Recovering Journalist

What Will Happen When the Presses Go Silent?

The Boston Globe had a story the other day about the travails of the Portland Press Herald last week, and it included a plaintive and intriguing question from a reader of the struggling, up-for-sale Maine paper:

"Can you even be a major city without a daily paper?"

We're going to find out the answer to that before very long, I'm afraid. And it's worth thinking about what such a city will look like.

No, its skyscrapers will not fall, its roads will not collapse, its populace will not move out en masse. In fact, I'll bet that whatever city loses its daily paper–and it will only be the first of many–will continue to be a major city, pretty much unabated. Its media landscape will change, but in ways that may be much less radical than many people think.

Let's think about an imaginary major American city–let's call it Whoville–and its media ecosystem. Today, Whoville has a major daily paper (the Whoville Bugle), four network TV stations with news departments, an AP bureau, an alt-weekly, a weekly business tabloid, a couple of weekly (or daily) ethnic papers, college papers, perhaps an all-news radio station (and at least a couple stations that still do some local news), a ring of suburban papers–mostly weekly, maybe a couple daily–and perhaps a handful of in-city neighborhood weeklies.

Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? And that's just the traditional media. Whoville and it's 'burbs also are bristling with new media. There are enough local online news and bloggers that Examiner.com and Outside.In each can devote a dedicated channel to aggregating Web content about the city.  Craigslist, Yelp, Citysearch and others have beachheads in the market, offering classifieds and reviews that are especially appealing to younger readers. Local outposts of MerchantCircle, Kudzu and other online business directories and Yellow Pages wannabes target local businesses.  Local restaurant bloggers, sports bloggers and other specialists write about things they're interested in.

Whoville's suburbs have blogs, as well, and perhaps a startup hyperlocal site or two. Just about every neighborhood has some sort of listserv or Yahoo group on which neighbors exchange information. And there are any number of specialty newsletters, Web sites, mailing lists and publications that serve specific audiences, ranging from PTAs to moms to local hobbyist groups. Oh, and of course, there's WhovilleBugle.com, the daily paper's Web site, not to mention Web sites for the local TV and radio stations and the community papers.

All of these media outlets are competing for readers in Whoville and its suburbs; most of them are competing for advertisers, too. In other words, there's a lot more to the Whoville media ecosystem than just the Bugle. And I'm sure I left a few things out (every market has a slightly different collection of local media, of course).

It is precisely this growth in competition that has helped to make the Bugle's financial position so tenuous. Surrounded by competitors that are picking off different audiences and advertisers and offering services for free that used to be revenue streams for the paper, the Bugle has been eaten to death by fleas (some of them very large fleas!). Once king of the jungle, it's now just another player–albeit probably the dominant player–in the Whoville media.

Now let's take the Bugle out of that mix.

The Bugle's owner, frustrated by mounting losses and departing advertisers and readers, decides to close up shop. It shuts the paper, idles the presses, and lays off the staff. (There are somewhat less dire versions of this situation, in which the print product disappears but the Web site remains, or the print product is drastically reduced to perhaps publishing a couple times a week, but for the sake of argument, let's go with the full doomsday scenario.)

What happens? The entire Whoville media ecosystem, described above, steps up to pick off the Bugle's advertisers and readers. Some of the media outlets that were dependent on the Bugle's coverage to inspire their content (e.g. TV news and bloggers) will learn to look to other sources. But there's already a lot of diverse media in Whoville serving local news and information needs, and they'll fill a lot of the gap left by the death of the paper.

Inevitably, a group of ex-Bugle staffers, backed by local money, will start the Whoville Daily Trumpet, a fraction the size of the Bugle but much more focused on the city itself. The new paper will leave suburban coverage to the community papers and be smart enough to not even mess with national and international news that's available in a zillion places. With more focus, a much leaner business plan, hungry ad sales reps and hired printing and distribution, the Daily Trumpet can be competitive in ways the bloated, overextended Bugle could not be. 

Many other ex-staffers will join the other existing media, beefing up their staffs and smarts. Still others will start blogs or small print or online media outlets to cover specific topics. Not all of these will make it, but many of them will, covering things the Bugle used to cover and serving various parts of the old Bugle audience.

Indeed, a year or two after the Bugle's demise left a seemingly enormous hole in the city's media landscape, that hole will essentially be gone. It will be filled by thriving, competitive media that already exist and a few new outlets that spring up in the wake of the newspaper's closing.  The Whoville media ecosystem will prove to be self-repairing, much more quickly than a lot of people would expect. The residents of Whoville and its suburbs will get their news and information from these old and new replacements, and advertisers will use those substitutes for the Bugle to reach those customers. 

The Whoville Bugle will be a nostalgic memory of local life–much like the Whoville Herald, the afternoon paper that closed without much of a fuss a generation ago, or the Whoville Daily News, which quietly bit the dust a generation before that. The Bugle will be toasted at annual reunions of the staff and remembered in dusty collections at the library and historical society, but it will soon be seen as yesteryears' news.

