioned.
Pretty soon the argus will be published once a week and printed on a single sheet of paper like tidbits.
Joan, a full year of the argus is $468. You really don’t need to pay that. You can read it for a nothing.
Lalley was on Knobe yesterday.
Talk about singing and dancing around the questions
Especially the one about How Many People Were Laid Off?
Poly43, there is one problem with that My adult mentally handicapped daughter likes to be able to hold it in her hands to read it, actually I do too, but I am seriously thinking about just getting it on Sundays.