Recovering Journalist

Inventing the Future in Iowa

The news about the newspaper business is bad. Circulation is sliding. Revenue is plummeting. Papers are closing. Layoffs abound.

Amid the chaos, far too many in the industry are paralyzed by fear. Their idea of innovation is a token, tentative project here or there. Or a foolhardy call to charge for content nobody will pay for. Mostly, they're cutting to—and past—the bone, chasing harebrained schemes, and generally praying that some miracle will happen, that the hundred-year-floodwaters will recede, the skies will brighten, and somehow the newspaper industry will be saved. 

It's not going to happen. They're simply rearranging the deck chairs on the newsprint Titanic. 

But not in Cedar Rapids. There, the Gazette (along with its associated TV station, KCRG) is trying something different. Radically different. Probably five years too late, but in an industry where not much of anything innovative is being tried, the Gazette's plan feels like a much-needed revolution.

The Gazette's leaders are talking about radical change for the newspaper and what it can be, in all forms—complete reinvention. I've mentioned this Iowa experiment before, but Steve Buttry, the former editor who is now the paper's "information content conductor" and leader of the transformation (along with publisher Chuck Peters), has now posted a detailed, multipart blueprint of what they're up to. It's heady stuff: a real manifesto for change.

You should dig in and read the whole thing (it's going to take some time). But I'll try to give you a Cliffs Notes version. Let's start with what amounts to the mission statement:

For consumers, we will be their essential connection to community life—news, information, commerce, social life. Like many Internet users turn first to Google, whatever their need, we want Eastern Iowans to turn first to Gazette Communications, whatever their need. For businesses, we will be their essential connection to customers, often making the sale and collecting the money. We will  become the Complete Community Connection.

Our company will provide an interactive, well-organized, easily searched, ever-growing, always updated wealth of community news,  information and opportunities on multiple platforms. We need to become the connection to everything people and businesses need to know and do to live and do business in Eastern Iowa. We need to change from producing new material for one-day consumption in the print product or half-hour consumption in the broadcast product to producing new content for this growing community network of information and opportunities.

Yes, that sounds at first blush like boilerplate from every newspaper's plan for change. And "Complete Community Connection" (aka C3) doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. But it's just the starting point for Buttry's vision:

We will reach some people who never read The Gazette and watch KCRG by doing important jobs such as connecting them with people of common interests or helping them find the products and services that help them live their lives. We will serve other people in multiple ways, producing and delivering their morning paper and their evening newscast, providing text news alerts during the day and networking them in the community in a variety of ways.

That still sounds a bit too print-centric, but wait:

We need to look at mobile opportunities and email opportunities as well as print and web. And we should watch for new opportunities as new technology presents new ways to connect. We should explore every possibility for providing people the news and information they want when they want it, whether that means email, text message, RSS feed, Twitter feed, social media, iPod, game device, GPS device or some other way of interaction. And, of course, print and broadcast will remain key platforms for some of this content for the foreseeable future.

...

C3 will be “my” web site, “my” email alert, “my” podcast, “my” text buddy, “my” shopping solution, “my” connection to customers, “my” solution for lots of life’s little and big jobs for individuals and businesses alike. (And yes, still, “my” newspaper.)

The entirety of Buttry's vision is a big departure from the usual newspaper model. It takes as a given that the audience—and its needs—are important. It posits that readers and viewers must be truly equal partners in the conversation about what's going on around town, rather than just being passive audiences. Above all, it proposes that the paper and TV station reclaim their roles as backbones of local life—and commerce. That's a position many papers imagine they have, but haven't really held for years. You can only get there by doing things very, very differently than papers are doing things now. That's where the Gazette proposes to go.

Most importantly, Buttry isn't just talking about editorial product change. Yes, he talks about bold plans for social networks, databases, local information, calendars and "enriched" community news coverage. He also has some very interesting and innovative things to say about providing coverage, information, guidance and services to every possible phase of a reader's life, from birth to school to marriage (and divorce) to retirement to death.

But he goes much further. He wants everybody at the paper—even journalists—to be thinking about new ways to make money:

Revenue generation traditionally isn’t a journalist’s job, but helping develop a business model for the future of journalism is every journalist’s job today. The job cuts throughout our industry (including here) have done too much damage to journalism to cling to our long-nurtured disdain for the economic facts of life. Journalists can protect our integrity and still collaborate in developing a new business model.