Let's get back to the original question. Will Whoville still be a major city? Sure. It will still have its various corporate headquarters, beautiful architecture and parks, international airport, pro sports teams, a thriving music scene, opera, theater, good restaurants, great neighborhoods and all of the other things that make up a major city. It just won't have its old-fashioned daily newspaper. And sorry, but the Bugle really won't be missed.

It's the Election, Stupid

It's a Presidential election year, about as big a news story as there can be. But too many news organizations still are not doing a particularly good or innovative job of providing online campaign coverage that goes beyond standard print and broadcast coverage.

In fact, it's taken a startup site to redefine campaign coverage in this Presidential cycle. The remarkable FiveThirtyEight.com is providing daily updates of polling activity and adding sophisticated statistical analysis tools to attempt to track and project what's happening among the ever-changing electorate. 

While most mainstream media sites still are fixated on essentially meaningless national voter polls, FiveThirtyEight.com is breaking down state-by-state results to attempt to chart what's going to happen in the all-important Electoral College (the site's name refers to the number of Electoral College votes up for grabs). Poll data is weighted based on the pollster's past record of accuracy. And the site applies tools like regression analysis and similarity scores to attempt to bring clarity to the mass of numbers it collects.

Who's behind FiveThirtyEight.com? A guy named Nate Silver, whose day job is being one of the principals behind legendary baseball statistics site Baseball Prospectus. (Silver invented the legendary baseball player stat-projection tool, PECOTA.) 

Silver is bringing the kinds of advanced statistical analysis beloved of baseball stats geeks to the Presidential political arena, and the results are revelatory. He's even run 10,000 simulations of the election to try to project the outcome, and constantly changes his probability estimates of various outcomes based on the latest polling data. At the moment Silver thinks there's 17.44 percent chance of an Obama landslide, a 3.98 percent chance that McCain could lost Ohio yet win the election, and a 0.82 percent chance of an electoral college tie.

This is heady stuff, especially when most major news organizations' idea of sophisticated political coverage is pretty much limited to reporter blogs. How 2004. Last time around, ABC News' The Note defined campaign coverage, and naturally, this year every major news site has its own version–The Fix, The Trail, The Caucus, Top of the Ticket, etc. Some are very good. But they're still pretty conventional, especially compared to what Silver is doing. Also conventional: Politico, the much-ballyhooed politics Web site/newspaper startup from two former Washington Post reporters that's quickly become a player on the national political news scene. Politico is solid, but it's still basically a newspaper on a screen (disclosure: I did some pre-launch consulting for Politico).

FiveThirtyEight.com is not the only one exploring new ways of looking at the election, but other good examples are few and far between. A handful of others worth checking out:

• PolitiFact.com, by the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, whose Truth-o-Meter is a clever way to look at the back and forth between candidates. PolitiFact is very witty and engaging about holding the candidates accountable for their statements, matched only by The Daily Show's masterful use of videos that catch contradictory statements. WashingtonPost.com has tried something sort of similar with its FactChecker blog, but FactChecker is inexplicably taking the summer off. Don't they know there's an election coming up? 
• Patchwork Nation, by the Christian Science Monitor, an interesting way to try to move election coverage away from the Washington vortex. Based on 11 blogs from around the country, each attempting to represent a different voter interest group (Evangelical Epicenters, Immigration Nation, Tractor Country, and so on) Patchwork Nation offers a different perspective, for sure. But I wish it had gone farther, and opened itself up to blogs and contributions from readers all over the nation, not just those 11 blogs. That would really bring the patchwork map that dominates the site to life. Still, it's a good effort to get beyond the usual political coverage.
• Poligraph, by HealthCentral.com (another former client) does an interesting job of tracking the candidates' positions on health care issues, with an easy to understand interactive graphic tool. You can even compare your own stance on various health issues with the candidates'. Extra credit: HealthCentral has made it easy for other sites to add Poligraph to their political coverage as an embeddable widget. One only wishes there were similar tools for other major issues.
• YouDecide, by San Francisco public TV station KQED, offers a smart interactive tool that both assesses your stands on various issues and challenges your position through a series of questions. It's an interesting approach, and it's also available for embedding in other sites (hint: embeddable widgets like this are a great way to spread a brand name).

Other than that, the list of interesting political coverage efforts is pretty thin. There are various versions of electoral maps and campaign finance databases, and WashingtonPost.com–which should be the ESPN.com of politics but never seems to rise to that level–does have a candidate-travel tracking tool, an issues-tracker (powered by DayLife) that seems out of date (it still lists Mike Gravel as a candidate), and a few rudimentary Facebook widgets (again, spreading the brand).

But FiveThirtyEight right now is way ahead in the election coverage innovation polls. But there could be a dark horse: Google did an incredible map-based site to cover last year's Australian election. If the company has something similar coming for the U.S. Presidential race (with less than three months to go, it had better get cracking), all those campaign blogs are going to look even more like also-rans.

