Recovering Journalist

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 But the basic idea of what a newspaper is, that we all grew up with, is outdated, outmoded and soon to be defunct.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.

Who's Doing Good Work in Online News? (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this series, I took a look at what traditional news organizations are doing to push the envelope in online innovation. But not surprisingly, some of the more advanced work in this area is being done by small startups that can be more nimble and aggressive than their mainstream counterparts. Here's a look at some of the best of these efforts; again, feel free to point out more in the Comments.

• The 2008 Presidential campaign highlighted some of the best startup efforts in journalism. Politico took advantage of political-junkie voids left by The Washington Post and other traditional news organizations to quickly become a leading name in political news. While I'm concerned about the long-term viability of the high expense of Politico's news operation, it's done some smart things to spread its reach far and wide, including syndicating its coverage to other news organizations. The other notable political startup from the 2008 campaign was the marvelous FiveThirtyEight.com, whose proprietor, baseball stats geek Nate Silver, applied that same geekiness to handicapping the electoral college. Nobody did a more interesting job covering the election–or a better job of predicting the outcome, with startling state-by-state accuracy. Now Silver has to figure out if there's a second act in applying his statistical analysis to the political doings in between elections. Also good on the political/government beat: the wonky OpenCongress.org. 

• A lot has been said and written about the crop of startup online newspapers now covering cities around the country. I'm particularly fond of Voice of San Diego, which I think combines solid reporting and writing with a particularly attractive design that has a more personality and flair than your average news site. Pegasus News, covering Dallas, continues to grow as well. Both of these, as well as sites like Minneapolis' MinnPost, primarily rely on professional staffs and are, in effect, newspapers minus the paper. The business models for this are still up in the air, and some, like Voice of San Diego and MinnPost, are relying at least in part on a PBS/NPR-like user-supported model (Pegasus News is a for-profit commercial venture). Others, like Chicago's ChiTown Daily News, are largely funded by non-profit grants. I worry about the long-term viability of these non-commercial efforts as the initial money runs out. To sustain, they have to find workable business models and revenue streams, and non-commercial status doesn't always provide the right motivation to do that.

• Non-profit support of journalism is taking other forms. Pro Publica is a non-profit, independent investigative journalism project whose work appears on its site as well as in major publications and on TV networks. This is an interesting model for journalism largely disconnected from traditional journalism entities. I'm less sanguine about a couple of roughly similar experiments: Spot.us, which hopes to convince readers to make contributions to fund coverage of stories suggested by the audience (seems like a longshot to me); and Global Post, a commercial effort to establish a sort of international wire service (alas, at a time when newspapers are eschewing foreign news in favor of local coverage). But there will be other efforts to supplement what traditional news organizations do by tapping into non-profit sources to fund specialty reporting, I'm sure. The Kaiser Family Foundation already is moving in this direction with health coverage, an area that's faced significant cutbacks in many newsrooms.

• Another foundation-based effort that has gotten a lot of attention is Adrian Holovaty's EveryBlock, which collates all sorts of local data, including news stories, crime logs, real estate sales, etc., and displays it in lists or plotted on a map. With his Knight Foundation grant running out, Holovaty is now looking for a longer-term business model. He's struck partnerships with The New York Times and other papers; that seems to be a good strategy, since EveryBlock seems to work best as the data support for a more well-rounded news product.

• More maps: Google has been tracking the spread of the flu this winter on its Flu Trends map, which cleverly plots Google searches for words like "flu" and "flu vaccine" and purports to be able to show the spread of flu around the country two weeks before health officials know about it. (The Centers for Disease Control is supporting the effort.) At the moment, it looks like Maine and Texas are particularly flu-prone. The flu map shows how Google maps are particularly useful for plotting breaking news about stories that spread over a geographic area. Google Australia, for instance, has created an interactive map showing the devastating bush fires outside Melbourne.

