There's some good if you look hard enough

To be fair, there have been some bright spots in the Herald-Press.
Sports Editor Sean Giggy did a nice job with his article about Nick Johnson. It was a pretty thorough story. Mia Blocher's writing has also been solid in her stories, especially in her coverage of the school board.
Rob Edwards has a nice eye as a photographer, but his abilities are being wasted with the poor layout of the newspaper.
There's still plenty to be critical about. The election coverage, already a disaster after Wednesday's effort, was compounded when complete election results never made it into the paper or even online. One of the biggest items that are read after the election are the complete precinct results. The results are normally available pretty early on election night, even on the county's website, so the H-P should have had those numbers in hand well before deadline. They did run some numbers on Thursday and put some basic numbers on the Web site, but we'd really like to know how many people voted in my precinct and how many votes each candidate received. The grids that had always been run in the past were always easy to navigate and a concise way to see exactly what the breakdown was.
There are still more ribbon-cutting photos, with no accompanying stories about the new businesses, as well as the usual spate of regurgitated press releases.
We still can't figure something out - many of the stories in the print edition refer to additional information on the Web site, but then on the Web site, most of the stories are truncated referring readers back to the print product. Which do you want us to read? We've never figured that one out.
Besides, when are newspapers going to get a clue? If we go to a newspaper site and see that the whole story isn't there or they want us to pay for the content, we'll never go back there. But if we can read the whole story, we'll stay on the site (and might read the ads as well.) Don't newspapers realize that they generate more traffic if they put all their content up on the Web, and therefore get more views for their advertisers and can charge more for all those extra views? Many of the bigger papers have made that work, like the Indianapolis Star. The Herald-Press is definitely not the Indy Star, but if the people running the show had any brains, they would realize that increased traffic means increased advertising revenues. Just common sense.
Speaking of online, we noticed that the H-P is offering a PDF version of the paper that is e-mailed each morning. They guarantee delivery by 7 a.m. each morning. There's got to be a joke there somewhere, but that might be considered piling on.