The End of Mass

Stowe Boyd has a good post on hyperlocal that touches on something I've said before: hyperlocal has to be a "fully edged phenomenon," drawing from a variety of the hyperlocal models we've seen so far.

But then Boyd segues into something even better: a discourse on how newspapers simply don't understand that their previous model of being all things to all audiences is permanently broken.

What the newspapers' management fail to understand is the end of mass: people simply do not hold with mass identity now that they are free to find human-scale identity, and once they find it, they will not go back. Newspapers and other mass media is falling first and fastest because we are rejecting the erstatz, mass belonging that they offered, as part of the expansion of the industrial Western democratic ideals. 

Newspapers–and other media–just can't keep following the old playbook of publishing for a general audience. The audience is rejecting that model and wants more specificity—products that are mostly useful to them, not mostly thrown away. (What percentage of the newspaper do you actually read, anyway? What a waste!)

Just as the magazine industry fragmented in the late 1960s and early 1970s from general-interest titles like Life and Look into specialty titles for every audience under the sun, newspapers have to find new ways to target key audiences with focused products. Those audiences may be geographic or they may be demographic. But the era of the large-scale, regional, mass-market newspaper is over, as painfully demonstrated by declining advertising and circulation numbers. 

The sooner newspaper publishers and editors recognize that, and move on to competing in niches within their own markets, the sooner they'll start to pull out of the current death spiral. Mass just doesn't cut it anymore.

The Mother of All Web Strategies

Not all newspaper companies are utterly bereft of new ideas and innovation. It just seems that way. But Gannett–yes, Gannett–continues to lead the way in thinking outside the newsprint box. And one way it's doing so is by going after a big, obvious demographic slice: local moms.

With little fanfare, Gannett has launched 60 sites in its various markets aimed at mothers and their interests, needs and passions. Two of the biggest and best are IndyMoms and CincyMoms, in Indianapolis and Cincinnati, respectively. These sites are largely user-generated–moms sharing tips, questions, photos, events, experiences, even prayers. Dive in and you see questions about pregnancy, places to vacation with kids, shopping sales, favorite movies, you name it. 

Best of all, the Gannett sites have great, friendly, funky designs that are informal and encourage audience participation—which appears to be happening in droves. And not surprisingly, advertisers are chasing these audiences as well, though the sites aren't yet blockbuster moneymakers. But clearly, there's an appeal to local and national advertisers who want to reach the motherhood market.

Gannett's not the only one experimenting with "mommy blogs." There are countless independent sites for mothers, and papers such as Boston.com (BoMoms.com) and startups such as TodaysMama.com are going after the same audience. I happen to think Gannett's doing a far better job with its friendly, informative, entertaining sites (BoMoms and TodaysMama, for instance, don't have a fraction of the verve and personality of the Gannett sites, and that's reflected in what appears to be tepid participation on those sites). 

IndyMoms, CincyMoms and their sister sites are great examples of what newspaper and other media companies should be doing more of: Getting beyond the traditional broad-bush, one-size-fits-all mass media model and targeting niches. In a way, these are variations on hyperlocal sites, adding content aimed at a specific local demographic. Local news operations should be building targeted sites like this for any sizable local demographic or interest group: sports fans, the military, large employers, the local music scene, whatever. Oh, and local communities, of course. 

Providing these audiences specific information and customized forums–and user-generated content and participation are essential for sites like these–is a way to put deep hooks into large local audiences and to attract high-CPM advertisers who want to reach those audiences. Gannett's moms' sites shouldn't be industry curiosities or interesting experiments–they should be an industry norm.

NewspapeRx, Revisited

I think we can all agree that the newspaper industry is in dire straits. My previous post on the most recent round of layoffs and who's to blame for the industry's problems is already just about the most popular post ever on this blog. I guess I struck a nerve. But it's easy to complain and point fingers. What are some possible solutions to the problems–if they're solvable at all? How can we fix what's broken with newspapers?

I've been writing on that subject since beginning this blog in late 2006. Some of my thoughts on how to change the industry can be found here, which is part of a white paper I wrote a few months ago on the transition from print to digital. More suggestions are here. But another set of prescriptions can be found in one of my earlier posts, NewspapeRx, which is reprinted, very slightly updated, below. Not all of these ideas are new or original–but what's scary is that 18 months later, very few of them have even been tried (though progress has been made on the first one–about a decade too late). 

Unimaginative newspaper managements continue to work off of their old, failed playbook, as the industry–and jobs–go down in flames. Clinging to print, not truly embracing the Web, not listening to customers (advertisers or readers), gutting newsrooms to cut costs, completely failing to invest in innovation–they just aren't working. Try something else. Please.

NewspapeRx

What would you do if you ran a newspaper?

