I’m a little shocked, though not surprised, by the cheerleading of these 10 ways newspapers are using social media to save the industry.

Few, if any, of the things listed will save the industry.

Let me start by defining “save the industry.”

Newspapers are a poor distribution method in comparison to digital distribution, though they are not unprofitable. However, they do not support large enough margins to overcome the massive debt most newspaper companies took on before the bottom completely fell out. Let me say that again. Newspapers are still profitable business, but the profits they generate can not pay the banks back. Blame the banks for handing out huge loans to newspaper executives who expected to sustain profit margins well over 15 percent. But blame doesn’t save anything.

The Internet will not save newspapers. So, suggesting that the Seattle P-I or Rocky Mountain News or any other former newspaper company go online-only is not helpful. Going online-only doesn’t magically make bankruptcy and the loans that lead to bankruptcy go away. If it were that simple, newspapers would make more than a handful of dollars from digital revenue and probably wouldn’t be in this big of a mess to begin with, since margins can run considerably higher for online media.

The newspapers that will eventually die in the coming months and years will do so under the weight of their debt, their bravado and their inabilty to adapt to rapid changes in the market. But let me say this again, the Internet won’t save the newspaper. It cannot support the cost of distributing the newspaper in its current form.

“Saving the industry” is not a matter of redefining journalism. It is a matter of recapturing lost revenue. Journalism isn’t necessarily broken. It is still an incredibly cheap way to deliver warm bodies to advertisers. But the core business of newspapers is not journalism. It is advertising. What’s killing newspapers isn’t an over abundance of information on the Web, it’s that the huge piles of advertising revenue evaporated from newspapers and they neglected building a solid business foundation online.

It was not an overnight thing. The bottom didn’t fall out because the recession hit. The bottom fell out because, for years, newspapers didn’t respond to the craigslists, the Monsters and the eBays of the world. Upwords of half their revenue slipped away as they sat by and watched. They focused too heavily on “hyper-local” without understanding what that actually meant. Instead of building huge networks of granular advertising, building on the reach of each Web site, they walled themselves off, they spent much of their energy focused on replicating online what worked for print. The display ad mentality, the overzealous protection of the “core” print product and the shameless lack of foresight and innovation, day after day, month after month, year after year, put most newspapers in a horrible position for turning a large and sustainable profit online.

It might be too late to save the industry. However, I think there’s still a glimmer of hope, though it dims every moment wasted on micropayments and absurdly drawn out conversations of whether or not allow comments on the site (flip a fucking coin already).

That hope doesn’t come from twitter. It doesn’t come from APIs or live blogging. It doesn’t come from attempts to attract more readers online or false hope in the Amazon Kindle or Google as saviors. Many news sites already have plenty of traffic. Lack of traffic or want of news is not the problem here. The problem is that the industry hasn’t properly figured out how to profit from that traffic. This is not an audience problem. This is not a journalism problem. This is entirely a business problem. Our problem has been that we’re entirely focused on the wrong damn thing.

The newspaper business has never been in the journalism business. Journalism is a means to an end (an end that unfortunately may no longer support the luxury of  “wasteful” spending on bureaus and months long investigations that turn up little to no news). The true core business is not newspaper production and distribution, it’s advertising.

If you want to save the industry, do it by focusing on things that will generate revenue. If people aren’t buying run-of-site display ads online, it’s because they’re ineffectual and expensive. Newspapers need to stop managing dwindling client lists and start actively seeking out new advertisers. To do that, they need to have the products in place to target new advertisers, to increase the reach of their network and the right technology to segment their audience.

They need data. I’m still surprised that so many news sites haven’t bothered to tap into the wealth of user information available through Facebook Connect. Instead they’re spending their time creating pages within Facebook that merely link to their sites full of ineffectual advertising, if they have any advertising at all. Or worse, spending gobs of time and money reinventing the wheel by building hyper-local social networks from scratch.

I have a few posts in the works that deeply address targeting new advertisers, increasing reach and segmenting audience. They’ll all go up over the next few days.

I’ve been avoiding this micropayment conversation since last Thursday. I don’t really think there’s more to add to the conversation beyond this. So, I’ll keep this post short and sweet.