Content and revenue must be planned together, so any innovation plan must address both needs. While I know big parts of the solutions here will and should come from colleagues in other departments, revenue generation must be part of the vision and I discuss it extensively throughout this blueprint.

Seen a lot of newspapers that truly think that way? I doubt it. But it's critical. And some of the ideas that spring from this shared journalism-business vision are very good (and very simple). For instance, he doesn't want the paper just to be a venue for people to buy and sell things like cars and homes (very occasional businesses for most readers, when you think of it); he wants the paper to provide a whole raft of useful (and monetizable) tools and services to drivers and homeowners, to be a critical part of their lives when at home or in the car. 

But the Cedar Rapids vision for new revenue streams goes beyond that, and even farther beyond the usual display, search, video and classified ads:

I will cite specific examples as I explain details of this blueprint, but those examples are only a start of the model I envision for C3 to move toward results-based performance of jobs for businesses, including conducting transactions for business customers. We need to connect the business with the customer and collect the money, taking a reasonable cut for ourselves.

That's good stuff, and long overdue. I'm going to take the liberty of breaking the next excerpt into bullets—you're welcome, Steve!—for better digestion:

• Gift registries for weddings, anniversaries, graduations, babies, retirements and holidays are important opportunities. 
• Obituaries offer chances to send flowers and contribute to memorial funds. 
• Our products and content relating to the arts and entertainment must include opportunities to buy tickets to movies, concerts and other events online or to buy books or download songs. 
• Sports sites will offer chances to buy tickets, clothing, memorabilia, etc. 
• The calendar will offer registration for events and classes, ticket sales and so on. 
• Dining content will include opportunities to make reservations or buy gift certificates. 
• For Hawkeye sporting events, community festivals and University of Iowa events such as graduation and orientation, we will offer chances to make reservations online for lodging, meals and entertainment. 
• Our iGuide business directory needs to include options for coupons, gift certificates, direct purchases, making reservations, placing orders, requesting information. 
• When we use traditional ads priced by how many thousand people see them, we should seek to include options to click to download a coupon, buy a gift certificate or order a product, delivering more value for the business and a bigger pay-for-performance cut for us.

Some newspapers have dabbled in this sort of transactional business, here and there, as a possible alternative to classic display advertising revenue streams. But what Buttry is suggesting, correctly, is that the newspaper should strive to be an active, aggressive participant in any sort of business transaction that it touches or causes to happen. Or, as he writes, "We need to connect the business with the customer and collect the money, taking a reasonable cut for ourselves." 

Editorial purists will shudder—it seems so...dirty. But it's not, if the right protections are in place, and these are obvious revenue—and hell, reader-service—opportunities that papers have been foolishly ignoring for years, or paying little more than lip service. The Gazette is actually trying to do all these things. How radical.

With online advertising rates low and print advertising revenue declining precipitously and local broadcast revenue also in decline, newspapers need to broaden our vision of serving business customers and move swiftly into direct sales and other business services such as lead-generation and email marketing. This may be a phased process, where we start with lead generation, coupons, inquiries and links to business web sites as we work out the technology challenges of interfacing with the inventory and ordering software of other companies or find a vendor who has already figured that out. Of course, as we work those challenges out, we will have tremendous economic opportunities in selling our solutions throughout the industry.

Note that last line. Buttry understands the big differences between what he's proposing and what the rest of the industry is doing—and how his plan, if successful, can be propagated throughout the industry for fun and profit. Indeed, what makes the Gazette's vision so much different from those of other, far more timid newspaper companies is beautifully elucidated by Buttry:

As you read this blueprint, don’t assume anything based on how media companies have traditionally operated or how we currently operate. That economic model is collapsing and this is a blueprint for a new way of doing business — new relationships with the community, new relationships with business customers, new relationships with business partners and competitors, new tools and technology for doing business, new structure and organization for doing business.

...

Don’t assume anything based on the past. We are proud of our past and cherish our heritage, but we want to honor that heritage by pursuing a future that isn’t limited by assumptions from the past.

And Buttry fires another well-aimed shot across the bow of the rest of the newspaper business:

Our industry seems to be clinging to Darwin’s theory of evolution, hoping that gradual adaptation to changing environment will be enough to help us survive. That works in biology, but in today’s disruptive business world, survival of the fittest is a matter of revolution, not evolution.

This series of blog posts is my call for revolution in media companies, starting at Gazette Communications.