• Another excellent view of the Australian fire story comes from a somewhat unexpected source: Wikipedia, whose entry on the fires is voluminous, comprehensive and up-to-the-minute. A lot of journalists like to knock Wikipedia because it's user-generated and therefore vulnerable to inaccuracies; in fact, the site is surprisingly accurate for most purposes and is turning out to be a very underrated collector of breaking news coverage. Next time a big story on an obscure topic breaks, check Wikipedia–you'll likely find surprisingly complete and ongoing aggregated coverage of the story that's as good as, or better, than anything from a traditional media site.

• The most interesting non-traditional journalism efforts are those that are using technology in new and interesting ways to manage, display and interact with news stories. Check out NewsMixer, developed by a group of Medill School of Journalism students, using the Cedar Rapids Gazette site as a guinea pig. NewsMixer is like reader comments on acid. Partly reliant on tools developed by Facebook, NewsMixer lets readers comment on stories, ask (and answer) questions about stories and talk among themselves, in an interactive format that brings stories to life in whole new ways. Great stuff. Another interesting news technology is OneSpot, from a startup headed by my former colleague Matt Cohen. OneSpot allows Web publishers to create sophisticated newsfeeds using tools that aggregate and filter news from myriad sources to create smart collections of targeted content. The Wall Street Journal's site is using it, and the company just announced a $4.2 million round of financing–no small feat in the current economic environment. The VCs must think OneSpot is onto something. One more cool news technology: Aggregate Knowledge, which bolts onto news sites, analyzes user behavior and reading patterns, and suggests stories that similar visitors read. Look for it at the bottom of story pages on WashingtonPost.com and Philly.com. 

• Two of my favorite areas for news organizations to be exploring are aggregation and niche markets, and Alan Jacobson's Tween Tribune taps into both of these. The site brings together stories of interest to kids between 8 and 14 and invites them to comment on them. It's an interesting effort, and Jacobson is marketing it to newspapers and schools as an updated version of the old newspapers-in-education gambit. Like Gannett's MomsLikeMe, mentioned in Part 1, this is a good example of aiming an interactive news product directly at a particular demographic niche–something that general-interest news organizations have never quite figured out. There's lots of money in those niches if you can get them right.

• If news organizations are going to thrive online, they're going to have to find ways to inexpensively capture advertising from smaller local businesses. A quiet startup called PaperG has patent-pending technology in stealth mode called PlaceLocal that can instantly create online display ads by searching the Web for business information like photos, awards, and logos. Disclosure: I'm an advisor to and investor in the company, so I've seen the technology–and it's very cool. Not surprisingly, it's already attracting a lot of interest from publishers. PaperG also has another piece of advertising technology, FlyerBoard, already deployed at Boston.com and WeeklyDig.com, that can quickly turn any piece of printed advertising into a simple Web ad attached to a mini-site (you can see it in action on the upper right side of the WeeklyDig home page–it's the little bulletin board). Similarly, TurnHere is creating thousands of high-CPM video ads by deploying low-cost videographers to shoot short videos of local restaurants and other businesses.

That's a long list, but there are doubtless other first-rate examples of news (and advertising) innovation worth sharing. Again, please add other good efforts to the Comments. And thanks to Mark Stencel and Chris Krewson, who pointed a few of these examples out to me–Mark especially, who suggested the idea for these posts.

Who's Doing Good Work in Online News? (Part 1)

There's a lot of time being spent these days chasing old ideas for the online news business that seem new to some people. Meanwhile, lots of smart folks are doing some very good work in truly inventing the future of online news.

Some of these innovators work for traditional news organizations; others work for startups or Web-only operations. These are people who really do have good ideas for the future of news and advertising. Over the next couple of posts, I'm going to take a look at some of the efforts I've seen that seem to be the most interesting. 

I'm going to skim over a few things, like Twitter, that have quickly become mainstream, and try to concentrate on products and projects that are breaking new ground–and hopefully can become examples for others to replicate. Some are fairly well-known; others have been too obscure, in my view. But all of them should be more widely adopted. Just about every news site should be doing versions of every one of these, and more.

