CoPress

We used to do a flash page flip (I'd manually update it every night), but we recently switched to Issuu (because it's archived, commentable and I don't have to manually change xml files every night). I never tracked traffic on it before we switched to Issuu this week because I always assumed it was just a way for us to appease advertisers who don't read the paper. Issuu stats show that we had 129 views for our four documents (not bad). I've never liked the idea of posting the print version online because I felt like it defeats the purpose of the web site. It's linear, one-way communication. If people are going to read articles, I want them to click headlines. But if readers and advertisers want it, I'll continue doing it.

Yep, absolutely important to post the print edition online. Biggest reason: archiving. We get requests from people all the time (old staffers, community members, researchers, etc.) to access old issues, and in most cases we'd have to tell them to come down to the office and browse through our physical archived copies in file cabinets. Not the fastest thing in the world. Having digital copies of the paper makes it a lot easier, and plus, it's searchable through Google (even copies as old as 50 years, with proper digital scanning and OCR).

There are other benefits as jowe mentions: a nice thing to tell advertisers (though not a huge selling point, especially not with more web-savvy ones), promotion of staff work, for old staffers to reminisce about the good 'ol days (haha), etc.

Initially, our archives were purely PDF (I spent fall 2006 setting up the archives with 50 years worth of papers), but with Issuu's SmartLook feature, we've switched to that (Initially tried Scribd platform, but found that Issuu has a much nice interface). The benefit of Issuu is that you save on bandwidth costs, because the PDFs tend to add up and swallow your monthly usage (lately we've been looking at ~50MB per 36-page issue).