Recovering Journalist

Be Prepared

A friend of mine points out that the Anchorage Daily News Web site didn't have anything about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's choice as John McCain's running mate as late as 11:15 am, Eastern time (7:15 Alaska time). Most of the rest of the media had the story confirmed a half-hour or so before, and it was a strong rumor for an hour or two before that. Want to bet the paper's Web-editor shift didn't start until later in the morning?

The newspaper's site did post a wire story on the Palin choice shortly after 8 a.m., but there's not a lot of excuse for being so far behind on such an important local story. Every newspaper Web site should have a plan in place for moving quickly on breaking local news no matter when it happened–including the ability for site managers to post from home or even from a cell phone, if need be.

PS: Steve Yelvington has a related take.

Beware the Printies

It's bad enough that newspapers are seeing their core business disintegrate and having trouble transitioning into their digital future. But they're also being held back by continuing and chronic problems with old-school managers who are clinging to the print model they grew up on and just won't let go. 

Call these dangerous dinosaurs Printosaurus Rex. Or, for short: Printies. Printies exist throughout the newspaper business, but they're most pernicious in the executive suite, where they continue to hold back intelligent, aggressive digital development. You know the type: They rhapsodize about how nice it is to be able to hold news in their hands as they read it. They tend to wear expensive suits and drive nice cars, paid for in better times. They declaim about never reading blogs. They may have a Facebook profile–but no friends. (But they don't hesitate to hold forth on their "expertise" about Facebook.) They spend money on inane print promotions but don't bother to market their Web sites. 

They print out their e-mail. 

Rather than firmly embracing and investing in the digital future, Printies are doing everything they can to preserve the dead-tree product they're so comfortable with, even at comical expense. They do crazy things like investing in printing plants. They fear the immediacy of the Web, leading to unfortunate memos that mandate paper-first publication (fortunately, cooler heads often prevail on these). They demand prominent "Subscribe to the print edition" links on the top of their Web sites. Truthfully, do these idiotic links really sell papers? Enough to justify that prime placement? I think not. 

Or–and this one's a hallmark of the Printie mentality–they come up with harebrained schemes to propagate the print product through laughable "e-editions" that provide a PDF (or worse) version of the paper for those who...well, I'm not sure who those e-editions are aimed at. Except maybe Printies themselves. These ridiculous products replicate the printed newspaper, online, right down to (hilariously) story jumps. This is of great comfort to the Printies, who believe that the form factor of the newspaper is perfect, even while fruitlessly trying to shoehorn a vertical page design onto a horizontal computer screen. But smart insiders know that very few readers partake of e-editions, and in the end, the only ones making money on them are the vendors who tricked the Printies into falling for the idea, thinking it was a nice way to represent the print edition online. Wrong! 

And that's the crux of the matter: Printies don't understand that the online medium is different, very different, from print. In clinging to their legacy print products at all costs, they invariably starve development of the innovative digital products that have the best chance to save the industry. 

Printies mean well, but they're dinosaurs, and their existence in every newspaper's management team (you know who you are) handicaps the industry's ability to do anything new, different or successful. The product they're protecting has been declining for years, but they're still standing in the way of a solution. Until they're flushed out of the ranks, newspapers will be fighting for their lives with one hand–clutching a PDF version of the print edition, no doubt–tied behind their backs.

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.

Imagine the World's Best Doctor's Waiting Room...

There are a couple of interesting developments on the magazine distribution front that are worth looking at.

The first one is Portfolio's takeout on Maghound, Time Warner's plan to turn magazine subscriptions into an a la carte business: basically, you'll be able to decide which issues of which magazines you take on a subscription, switching back and forth between Time, People, Sports Illustrated and 100-plus other magazines. The idea is that you'll pay a set fee of a few bucks a month and then choose what mags you want delivered to you. 

I'm not sure magazine subscribers are truly that eclectic and fickle. Do you really want to have to manage your magazine choices every month? The whole point of a subscription, after all, is a sort of set-it-and-forget-it model. Still, it's an interesting approach that might find a nice niche market.

Far more fascinating–and pernicious–is something called Mygazines.com, which is urging people to scan and upload magazines so that they can be shared among the company's 16,000–and growing–members. Oprah, Wired, BusinessWeek, Men's Health, you name it–virtual copies of the latest issues are sitting on the Mygazines site for your perusal, just as if you're sitting in a doctor's waiting room surrounded by piles of fresh magazines. (The company apparently draws that parallel, in fact.) None of this is authorized by the publishers, natch.