We're at a point where the news business really needs some bold, imaginative thinking in everything from news presentation to business models. These examples are some of the best of breed. (If you know of others, please add them in the Comments.) 

First, from traditional organizations, in no particular order:

• Maps are a powerful way to illustrate lots of information at a glance, and given the Google maps API, it's surprising that they're not used more by news sites to explain stories that literally cover a lot of ground. And not just stories: CinciNavigator, from Cincinnati.com, does a nice job of plotting local information ranging from news stories to crime to business listings to gas prices, all in one place. Obviously, this builds on the great work being done by Adrian Holovaty, first on ChicagoCrime.org and then on EveryBlock (more on that in the next post). But it's surprising that more news organizations haven't provided their readers with this service. Another example: WashingtonPost.com's LocalExplorer, which launched about the same time as the overhyped and disappointing LoudounExtra, and is actually much more useful–albeit more limited than CinciNavigator.  

• Another interesting use of maps: the Newseum's Today's Front Pages feature, which plots newspaper front pages on a map (a map with a weird East Coast bias, for some reason). WashingtonPost.com comes at something similar in a very different way with TimeSpace: World, a somewhat confusing mashup of news stories and photos overlaid over a world map. Both of these are actually riffs on work that was done at the MIT Media Lab in the early '90s on world news maps; it's nice to see a good idea finally making the mainstream of journalism!

• Stuck in a traditional one-size-fits-all mentality, many news organizations have had problems thinking about creating great niche sites to target specific audience segments. Gannett, however, has quietly built a network of local sites aimed at mothers that now has dozens of outposts under the MomsLikeMe banner. A recent redesign–which brought the initial sites onto a new platform under one banner–unfortunately cost the sites a lot of their personality. But the MomsLikeMe sites still do a great job of providing a forum where mothers can exchange information, tips, stories, whatever–and where advertisers can reach those moms. The format is much more like a community bulletin board than a traditional news site, with lots of user-generated content. That's a very good thing, because it means authenticity, participation, engagement–and inexpensive content.

• There was a time a few years ago when news sites went a little Flash-happy, creating all sorts of overdone interactive features that seemed to serve their designers' portfolios more than they did readers. Flashmania has calmed down a bit, thank God, and now multimedia presentations are deployed a little more judiciously. A great one is the Please Touch Museum site the Philadelphia Inquirer built to feature the city's new museum for children. Put together by a team led by Frank Wiese, the Inquirer's online projects editor, the site perfectly fits its subject: you want to touch it and find out what's going on. Nice work.

• A lot of print news sites have leapt into video, inspired by YouTube's success into thinking it's the Next Big Thing online. It may be, but not the way most news sites do it. Sure, it's great to put up video of news events, but too many sites try to emulate television and create high-production-value video reports that replicate TV news. Usually, these are boring, and readers avoid them like the plague. And then there's The New York Times' David Pogue, the tech reporter who's made a science out of creating witty, guerilla-style videos that trade overproduction for humor, substance and personality. The results are videos that, like the best of YouTube, get forwarded all over the place and viewed by literally millions of people. Rather than trying to out-TV TV, every print news organization should be showcasing newsroom personalities (and newsrooms always have their share of personalities!) in videos that will entertain as well as inform.

• Speaking of The New York Times, the paper's much-touted team of experimental web developers is doing work that's always interesting, if not always clearly useful. But that's what cutting-edge innovation often is. Two good examples: The enhanced New York Times Extra home page (to get there, click on the green Extra link below the logo; it's oddly not bookmarkable) and a map that tracked popular Twitter words during the Super Bowl. The latter was an interesting thought piece with no real utility, though one can imagine it being more useful for some other fast-breaking Twitter-led story. But the Times Extra home page, which adds related third-party links to Times headlines, is a very interesting example of moving outside the traditional walled garden of news sources and showing visitors what others are writing about the same subjects. Also worth a look: Blogrunner's Annotated New York Times, which takes the enhancement/aggregation idea a big step further. Update: The Times developers have added a blog with links to interesting projects and prototypes they're working on. Well worth a look.