Everyone in the newspaper industry should heed this call for revolution and respond to it with real action of their own. Complacency is death. The Cedar Rapids Gazette is trying to find a different path to a different future, and offering to share what it's doing with its peers. That's leadership in an industry that's absolutely starved for some. Bravo.

Twittering the Pulitzers

There are those of us who remain a bit skeptical of Twitter's mainstream appeal, partly because of incerasingly loud whispers that nobody under 25 seems to use it (a key metric for an allegedly hot online service) and partly because of a feeling that it has a particularly rabid following among journalists, who are enamored of it and writing stories about it all out of proportion to its following among the general populace.

On the latter point, I present this screen shot of what's hot on Twitter right now, a few minutes after the announcement of the Pulitzers—a story that has a very narrow audience:

I'm just sayin'...

Speaking of the Pulitzers, a shout-out to the fantastic PolitiFact, which just won the National Reporting award. Kudos to Bill Adair and crew.

Editors as Curators: What's Taking So Long?

These are tough times for editors. Senior editors are being forced to make deep, painful cuts in their newsrooms. Assignment editors are being phased out at some papers, seen as extraneous layers in the production process. Copy editors are seeing their jobs consolidated or even outsourced. And many reporters, by their nature, never had much use for editors of any stripe to begin with.

But the news judgment skills of editors should be more valuable now than they've ever been before to newspapers and other news organizations. That's because, in a world in which the walls around journalistic walled gardens are being (slowly) torn down, editors can play a vital new role in deciding how to choose content from all over the Web and package it for their readers' edification.

The buzzword for this is "curation," and that's a good way to think of it. It's an application of the same sort of news judgment that good editors use on a daily basis. (As one smart editor of my acquaintance likes to say, "They pay us for what we leave out.") With all the resources of the Internet at their fingertips, editors should be able to use their expertise on a subject or geography to sift through multiple sources of news and information and use links and other tools to assemble a comprehensive, edited collection of information for their readers.

The buzzword for that is "aggregation." And the big surprise is that it doesn't seem to be happening at most mainstream news Web sites. Instead, newspaper and TV sites still generally are trapped in their walled gardens, putting together their daily reports only from the sources they pay for: their own reporters, maybe some wire and syndicated copy and photos, and that's about it.

On the Web, you're not limited only to the content you own. You can create a rich, deep package for your readers on any subject by linking to outside sources—background, context, documents, data, video, discussions, blogs, user-generated content, etc. Even, shudder, good stuff from competitors. But with very few exceptions, this is done only tentatively, if at all, at the vast majority of news sites. (Big exceptions: Web news mega-success stories—some automated rather than hand-curated—like Google News, Huffington Post and Drudge Report. Hmmm--suppose they know something?)

This sort of picking, choosing and assembling from a wide range of sources—curation and aggregation—is precisely what modern editors should be doing online, not just regurgitating the limited content they get from their parent organization. It leverages the strength of the editor's skills: the ability to divine the best content, deep knowledge of a subject, and the ability to shape it into a compelling package for readers. That's what good editors have always done: curate. 

Incidentally, I by no means assign this role solely to editors—good reporters should be able to use the same expertise on their beats to provide readers with the most complete report possible. Fortunately, many beatbloggers are starting to do this. But it's still not ingrained in online news culture at most organizations.

There are a few exceptions to this deficiency, fortunately, in the mainstream media. The New York Times' experimental alternate home page (available from a small link at the top of the regular home page; it should be the default) presents complementary headlines from other sources. NBC's owned and operated TV stations are now running local news sites that aggregate information from multiple sources (though the sources often aren't identified well, unfortunately). Examiner.com is aggregating local news and info in dozens of cities. Boston.com angered competitor Gatehouse by aggregating hyperlocal news in Boston suburbs. And...I'm running out of examples, unfortunately.

In this day and age, it's hard for me to imagine what newspapers and broadcasters are waiting for. They all should be jumping onto the Web news curation and aggregation bandwagon. Under siege from all sides, news organziations need more than ever to establish their Web sites as authoritative sources for local news and information. Their core content, clearly, isn't enough. They should be creating aggregated sites that take advantage of their strong local brands and news-judgment reputations to provide readers with everything they could possibly want to know about the topics they care most about. Not just what the newsroom and wires can produce. (Hint: There are no space limitations on the Web. Go nuts with this stuff.)