Ding ding ding ding ding! That alarm you hear is the copyright police going completely nuclear on this wacky concept, which claims to be based on the first-sale and fair use doctrines in copyright law. The company behind it has the advantage of being based on the Caribbean island of Anguilla (a British territory), and thus is harder to prosecute under U.S. law. The company's ownership (the URL is registered to a John Smith, for instance) sounds pretty dodgy, too.

Nice try. As an AP story on the new service points out, copyright lawyers don't think much of this idea, and the publishers that employ those lawyers will think even less of it. You'd better hurry and get over to Mygazines for a look before the cops–or maybe Interpol–get there.

Georgia on My Mind (No, the Other One!)

I'm no fan of Google News. I think it's a clever idea, but its algorithms are sloppy, its sources are sometimes murky and as a result it has an annoying tendency to pick important news from the most obscure source, rather than striving for the most credible source.

And occasionally its algorithms go completely haywire, and something like this happens!

The AP–Of All Places–As News Industry Think-Tank

The Associated Press has taken a beating in some quarters lately over perceptions–largely misguided, I believe–that it's somehow competing online with its newspaper members. Not only does this reflect a misunderstanding of what the AP does, but a lot of critics seem to forget that AP is owned by those newspapers. It's a rare example of newspaper ownership of a savvy online player, and a lot better than the alternative (think: Reuters. Or Google).

One of the reasons AP is taking some heat, frankly, is because it's been especially aggressive and innovative in embracing online media. Once incredibly stodgy, AP's leadership now seems to be on the cutting edge in how it thinks about the new world of journalism. Go figure.

The latest example of that is a fascinating research report released recently by the news cooperative. "A New Model For News" slipped out of the AP a few weeks ago and has gotten very little coverage in the industry media. But it reads like a roadmap for what news organizations–and especially newspapers–should be doing to regain their competitiveness, especially with young readers.

The report is based on detailed interviews and observations of young (20ish) readers in the U.S., Britain and India. Not surprisingly, it finds out that kids don't read newspapers. No news there. But it does show that they've got real interest in news, and are going to all sorts of sources besides print to find out what's going on in the world.

You should read it, but I'll briefly summarize: TV, Web sites and mobile alerts are popular with these young news consumers. So is news exchanged via social interactions (online and offline) with friends and co-workers. (Missing from the report: Any mention of Twitter, but that may have to do with the timing of the basic user research, which is now a year old.) Interestingly, the young folks interviewed generally don't think they're getting enough depth in their news. The detailed profiles of the various young readers and their news habits are quite interesting–and depressing if you're still betting on print.

Yeah, yeah, you're saying, we know all that: Kids use non-traditional news sources. But what are traditional news sources, i.e. newspapers, doing about it? Not a hell of a lot. Most papers haven't done anything particularly interesting with video (traditional TV, not just Web video), mobile alerts, and even now-"standard" technologies such as e-mail newsletters and RSS. The industry's track record on these vital new media is pretty sad.

Not to worry: The AP report provides a veritable cookbook of "new models" for news production and distribution, including:

• Tying news delivery more closely to e-mail. Clearly, these readers want news pushed to them. They want to be alerted when something is going on that they care about (gee, maybe they're news junkies more than anyone thought!), and they want to be able to do it simultaneous with checking their e-mail or text messages. That means more e-mail products, mobile products and distribution via things like instant-messaging and RSS. 
• Deliver to the technologies these readers live with. Seems obvious, but again, most newspapers and their Web sites are still publishing most of their news the old-fashioned way. These readers are looking at TV, their phones and PDAs, and other, fresher technologies (a surprising number don't even have computers at home, or dismiss the computer as more of a time-waster). That's where news needs to be delivered, with the same quality and aggressiveness of traditional outlets. (AP is walking the walk on this: its AP Mobile News app is one of the snazzier of the new iPhone apps.)
• Don't underestimate television. It's still a significant form of news delivery for these consumers. That suggests that newspapers need to find ways to move their brands onto TV (what is this, 1955?). Online video is one thing–and it's important–but regular TV is still a very viable medium for these young readers, and newspapers don't reach them there.
• Give them depth. This one's a bit of a surprise, but clearly these young readers are frustrated by the thinness of the news they're getting. I think the secret here is to give them the option to go deeper if they like–but not to force depth on them. Products need to offer both brief and long versions that readers can choose.
• News consumption is increasingly multitasked. Translation: These news consumers want information they can access while they're doing something else, rather than having to focus intently on, say, a newspaper or Web site. They're getting news while driving or while doing other things. That means news organizations need to find ways to wedge news products into those activities rather than demanding 100 percent attention (young readers will give that if they're more interested in depth).
• A bit of news fatigue is setting in. With news coming from many directions, these consumers feel overloaded by information. This argues for well-crafted, focused news reports that maximize the amount of information delivered and provides it in high quality. Sounds like a business newspapers should know well–but it needs to happen in different media than paper.
• News is social currency. It's "cool" for these kids to know something their friends don't, and then to be the source of that news, or for them to be conversant with their friends and colleagues about what's going on in the world. That's an old-fashioned value that appears to still hold with these new audiences.