I didn’t bother reading the Time piece. I went to it, but then I was served a pop under that snuck by my blocker. I have a policy of not using sites with interstitial, pop up and under ads, and pre-roll video ads lasting more than 5 seconds.

But, right now, I have 15 tabs open, all blog posts containing conversations about what’s in the Time piece. I saw The Daily Show piece. I’ve read about 900 tweets on the subject.

Micropayment that.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin.

How about we stop talking about “Online Newspapers” and start talking about how to build kick ass Web sites?

Note: If you’re reading this in your feed reader, this post is likely best read at my site, due to some formatting. Stray h4s here and there in the feed may occasionally chop up your reading experience. Sorry for the inconvenience. — Zac

For the past few weeks I’ve had a fairly angry post sitting in my drafts. I can’t bring myself to hit the publish button, no matter how hard I edit the damn thing. The gist of it is that I’ve become increasingly annoyed with the business strategies—or lack thereof—at most newspaper Web sites. There’s absolutely zero creativity going on at most companies, which is troubling as it feeds the myth that “online might not provide a reasonable solution for dwindling print revenue.” Staff reduction does little for the bottom line, rather it jukes the stats by driving the bottom further down.

That post is going to sit in the drafts queue forever. For the most part, it’s unnecessarily mean. And full of math. If you want to see my random angry outbursts, follow me on twitter, where I happen to explode occasionally.

However, amidst the rant, I think I had some useful points to be made.

“Lastly, our study shows that newspapers are trying to improve their web programs and experimenting with a variety of new features. However, having actually reviewed all these newspaper websites it is hard not to be left with the impression that the sites are being improved incrementally on the margins. Newspapers are focused on improving what they already have, when reinvention may be what is necessary in order for the industry to come out of the current crisis on the other side.” — The Blevins Report.

Media companies must sever the bindings that drag business in the long run. Market fluidity, the key to the successes of the few that weather the coming storm, will only come through agility and unyielding focus on the future. Mammals didn’t inherit the Earth because the dinosaurs died. The dinosaurs’ extinction was a product of an outside force that lead to a more hospitable environment for mammals. Yes the majority of revenue comes from the ‘core’ print product, the ‘core’ broadcast product. But we aren’t in the ‘newspaper’ business. We aren’t in the ‘broadcast’ business. We are, by definition through ownership of web domains, in the information business. We’re in the advertising business. The medium is just that—a medium for passing information and advertising, connecting audience in search of information to business in search of audience. The Web is best suited to show measurable results to advertisers looking for ways to not spend advertising during a recession.

Now, I know most of you understand this concept. I’m not trying to patronize. However, the gap between knowledge and action shows few signs of narrowing. I’d like to turn some of the issues that must be addressed (preferably months ago) on their heads:

“It is fair to surmise that newspaper stocks last year got trounced twice as badly as the broader market , because investors have not seen any plausible strategies from publishers to reverse the accelerating declines in readership, advertising and profitability that have been under way since 2006.” — Alan Mutter

• Media sites think too small with regard to scope.
• Media sites think too big with regard to advertising.
• Media companies don’t disrupt. They allow themselves to be disrupted.
• Vendors, ever the albatrosses, hang heavily around our necks.
• We place too many barriers in front of potential advertisers.
• Our advertising products stink when compared the competition despite our obvious advantages.
• We tend to think in terms of what the advertiser wants, when we should be thinking about what the advertiser needs: results.

Scope

“Major advertisers such as automotive, financial services, retail and real estate will not return any time soon; they will be diminished and different when they rebound a year from now. That is a disaster for local media, which could easily see more than half their ad revenue base wiped out in 2009.” — Dianne Mermigas

Dyed-in-the-wool newspaper folk think in terms of their geographical markets. In a time when geographical monopolies existed, this lead to sound business practices. Online, where geography is little more than a Google map and an entry on Wikipedia, media companies need to think bigger.

I’ve made the argument before that newspapers should create content for the Web that travels beyond the bounds of geography. It should scale to regional, national and international audiences. Hyperlocal can mean more than place. It can be ideas, too. Niche bloggers figured this out and quite a few have made a killing doing it.

The same philosophy should be applied to advertising. You can’t do that with banner ads and sponsorships alone. A business that manufactures widgets locally, but sells them online, sells them online with the expectation they can reach a wider customer base. Selling them a generic banner ad on the weather page of their local site probably doesn’t do much for their reach, to say nothing of a direct impact on sales.