• I'm a big fan of news aggregation; even as traditional editors are complaining about being linked to by Google or competitors, I think it's something every news organization should be doing to establish its site as a one-stop destination for everything on a topic, especially local news. Leverage your brand, local knowledge and editing skills to present readers with an aggregated package of stories and information from all sorts of sources–yes, even your competitors–and you'll be performing a service that goes far beyond whatever you can do with your own content. The NBC owned-and-operated stations have figured this out, and while I'd quibble a bit with the execution–they seem shy about giving source credit where credit is due–efforts like NBCWashington.com site are excellent examples of the power of aggregated local news. Honorable mention: Examiner.com, which has built sites in 60 cities to aggregate local news and supplement it with blog-like reports on specific topics from local "examiners." Examiner.com (on which I did some early strategic consulting) is a bit too tentative about taking advantage of third-party sources and a bit too overreliant on its "examiners" for content, but it's still building unique local franchises that compete directly with local newspaper sites.

• Tribune Co. has taken a lot of heat for some of its management's wacky ideas, but a couple of the Chicago Tribune's ongoing projects are real pathbreakers. TribLocal is probably the strongest effort yet at creating a hyperlocal site that combines professional and user-generated content; as a co-founder of Backfence and close follower of all things hyperlocal, I've watched TribLocal closely and with much admiration. It's expanded to more than 40 Chicago suburbs and seems to be getting traction with readers and advertisers. Tribune's other interesting endeavor is Colonel Tribune, maybe the single must unusual thing being done online by any major newspaper. Col. Tribune is a fictional character created by the Tribune as a sort of host of and guide to the newspaper site and, more significantly, a participant in social networks like Facebook and Twitter (where the colonel has 5,400 followers). If nothing else, the colonel gives a somewhat drab news site a touch of personality.  

• Somewhere between hyperlocal and aggregation is GateHouse Media's TheBatavian, an online-only local publication started from scratch in a small community in New York state. TheBatavian brings together a small professional staff, community-contributed content, links to other local media, user forums, a blog-like layout and aggressive pursuit of local advertisers to create a next-generation community news product that's well worth watching. GateHouse digital smart guy Howard Owens has said he's using just about everything he knows in creating and running TheBatavian, and that's a lot of horsepower. It's a good model for what might replace print newspapers in the months and years to come.

• We saw a lot of good Web work come out of the recent election; much of the best of it, like Politico and FiveThirtyEight.com, came from outside traditional news organizations (and will be covered in my next post). But the St. Petersburg Times fact-checked candidates during the campaign with its Politifact site, and has kept up the momentum with an ambitious project to track President Obama's campaign promises. The Obameter is keeping its eye on more than 500 promises, and grading the president on his ability to keep them–or not. Smart bonus: The Obameter is being syndicated as a widget that other news sites and blogs can add to their pages. This sort of thing should be the rule, not the exception, for interesting online efforts.

• The action in news and information innovation is not limited to the Web. The iPhone has quickly become an important delivery platform, and the smarter media companies have built iPhone apps that extend their product and brand to the palms of people's hands. There are a lot of news-related apps for the iPhone, and a lot of them are sadly mundane. But the Weather Channel–whose Web site has never dazzled–has a fantastic (and free) iPhone app that includes forecasts, videos, radar and just about anything else a weather junkie (or even a normal person) could want. Another great iPhone app from a sort of traditional media outfit is Major League Baseball's MLB.com AtBat, which combines scores, stats, video and other goodies into an essential tool for baseball fans; this season's version is said to add live radio broadcasts of games, too. Note to those who would like to see people pay for content: MLB gets $4.99 for AtBat, and it's worth it for such a well-done, useful product.

