Three months after closing 63 “underperforming” restaurants as part of a voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Friendly’s closed an additional 37 stores Sunday after being unable to renegotiate leases with property owners. With that move, that iconic ice cream place your parents took you to as a kid significantly scaled back its presence on the local eatery scene.
Is it a sign of the end for Friendly’s or simply a restructuring that could leave the slimmed-down fast food chain financially sound? It’s anybody’s guess. But first, the more important question on the minds of Friendly’s fans in Central Massachusetts — what’s left?
Taking a look Central Mass. in the Worcester/Leominster region there are eight restaurants left.
Those still open:
Leominster — 482 North Main Street. 978-537-9787
Gardner — 18 Pearson Boulevard. 978-630-1821
Holden — 1060 Main Street. 508-829-2991
Worcester — 966 Grafton Street. 508-798-3298
Sudbury — 457 Boston Post Road. 978-443-2033
Auburn — 697 Southbridge Street. 508-832-3102
Webster — 129 East Main Street. 508-943-8533
Milford — 17 Medway Road. 508-473-7398
From a map view, that’s not horrible. There may not be several Friendly’s within a 10 min. drive of your door as there once was, but there’s still a smattering of them left spread out in the region. With the closure of the additional 37, Friendly’s says it has now emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That means the future is theirs to either grow, survive or die.
It definitely has a chance to survive. When the chain closed the Monument Square location in Leominster my son and I used to go to we drifted over to the one left on North Main Street. It was packed. We’ve been back twice since. Each time there’s been a wait for a seat. Despite a growing reputation for what many see as poor customer service and quality control, Friendly’s has a decades-old brand with sentimental attachments. With fewer stores left, those that are left are pulling in customers from a wider area. Sure, the economy is tough, but plenty of chains are doing well. With massive debt no longer looming over the chain, the Supermelt is squarely in Friendly’s court.
The Internal Revenue Service (Creative Commons photo by Scott S.)
The Columbia Journalism Review last month reported troubling news for those struggling to launch non-profit journalism ventures. From CJR:
Nonprofit news organizations applying for tax-exempt status are running into long delays as the IRS bundles them together as “precedential” and studies whether they qualify for the status under 501(c)(3).
Worcester Wired, the non-profit WPI professor James Dempsey and I founded in 2010 is lumped into that group waiting for word from the IRS. I took the summer off this past year and worked with six students as a test run for Worcester Wired and we were doing some pretty fabulous stuff. Until we can get that coveted 501(c)3 status, however, fundraising is an uphill road. And even though a lot of non-profit web-only operations can run on a very thin budget, you need to have some funding.
The holdup from the IRS is frustrating. In Worcester Wired’s case we not only sought to provide needed news and discussion to an urban area, but were using it as a training tool for college students to improve their writing and investigative skills while getting them out of their college bubbles and sticking them into the community. Sounds very non-profit to me.
The media landscape in Worcester has a new player — and it’s likely to shake up the landscape a bit.
GoLocal24, a company that’s been running GoLocalProv.com for the past year and a half is expanding to Worcester. It’s scheduled to launch a Worcester site soon and is putting serious resources into it. This is no journalist-wanna-be blog. It appears the site will have three full-time editorial writers in addition to a small crew putting together video news pieces. GoLocal has some serious investment dollars going into it and will be competing aggressively for ad dollars in the Worcester market. The new venture will set up shop in the old Worcester Research Bureau office next to Mechanics Hall. The site will also feature the talents of former Boston news anchor Natalie Jacobson.
Most journalist know that Facebook and Twitter are important tools in building community and sharing stories. I’d like to think the industry has largely moved away from the mindset exhibited by an editor to me a few years ago who walked up to my desk and said “What’s up with this whole Facebook thing? I don’t get it.”
But there’s a vast gulf between knowing something is important and knowing how to use it. Here’s a few tips for using Facebook as a journalist:
1.Use photos with your stories. Even if it’s a file photo. Photos have always pulled in readers, whether it was print, the web or mobile. Facebook is no different. According to a study on people’s Facebook habits by social media management firm Virtue, image posts received 54 percent more engagement than text only posts. That’s a huge difference. Videos received 27 percent more engagement than text posts. Photos grab our eyes and we know subconsciously when we click on them that we can look and go on our way. A text-only post requires us to invest more time. Photos rule the social media world. Use them.
