Buffalo News Reads TechCrunch, Clones Groupon

Maybe you can have one of the editors at the Buffalo News fix your article for you. As you say, typos happen to everyone.

Here a great example from a story I read last week:

"Financially stable restaurants are in a position to market themselves with coupon offers because they know the coupon customer may visit again, whether that be next month or in three month’s time. The Groupon deal, for example, offers a customer a $50 coupon/gift certificate for $25. In these cases, the restaurant only receives 50% of that $25, minus the administrative costs tagged on (such as credit card processing fees). This leaves restaurants with circa $11 of gross income per $50 worth of credit in their restaurant. If 3,000 coupons are sold providing customers with a retail coupon for $50 worth of spend, that equates to $150,000 of goods the restaurant must provide (albeit their menu will carry a margin) for which they will only receive $33,000). One must therefore be acutely aware of the cost of customer acquisition in this scenario."

You can read more here:
http://westernnewyork.localfoodservice.com/apps/blog/blog_article.cfm?cmmid=42958&cmmtoken=4546810547&catid=8114&ctoken=1815160399

you know, the repeated sneering at the news is unprofessional and beneath bro. so you do the internet better than they do? so what. they do journalism better than you do. please find something better to do with your time and bandwidth.

These are exactly the kind of tear downs that give BRO an amateur feel. Is the worst offense you can find by the news that they tried to launch a coupon site, or that they tried to clean up an across the board spammed comment system?
Try to contribute something constructive at least instead of adding another negative voice to this city, for some vendetta you seem to have.

I just wanted to second grad94's point about the repeated sneering. It strikes me as both unseemly and unnecessary. Why not take the high road?

And for whatever it is worth, I read the fine work of both BRO and the News every day, and I sincerely hope the News continues these kinds of experiments until they find a way to support local, professional journalism for the long term. I also hope I am not the only one in this camp. Sometimes I wonder.

The Buffalo News will be here long after BuffaloRising and a thousand more like it are gone. If BRO had writing that was half the quality of the best Buffalo News writing, it might be read by more people.

wah.

Nope, not at all. The trend from analog dollars to digital pennies references comments from media executives who have recognized the new realities of their businesses. See Jeff Zucker's comments and quotes: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/11/trading-analog.html

Revenue is dropping at all newspapers and costs need to be cut to accommodate for that new economic reality. While the News has offered some buyouts over the past couple years, they haven't cut enough. They provide real value in a region desperate for quality journalism but tinkering around the edges of the News income statement in the form of daily deal sites isn't going to change the short, medium or long term trajectory of the organization.

No one said anything about 3 or 4 paid employees and I have no idea what your reference to ambulance chasing lawyers is supposed to mean.

Somehow I expect Warren Buffet's Buffalo News will survive. He wouldn't hold on to it if it were a dying business.

How do you know so much about the News' finances anyway??

why is buffalo rising so consistently anti-union? The inherent amateurism is frequently on display but now I'm beginning to think of this as a subsidiary of WBEN.