Media companies with many properties tend to reserve networked advertising for the largest advertisers, which is absurd. An impression is an impression no matter how deep the pocket. Your job is to connect the advertiser to the potential customer, despite location. Well, not despite location, but despite your concept of location. Who does the advertiser want to reach and which audience segment is likeliest to buy?

This holds especially true for vertical classifieds. People are willing to travel for the right car, the right apartment, the right house. So why wouldn’t people travel, at the very least digitally, for the right widget? Who cares if the widget-maker is local? Everything is local in the right context. Again, when you’re online local doesn’t have to mean place.

Microscope

“Internet publishers have forced marketers into a straightjacket of standard ad units too small for brands to breathe. If the sector is to capture a larger share of brand advertising from magazines and television, the creative needs to have more impact.” — Nick Denton

At the same time media companies think too narrowly in terms of what money they can go after, they think too broadly.  Look at where building business models on the back of employement, auto sales and Realtors has left the newspaper business. It made sense even a couple years ago, and still makes sense in a few markets, but I wouldn’t want to hinge my business on toxic industries. We have to reevaluate our budget forecasting, and we have to accept the current fiasco for what it is. Continuing to view these industries as the backbone of your business model is akin to looking at a paraplegic and thinking he has scoliosis. Either way, it’s a shitty situation, not a silver lining.

Big retailers, tied just as tightly around the neck as the above industries look to be cutting back their advertising bugdets, too.  Despite what some people in our industry still think, the consumer market just won’t pay for content online; Let’s throw the transaction model out the window for now. Those who have tried it haven’t shown meaningful, sustainable revenue. Newspapers haven’t yet properly responded to craigslist and eBay with classifieds solutions that work (by generating much money or by being of any use to people). So where do you turn?

The first step may be to diversify your advertising offerings. Figure out your advantages with particular audiences and move on businesses that want to reach those people. Not just with those that already advertise in the paper on on air, but also go for the businesses that haven’t advertised in a newspaper or on television for years because the price point was too high. Fan out. One thousand dollar bills spends the same as a hundred $100 bills.

In order to fan out we need to become more sophisticated in tracking and segmenting audience. We need to become more sophisticated in putting the most effective ads in front of the right audiences. We need to better understand contextual advertising and demographics targeting, among other metrics.

Google, for example, likely already provides contextual advertising to your pages through the Adsense program. Google scans the content of your page and delivers ads in their inventory that match up well with the content. The first problem with Adsense, though, is that you have no idea what your cut of the profit is. Google just cuts you a check and you have to hope you’re getting a fair share. The second problem is that you already know what content is in your databases, so why do you need to farm out advertising placement to Google?

This is a technological issue. It can’t be done with manpower alone. It’s just not cost effective to send reps after lots of small potato advertisers. So, something needs to change technologically to make these sales more efficient. There isn’t a media company in existence that can do technology the way Google can, but isn’t providing a reasonably good contextual advertising solution, taking 100 percent of the profit better than an amazingly good contextual ad solution for a vague percentage?

And it’s not just ad placement that needs to become more sophisticated. Have you ever tried to buy an ad on a newspaper site? It’s a horrible, horrible experience! PDFs of unintelligible rate cards, or worse, simply a fax number for a rep would drive any new customer to Google, Yahoo and Facebook where they’d have a targeted campaign up, paid for and running within a half hour–without the BS jargon and with better metrics to track the effectiveness of a campaign.

Part of the problem, which I’ll get into in greater detail in a bit, is that newspapers buy into vendors that focus only on the print product. The Web interfaces are an afterthought. Don’t believe me? Try to buy a classified ad on any major newspaper site near you. Do it now. This post isn’t going anywhere.

At a time when potential advertisers want to hold onto their money as tightly as possible, we’re making making the process of buying into our systems convoluted and burying effectiveness in poor information architectures.  The cash flow must be as liquid as possible, not obfuscated in cryptic rate cards and piss-poor online buy solutions.

