Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Say it: I’d like to see the following things this year

Published on 04/01/08
by Zac Echola

In the order these things should happen at your newspaper.com:

I’d like to see better headlines. Too many papers port their print heads to their Web sites. Worst idea ever. Your Web site isn’t the only context for your words. Think about how RSS readers, email alert receivers and Google searchers see your headlines.

I’d like to see more information you wouldn’t bother printing in the paper. Which roads are closed today, or this week? Most newsrooms get hundreds of news releases a day. Most are lame, but surely someone will find a quick brief on it interesting. I’d like to see more pictures. Lots more pictures.

I’d like to see more pay walls fall down. There sure was a lot of talk about this last year but not many sites actually followed up on it. Move it and lose it, folks.

I’d like to see better search. Keyword based search is fine if it works, but I really care about timeliness as much as relevancy.

I’d like to see granular linkage. Tagging would be really nice. Pro tip: Granular news begets granular advertising. Think smaller. Much smaller.

I’d like to see better use of RSS. Granular RSS would be really sweet. Full text and pictures with or without ads, doesn’t matter. Unless you are the Washington Post or the New York Times, I just won’t follow your sites (and probably will never go to your site again unless someone I trust links to it). I’m much further ahead on the tech curve than most people when it comes to RSS, but I’ve already made it a policy this year to drop most feeds with partial text. You must have pretty compelling content to keep me as a subscriber to partial text feeds.

I’d like to see sexier designs. You wouldn’t put every headline on A1, why do you do it on your sites?

I’d like to see better ad strategies. Banners are lame and unless you’re in a fairly large market you’ll have a tough time selling inventory once you drop the pay wall. Think about how you can target and integrate advertising with content. No, not Intellitext. Clicking a tag or a search narrows content, it should narrow advertising too. Get creative. Have lots of editorial Google maps? I bet there are businesses in those areas…

Registration should let me do more than comment on articles. Come up with some good ideas here for yourself.

This one will likely be controversial: Write more stories using fewer words. 10 inches average. I’m serious here. Stop writing so many 40-50 inch articles every day. Use site metrics and reader reactions to help you decide stories to follow up on or to write-through. Write 50 inches on a story over the course of 5 articles. And make sure to leave me the crumb trail if I’m interested in the topic.
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I know most of this stuff seems trivial when we’re talking about grander enterprise issues. I know the hot topics of late include blogs, video, mobile versions, Facebook apps and structured data. Sure those are cool BUT there still exist too many papers missing the fundamentals above.
Nothing else should even be a discussion at the table until these objectives have been met.

The end. Or is it?

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