Ironically, this failure to create aggregated sites is happening even as some smart editors foolishly complain about having their own content aggregated. That's what's behind the complaints about Google News and others that bring together news and information from multiple sources, supposedly ripping off newspapers by selling advertising against links to the newspapers' stories. Boo-hoo. Those links are bringing in readers the papers' sites never would have attracted on their own. (Want to shut down Google links and snuff 20 or 30 percent of your site's traffic? Be my guest. But first run some numbers on how much it would cost you to do enough marketing to replace that traffic. Get back to me when you do.)

No, newspaper sites–and other smart news sites—absolutely should be aggregating content, using their editors' skills and news judgment to be curators of news and information, rather than cutting editorial positions. I really don't understand what everybody's waiting around for. Take advantage of editors and their curatorial powers before there are no editors left.

PS: Must be Curation Day. Steve Rosenbaum weighs in:

Curation is the new role of media professionals.

Separating the wheat from the chaff, assigning editorial weight, and -- most importantly - giving folks who don't want to spend their lives looking for an editorial needle in a haystack a high-quality collection of content that is contextual and coherent. It's what we always expected from our media, and now they've got the tools to do it better....

Curation shifts the balance of power back to brands and publications. While anyone can make content, the decision to gather it, and present it by trusted content curators has more risk, and therefore more value.

More Hilarity

If you haven't seen Simon Dumenco's guide to the language of Web 2.0 in Ad Age, it's hilarious. Samples:

Kindle -- v. To burn your old business model. 
Micropayment -- n. 1. A media-industry salary.
Revenue -- n. A legendary mythical entity similar to the Loch Ness Monster or Sasquatch.

Paperless in Seattle

The bad news: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer publishes its last print edition tomorrow. The good news: Hearst, after needless dilly-dallying over what should have been a fairly obvious decision, has announced that it will continue SeattlePI.com as "the leading news and information portal in the region."

Hearst Newspapers President Steven Swartz says the post-newspaper site "isn't a newspaper online—it's an effort to craft a new type of digital business with a robust, community news and information Web site at its core."

Hopefully, that includes lots of aggregation, reader engagement, social tools, user-generated content and other Webby features that will distinguish it from a newspaper-on-a-screen. If Hearst can use this opportunity for some bold experimentation in what a local news-based online site can become—and find an ad-based business model to support it—this could be a watershed moment in new media, and a model for other publishers to follow as the presses begin to go silent. Godspeed.

Laid Off? 10 Tips For Suddenly Unemployed Journalists

According to the excellent (if depressing) PaperCuts newspaper layoffs tracker, more than 20,000 jobs have been cut from American newspapers since the beginning of 2008—more than 3,500 in the past two months. That quickening trend is going to continue as the industry's spiral worsens and more newsrooms are cut back and/or papers close.

The newspaper crisis really hits home, of course, when it's your job that's cut. There are waves of guilt, shame, anger, depression and fear that come fast and furious. Questions abound. What do I tell my family? How will I pay my bills? How will I find a new job in this economy? Was it something that I did, or didn't do? You'll go through all of this and more when you're laid off.

I've been laid off and I've had to lay people off, and it's an understatement to say that it's not easy for anyone. But there are some things you can and should do to get a grip on the situation and position yourself to move on to the next phase of your life. 

Here are 10 tips for suddenly unemployed journalists. Nothing can immediately take away the pain and anxiety that you're feeling, but hopefully these will help you understand that your situation is not unique and that you'll be able to get through this. And maybe it will get you thinking about next steps.