Getting back to contextual advertising with a simple example, start by thinking about how your advertisers could change their campaigns based real customer interest. If you sell a sponsorship on the weather page, why make it such a broad advertisement for a retailer that it becomes meaningless? The content of that retailer’s ad is their brand, just as your editorial content is your brand. If the forecast calls for rain, the advertiser should be able to sell their umbrellas. If the forecast calls for snow, the ad should be for their shovels. That’s something useful to everyone: Readers, advertisers and media companies (since it’s technically two different ads, and if you’re charging for click-throughs, you’ll probably see a spike).

Lastly, niche content abounds. Mommy sites, prep sports sites, etc. crop up everywhere. They’re a constant trend from media companies. Most of them kinda suck or at the very least fall prey to entropy through mismanagement, but you have a real opportunity with them to do something beyond sponsorships and run-of-site banner advertising. Editorial products like these prove perfect playgrounds for aggregating an entire arsenal of contextualized advertising you may already have but don’t yet realize; Niche classifieds, demographically-targeted email marketing, video ads, search advertising all work extremely effectively on these sites, especially when the scope of the site exceeds the bounds of the narrow print circulation market I mentioned in the previous section.

The rope to hang ourselves

When disruptors like craigslist take a chunk of classified sales from newspapers, newspapers have been slow to react. Throwing up your hands in defeat solves nothing. Not changing your product to match the competition’s offering does nothing. Yet we see it again and again. Craiglist moves into a market and the local papers don’t react appropriately.

“How do you compete with free?” “We’re not craigslist, so you can’t compare our product to theirs?” Both counts are simply ridiculous. You can compete with free. You can give away your classifieds and still make money from them.

Rather than selling the Web as an upsell, why not give away classifieds online and sell the paper as an upsell? You’ll garner more pageviews that way which can turn into ad dollars. You can sell premium placement for classified ads, the same way Facebook marketplace does. You can come up with solutions that contextually tie paid items from classifieds to content.

My wife sells discarded library books and other used books on Amazon. She makes a decent income doing it. When I asked her why she sells on Amazon, and not craigslist, Facebook or her own Web site, where she wouldn’t have to pay Amazon’s fees, she tells me it’s because Amazon does all the advertising for her. She simply has to manage inventory and Amazon will put her products in front of people likely to buy them, through their own search and recommendation engine, but also across the Web through their affiliate advertising program.

Yet classifieds pages on news sites tend to be tucked away, running lists of text and, if you’re extremely lucky, you have a search bar and a dropdown menu. Boring!

Over the past year we’ve seen some interesting experiements in how to disrupt on the editorial side. Reporter blogs are ever more present. Sites like The Batavian and Northfield.org have taken on the task of directly disrupting local media. Everyblock turned granular information gathering on it’s head, effectively proving that “the story” isn’t all there is to news. Where is that entrepreneurship on the business side?

When we ourselves don’t disrupt, we allow ourselves to be disrupted. There is nothing stopping the Batavians from moving into markets that already have established sites. Even a half-assed site will still pull in a certain percentage of marketshare. And marketshare means dollars. If done right, it could mean substanial revenue.

The rope goes beyond being disruption. It represents an unyielding reluctance to try anything new and untested. Denton is right about the IAB standards. They suck. Why follow a standard that sucks?

The noose

What I’m suggesting here requires development, taking a hard look at your assests and figuring out what you can build on or make better. The costs upfront will be expensive to develop, for sure. But in the long run you’ll be better positioned for any sudden changes.

Building it yourself means you have complete control over the final product. When we buy into vendor systems like Legacy, newsbank, print-focused classifieds vendors and more, we essentially give up that right to have complete control over the product. In the case of many vendors, you don’t even get to have their system running on your domain (in most cases, you can’t even fake it through a DNS mask). So when someone does a search on your site and that brings them to newsbank, you can say goodbye to any search advertising opportunity you may have had had you done it yourself. When someone goes to Legacy to view an obit, kiss massive pageview numbers goodbye.

Sure, you can advertise on these pages in some cases, but chances are you’re looking at another vendor or you’re further tying your future to your vendors success.

That isn’t to say all vendors are bad. A few give you complete customizability and even offer APIs your IS and Web teams can tap to further extend your product. But vendor contracts have to be chosen with care. Newspapers need to decompartmentalize their divisions so that a descision for, say, print classifieds, doesn’t tie the hands of the people on the Web–and vice versa.

