A Message From the Publisher: Beaconcast.com Site To Re-Launch On Sunday

By John Fredericks / Staff

Thank you for reading Beaconcast.com. We appreciate your continued trust and loyalty.

We are excited to let you know that our company we be re-launching our content website, Beaconcast.com on Sunday, April 26, 2009. We are confident you will enjoy the new look, feel, and increased functionality of our new site. It will feature state of the art upgrades that are designed to enhance its navigational capabilities, making it much more user-friendly. In addition, our editorial staff will be updating our site daily as North Fulton County news stories break.

SPECIFIC CONTENT WILL BE SUBSCRIBER ONLY

Certain content on Beaconcast.com will be available to paid subscribers only. These will include our cover stories, key political and news analysis and high school sports. As a Beacon reader, you will have the unique choice of being able to subscribe to the Sunday Beacon print edition or just to the online version at Beaconcast.com. Sunday Beacon print subscribers will have full access to all content on Beaconcast.com for the full term of their print subscription. Subscription rates to Beaconcast.com will range from $2.99 for three days to $29.95 for 365 days.

WHY SUBSCRIPTION FOR ON-LINE EDITORIAL CONTENT?

Much our industry’s recent plight has been blamed on the recession, the rise of the Internet, or both. In reality, legitimate newspaper content websites have experienced enormous unique visitor growth on their relative sites, as on-line readers have flocked to them to get the news and analysis they covet and trust. We believe that most people still want their news to be straight, accurate and trusted.

Just selling ads on the Internet cannot effectively monetize our industry’s rise in on-line news readership. No model in the nation has proved successful to date. Many will not pay for their information served up one way (print) when they can get the same thing for free (on-line). Professional editorial journalism is like many other professions. It’s easy if you do it wrong and hard if you do it right. To do it right takes a tremendous amount of dedication and hard work. If you simply give it away, no one will choose to do it. So what you are left with is shoddy journalism or illegitimate bloggers posing as professionals. This combination is toxic. The legitimate press is the lifeblood to a free, open and transparent government, and serves as the spinal chord of a free society.

WE ARE GOING TO BUCK TREND

Naturally most editors around the country believe this. But they are reticent to charge for their content because they are fearful that no one else will and they will lose their web readers. That is salient and real. However, somebody, somewhere has to start this trend for professional journalism to survive. We have bucked a lot of other trends. So now we have decided to make our premium editorial content on Beaconcast.com subscriber only on April 26. We hope our brethren in our industry follow suit.

We hope you will subscribe to THE BEACON and Beaconcast.com today!