Nearly every editorial published in the online edition shows a marked right-wing bias. From my time there, I know the paper used to run opinion columns that offered a more liberal view, to balance out columns that were of a more conservative bent. I wrote one for about a year, and the paper would run syndicated columns from other writers who, like me, leaned somewhat to the left.

This was fair and balanced delivery of the opinions of the day, from writers who came from all parts of the political spectrum. Sadly, this seems to be a thing of the past at the Bluefield Daily Telegraph.

I first thought this might be an issue with online reprint rights to the syndicated columns. Even taking the financial aspect of this into consideration, it is the job of the paper to provide a forum for political discussion that encompasses everyone. As it stands, when you read the online edition, you get one world view shoved into your face – the conservative one.

The late Tom Colley, a conservative, and executive editor of the paper, believed in providing such fair and balanced coverage. On the basis of my frequent contributions to the Letters to the Editor section, he, along with then-publisher Gary Adkisson,  encouraged me to write a weekly column, even though 95% of the time he disagreed with what I wrote.

Taking the syndication issues out of the equation, there are surely more than a few qualified writers in the area, of the liberal persuasion, who would be able to contribute their thoughts on a regular basis. The conservative writers, obviously, have every right to speak their mind. Is this option being offered to prospective contributors who "lean to the left?"

The Bluefield Daily Telegraph does its readers a huge disservice by not offering the other side of the story when it comes to the political issues of the day. It's their job to do so, and they are failing miserably.

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The Newspaper Association of America released some data in March 2008 on the general decline in advertising revenue in newspapers. While total newspaper advertising dollars fell a dramatic 9.4% last year, Real Estate classified advertising revenue fell a staggering 22.6% from $5.16 billion in 2006 to $3.99 billion in 2007.

This is clearly driven by several major forces:

• The real estate audience is no longer reading newspapers, having shifted its attention to the Internet, which is now the primary research tool for real estate research. This makes it more difficult for newspapers to sell ads to their customers. The National Association of Realtos reports that 84% of buyers used the Internet in 2007 compared to less than half which used print media.
• The traditional classified advertising products are in many cases not cost-effective compared to their digital alternatives. With free Internet real estate listing services, why would one buy newspaper classified advertising? Also, as rates have been going up over the years and these products are often sold via expensive telesales operations, it is extremely hard to compete on price with internet advertising
• The change in the housing market means that agents and brokers are feeling poorer and spending less marketing money. In addition we have seen the dramatic decline of the home building industry. When they are spending, they are actively looking for cheaper alternatives as they shift their ad budgets to online sites.

Ad spending in newspapers in the real estate industry has held up for longer than other industries such as autos and recruitment, but today’s market is forcing a change of behavior in how brokers and agents allocate their budgets. This will lead to a positive impact to the real estate advertising Industry as a whole as it emerges from the current decline. But there is no doubt it will take a few years.

Ad spending is more complex in the real estate industry and not purely driven by the transaction. It is also driven in a large part to appease sellers to get the listings and for brokerages to advertise to retain agents. These marketing decisions are not made on a strong financial basis and until the Industry can work to change the mindset of sellers and agents there will be lots of inefficient spending in the future.

While the news for print real estate advertising is not good, let’s face it – it was inevitable. The triple whammy of the housing market, audience migration and the slowing economy is making a tough job even tougher for the newspaper industry. While there have been numerous efforts from the newspapers to build online services these have yet to prove themselves universally successful and definitely don’t make up for the decline in overall advertising dollars. These institutions have been around for decades, and have enormous revenue streams, but it’s going to be interesting to see how all this shakes out over the next several years.

So, while the trends mentioned above are very bad news for the newspaper industry, it’s great news for the real estate industry and consumers. Removing costs and shifting ad spending to more efficient means will help brokers and agents build profitable businesses and also benefit home buyers and sellers as it helps take unnecessary costs out of the process.

When using Blackbird’s built-in search feature, results will skew towards African-American news sources and blogs in an effort to highlight those resources.. A search for “Barack Obama” in Firefox’s search box, for example, will bring results like BarackObama.com, Wikipedia, and Chicago Tribune. But the same query in Blackbird’s box will return results from AOL Black Voices and blogs.bet.com.

Ed Young, the CEO of 40A, argues that the browser “isn’t about exclusion, but rather inclusion.” Sorry, but to me, Blackbird exemplifies the latter – a browser that is attempting to more or less isolate a group that comprises as much as 14% of the U.S. population is nothing but a bad idea. And by skewing search results in favor of websites that meet 40A’s criteria – whatever it may be – for being a “good” news site, the company is doing users of the browser a disservice by de-emphasizing other sites.

This country has taken huge strides in doing away with the great racial divide. We’ve elected a black president. 40A has every right to build and market a web browser. But who in their right mind would want to use something that, even if only so slightly, returns us to a segregated society?