1. Don't freak out–This is hard to hear. "I just lost my job, for chrissakes!" Yes, you did. But don't beat yourself up about it. Given the state of the news business these days, a layoff is hardly your fault–it's a failure by your ex-employer. Don't succumb to depression or go into a funk. Get to work immediately getting your act together and finding a new job. And you're going to quickly find out that you're hardly alone—and I don't just mean those 20,000 other newspaper jobs lost since the beginning of last year. Many friends will come forward to tell you that they've been laid off or fired during their careers. They've just never told you until now. It's an unfortunate part of life, and they went through it and survived. So have millions of others. So will you. 
2. Get your finances in order—Hopefully, you saw the industry faltering and began putting money away for this rainy day. Even if you didn't, look hard at ways to conserve money and get by with less. Sorry, you might have to give up that daily Starbucks for a while, and cut way down on going out. And it's time to finally learn Quicken and how it can help you manage your finances. Take care of yourself, too: Spend some time at the gym.
3. Apply for unemployment—Your employer paid into the unemployment pool, and now it's time for you to take advantage of it. It's no shame, it's not welfare–it's there precisely for this reason. Start collecting it–it's a small but essential flow of cash that can run for several months.
4. Network like crazy—Get in touch with everybody you know who might be able to help you. Ask them to refer you to others they know. Then do it again, and again. If you're a good reporter, you know the drill–it's very similar to working a beat—persistence and repetition pay off. You've got to regularly let people know that you're available. Out of sight, out of mind is a real problem when you're in the job market, and you never know when you'll contact somebody who just happened to be looking for somebody with your skills. If you don't do it, it won't happen for you. Plus, it's an excuse to get out of the house for to get together with other people.
5. Get on Facebook and LinkedIn—These are the modern forms of networking. If you're not already on these essential social networks, register for accounts (it takes seconds), start "friending" people and learn how to use them to connect with others. Again, that old colleague you hadn't thought about in years until you reconnected on Facebook could have a job lead for you. In addition, familiarity with Facebook is a good way to start understanding some of the leading edge principles in new media. It also can be lots of fun.
6. Expand your new media horizons—And not just Facebook. Spend some time getting to know and using things like Twitter, Flickr and all those other strange names you've heard about but never really paid attention to. Getting up to speed on these will greatly enhance your knowledge of new media, and that's going to be essential to keeping your journalism career going. Your print skills will only take you so far. You can no longer pay lip service to new media–dive in. And no, you don't need to learn HTML or any computer languages. Really. It's not that scary. But it doesn't hurt to take some classes at a local community college or even the Apple Store to learn about things like Photoshop, video production or, yes, HTML. Don't be intimidated. Getting comfortable with those things—and it's easier than you think—will enhance your skills and make you much more marketable. (Gina Chen's blog is a good resource for helping journalists understand the new media world.)
7. Start a blog—If you're not blogging already, start, immediately. Again, it's really easy and gets you into the new media milieu. If nothing else, it's a good way to keep your writing chops sharp. You can blog about just about anything, but here's a thought: Why not be really entrepreneurial and start a blog about your old beat, or about some niche topic that you think is undercovered. Keep at it, and over time, you may find your blog becoming a key to your next job.
8. Look beyond journalism for your next job—Journalists have investigative, organization, storytelling, writing and editing skills that are taken for granted in newsrooms but are seen as rare and valuable in other fields. Broaden your range of possibilities by thinking about a new career outside of journalism. I wrote about that at length a while back in a post called Life After Journalism. Check that out for ideas.
9. Don't be afraid to ask for help—Misplaced pride can hurt you. Please don't be embarrassed by what happened to you. Don't let your self-confidence crumble (though it's easy to understand why it would be shaken). People want to help; reach out whenever you can and ask them for help. It's not a sign of weakness. And by the way: These are the times when you really find out who your friends are. You'll treasure them forever for what they do for you.  
10. Take a deep breath—Again, don't freak out. You're going to get through this. If you can hack it financially, take some time for yourself before plunging into finding a new job. You've been through one of life's most traumatic experiences (no doubt on the stressful heels of months or years of uncertainty and fear in your newsroom). It's going to take you some time to emotionally recover, in ways you won't grasp for years. If you can get away and take some time off to decompress, do it. It will really help your mental health and ability to move forward. And you may never get a chance again to take a mid-career break like this, for yourself or to spend time with your family.

Good luck. 

Smart Reads

A couple of smart reads today on what people should be thinking about when they think about online news—and one not-so-smart one:

My pal Jim Brady, former executive editor at Washingtonpost.com, in a wide-ranging Q&A at Poynter on the state of online news:

I think the level of experimentation has increased a lot in recent years, though I'm always one who feels like there's not enough risk-taking in media. We've done things a certain way for so long that change comes at too slow a pace. But you see great work coming out of big shops, small shops and startups, and that's encouraging. But I do firmly believe that the pace of experimentation has to increase. Launching blogs in 2009 isn't innovative anymore. Launching comments on articles in 2009 isn't innovative. But a lot of sites are just getting to that point now.