A certain level of openness has to break through when it comes to vendors. No longer can you sit with vendor products that focus almost entirely on the print operation. No longer can vendors deny developers access to a companies own data via modern technological standards.

The Associated Press doesn’t divvy out a quarter as much shit as some vendors do, yet the AP is on the chopping block at many companies (I agree with dumping the AP for a better model, but that same business logic needs to be applied to every aspect of an operation).

I know not every paper can afford to hire developers and I know most programming talent doesn’t want to work for “old” media, but for those that do have the resources, you’re sitting on an opportunity to become that vendor that doesn’t completely suck.

When life gives you lemons…

Let’s face a few facts: Nothing a newspaper can do will stop the migration of readers (and ultimately money) from printed product to the Web. No redesign, no layoffs, no consultant will change the will of the information consumer. I’m not suggesting print will completely die. No medium has yet desimated another medium, only forced new technologies to deploy the old media. Video hardly killed the radio star, but the addition of new technology certainly changed the game–and with it, new business models were forged.

“Ads are the revenue but in all cases they are tag along with content. My wife likes to say that food is just a vehicle for the sauce. Content is the vehicle for the ads. If the content isn’t being consumed the ads aren’t being delivered, regardless of the media used.” — A commenter at Lost Remote

When I worked in television, I had a manager say to me upon the release of the iPod video, “Nobody will want to use that when HD becomes more prevalent.” He was flat wrong.

Now on the broadcast side, you’ll not only become more screwed over by consumer tendencies, but also the networks cutting you out of the loop to go directly to consumers through iTunes, Hulu, Netflix and other on-demand services. The technology for High Definition TV over IP is already here. It’s just a matter of waiting for the home broadband lines to catch up. To compound this, I can’t honestly see DTV lasting more than a decade (at most) before the earnest discussion of opening the spectrum to Internet services begins. 20 years (at most) until it actually happens and local TV is just a Web site nobody goes to.

Too many reps continue to sell the newspaper, adding the Web as an up-sell or worse, bundling the Web with a print buy. Move beyond that model. Sell your audience. Again, connect your advertiser to the people most likely to buy a product. A run-of-site display ad packaged with a print run makes sense for an advertiser looking to reach mass audience. But advertisers also want targetted results, which you can easily give them online.

That means unbundled your advertising. It means giving more advertisers easier access to your audience. It means creating pricing structures that allow for a wide spectrum of ways to interact with potential customers. Let your advertisers buy slices of that spectrum in increments.

…Make lemonade

“Sounding a more positive note, [Russ] Stanton said the [LA] Times’ Web site revenue now exceeds its editorial payroll costs.” — via David Westphal

When the Wright brothers sought to crack the problem of man-powered flight, they began by breaking the big problem (flight) into smaller problems they could digest and solve individually: Lifting surfaces (wings), a method of balancing and controlling the aircraft and propulsion. Each of those problems could be broken down into more solvable problems. But unlike other inventors, like Sir George Cayley, the brothers sought to solve each problem with consideration to the final design at the outset. When they made a change to the propulsion system, they took into account any redesigns needed for the wings and controls.

Product development works the same way. When a website manager decides to launch RSS feeds, as many newspapers did in the past couple years, the consequences of what that means for other products needs to be taken into account. A strategic change shouldn’t happen in a vaccuum. Adding RSS feeds means opportunity for advertising, but according to the Blivens Report it doesn’t look like many newspapers thought the entire strategy through. Adding those feeds would mean making changes to the advertising strategy. It would mean making changes in how managers calculate metrics.

The promised land: Building an elegant business application. Why make your advertisers sign into a separate account to manage their advertising, when you could give all your registered user accounts access to purchase an array of ads–or merely post free classifieds? When you create something like a marketplace database for businesses, allow paid businesses to manage their inventory through the same classifieds dashboard, giving them options to attach their ads to certain segments of audience. Allow them to purchase certain types of display and text advertising easily, as well. Give advertisers feedback through good reports (maybe paid classifieds users get data on how many people viewed their listing, for example).

The point here is that web forms don’t need a commission, they work on holidays and weekends and they don’t ever sleep. Obfuscating the various ways we can take money from advertisers is a horrible plan, all things considered. Keeping products clear and always available is key to any future success newspapers hope to expect online this year.