Somebody asked me that question recently, and it made me pull together some of the thoughts I've had recently about the problems that newspapers are having and what they might do to pull out of their current spiral. This is hardly a complete list, but here's a 10-point prescription for ailing newspapers:

1. Make the Web the primary product. 
Stop pasting the newspaper onto a screen. Reorganize the newsroom so that its work appears online as quickly as possible. Breaking news, enterprise and feature stories should be put on the Web as soon as they're ready. Period. The printed paper should be a snapshot of what's online at 11 pm, and that's about it. Publishing on the Web should drive priorities, not publishing in print. And embrace the technology: news Web sites should be full of Web 2.0 goodness like interactive maps, social networking tools, RSS feeds, distribution to mobile devices, etc. Use the medium to its fullest.

2. Local, local, LOCAL!
There are a zillion places to get national and international news, in real time. But newspapers are virtually the only source of truly local news. So why do so many newspapers splash national and international news on the front page and relegate local news to an inside section? Local news is the last unique franchise that newspapers own, and too many newspapers don't seem to understand this. People are cancelling newspaper subscriptions because the product is irrelevant to their lives; local news and information is critical to their lives. That's where the readership gains can be had. (Why do you think local community newspapers are thriving when big metro dailies are shedding circulation?) Every resource available should be thrown at local coverage, newsroom pay and promotions should be tied to excellence of local reporting, the front page of the paper and Web site should be entirely local, and national and international news should be relegated to an inside section. Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to get truly serious about zoning, with editions that are solely devoted to local communities, not just paying them lip service or rearranging existing local content. I don't care what's going on two towns away from me; don't waste newsprint or pixels on it in my edition.

3. If it's widely available elsewhere, don't waste time re-creating it.
Does every newspaper really need its own movie critic? A TV critic? Staff coverage of national sports events that don't involve local teams? Book reviews? Stories from Washington that the AP already has? Expensive foreign bureaus? A sickly thin Sunday magazine? Reporters in hot spots like Iraq? It's going to pain a lot of newspeople to read this, but the answer is unequivocably no. Those resources are just wasted, and way too many of those staffing and coverage decisions are about editorial ego more than serving the reader. The stories that are produced aren't different enough from what's available on the wires (or on countless Web sites) to justify the expense. They just wind up diverting staffing resources that could be devoted to news and information that aren't available elsewhere. See Local, above.

4. Zero-base the news operation.
Pretend you're starting from scratch. Look at everything that's in the paper and ask tough questions about whether it's still necessary in an age when readers have multiple sources of news and information. A lot of what appears regularly in newspapers is there because it's always been there, without anybody taking a hard look at whether it makes any sense any more. Perfect example: It took years for newspapers to understand that the vast majority of readers had switched to getting stock information online, and that pages of stock tables were an expensive anachronism. That's a start. Now apply the same reasoning to sports statistics and box scores (except for local teams), comics (yes comics), syndicated columns, national business news, non-local news briefs, etc. Jeff Jarvis had a draconian, thought-provoking take on this that's worth a read.

5. Get the readers involved.
As Dan Gillmor has elegantly argued, the audience knows more than news people do. Much more. Tap that knowledge by encouraging reader participation in as many ways as possible: contributing news and information about their communities, sending in photos and videos, commenting on everything. This can't be a token effort, and you absolutely cannot be scared or controlling about it: let the readers get involved at every opportunity. It will greatly improve the product and increase readership. 

6. Lose the editorial page.
Unsigned editorials are a relic of a bygone era when newspaper barons exerted power in their community. Now they're a liability, misunderstood by most readers. Newsrooms know that there is a wall between editorial opinion and newsgathering; readers don't, and they conclude that editorial positions drive news coverage. That's a huge source of the drumbeat charges of bias in coverage. There are other ways to be vigilant about bias, but getting rid of the traditional editorial page is a big start. Here's a thought: Replace it with reader opinions!

7. Expand the advertising base.
In any market, there are thousands of small advertisers that would never consider advertising in the big local newspaper. It's too expensive and covers too broad an area. But those advertisers want to reach the same people the newspaper does. Find a way to make this happen: more focused zoning, cheaper ads, ad rep pay structures that encourage selling to smaller advertisers. This is another area where community papers are running rings around big dailies. And online competitors are moving in on this turf, too. As large advertisers disappear, newspapers need to find ways to serve smaller businesses.

8. Rethink the classifieds.
Craigslist, Monster.com and countless other news competitors have decimated the newspaper classifieds business. That seems obvious, but a lot of newspapers still are in denial about it. Anybody who's used craigslist knows how much more effective it is than paid newspaper classifieds. Look hard at your classifieds business and make the tough changes to stay competitive. Yes, that may include shifting most of the classifieds online and giving them away for free, in order to keep the critical mass of classifieds that makes them useful. And make sure your online classifieds offering is absolutely world-class, for both advertisers and readers. One of the reasons craigslist works so well is because it's incredibly easy to use. Most newspaper online classifieds sections are clumsy and confusing.

