Today's Media Spotlight: The Prize Winning Worcester Telegram

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So the good ole T&G finally won an award. No not a Pulitzer. Something better, the NEN&PA award!

The New England News & Press Association had their annual showdown. So, from a field of 14 dailies, including the Herald, but not the Globe, can’t say there was any competition to speak of - never heard of most of them. I wonder if all 14 newspapers in the +60k circulation category competed?

Having won an award, does that mean the T&G is qualitatively better? Better than who? My guess is that they got the award, like the other contestants, just for submitting an application & fee. Handing out awards, that's what industry associations do. Gotta put sumptin on the office wall right, show the boss when he's in town. Interestingly the T&G doesn’t state why it won.

So what exactly makes the T&G standout? I checked NEN&PA’s website for the criteria and the judges - newspaper people judging using multiple journalistic criteria. If a bunch of newspaper people think the T&G really earned an award for journalism, then we better start asking questions like, define journalism.

What is the true test of a good journalism? I think that’s best judged by the readership/commenters. Think they know good journalism when the read it? Not really. So who are they?

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Well, its mostly retirees - who else has the time to hang out at telegram.com or senile enough to buy a subscription. Amazingly, some folks post 13, 15, 18 times a day! One guy 395 times in a month! Just folks catching up on local news or cantankerous old coots with too much time on their hands?  

Quantcast’s webstats provides some insight. Lets see: 48% are over 50 - twice the norm. 78% have no kids. 53% have a college degree (with those comments, ya coulda fooled me). 30% make over a $100K (Social Security pays good eh). And 94% are white. Um...

So the typical T&G reader is a geriatric, could be female or male, white, degreed, and rich. Somehow that doesn't seem like the Worcester I know.

While we're on the subject of media. Did you know that Quantcast is Womag's prefered webanalytics provider. If you pull up Womag on QC, you'll see the demographics are missing. Think they're hiding sumptin? Whatever it is, must be pretty embarassing.

Of course no local media related post would be complete without a mention of InCityTimes - Quantcast shows no traffic numbers. Um... funny huh? What no readers? Has ICT faded into obscurity? Well sorta - its become irrelevant. Poor ICT - extinct at 10.

So welcome to Wusta, home of the award winning T&G. Now we finally got sumptin to boast about.