We all have our differing opinions on the quality of Dave Thomas and team with their coverage of Torquay United, but with what is our main source of information now becoming a weekly publication, surely this cannot do the club any favours when trying to report or 'spread the word'?? :slap:
Although clearly a business decision, surely this can only go to alienate a vast majority of its readers, and full of out-of-date news??
I for one will miss the daily read, the first thing i do is flip it over to the back page to see the latest gossip!!
Bad news for us if true, it has become one of the main places to get info from over the past few years (as well as here of course) but it certainly beats the OS on this front. I wonder if there's a chance DT and co may still runs Torquay stories on their website? Not being local to the area I very rarely view the paper version anyway.
No great surprise. The dead tree media is a dying breed. Given that a lot of people probably read the HE online for free these days, you can see why the business model just may not work any more.
This will be a major loss,I think the coverage of Torquay United is excellent and one of the main reasons I buy the paper.
In the lead up to matches.particularly the day before,such coverage can whip up support for the club and entice people to attend.
Other forms of media just don't work in the same way.
There will be a daily news channel on www,thisissouthdevon.co.uk but it remains to be seen how much sports coverage there will be.
This is a business decision based on advertising revenues-I understand sales of the paper are still strong compared to many local dailies.
I've already spoken to a few people in various walks of life locally and they are not at all happy about this.
I think there will be a major protest about this and if the owners of the Herald Express don't respond appropriately,there could well be some moves to fill the void with another newspaper.
Don't take this lying down,write to the Herald to express(no pun intended), your concerns and mention the excellent coverage of Torquay United and local sport,which can't possibly be maintained by a weekly edition.
It's going weekly because newspapers are a dying media - so few buy them compared to what they used to. They therefore don't spread the word anywhere near as much as hey used to either, particularly amongst the younger crowd.
Behind-the-Gulls wrote:This will be a major loss,I think the coverage of Torquay United is excellent and one of the main reasons I buy the paper.
In the lead up to matches.particularly the day before,such coverage can whip up support for the club and entice people to attend.
Other forms of media just don't work in the same way.
There will be a daily news channel on www,thisissouthdevon.co.uk but it remains to be seen how much sports coverage there will be.
This is a business decision based on advertising revenues-I understand sales of the paper are still strong compared to many local dailies.
I've already spoken to a few people in various walks of life locally and they are not at all happy about this.
I think there will be a major protest about this and if the owners of the Herald Express don't respond appropriately,there could well be some moves to fill the void with another newspaper.
Don't take this lying down,write to the Herald to express(no pun intended), your concerns and mention the excellent coverage of Torquay United and local sport,which can't possibly be maintained by a weekly edition.
This is a trend that will no doubt also affect the Express and Echo and Plymouth Herald is years to come as well. As some of the eagle eyed posters on this forum have no doubt also noticed is that Dave Thomas has been covering TUFC for the WMN in the past year instead of Ross Reid who previously reported on the Gulls' fortunes for said paper.
However, the Western Gazette do an excellent job of covering Yeovil Town as a weekly paper and if they can replicate their approach at Harmsworth House, the needs of Gulls' followers will be excellently served. Big stories will probably appear in the WMN and the thisisdevon site as well.
As for the online news channel, I will reserve judgment for now.
Myself and a friend of mine who writes for the Dartmouth paper were talking about this just now over Facebook.
My view is that if they're going to take it down to one day a week, they may as well scrap it altogether. Weekly papers work for small towns, but for the entire Torbay/Newton Abbot area, it's a strange decision. 150,000 people (or whatever it is) aren't going to wait a week to find out what's going on in their area. The majority will go online. I think the Herald as a print medium will inevitably become obsolete.
From a TUFC perspective, it's a shame because that is always the first page I look at when I go into work, especially over the summer for transfer information and also after the weekend when I haven't managed to get to the game.
i remember my dad having the herald delivered as an evening paper,reading about tufc was the main reason,before we had teletext, on a saturday evening he bought the late paper to get the tufc match report(even if we had been to the game and he already had the earlier edition)and the full results,that was stopped .then that evening paper became daily,am i right its not even printed in torbay anymore but in plimuff.media in the world has changed so much and i understand about the digital age,teletext,sports channel,internet etc, but still a lot of people rely on the newspaper for information,whats going on,a weekly paper will be doomed,the news will be outdated and on principle i think people will just say b***ocks to it. if sales are down surely the content and standard of the paper should come under scrutiny.lots of people i meet(and i meet a lot of people in my job) have said for a long time the paper has gone downhill.its the same as everything else take the easy way out slash and cut,dont sit down reorganise and think about where the real problems are and find a solution,do it quick and it looks good on paper.i for one will boycott the weekly,just on principal,it should still be daily.
Very sad news indeed. Just goes to show that unemployment in the bay is going to continue to go up. Think of all the poor paperboys who'll no longer get their pocket money from delivering the Herald after school.
Mind you, when I was doing my paper round - almost 18 years ago now - I got £7 a week, and I had to deliver about 35 papers, but the route was 7 miles! It used to take me ages, even on my bike.
