The unofficial online home for fans of the Western Michigan University Broncos. Part of Collegiate Sports Nation (CSN).

If the Mlive post layoff coverage, for all news Kalamazoo wide is any indication, WMU football will be in a world of hurt next fall. Stories actually from Kalamazoo are few and sit on the site for days at a time. And on the Kalamazoo section, there are Bay City, Flint, Detroit stories making up the bulk of it. And of course there are the bait click stories like today: "Most expensive homes in Kalamazoo County sold in 2015". That is such a cynical ploy to get clicks from mostly angry people. There is no kalamazoonews.com website out there, and too bad there is not someone with the funding and vision and business sense to get a handful of people with journalistic talent and integrity from this area to actually get something going. This is really the death of local news and it is very sad and scary.

I don't know if there's ever, EVER, been a home WMU men's basketball game that did not have a writer from the Kalamazoo Gazette in attendance...until this week.

So very sad.

I know of several people that have quit working there in the past few years (low wages, poor management), not to mention the ones laid off.

The Gazette, and most small papers, are not long for this world.


On a related note, my hometown newspaper from the east side of the state closed up shop last year, which saw a consolidation of an entire region into one regional newspaper.

Nobody cares about newspapers. I have a subscription for the Sunday paper because I use the newsprint to start my wood stove fires, mask things off when I paint, etc. my wife clips coupons out of habit.

The sports page is crap and has been for quite some time. The local news is irrelevant. They print obituaries on Sunday, but that is just to generate some income, they charge the grieving family big bucks to print them.

(01-15-2016 07:02 PM)Dirty Ernie Wrote:  Nobody cares about newspapers. I have a subscription for the Sunday paper because I use the newsprint to start my wood stove fires, mask things off when I paint, etc. my wife clips coupons out of habit.

The sports page is crap and has been for quite some time. The local news is irrelevant. They print obituaries on Sunday, but that is just to generate some income, they charge the grieving family big bucks to print them.

Point is not about newspapers, the physical entity that went the way (mostly) of the pay phone. THIS IS THE ON LINE local coverage that is NOT BEING REPLACED by anyone or anything. This Friday, Portage Northern had to fight off Portage Central in boys basketball and won a one point thriller. NO COVERAGE, could not even find the score on m live. Had to find the score with an extensive google search. There needs to be some creative thinking/partnership between WMU marketing/publicity and m live or the team will suffer. Coverage=exposure is important. Recruits, parents, local fans want to read about the team from what they believe is an objective source.

Kalamazoo mlive has the AP story of last nights WMU men's game.

Very Sad excuse of a local news source

(01-17-2016 09:40 AM)uclabruin Wrote:  

(01-15-2016 07:02 PM)Dirty Ernie Wrote:  Nobody cares about newspapers. I have a subscription for the Sunday paper because I use the newsprint to start my wood stove fires, mask things off when I paint, etc. my wife clips coupons out of habit.

The sports page is crap and has been for quite some time. The local news is irrelevant. They print obituaries on Sunday, but that is just to generate some income, they charge the grieving family big bucks to print them.

Point is not about newspapers, the physical entity that went the way (mostly) of the pay phone. THIS IS THE ON LINE local coverage that is NOT BEING REPLACED by anyone or anything. This Friday, Portage Northern had to fight off Portage Central in boys basketball and won a one point thriller. NO COVERAGE, could not even find the score on m live. Had to find the score with an extensive google search. There needs to be some creative thinking/partnership between WMU marketing/publicity and m live or the team will suffer. Coverage=exposure is important. Recruits, parents, local fans want to read about the team from what they believe is an objective source.

It is a dual structure. Newspaper based that has tried to put a newspaper on-line. That is why it doesn't work. They are marketing an on-line product to a newspaper oriented base, trying to pretend you can get your content either way.
The problem being the product is crap either way you access it.

This is ALL the fault of MLive mgt. They really messed up... and I'm not sure how they recover from this.

They clearly have put all their eggs in the U of M and Sparty fan base, completely ignoring everything else -- news, sports EVERYTHING!

Not a recipe for success at all.

We as Bronco fans are going to go insane when our football Broncos aren't covered -- AT ALL!!

And forget about the MAC Basketball Tourney.

Forget about everything.

Fans have been abandoned by MLive...

News consumers have been abandoned by MLive.

Atrocious.

how hard would it be to do the netflix thing where you get charged based on how many devices you read the news from, and if you want a printed copy or not. Sounds like a good idea to me.

Our local paper has shrunk to next to nothing, including Sunday edition.