9. Find new ways to serve advertisers.
What newspapers offer advertisers—display ads, classifieds—really hasn't changed much in a century. Look for ways to change that. Get into the Yellow Pages directory business online. Aggressively offer contextual advertising. Use idle newspaper delivery resources to help local businesses with their delivery needs. Use subscription lists to help businesses find customer leads. Explore interactive advertising forms that go way beyond boring banner ads. Offer data services to help businesses manage their inventories or sell things online. It's not enough to simply sell space in the paper or on the Web site. Help advertisers make their businesses more successful.

10. Take chances. Innovate. Be fearless about trying things—and killing things.
Change in the newspaper business is glacial. But the surrounding environment and the competition are changing at light speed. The time is long past for incremental, evolutionary steps—newspapers need to think out of the box, try things that previously were unthinkable, and be prepared to quckly and ruthlessly abandon efforts (old and new) that aren't working. This requires a major cultural shift—as a wise editor once said to me, there's virtually no history of research and development in the newspaper business, which is odd considering that covering the news is a daily act of research and development. Let's face it: The single biggest innovation in print newspaper journalism in the past decade or so is...Sudoku. Newspapers can and must do better than that to survive. 

What would you do if you ran a newspaper?

Somebody asked me that question recently, and it made me pull together some of the thoughts I've had recently about the problems that newspapers are having and what they might do to pull out of their current spiral. This is hardly a complete list, but here's a 10-point prescription for ailing newspapers:

1. Make the Web the primary product. 
Stop pasting the newspaper onto a screen. Reorganize the newsroom so that its work appears online as quickly as possible. Breaking news, enterprise and feature stories should be put on the Web as soon as they're ready. Period. The printed paper should be a snapshot of what's online at 11 pm, and that's about it. Publishing on the Web should drive priorities, not publishing in print. And embrace the technology: news Web sites should be full of Web 2.0 goodness like interactive maps, social networking tools, RSS feeds, distribution to mobile devices, etc. Use the medium to its fullest.

2. Local, local, LOCAL!
There are a zillion places to get national and international news, in real time. But newspapers are virtually the only source of truly local news. So why do so many newspapers splash national and international news on the front page and relegate local news to an inside section? Local news is the last unique franchise that newspapers own, and too many newspapers don't seem to understand this. People are cancelling newspaper subscriptions because the product is irrelevant to their lives; local news and information is critical to their lives. That's where the readership gains can be had. (Why do you think local community newspapers are thriving when big metro dailies are shedding circulation?) Every resource available should be thrown at local coverage, newsroom pay and promotions should be tied to excellence of local reporting, the front page of the paper and Web site should be entirely local, and national and international news should be relegated to an inside section. Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to get truly serious about zoning, with editions that are solely devoted to local communities, not just paying them lip service or rearranging existing local content. I don't care what's going on two towns away from me; don't waste newsprint or pixels on it in my edition.

3. If it's widely available elsewhere, don't waste time re-creating it.
Does every newspaper really need its own movie critic? A TV critic? Staff coverage of national sports events that don't involve local teams? Book reviews? Stories from Washington that the AP already has? Expensive foreign bureaus? A sickly thin Sunday magazine? Reporters in hot spots like Iraq? It's going to pain a lot of newspeople to read this, but the answer is unequivocably no. Those resources are just wasted, and way too many of those staffing and coverage decisions are about editorial ego more than serving the reader. The stories that are produced aren't different enough from what's available on the wires (or on countless Web sites) to justify the expense. They just wind up diverting staffing resources that could be devoted to news and information that aren't available elsewhere. See Local, above.

4. Zero-base the news operation.
Pretend you're starting from scratch. Look at everything that's in the paper and ask tough questions about whether it's still necessary in an age when readers have multiple sources of news and information. A lot of what appears regularly in newspapers is there because it's always been there, without anybody taking a hard look at whether it makes any sense any more. Perfect example: It took years for newspapers to understand that the vast majority of readers had switched to getting stock information online, and that pages of stock tables were an expensive anachronism. That's a start. Now apply the same reasoning to sports statistics and box scores (except for local teams), comics (yes comics), syndicated columns, national business news, non-local news briefs, etc. Jeff Jarvis had a draconian, thought-provoking take on this that's worth a read.

5. Get the readers involved.
As Dan Gillmor has elegantly argued, the audience knows more than news people do. Much more. Tap that knowledge by encouraging reader participation in as many ways as possible: contributing news and information about their communities, sending in photos and videos, commenting on everything. This can't be a token effort, and you absolutely cannot be scared or controlling about it: let the readers get involved at every opportunity. It will greatly improve the product and increase readership. 

6. Lose the editorial page.
Unsigned editorials are a relic of a bygone era when newspaper barons exerted power in their community. Now they're a liability, misunderstood by most readers. Newsrooms know that there is a wall between editorial opinion and newsgathering; readers don't, and they conclude that editorial positions drive news coverage. That's a huge source of the drumbeat charges of bias in coverage. There are other ways to be vigilant about bias, but getting rid of the traditional editorial page is a big start. Here's a thought: Replace it with reader opinions!