2.Timing is everything. Do you pay attention to what time of day you post? You should. Do you know what day of the week people are most active on Facebook? What time of day? With such a rapidly updating news stream in most user’s feed, getting your post viewed can depend a lot upon when you are posting. According to the same study by Virtue, generally speaking Friday posts have the most engagement while weekend posts have the least. And I can tell you from personal experience that posting a story on a beautiful Saturday afternoon during the summer will pretty much flop. Either wait or post it again Sunday evening after 6 p.m. People begin migrating back at that point.
Of course, posting content every day is the best strategy, but when you do, what times will get you the best reader engagement? According to the same Virtue study, posts made before noon get 65 percent more engagement than posts made after noon. This makes sense if you consider most people’s social media habits of checking their feeds first thing in the morning and then moving onto work. But if your posting schedule follows a 9 to 5 routine, you may miss them. If they’re starting work at 8 or 9 a.m. and checking their Facebook news feed, are you already there?
3. Interact. Journalism as a broadcast, one-way medium is outdated. Page views aren’t the only goal of growing an online audience. Engaging with your audience not only can generate story ideas, it tells your audience that you are engaged. A lot of newspaper Facebook pages I see have readers making comments or asking questions of the staff. When these go unanswered, readers feel they’re not being heard and that you don’t care. Not good. Stay engaged, don’t get defensive or go on the attack, but do answer questions and inform. Be the smart, reasonable source they expect you to be.
4. Promote. Include a link to your Facebook page at the bottom of every story on your website. If your reader liked what they read, they’ll be inclined to want to like your page.
5. Don’t just post links. Facebook is great for driving traffic to your stories, but use it as a communication tool as well. Don’t be afraid to post one-sentence news items, questions or links to other sites. Links will get more likes and engagement, but showing that you’re about more than just driving traffic makes you part of the community.
To stay in touch with Behind the Headlines, follow me on Twitter or “like” my Facebook page.
Newspaper boxes. (Creative Commons photo by Tom Magliery)
CraigsList killed the classifieds. But lets face it, they had it coming. The web has taken the conveyance of information out of the hands of a select few and connected people directly with each other.
What’s next? The writing seems to be on the wall for community news — those little announcements and information about the goings-on in town frankly just don’t need newspapers anymore. At least not their online counterparts. There was a time when the local newspaper was really the only way you would find out what was going on around town. Entities like AOL’s Patch have tried to corner the market for this type of information online. But is that really the work we need journalists today to do?
Here’s today’s five posts from the homepage on Shrewsbury Patch:
The five strangest police stories of the year actually sounded interesting. But there was no context. They were one-liners. And I heard more interesting ones just listening to the scanner at the Telegram on Christmas Day (like the woman who complained to police that her husband had been asleep for 12 hours — oh, and that he was a jerk).
As for the rest of the stories, none of them offer any real context. They are, simply, information. And you can get that information anywhere these days. Chances are people in the Paton School community are either on a school email list or following the school’s Facebook page. Many police departments now offer the logs on their websites and the way the logs are printed these day they offer very little information. This is in contrast to several years ago when it took a reporter to go in and copy it for printing in the paper. Trash pickup schedules are on the town’s website.
I don’t want to pick on Shrewsbury Patch here. I can find an equal number of such items on the TelegramTowns site or many other community news sites. But can anyone sustain a business simply replaying information readily available elsewhere? That’s a tough sell.
If it sounds like I’m suggesting we don’t need journalists anymore, I’m not. We need them more then ever. But we need them to deliver context, not just content. The stories we need journalists to tell us are the ones that we can’t find on the town website. And if you’ve got something no one can get anywhere else … well, that sounds like something you can build a business on.
Three months after closing 63 “underperforming” restaurants as part of a voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Friendly’s closed an additional 37 stores Sunday after being unable to renegotiate leases with property owners. With that move, that iconic ice cream place your parents took you to as a kid significantly scaled back its presence on the local eatery scene.
It definitely has a chance to survive. When the chain closed the Monument Square location in Leominster my son and I used to go to we drifted over to the one left on North Main Street. It was packed. We’ve been back twice since. Each time there’s been a wait for a seat. Despite a growing reputation for what many see as poor customer service and quality control, Friendly’s has a decades-old brand with sentimental attachments. With fewer stores left, those that are left are pulling in customers from a wider area. Sure, the economy is tough, but plenty of chains are doing well. With massive debt no longer looming over the chain, the Supermelt is squarely in Friendly’s court.