And any other newsroom that feels it necessary to build their business on the desires of the rubbernecks

I’m disappointed to see the Herald ran a fatal accident story, complete with photograph on Sunday’s front page.

While I concede that deaths in public are a matter of public record, I cannot see the public value of giving these types of stories undue weight on the front page.

What news value do such stories have? Who do they impact beyond the people directly involved? At what magnitude does a rather unimpressive accident become so important that it be splashed across the front page? How can you consider something so routine unusual enough to disrupt the balance of fair coverage? One would expect that a Pulitzer-winning paper would have a firm grasp of such things, but maybe all the decent people at the Herald left for greener pastures.

Was it because a moped was involved? If that’s the case, by putting the story on the front page are you implying that mopeds and scooters are intrinsically dangerous? Why don’t you grow some stones and report on the safety of these vehicles instead of using someone’s death for your own purposes?

You have set a terrible precedent. Will you always put these accidents on the front page? I hope you’re not stupid enough to let that happen.

And the photo. Did you stop to consider the harm running a photo of the vehicle could cause? By not releasing the name of the victim, you understood that the family likely had not been notified. And yet you gave enough information (location, age, vehicle) to identify the victim without actually naming him. Did you even ask if the family had been notified? I doubt it. I know that the much of the victim’s family, including one of his daughters, had not been informed by the time you published.

Maybe I’m misguided. Maybe thousands of 63-year-old men ride their white mopeds up and down that residential street every day. Or maybe your laziness and disregard for decades of journalism’s ethical standards is the real issue here.

“People read it.” That is your only excuse. You know it and I know it.

I have never understood media’s desire to pander to rubbernecks and gawkers. It is one thing to set aside your emotions to report a story, another to set aside your humanity to sell litter lining. To call you vultures would be incredibly unfair to vultures.

No wonder this business is failing. You’ve lost touch with the people in your communities that give a damn. You’ve traded them in for suckers and rubes. And you know what they say about birds of a feather…

I’m mostly ranting here, so I apologize if it comes off a bit scatterbrained.

I want to believe that Howard Owens is right, that the Philly memo means they’ll break the trend and differentiate their products in a meaningful way. It’s a provocative argument. But I don’t believe that’s what’s actually going on at the Inquirer. At least not from what I read in the memo:

“We won’t post those stories online until they’re in print.”

“We’ll make the decision to press the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up The Inquirer on their doorstep.”

“For our bloggers, especially, this may require a bit of an adjustment. Some of you like to try out ideas that end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first.”

In regards to breaking news: “I want to re-emphasize that being first with the news is all-important.”

That, to me, is saying that your Web site is little more than radio news, with a few news “packages” you can send off for antediluvian awards and pats-on-the-back. You will only focus on the breaking coverage, and then you’ll shovel the paper online at a later time. Oh! And if you use your blog to collaborate and tweak your print stories, maybe you won’t get to do that any more.

When I think of “Web-first” I don’t think of running a nearly-finished, print-ready story, like so many supposedly Web-first shops operate. I think of a series of quick updates, watching a story build, collaborating with other reporters from multiple angles and engaging the public for their opinion and their expertise. That’s how I envision it.

But basically saying you’re not willing to let the network be the network, that you might not be willing to build the majority of your content from the ground up in front of people? That frightens me. What makes you any different than radio or TV, if this is your grand plan for the Web?

To me, this smells not like differentiating a product. It smells a lot like reallocating scant resources to the print product so they can use the Web mostly as a place to shovel their content. And shovel it later than they were shoveling their content previously.

Lastly, this isn’t a business model. It’s a defensive move to try to protect the print product while sticking their tongue out at their online readership.

I’ve been following a meme this week regarding the fragmentation of conversations in the blogosphere. I’ve collected some of these posts at del.icio.us.

There appears to be a bit of backlash against conversations moving away from commenting ecosystems within a blogger’s community (his or her blog) and onto systems like twitter, FriendFeed, and other sites.

