Texas paper follows Star Tribune, offers Sunday print exclusives

Photo by drb62

For the past several weeks, the Star Tribune has been offering stories that are exclusive to their print edition. The idea seems to be catching on as a Texas paper has followed their lead.

The McAllen Monitor will now print Sunday exclusives of some of their large enterprise work. More from the Monitor:

Over the past several years, The Monitor - like may of the nation's daily newspapers - has been pushing hard to increase its online content and, in the process, has become engaged in a high level of what has become known as "reverse publishing," in which content appears first on the Internet and then in print.

Beginning this Sunday, we are going to begin reversing that trend a bit. From now on, each Sunday edition of The Monitor will prominently feature one or more "Print Edition Exclusive" stories that are of major impact, importance and interest to Valley readers. These stories - all of which will involve enterprise reporting by Monitor staffers - will not be featured online at themonitor.com and will not be stories that you will find available through any other area news medium except one of the three Valley daily newspapers operated by Freedom Communications.

No word yet on sales of Sunday papers from the Star Tribune to signal that this is increasing readership of the print edition, but the idea has created a lot of buzz. Last week, Strib editor Nancy Barnes said the web teases for the print exclusives get 'tremendous' traffic.

One interesting thing to note about the Monitor announcement: They make no mention of posting the exclusives online at some point. The Star Tribune has been holding their Sunday stories until later in the week and then featuring them on the Web. If they won't ever appear on the paper's site, is the newspaper doing their best to serve the community by limiting the information to those able to purchase the Sunday edition?