Again, you should read the entire report and think about how your company's products should be refocused to better serve this audience–which, of course, is the audience of the future. You've got to build products that that audience wants, not just creating (print) products for an audience that is aging rapidly (you know how that story ends). Clearly, from the AP report, even news Web sites aren't enough–and may remind them too much of their print forebears. There's a real need for a fresh approach to news, from reporting to delivery.

Moreover, one of the most interesting and profound statements in the report is from an AP editor who says, "We're reporting what is happening, not what has happened."

That's a critical change in tense, and very smart thinking. Everyone in the newspaper and new media business should be pondering it. Yes, it's a rougher first draft of history than many journalists are used to, or even comfortable with. But in an era of technology-driven news immediacy, it's exactly the right philosophy to have, especially to reach the younger news consumers who are subjects of the AP research report. 

All of AP's member newspapers should be closely examining "A New Model for News" and looking for ways to build products that exploit its findings. After all, they paid for the research. They might as well take advantage of it.

Update: On a related note, the Newspaper Association of America just released a good primer about what newspapers should be doing with mobile publishing. It all seems so obvious–but there really aren't a lot of good newspaper mobile efforts out there, much less any that really try to make money on it. It's a big opportunity.

Au Revoir, Minitel

The Kelsey Group blog notes the imminent demise of Minitel, the French online information service that was sort of Le World Wide Web before there was a World Wide Web. Minitel flourished in France in the 1980s, though the technology goes back even farther than that. It was intended as an electronic replacement for the White Pages, but soon grew into a more general, videotex-based information service, including retail sales, ticketing, message boards and, yes porn. 

The French–who were given Minitel terminals for free by the state phone company–loved the service, and it eventually was used by about 45 percent of the nation's population. The subsidized distribution really helped–Minitel never really caught on anywhere besides France, making it the Jerry Lewis or Mickey Rourke of technology. US West offered it briefly in the United States during the 1990s, and at one point, as I recall, New York magazine even offered it to subscribers as a primitive online service in lame competition with AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve.

The growth of the Web, of course, made Minitel obsolete, and while there has been much resistance in France to giving up the homely terminals and service, France Telecom plans to pull the plug next spring. But Minitel is an interesting footnote to today's information technology explosion–it provided early (albeit subsidized) proof that a mass market of consumers would use electronic home info services.

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.

Local Ad Dollars, Slip Sliding Away

There's a good but depressing article in the Wall Street Journal about how newspapers are continuing to fall behind in the local online advertising derby–even as their print ad revenues are ebbing away. According to Borrell statistics cited in the story, newspaper share of the local online ad market has fallen to 27.4 percent from 35.9 percent two years ago. Things aren't going in the right direction. That's not good–especially when the overall local online advertising market is growing, ahem, at a 57 percent annual clip.

The Journal story lists several reasons for the newspapers' local online advertising problems, unfortunately well-known to anybody who's been around newspaper online ad sales operations:

• It's hard to get sales reps interested in selling less-lucrative local online ads.
• Small local advertisers generally don't buy banner ads favored by larger national advertisers (and still the standard ad on most newspaper Web sites).
• Strategies of bundling print and online advertising may cause more cannibalization than added sales. 
• Local online ad growth is coming from small- and medium-sized business–which traditionally haven't been significant advertising customers of most good-sized dailies.

That last point is particularly interesting. In print and online, most papers, by covering a broad metropolitan area, are more attractive to larger local advertisers like car dealers and banks. Smaller advertisers–the pizza parlors, nail salons, mom-and-pop stores–don't want the broad geographic reach that papers offer, and can't afford the high rates. And they're harder to sell to (and the commissions aren't as large). 

So newspaper sales reps traditionally haven't called on those smaller advertisers. But there are lots of them, and other media are moving in–community papers, local Web sites and blogs, even Google, Yahoo and specialty sites like Yelp. That's what's crowding the newspapers out of their own markets, online.

