Recession forcing car dealers, newspapers, blogs, podcasts to conserve space

Drive by Northfield’s car dealerships and look carefully.

car dealer car dealer
At Furlong and Dokmo’s, they’ve reduced their inventory dramatically due to the recession but they’re camouflaging it by spacing the vehicles further apart.

Northfield News Northfield News
At the Northfield News, they’re expanding the size of the graphics and photos, enlarging the font size in many places, using larger header and footer banners, adding advertising banners to the bottom of the front page, reducing the total number of pages, etc. Compare two recent front pages (left) with the front page of the last issue of 2007 (right).

IMG_6573Here at Locally Grown, we’re having to adopt similar strategies.

We’ve cut the number of fluff photos posted to the blog by 50%.

For those that we do include, like this one of copulating squirrels outside my home office window, we’re reducing the size of the linked popup from 1100 pixels wide to 999. And we’ve expanded the margins around the thumbnail from 5 pixels on one side to 15 pixels on both sides.

I could have used a videoclip of the sex al fresco but that’s just cost-prohibitive these days.

On our Locally Grown podcast, discerning listeners will notice another space-saving strategy, requested by KYMN news manager Jeff Johnson. Our contractual arrangement with station forbids us from blogging about this but we will be able to discuss in on the air today.

2 Comments

  1. BruceWMorlan said:

    Griff, first you start with ducks, now you’re into squirrels. Is there no end? Have you no shame? Or is this just cheep voyeurism? They are cute though!

    July 9, 2008
  2. John S. Thomas said:

    Yea Griff, I know what you mean.

    I too am having to cut back on my posts as well. I am having to conserve all that bandwidth.

    Have you thought about moving the full size, full length video to a Lo-Gro-No Pay-per-view site? 😎

    Also, being on the Northfield News Reader Advisory panel, I am aware that the changes to the NNews were of the style guide, and meant to give more continuity and “togetherness” to the paper. I do not think it is a “recession based, we do not have enough content to fill our pages” type situation.

    If anything, the content of NNews, the website, and the spell checking have gotten much better under Sam and Jaci’s watch.

    Good Fluff though Griff, keep up the great work.

    P.S. –
    How about that squirrel image on a LoGroNo T-shirt?
    or maybe a “As Seen on LoGroNo” bumper sticker?
    How about a “Warning! If your reading this, you may be blogged” T-shirt?

    😎 The marketing possibilities of the site are endless.

    I still want the “Fluff” shirt though…

    July 9, 2008

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