7. Expand the advertising base.
In any market, there are thousands of small advertisers that would never consider advertising in the big local newspaper. It's too expensive and covers too broad an area. But those advertisers want to reach the same people the newspaper does. Find a way to make this happen: more focused zoning, cheaper ads, ad rep pay structures that encourage selling to smaller advertisers. This is another area where community papers are running rings around big dailies. And online competitors are moving in on this turf, too. As large advertisers disappear, newspapers need to find ways to serve smaller businesses.

8. Rethink the classifieds.
Craigslist, Monster.com and countless other news competitors have decimated the newspaper classifieds business. That seems obvious, but a lot of newspapers still are in denial about it. Anybody who's used craigslist knows how much more effective it is than paid newspaper classifieds. Look hard at your classifieds business and make the tough changes to stay competitive. Yes, that may include shifting most of the classifieds online and giving them away for free, in order to keep the critical mass of classifieds that makes them useful. And make sure your online classifieds offering is absolutely world-class, for both advertisers and readers. One of the reasons craigslist works so well is because it's incredibly easy to use. Most newspaper online classifieds sections are clumsy and confusing.

9. Find new ways to serve advertisers.
What newspapers offer advertisers—display ads, classifieds—really hasn't changed much in a century. Look for ways to change that. Get into the Yellow Pages directory business online. Aggressively offer contextual advertising. Use idle newspaper delivery resources to help local businesses with their delivery needs. Use subscription lists to help businesses find customer leads. Explore interactive advertising forms that go way beyond boring banner ads. Offer data services to help businesses manage their inventories or sell things online. It's not enough to simply sell space in the paper or on the Web site. Help advertisers make their businesses more successful.

10. Take chances. Innovate. Be fearless about trying things—and killing things.
Change in the newspaper business is glacial. But the surrounding environment and the competition are changing at light speed. The time is long past for incremental, evolutionary steps—newspapers need to think out of the box, try things that previously were unthinkable, and be prepared to quckly and ruthlessly abandon efforts (old and new) that aren't working. This requires a major cultural shift—as a wise editor once said to me, there's virtually no history of research and development in the newspaper business, which is odd considering that covering the news is a daily act of research and development. Let's face it: The single biggest innovation in print newspaper journalism in the past decade or so is...Sudoku. Newspapers can and must do better than that to survive. 

Looking for the Hyperlocal Magic Bullet

As long as I'm trying not to pile on the folks at washingtonpost.com, I'll refrain from commenting directly on the interesting story that ran in the Wall Street Journal today about the problems at post.com's LoudounExtra hyperlocal site. It speaks for itself.

But there's some interesting commentary on that story and subject from another hyperlocal practitioner, Outside.In's CEO, Mark Josephson. And Mike Orren, who runs Pegasus News, had some interesting thoughts about what makes hyperlocal work in an interview this week with Peter Krasilovsky.

Each of these models represents a different approach to hyperlocal, although there's some overlap. In a nutshell:

* LoudounExtra is primarily a staff-written, technology-heavy model, with a lot of databases of local information and virtually no user-generated content.

* Outside.In is using technology to aggregate existing local content from bloggers and others.

* Pegasus News also uses a professional staff, but Orren has concluded that databases are the magic beans for hyperlocal success.

At Backfence, the company I cofounded, we went yet another direction, which I also believe is critical: a heavy reliance on user-generated content, for which we provided a platform.

Backfence is gone, LoudounExtra is struggling, and neither Pegasus News nor Outside.In can be labeled a commercial success at this point. So what's the right formula for hyperlocal?

I think the answer lies somewhere at the intersection of all of these models. You need sharp technology, lots of databases, aggregation of existing blogs and content, and lots of low, low-cost user-generated content. Professional content is good, too, if someone else is paying for it. You've got to be intensely local (LoudounExtra, by covering a 520-square-mile county, missed the boat here). And then you've got to market the hell out of the resulting stew, with aggressive community outreach, grassroots campaigns and, if you're fortunate enough to be attached to traditional media, a print counterpart and the boost you get from an attached media Web site.

Nobody's put this all together yet. But I believe we can find a winning formula to make hyperlocal a successful business. We've just got to keep working to find the right combination of ingredients to attain it.

When Local News Breaks—Fix It!

There are right ways and wrong ways to cover fast-breaking local news on the Web, and as I write this on Wednesday afternoon, washingtonpost.com is providing a good lesson in how not to cover a high-impact local story.

I'm generally reluctant to write about Post.com, because it's my alma mater and it's run by good friends of mine. But they're not having a good day. 

A serious line of thunderstorms swept through the Washington area a couple of hours ago, knocking down trees and power lines, and reportedly spawning tornados in the area. Local TV is all over the story, with a veteran local weatherman calling it one of the worst storms he's ever seen here. Local schools even locked down students until the storms passed.