At Backfence, we saw that there was definite interest by these small merchants and service providers in advertising online on a focused local site. But newspapers, for the most part, still don't have significant offerings of that type. Not only are they not selling the ads, they often don't really have the strong local online products to sell them on. Want to dominate the local online market? Start with a killer local entertainment guide. But most newspaper sites still haven't figured out how to provide readers–and advertisers–with a topnotch local events guide. And hyperlocal coverage, which gives those small local advertisers access to customers nearest to them, is still a pipe dream at most newspaper Web sites.

All of this is quite unfortunate, since newspapers at this point need every ad dollar they can find, and those small local businesses represent a largely untapped pool of potential ad revenue. To get it, newspapers need to really change the way they approach their local market, online. Some suggestions:

• Build a strong local product to attract local advertisers–an entertainment guide, hyperlocal sites, a site targeting a specific local demographic, whatever.
• Push the cost of ad sales down as low as possible. No more high-salary, high-commission sales reps who can only score decent bucks by selling another car dealer ad. Try commission-only telemarketing reps smiling and dialing to blanket small local businesses.
• Self-serve advertising tools. Make it easy–really, really easy–for small advertisers to come online, create, place and pay for an ad. That drives the cost of sales way down. Did I mention it has to be easy? Most newspaper sites haven't mastered that concept for simple things like placing online classifieds, unfortunately.
• Seminars for local businesses on online advertising (see the Bakersfield Californian example in the Journal story). It's still new to many, many small business owners. Educate them on the value of online advertising and how to take advantage of it. 
• Don't sell only your own products. Deploy ad reps with a portfolio of offerings to local businesses that might include ads on Google, Yahoo, or even the Yellow Pages. You've got the feet on the local streets--use them.
• Experiment with new online advertising forms. Banners and tiles aren't the only way to advertise online. In fact, they're quite tired (clicked on a banner ad lately? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone?). Try everything from text ads to interactive ads that couch the ad message in a game or quiz. Sell sponsorships of various elements of the site. And don't forget video ads, which are becoming very popular among local advertisers. Real estate walkthroughs, chefs describing their restaurants–these videos seem obvious, but they're still few and far between on newspaper sites. 

Newspaper competitors online already are doing all of these things. Just as on the news side, too many papers are still trapped in a business and operational model that dates to just after the days of Ben Franklin and John Peter Zenger. Local online advertising represents a significant source of badly needed advertising revenue. Newspapers can't afford to let it slip away.

To Be Continued, Online and Off

The Washington Post is running a 12-part series about murdered Washington intern Chandra Levy. Yes, you read that right: 12 parts, about a story that was numbingly over-covered when it was current, seven years ago.

The Post has put three of its best reporters to work rehashing the Levy case in an effort to demonstrate why the case was bungled by the cops, why Rep. Gary Condit, her lover, was falsely accused, and why "the killer may never be brought to justice." 

Did I mention it's 12 parts?

The Post's approach to this series is both unusual and fairly standard in this era of combined online and offline journalism. Like all good large-scale projects these days, the series has an online component, as well, including bits of audio, video, documentary information, reporter's notebooks and other supplemental content. All good. In all, according to the package's credits, more than two dozen people from the print and online staffs worked on the series.

But what's different is that in print, the story is being told as a 12-part serial, in bites of about 1,500 words each, rather than in three or four 5,000-word chunks. And based on the first couple of "chapters," it's not really working. 

The first two episodes have seemed very thin, there doesn't seem to be that much new information, and one is left with the overwhelming impression that the story is being dragged out over 12 days solely in an effort to sell 12 papers (or 12 Web visits). While the thin-but-extended format may help readers who don't want to make a significant daily reading commitment, it doesn't seem to add much if anything to the story itself. And the Web supplemental information is OK--but it's just that, supplemental. It feels sort of tacked-on and doesn't really have the depth one might expect.

It might have been interesting if the Post had tried a somewhat more daring strategy of packaging the story: Three rock-'em, sock-'em print episodes that summarized the reporters' findings for readers who want the basics, promoting a much deeper, more comprehensive Web version for readers who really wanted to dive in for more. Read the synopsis in print; get the book-length version online (plus the supplemental information for the real junkies).

Newspaper Web editions, alas, still are slaves to their print counterparts, and the Post's series demonstrates this—the online version doesn't really use the medium well or improve on what people got in print. But if print space is precious—and online space basically unlimited—why not provide two very different versions of a series like this and let readers choose which one they prefer?

But 12 parts? That's a bit much for anything.

Update: Post Executive Editor Len Downie on the thinking behind the 12-part format. And sheesh, if stretching a perfectly good three-part series over 12 parts is such a radical breakthrough that it's worthy of coverage in the industry's trade magazine as an innovation, maybe newspapers are in even bigger trouble--is that possible?--than anybody thought!