Latter used to have six sections, most recent was down to four.

(01-17-2016 09:40 AM)uclabruin Wrote:  There needs to be some creative thinking/partnership between WMU marketing/publicity

I laffed...mostly because you said "WMU marketing" and "creative thinking" in the same breath.

(01-17-2016 09:40 AM)uclabruin Wrote:  Point is not about newspapers, the physical entity that went the way (mostly) of the pay phone. THIS IS THE ON LINE local coverage that is NOT BEING REPLACED by anyone or anything. This Friday, Portage Northern had to fight off Portage Central in boys basketball and won a one point thriller. NO COVERAGE, could not even find the score on m live. Had to find the score with an extensive google search. There needs to be some creative thinking/partnership between WMU marketing/publicity and m live or the team will suffer. Coverage=exposure is important. Recruits, parents, local fans want to read about the team from what they believe is an objective source.

Now that he has plenty of time on his hands, Dave Drew should cover the rest of the WMU bball games, both home and road, on his own dime to bolster up his resume for future employment.

Sincerely,

CD/CD1/CD2 and, yes, uclabruin.

(01-21-2016 07:11 PM)Charm City Bronco Wrote:  

(01-17-2016 09:40 AM)uclabruin Wrote:  Point is not about newspapers, the physical entity that went the way (mostly) of the pay phone. THIS IS THE ON LINE local coverage that is NOT BEING REPLACED by anyone or anything. This Friday, Portage Northern had to fight off Portage Central in boys basketball and won a one point thriller. NO COVERAGE, could not even find the score on m live. Had to find the score with an extensive google search. There needs to be some creative thinking/partnership between WMU marketing/publicity and m live or the team will suffer. Coverage=exposure is important. Recruits, parents, local fans want to read about the team from what they believe is an objective source.

Now that he has plenty of time on his hands, Dave Drew should cover the rest of the WMU bball games, both home and road, on his own dime to bolster up his resume for future employment.

Sincerely,

CD/CD1/CD2 and, yes, uclabruin.

He should do that. But he is a lazy retweeting non-stat checking POS. He will be out of journalism or writing for some chamber of commerce soon. The fact that he isn't blogging about anything is telling. If you love sports writing WRITE brother.

^PJ?

Having no clue that m-live was going to literally throw in the towel on WMU sports, I stand by my comments at the time, believing that no decent organization would throw coverage of a Division One program under the bus. Now we are in a terrible position for WMU coverage, for coverage of the city. Shameful. I wish DD well and thought he did a very good job and if there had been a positive organization behind him, he could have done even better.

Front page of each MLive edition looks identical. You really have to look closely for local news-sports.

Not much better than what I get from FREEP.

They're dropping columnist Andrew Heller now, too.

When does this thing go away?

I don't look at it any more because there is nothing to read of interest.

On another related note, I look at this forumn and find paltry traffic. Dips new site has some of those who migrated away but added up together still isn't any more that was had in the day.

Fact is, WMU fandom pales in comparison regarding shear numbers to that of NIU, OU and BSU. BGSU, Miami and UT trail them. CMU might be there but then it falls to us, EMU, Akron and Kent.

Why would an entity like Mlive with it's shrinking budget not focus on Sparty and the Wolves? Not intimately knowing the financial model I just think it makes common sense with margins and volume shrinking.

I don't know if WMU even cares. They don't compete against anyone and don't have answer to anyone. So I don't see any uptick in exposure.

(01-24-2016 02:27 PM)Cucumber Salad Wrote:  When does this thing go away?

I don't look at it any more because there is nothing to read of interest.

On another related note, I look at this forumn and find paltry traffic. Dips new site has some of those who migrated away but added up together still isn't any more that was had in the day.

Fact is, WMU fandom pales in comparison regarding shear numbers to that of NIU, OU and BSU. BGSU, Miami and UT trail them. CMU might be there but then it falls to us, EMU, Akron and Kent.

Why would an entity like Mlive with it's shrinking budget not focus on Sparty and the Wolves? Not intimately knowing the financial model I just think it makes common sense with margins and volume shrinking.

I don't know if WMU even cares. They don't compete against anyone and don't have answer to anyone. So I don't see any uptick in exposure.

Chicken/egg thing.

Sports page sucks, no one reads about stuff. Then people just lose interest and something else fills that space. Now the news source has lost a customer segment. Business dies, fan bases die excepting the big dogs

You would thing social media would fill the need, and maybe it does. I just do a couple message boards, people post a little stuff on Facebook, but that's about it for me.