But washingtonpost.com has been very, very slow off the mark. For a half hour after the storm, all the site had was a headline at the top of the home page linking to weather updates, even as TV was carrying the first reports of damage. The site has now put up a short staff-written story that's gradually being updated, but it's awfully basic, and not very helpful—it reports that a person was killed in the storm somewhere in suburban Fairfax County, but doesn't really say where. It glosses over the commuter problems and a storm-related shutdown of the Metro subway system, and barely mentions the tens of thousands of people without power. And not a word about the school lockdowns.

This is a scary storm that's disrupting the afternoon commute and has clearly caused a lot of damage (which TV is showing, of course). But the Post site seems all but unaware of its scope, and is handling it in old-media sorts of ways. 

Why not put up a news blog to provide fast-breaking developments? (Ironically, that's how the Post was covering the national political developments last night!) How about a map showing the path of the storm? (TV can do this in its sleep.) Why not put out a prominent call to readers for information, anecdotes, photos and videos? This is elementary stuff, and should be at the top of the playbook for a local media site dealing with a nearby disaster.

The New York Times gave a textbook lesson on breaking local coverage in last week's crane collapse, for which they used blogs, maps and user photos within minutes of the disaster—but Post.com seems unable to provide similarly sharp local coverage.

Of course, there is one place on the Post site that's provided live coverage of the storm: The well-hidden, ill-fated hyperlocal experiment, LoudounExtra.com, which is doing a great job with a staff-written news blog. It tracks the storm in that western suburban county and mentions the school lockdowns there. But none of that coverage is being integrated into the main site. What a wasted opportunity.

Post.com friends: This is a major, fast-moving local story, affecting millions of people in your primary coverage area. Many of them doubtless are checking the site (if they have power!) to find out what's going on around them. You've got to do better than this.

Addendum: I wasn't the only local washingtonpost.com reader frustrated by the site's storm coverage today. Scott Karp's good take is here.

The New Philly.com

When I took a temporary gig as VP-Editorial at Philly.com a few months ago, I wrote that I probably wouldn't be able to say much in this blog about what we were doing while we rethought the site. Well, now I can: We launched the new version of Philly.com this weekend, and I think we've broken some important new ground in what it means to be a newspaper Web site.

To start with, the new Philly.com doesn't look like most other news Web sites. It doesn't have an endless collection of text links on the home page. Instead, it's got a clean, elegant design (by the good folks at the Philadelphia office of Avenue A/Razorfish) that highlights important content and is designed to move readers deeper into the site to find more. It makes very strong use of photos and video, in addition to text. It uses photo-illustrations of Philadelphia landmarks at the top of most pages so that there's no question that you're on a site about Philadelphia. In short, the new Philly.com has a strong personality and identity—unlike most newspaper sites, which generally lack local identity.

But those are just the cosmetics. Philly.com also tries to rethink what it is to be a newspaper site. Yes, the excellent content of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News is front and center. But the site is not just about news. It's also full of guidance to living and visiting in the Philadelphia region, including events calendar searches on every page, to help readers find out what's going on around town besides what's in that day's news.

More importantly, Philly.com finally breaks free of being a one-way lecture to the audience. It's bristling with calls to action for reader participation, in comments, discussions, user-submitted reviews, photo and video uploading and other user-generated content. Highlights of that reader content are displayed on just about every page, so that visitors are invited to talk amongst themselves about what's on the site and what's going on around them. I don't think any news site as gone this far in encouraging reader involvement. Underlying this is an industrial-strength comment-management system that minimizes the amount of work the staff has to do to police all of this user interaction.

On top of that we've got dozens of reporter and columnist blogs, a growing number of video elements and shows, ubiquitous horizontal navigation to keep readers moving around the site, some cool tools from Aggregate Knowledge to help readers see what others like them are interested in, and much more.

And this is really only the beginning. As with any redesign and relaunch there were a few things that didn't make the deadline, most notably some social features, which will be phased in over the next few months. Philly.com will continue to grow and improve, but it's already light years ahead of where it was before this redesign. (For a glimpse at what it used to look like, see the screen-grab at left. The change is really dramatic.)

There are a number of people who deserve great credit for the new site, starting with Philadelphia Media Holdings CEO Brian Tierney and Philly.com President Eric Grilly, who have strong ambitions for what the site can be and how it has to move from simply being a "newspaper site;" the aforementioned Avenue A/Razorfish, which delivered a great design (further polished by Jill Hoover and Jeff Aiken); Jennifer Musser-Metz, who did an incredible job project-managing the design and launch process; and the talented and hard-working production and tech teams at Philly.com, who brought it all together and will keep the site evolving and growing over the next weeks and months.

As you can tell, I'm very proud of what's been accomplished with the new Philly.com, and I'll be excited to see it get even better in the future. We're defining what makes a great newspaper site. Up next: Philly.com does hyperlocal. Watch this space.

Comments Aren't Rocket Science

I've said it before and I'll say it again (and again): Managing comments on newspaper Web sites isn't exactly rocket science. But newspapers seem to keep thinking that it is.