And another old friend, Steve Yelvington, with eight reasons why subscription advocates should think very hard (and do some homework) before suggesting that readers be asked to pay for online news, not the least of which:

Ultimately the idea of paid content goes to war against the idea of ad-supported content. In local markets, the ad model is stronger than in global markets. ... Local advertising sold by local sales forces is a substantial revenue stream, and if you're not tapping into that, it's your own fault.

Update: On the other hand, yet another friend, David Carr of the New York Times, is completely out of left field with this column:

My fantasy meeting goes something like this: a rump caucus could form where the newspaper industry would decide to hold hands and jump off the following cliffs together... No more free content. ... No more free rides to aggregators.

The "off the cliff" metaphor is accurate: That would indeed be a death plunge. Though he does touch on the need for better advertising models–but seems to want newspapers to collude, as well, to solve that problem. Sheesh. Yelvington's intelligent post is the perfect anecdote to Carr's fantasies.

The Future is Now

This was the week that was:

• The owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News filed for bankruptcy protection; so did Journal Register Co.
• Hearst said it would close the San Francisco Chronicle if it cannot drastically cut costs or find a buyer.
• The Rocky Mountain News ended publication after nearly 150 years.
• The American Society of Newspaper Editors canceled its annual convention because of lack of attendance.

This was the week that was–the beginning of the end. Newspapers, as we know them, are dead.

I know a lot of people don't want to read that, and will rise up and argue that millions of papers are still sold every day, and thousands of people work hard to put them out, and millions of people read them, and countless advertisers still pay to be in them, and blah blah blah, but sorry: the printed newspaper, full of static, day-old news, is an anachronistic product, declining in popularity and value. Their Web sites, sorry, aren't much better.

Don't believe me? Look again at what happened last week, when the daily drumbeat of bad industry news was louder than ever (and hardly the last of the tremors to rock the industry). 

Look at the declines in readership, revenue and stock market value of newspapers and the companies that own them. Already inexorable, hastened by the slump in the economy, they're falling off a cliff. And they ain't coming back, no matter how many people wish that what's happening is merely cyclical, and someday, some way, those auto and retail and real estate advertises will come back, by gum, and so will readers, especially those young ones, and Wall Street will love us again. Not gonna happen.

Again: Newspapers, as we know them, are dead. Some will live on in a shadow of their current form; others, at the low end of the journalistic totem pole (e.g. community weeklies) will outlast their larger cousins. But the basic idea of what a newspaper is, that we all grew up with, is outdated, outmoded and soon to be defunct.

Rather than argue that, or mourn some romantic notion of what a newspaper was, we need to begin focusing now, right now, on what comes next. 

How will people find out what's going on around them when newspapers, in the next few months, wither and die? What will be the replacement? We're already seeing examples of the next-generation news and information product, in the Web, in blogs, in advertising competitors like craigslist and Monster and eBay, in information-finders like Google, in new local players like Yelp, in new ways to connect people and information like Twitter and Facebook.

The replacement for newspapers needs to be a melting pot of all of those things and more, a rich stew of information, connection, convenience, context, analysis, community, multimedia and many other things. We've not seen anything like that amalgam yet. But I think we can start to sketch what it might look like.

The news, information, advertising and interaction products that replace newspapers will vaguely resemble newspapers, but only superficially. They'll be online-centric products, taking advantage of all of the tools the Web (and mobile distribution) offers, rather than attempting to replicate their printed predecessors–a fatal and chronic mistake. They'll be highly participatory, providing opportunities for audience members to talk back, talk among themselves, freely exchange information they find, and rely on professional journalists to help them sort out the more thorny topics. The one-way lecture that we now know as news is going to be history; non-relevant news (e.g foreign and national reports available widely elsewhere) will be banished; information and advertising will be highly targeted to the audience's needs and desires.

Some particulars of these next-generation products:

• Local, local, local–The last truly defensible news franchise is highly targeted local coverage. There are readers and advertisers for hyperlocal government, school and crime and sports news, local entertainment reviews and other information.
• Niches–Some of these new products will cover demographic or subject niches, rather than (or in addition to) traditionally defined geographies. Think focused local sports, for starters.
• User-generated content–Let the audience members help out. They know things journalists will never get to. Give them a forum to share and talk about what they know.
• Professional content and curation–It's not all amateur hour. Put pros on key beats and, above all, get those journalists interacting constantly with readers to find out what's really important to the community.
• Aggregation–Jeff Jarvis said it best: Do what you do best and link to the rest. There's lots of content out there to aggregate. Be your audience's guide to the best stuff. (Howard Owens has an excellent primer on aggregation types, btw.)
• Databases–Find new ways to collect, collate and present information. Everyblock- and CinciNavigator-style info-maps are a good way to start. News and information don't have to always be presented in inverted-pyramid text formats. Really.
• Discussions, comments and forums–Get the readers participating, talking, sharing. The next-generation information product should be a beehive of community conversation.
• Social tools–Leverage Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and the rest to bring together audiences that already have connections to each other.
• Twitter–It's an obvious breaking-news and newsgathering tool. Take advantage of its immediacy.
• Video–Use it to for stories that are better shown than told. And by all means, make it easy for site visitors to upload their own videos. That goes for photos, too.
• Entertainment guides and calendars–Be the definitive place to find out what's going on around town. Let the audience easily add events, too.
• Multiple forms of distribution–Cell phones, iPhones, Facebook widgets, Kindles, syndication deals, whatever. Be promiscuous.
• Search-engine optimization–Part of being promiscuous: Make it easy for Google and other search engines to find your content (not the other way 'round, as some dinosaurs would advocate).
• Targeted and contextual advertising–Banner ads are soooo 1997. Google is winning because it ties ads directly to the content they accompany. Advertisers prefer that, too–and will pay more for it. 
• New advertisers–How many local businesses advertise in the average big-city daily? It's a single-digit percentage, in most places. There's a lot of room for growth there. Find ways to help restaurants, plumbers, party planners, barbers, nail salons and other small business to get the word out.
• Self-service advertising–The key to making advertising for small businesses profitable is to make it cheap to create those ads. One solution: Make it dead-easy for advertisers to place their own ads. 
• Business directories–Make it easy for readers to find them and review local businesses. Make it easy for businesses to reach out (and advertise) to readers. Everybody wins.

This list just scratches the surface–the successful next-generation news and information products will have to have all of these attributes, and more. But starting with a blank sheet of paper to design these new products, rather than trying to adapt existing products, will go a long way toward creating modern news, information and advertising services that are far richer (and more successful) than their existing forebears. These will be entirely new and different ways of finding out about and interacting with the world around us.

One more big thought: These next-generation news/information/communication/advertising products probably are not going to be built by those dying newspapers, or by the people who currently put them out. That's a hard thing to say, but I believe they've officially blown their chance. Weighed down by legacy thinking, costs and culture, the existing operators of newspapers simply can't move fast enough or imaginatively enough into the future. We've learned that over and over. If it wasn't true, newspapers wouldn't be dying.

I strongly believe it will be upstarts, new players, that build the successful news products of the future. Lean, nimble and creative, they'll be able to pull together all the ingredients listed above and come up with a replacement for the traditional newspaper that's far more interesting, interactive and richer in just about every way. 

The basic skills and mores of journalism that underpin them will have their roots in the products of the past, but will be arrayed in entirely new forms for an audience that assumes it's going to get real-time information, delivered in multiple forms, with audience participation and the ability to share, mix and match every element. Indeed, that sort of flexibility and freedom is antithetical to the tightly controlled newspapers we've known for decades. These new products will be so much better.

Newspapers are dead. The future is now. Let's start finding the best ways to serve the audience that's clamoring for something that puts the "new" back into news.

A Crowded Patch

The New York Times, doing what all smart newspapers should have been doing years ago (and some were), is finally jumping into the hyperlocal game. It's launching community sites in two communities in Brooklyn and three in New Jersey. 

Called The Local, the sites will offer neighborhood-level coverage of crime, schools, government, restaurants and real estate, supported by local advertising. The content will largely be written by community members themselves, with supervision by Times staffers. In other words, the usual user-generated hyperlocal model. One of these days, somebody is going to make it work–based on the glimpses we saw at Backfence, there's no question that there's content, an audience and advertising for such hyperlocal sites. It's just a matter of finding the right formula.

What may be most interesting is how the Times picked the communities in New Jersey. There's a new hyperlocal startup called Patch, founded and backed by some Google alums, that recently launched three sites in New Jersey to cover community news with a mix of staff- and user-generated content. Which three New Jersey communities is Patch in? South Orange, Maplewood and Millburn–exactly the same three the Times has chosen for its New Jersey hyperlocal rollout. What a coincidence.