• And finally, so that we're not completely wallowing in editorial efforts, here's one from the revenue side. Cox has been launching Kudzu business directory sites around the country, and this is exactly the sort of thing that every media company should be building in its local market to tap into small-business advertising. (Disclosure: I did some consulting for Kudzu several years ago.) It's the tried-and-true Yellow Pages business model, with free basic listings plus upsells for enhanced information; readers can add business reviews, as well. But the coolest thing about Kudzu is its alternate Kudzu Virtual House interface, which provides a striking visual navigation of business categories in addition to the usual search and browse access. Again, multimedia used intelligently–with a revenue model, no less!

Coming in Part 2: Good work being done outside the traditional news organization mainstream. And again, please add to the Comments anything else that you think is particularly good and worth emulating. We need all the smart ideas we can get right now to move journalism forward, make it more attractive to more people and find business models to support it.

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A Balanced Local Diet

Steve Yelvington has a terrific post on the three roles that local news operations need to fulfill: Town Crier, Town Expert and Town Square. Most journalists are very good at the Town Crier role; the other two, not so much. 

As Steve writes, "News is not enough. ... The other roles aren't secondary. They're coequal, and they're grossly neglected by most local news websites."

Right on. But how to do fulfill those roles–which are much better advertising/revenue draws than news, btw–in a time of limited or declining resources? Hint: Ask your readers to help.

Steve's post is excellent. It's required reading for anybody who wants to find ways to better serve local audiences.

GateHouseGate

I got a call a few weeks ago from a usually smart print editor who was outraged about aggregation sites linking to his paper's content. In his view, the aggregators were "stealing" his content and selling ads against it–even though all the aggregator was doing, like most of the breed, was putting up headlines and links. 

In fact, I told him, the aggregators were driving traffic to his paper's site that it wasn't going to get anyway, and therefore what was happening was positive (ask anybody who's enjoyed a flood of traffic from Drudge). Moreover, I told him, his paper's site should be doing exactly the same thing: Aggregating every possible local link and creating a one-stop entry point into news and information about its city and region, regardless of source. You know, being the ultimate authority and guide to every piece of news that happens in town. Kind of like newspapers used to be before they had all these annoying competitors.

This is counterintuitive, I guess, to newspaper folks who were raised in their walled gardens. So you hear this sort of anti-link sentiment occasionally from traditionalists. Which is why it's so surprising that similar charges are now being made by GateHouse Media, heretofore one of the smarter newspaper companies about taking advantage of the Web.

GateHouse has sued The New York Times Co., arguing that the Boston Globe's new YourTown hyperlocal site for Newton is violating copyright laws by copying headlines and first sentences verbatim from GateHouse sites in Massachusetts and–horrors!–linking to the stories themselves on GateHouse's pages.

I see this, and I scratch my head and ask, yet again, what decade are we in? C'mon, GateHouse. That's how the Web works. Sites link to each other. A piece of copyright law called the fair use doctrine even covers the kind of excerpting that Boston.com–like virtually every other Web site with half a brain–is doing. More importantly, I guarantee that Boston.com will be driving traffic to those GateHouse links–again, they lead to GateHouse sites–at levels GateHouse hasn't seen before. So what, exactly, is the problem? 

The problem, I fear, is a dinosaur or two in GateHouse management that doesn't quite understand what's going on here, and is overruling the smarter folks at the company and siccing the lawyers on the Times Co. (It turns out, in fact, that GateHouse itself has linked to Boston.com stories in the past. Details, details.) And not surprisingly, this fracas has arisen just as Boston.com has started launching its hyperlocal sites, which compete directly with GateHouse's smart WickedLocal hyperlocal sites in covering the Boston suburbs. Imagine that.

More cynically, I wonder if GateHouse, which has financial troubles from taking on too many big loans to assemble its collection of 125 small community newspapers (collecting them: smart. Big loans: not so much), is looking at the Times Co. and thinking, "Mmmm. Deep pockets."