Today's hapless example: Norwich (Conn.) Bulletin, which turned on comments and discovered that, HORRORS, contributors were posting horrible things (even on wedding announcements, which is actually pretty funny). So what did The Bulletin do? It turned the comments off—while The Day, in neighboring New London convened a public forum about online comments, replete with various experts and editors (not necessarily the same thing), along with an earnest followup story in the paper that talks about "the relatively new and challenging world of online reader comments."

Relatively new world? Really? Maybe to The Day and the Bulletin. But there have been online comments for more than two decades now, beginning at places like The Well, Compuserve and AOL, and advancing through too many online forums to mention—some of them even run by newspapers. There's nothing new about comments. The only thing new is the newbies in the newspaper business that don't do their homework before turning them on.

What those veteran sites have learned—which papers like The Bulletin only seem to bother to find out through trial and error—is that fully anonymous, ungoverned comments turn into chaos. Surprise!

Let us count the ways—and the ways it could have been prevented: The Bulletin said it had trouble with profanity (try a profanity filter), "irrelevant ranting" (try registration and moderation) and "vitriol" (see previous recommendations). Yep, that's pretty much the usual list of complaints. And they all could have been avoided from the jump. (I'll link to my previous post on this again.)

To repeat: This isn't rocket science, and it's hardly a new field. The Bulletin says it is going to relaunch its comments with user registration and staff moderation (the latter is probably unnecessary if registration and user-policing are used); no word about a profanity filter (highly recommended). And like other newspapers before it who have taken these steps, The Bulletin will discover that the comments aren't as difficult as they first appear. Gee—maybe The Bulletin's editors could have avoided these problems if they'd just done a little research first.

It's the Interactivity, Stupid

Comes now a survey sponsored by Associated Press Managing Editors that contains a couple of interesting conclusions: 1) That newspaper Web editors much prefer user-generated comments and contents that are not anonymous, vs. how non-journalists feel, and 2) that 58 percent of the Web journalists surveyed worry that "letting journalists join online conversations and give personal views would harm journalism," while only 36 percent of readers agree.

Leaving aside the somewhat odd methodology of the survey—which talked to more than 1,200 newspaper print and online journalists but just 500 readers (which seems very low as a sample size)—this study shows that we're making progress in some areas of letting our readers contribute online, but still have lots to learn in other areas.

Let's all agree, please, that pure anonymity in comments is bad. I've written about this before, and a lot of Web journalists agree, as the survey shows. But there are still way too many newspaper Web sites that are sloppy about handling comments, starting with a failure to require registration—which is the first step in combatting anonymity. The result, as one Web editor friend calls it, is "a sewer" in comments (perfect example: the Tribune papers using registration-free Topix as a comments engine).

Look, you're probably never going to fully do away with anonymity in comments—not and get any real participation—but requiring registration at least means that site managers have some idea who's behind specific comments, and can control them appropriately. It's really not that hard—but too many newspaper Web sites still seem to think that anonymity is part of the Web ethos, for some reason, and don't take the proper precautions to register the people they allow to comment on their sites. Result: the aforementioned sewer. It's nice to see that a majority of editors surveyed by the APME agree, though that opinion still doesn't necessarily square with industry practice.

Far more troubling is this notion that journalists shouldn't join online discussions. I've heard this anecdotally recently, as well, from reporters who don't think they should be interacting with readers online. Huh? Sure, I understand the concern about reporters expressing opinions in online forums, comments and discussions. That's probably a realistic—if overblown—concern.

But the best online forums on newspaper Web sites are two-way conversations involving reporters and other journalists interacting with readers, answering questions and generally making themselves available. Just look at WashingtonPost.com's fantastic discussions area for daily examples. Or check out some of the better newspaper blogs, where the authors are regular participants in the comments.

Yes, sometimes these toe the line of allegedly objective journalists expressing opinion (it's not a problem when the participant is a columnist, incidentally). But far more often they enrich the conversation—not to mention the readers' understanding and the reporter's beat—by fomenting a healthy, interesting, helpful dialogue. Oh, and by the way, journalist participation in comments and forums tends to improve the quality of the discussion in general—a factor almost as important as banishing anonymity.

This study shows that we still have a ways to go in understanding how best to deal with the new participatory styles of journalism. Some of these opinions reflect fear of the new, of what it means to interact with the audience. But the upside of doing so is phenomenal, and most journalists I've talked to who've taken the plunge into conversing with their readers have become big fans of the idea. To those 58 percent of newspaper journalists who worry about participation in comments and discussions: Get over it. Fast. You're missing out on an important part of the online revolution that's fundamentally changing our business. A large majority of readers wants you to interact with them. Start doing it.

Oh, and one more way that journalists are still a little disconnected from the Web: The full version of the survey is available only as a PDF download, you know, so it's easier to print out. Hey APME: Why not put it up in HTML so it can be read online?