There's another interesting common thread between Patch and the New York Times effort. The Times sites in Brooklyn will be aided and abetted by journalism students at the City University of New York, under the direction of long-time hyperlocal champion Jeff Jarvis–who also happens to be an advisor to Patch. (Jeff has more detail here.) Small towns sure can be small worlds.

Death of a Chronicle Foretold

If you want some idea why the San Francisco Chronicle is on the brink of extinction, just take a look at its Web site, SFGate.

It's a perfectly adequate newspaper Web site–and that's the problem. Newspapers have been fumbling their Web sites for years, and that's one reason why the future for the Chronicle, and many other large papers, may be bleak. They've failed to concentrate on building great, useful Web sites rather than merely adequate ones. Satisfied with pasting newspaper headlines and stories on a screen and trying to convince print display advertisers to run online banners, the Chronicle and other papers have been left behind by smarter thinking on the Web. Their cluttered designs are hard to navigate; many still labor under the misconception that readers come to their sites looking for foreign and national headlines rather than focusing on local news; and they've failed utterly to keep up with the latest trends in online advertising and content delivery.

Sure, they've got blogs, maybe a podcast or two (how 2005), possibly some online discussions with staffers, maybe, just maybe, a submit-your-photo feature, or story comments. But where's the aggregation of local content, the hyperlocal and niche sites, the local database maps, the sophisticated ad formats, the aggressive efforts to bring readers into the conversation and solicit user-generated content to augment and enhance expensive professional coverage? You find occasional examples of sophisticated Web work here and there around the industry, but almost unanimously, newspaper Web sites, like the Chronicle's, are adequate–at best. And don't get me started on the amateurish design of most newspaper sites, or the lack of search-engine optimization smarts, social media links, iPhone apps and other leading-edge thinking that's a staple of any good Web company. Newspapers just don't do that.

It's not like the Chronicle didn't have good local examples to follow, sitting as it does at the headlands of Silicon Valley. Yelp is just around the corner from the Chronicle's headquarters at Fifth and Mission. Craigslist is just a few blocks away. Google is just down Highway 101 in Silicon Valley. And so on. All of these were founded and thrived in the shadow of the Chronicle until they themselves cast their own shadows over the paper and its Web site, grabbing away local readers, shoppers, advertisers and others.

The Bay Area is the most fecund place in the world for the development of the Web ideas that have helped cripple the newspaper industry, but the Chronicle seems to have been all but oblivious to what was going on all around it. Like other newspapers, it's been unable to break free of its print shackles and think aggressively and wisely about how to compete–really, seriously compete–online. Hell, SFGate could have established itself as the leading, um, chronicler of and gathering place for all that was going on around it in the technology industry (you know, like neighbors CNet or TechCrunch). But it missed that boat, too.

The problem was, as it is at so many other newspapers, that nobody at the Chronicle or Hearst ever really took the paper's Web site seriously or devoted real management cycles to it. It never was given the proper resources to develop, and with the exception of a visionary or two like Bob Cauthorn, who ran SFGate for a while a few years ago, it never really had bold, imaginative leadership, at any level. (A smart friend who interviewed for a top job at SFGate a few years ago all but ran screaming from the building, astonished at the lack of sophistication he found.)

Corporate machinations multiplied the problem. A couple of years ago I had a fascinating and thought-provoking dinner with a group of high-ranking Chronicle and Hearst executives. We brainstormed way outside the box about how to rethink the paper's Web site as a revolutionary guide to the best of the Bay Area, tapping into myriad non-newspaper sources to create a compendium of local news, information and opinion. It was heady stuff, and then ... nothing. I heard later that the problem was that the Chronicle execs didn't really control the Web site; the Hearst execs in New York did that, and they had their own, different priorities. We had the right people at the dinner table, but between them, they were unable to make significant changes to reinvent the Chronicle's site in a way that might have made it a breakthrough Web product. Opportunity lost.

So now the Chronicle, and SFGate, are on the brink. Maybe Hearst can make the drastic cuts necessary to save its San Francisco operation, in what now looks like the best-case alternative to closing the paper. But it's hard to believe those cuts won't also gut the already thin SFGate Web operation. And so the Web site, which should have been a big part of the solution to the Chronicle's woes, will totter on, nothing better than adequate–if the whole shebang survives at all. What a pity.

PS: Jeff Jarvis offers a telling contrast between the Chronicle and Google. And Marc Matteo has an excellent overview of what's wrong with newspaper Web sites.