This sort of nonsense really has to stop. Companies like GateHouse need to understand the medium they're playing in, and how best to play in it, rather than trying to turn back the clock to some sort of imaginary time when they could keep their garden walls tall and stout.

Or, better yet, I have an idea: Why doesn't GateHouse just do its own aggregation play, grab some Boston.com headlines and ledes and link back to that site? What a concept!

NBC Goes Local

Don't look now, but NBC is rolling out some sharp-looking local news sites for its owned-and-operated stations in New York, Washington, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Using URLs like "NBCWashington.com" and the tagline "Locals Only," these are quantum leaps over the usual crappy local TV news sites for a very simple reason: They're actually focused on local news, and eschew the usual mindless over-promotion of the local NBC news team and primetime schedule. They're also not limited to NBC-produced content–the sites promise to aggregate content from other local sources, as well, a la the very smart Examiner.com model. 

As such, these sites are potentially serious competitors to local newspaper sites. The power of local TV stations to promote their own sites can't be underestimated–I found out about NBCWashington.com because the local NBC station is running teaser ads for it–and the focus on local news and information makes these sites potentially very attractive to local readers and advertisers. 

In their initial incarnation, the NBC local sites are a bit too heavy on national news and celebrity froth for a "local" site. And they could use more user-generated content. But they're still very well done, with a clean design that even nicks a nice animated graphic feature from iTunes' "cover-flow" trick–you can use your cursor to "thumb through" a list of stories. Weather, traffic and events calendars are prominent, as is a poll, e-mail and mobile alerts, RSS and local photo galleries. The happy faces of the local news team and promotions for the primetime schedule are nowhere to be seen.

This is a serious effort–and yet another reason why newspaper sites can't stay stuck in the mud with aging designs and newspaper-centric approaches to content. You've got to be ready to aggregate local information from anywhere you can get it, and present it in a manner that's snappy and relevant to site visitors. Otherwise, you're going to lose your audience to efforts like NBC's "locals only" endeavor.

Hyper About Local

Howard Owens has a fantastic post up touting local community sites as the future of newspapers and the Web. It's well worth a read, and among other things it debunks the notion advanced in some quarters that the best definition of "community" isn't about geography but about shared interests. Hogwash. The primary community for anyone is geographical–where they live. Hyperlocal sites are about replicating that georgraphical community experience online. 

Anyone who questions that people are interested in talking about their communities hasn't dug in to the plethora of listservs, Yahoo groups and organization sites that already provide coverage of many local communities. The trick is to find a way to create a portal site (I know--"portal" is a dirty word from the bad ol' '90s, but it's the best description) that ties together all those local interests in a locally focused destination site, mixed in with calendars, social tools and many other elements. Nobody's really cracked the code on hyperlocal yet, but there are a lot of interesting efforts out there–and there are a lot of local advertisers looking for those sorts of venues to reach their local markets.

Howard, in his role as Gatehouse's digital wizard, just launched a very interesting hyperlocal effort, The Batavian, serving Batavia, N.Y.–basically, an online equivalent of a good community paper, minus the printing press but with lots of Web 2.0 goodness. At the moment, it's sort of a glorified community blog (it needs more photos out front, for one thing), but Howard promises more to come. It's a very interesting effort by a traditional publisher to launch a local publication in a new market, sans the printing and distribution expenses. (Its antecedent, in many ways, is Morris Communications' pioneering print-free hyperlocal site, Bluffton Today.) It will be interesting to see how The Batavian develops, and whether Gatehouse will launch similar products in other communities to tap into the power of local information and discussion (and advertising).

Incidentally, I don't meant to dismiss Web sites and products aimed at non-geographic communities--I'm on record as loving niche products like Gannett's "moms" sites, for instance. But local is a community, too, with passionate interests that cry out to be served. And there's real magic, I think, in combining the two ideas and building local niche sites, as Gannett is doing. There's not nearly enough activity in that space. But at least efforts like The Batavian show that some publishers are willing to launch some innovative experiments in an effort to break out of the industry's malaise.

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.