Blogs use technologies like pings and trackbacks to let other blogs links to one another, unifying the conversations that happen around a given topic of discussion. But Paul Buchheit, of FriendFeed, writes in his blog:

Although comments are one of our most popular features, they are also our most controversial feature. If you believe that there should only be a single, unified discussion, then the extra fragmentation caused by FriendFeed will seem like a step in the wrong direction. In fact, not only is there a separate discussion on FriendFeed, there may be hundreds of separate discussions within FriendFeed on the very same topic or link (because different people are sharing the link, and different people have different friend groups).

Maybe it’s because I work at a newspaper company and watch journalists miss conversations about their content on a daily basis, but this doesn’t seem revolutionary to me. People have always had conversations about content separate from the content itself. Thankfully I’m not the only one not amazed by this idea. Terry Heaton:

It is ironic, to say the least, that the blogosphere — the place where stories were lifted from the mainstream press for “discussion” — is now faced with the same issue that mainstreamers have been fighting for years.

Conversations happen everywhere. My friends and I talk about all sorts of things, as do yours I assume. We talk about LOST, random YouTube videos, books and blog posts and we have no intention on communicating with the originator.

I describe the difference between old media and new media to classes using the following two slides.

With old media, families would sit around reading the paper, watching Cronkite and Jack Benny, listening to FDR’s Fireside Chats. The media would be broadcast to them and these audiences would process this information. Being social creatures, we’d sit around the dinner table and talk to those in our physical vicinity, but we’d have no idea what our neighbors were talking about. Barriers like distance from our neighbors kept us from communicating with each other on a larger scales without mass media tools like printing presses and broadcast towers. People in the left house had no idea what was going on in the right house.

But technology breaks down those barrier. Loud cell phone talkers can broadcast their one-on-one conversations over the phone to everyone around them. People who post on their blogs can talk directly to individuals, but also in front of the crowd.

But now we’re seeing new barriers. Instead of distance, we’re running into “too many places to converse.” It’s harder to keep up with conversations you’re following because they’re happening in nooks and crannies you wouldn’t think to look. Too few opportunities has turned into too many to keep track.

Everybody wants different types of spaghetti. As content fragments, so too should the conversations. Some people like chunky spaghetti and some of those chunky spaghetti lovers also like spicy spaghetti. If you write on your chunky spaghetti blog about a type of spicy spaghetti (that happens to be chunky), of course people will take that single post of yours and incorporate it into spicy spaghetti communities that you may not necessarily monitor.

This is how pollination works. It’s the definition of word of mouth marketing. You want people to take something from your community and jam it into their communities. You want this to happen again and again, constantly bouncing a brand or idea from community to community virally and organically. Fragmentation is good in this regard. However it requires giving up control.

This idea that conversations have to happen in your ecosystem or you will lose page views is silly. You should experience an increase in page views from users unaware of your brand, idea or content in the first place. You’ve made new connections to new markets. Tap it! Don’t bitch about it!

ReadWriteWeb offers some essential tools to help content producers keep up with conversations happening outside their ecosystems.

Use them to follow conversations and to discover new niche communities you may wish to join.

The Las Vegas Sun recently launched a new Web site and I have a few criticisms. Overall, I think every paper in the country should find a way to emulate what the Sun is doing in terms of markup and general site design. I question a few other tactics.

The Good

Light use of photos and graphics makes the main graphics pop out and the page load extremely fast. Kudos.

The Sun has the most elegant markup I’ve seen on any current newspaper Web sites. With no inline styles, the table-less design will make re-skinning the site a snap down the road, should they feel the need to update. Separating content from format will save them months.

Item’s that need to be presented big are presented big, rather than simply on top. I love that the editorial picks share space above the fold with the constantly updated blogs that feed news throughout the day.

The Hi Def video looks beautiful. It’s well presented on both the homepage and the multimedia page. That you may download many videos in popular formats or embed them in your site is a step in the right direction.

The search! Simple yet powerful date span search aids in honing down keywords. Keywords are great for Google searches but news searchers generally seek specific items.

Human-readable URLs!

iCal exportable calendar!

The Bad

No ads? I love it, personally. But what a horrible business model! As of now, there seems to be no monetization strategy. That’s really bad news if you’re pushing video, let alone Hi Def video. Obviously an ad strategy will come, though I wonder how they came to the decision to roll out new site before building in ads. Seems silly to lose the revenue for no apparently good reason.

Feeds only exist for main sections, blogs and general comments throughout the site. But doesn’t some of that content overlap? I think we, as an industry, should be moving toward ever more granular feeds. As far as I can tell there aren’t any tags on news items. I’d like to subscribe to news, calendar events and blogs that only mention, say, McCarran airport.

The feeds are also partial text. Yuck.

Commenting requires registration. While a lot of anonymous comments amount to crap that must be moderated, a lot of good discussion comes from anonymous comments, too. I think the trade-off is worth it.

The Hi Def video sets you apart as far as a craft news goes, but what about commodity news? What about constantly feeding your site with brief video updates? Maybe the bloggers eventually do that, but I don’t see a site surviving on well produced Hi Def video alone. Not yet. Though, I really don’t know the Las Vegas broadband market well enough to comment. I do think the current strategy, while beautifully executed, feels old media. It lacks serious disruption against other competitors in the video arena.

The site, as of now, relies heavily on story-centric items. I’d like to see a solid push for database items. (For a start: There’s a LOT of money in Vegas, where is it all going?)

Update: Yoni Greenbaum just emailed this to me:

It looks like the lack of ads is the results of the JOA which has Las Vegas Review-Journal handling the advertising, circulation, production and marketing functions of the Sun, but having no involvement in the Sun’s website. In addition, the terms of the JOA “guarantees a second newspaper voice in the community”, so maybe online revenue is not a concern.

There’s some great discussion at editor on the verge regarding the full vs. partial feed debate.

Obviously, as a user, I’m on the side of full text feeds. But I think the business argument against full text feeds is exactly the same as those early arguments about putting print content on the Web. That argument, clearly, has been wrong.

Partial feed myths like “feeds take away page views” or “the market isn’t prepared to advertise via RSS” are stupid.

Feeds take away page views when you offer no extra value on your site. I’d argue that they can increase page views if you do it right, turn your best readers into your marketing department. Give them the tools.

Secondly, the market isn’t prepared to advertise via RSS because you’re selling based on page views and impressions rather than reach (or better yet, click-throughs). You, the advertisers, have not yet educated the market on the value of RSS. Instead you’re perpetuating these fears and myths of RSS while blogs and other sites come in and cut you at the heels for advertisers in this marketplace.

Advertising, like content, needs to be relevant to the readers. Don’t just give a sports page feed and attach ads from the local sporting goods store. Give people granular feeds and pump in ads from smaller, more relevant advertisers.

What do you think?

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.

Besides starting this blog this year (and this one and this one and this one), I have to say despite all my screaming and yelling and general frustration, I’m pretty pleased with what’s been going on over the last 12 months.

Newspapers seem to be getting it. It’s slow going, for sure, but many newspapers now see the power of the Web. The greatest coups for online staffs have come from breaking news situations like the Virginia Tech shooting and the California fires. This is good. I’m not one for predictions, but I expect to see some really awesome stuff happening in 2008. I expect TV sites will finally start to come around to the Web and I expect many of them to fail miserably again. I expect to see more sites fully embrace simple technologies like RSS and I expect them to figure out how to monetize them. I expect to see a large blog network or two purchased by a traditional media powerhouse.

We’ve seen some truly great things happen in the world of community journalism, the smuggled Myanmar videos being the prime example. We’ve seen many newspapers hand local TV stations their asses with online video (and we can still do better). New York Times tore down their pay wall and they’ve only begun to see the benefits. Reporters and editors, although still somewhat begrudgingly have taken blogs under their wing.

Declining print readership and online advertising sales not making up the loss continue to concern publishers. Eventually those streams will cross. But only if we do things right this time. The fact remains that I can find breaking news faster on twitter and Wikipedia than the papers that supposedly serve the markets where these events occur. Omaha.com was a disaster to never be repeated. Pay walls unfortunately still block thousands, possibly millions of readers from content. Papers still fail to understand search engines. Papers have no idea whatsoever how to turn print-comparable profit on the Web. It’s still being sold like the print product. Site designs must improve. We can do better.

Believe it or not, this was my first full year as a full-time “web guy.” My background is in TV and before that, alternative print. If I can jump head-first into this, so can you. I hope publishers start to take the time to understand their “web guys.” Let’s make 2008 awesome.