Today is my wedding anniversary, so I haven’t had a chance to read the entire report yet, but I’ve skimmed through some of the online section.

This part really struck me:

If the Web is all about democratization of the news and the flow of information, there is an interesting chasm in the priority of news public interest. Through the year, the one area that the public consistently said the press gave too much attention to was foreign news.

To me that says people look for national/international news at national/international Web sites and they want local content on their local sites. I know we’ve been talking hyperlocal for years, but there hasn’t been a lot of research in what readers actually want out of a local site (the hyperlocal argument having been previously focused on local audience growth through search engines, because there’s much less competition for those local keywords).

Now that doesn’t mean foreign coverage is dying, far from it. It means that if you’re going to cover national and international events, cover them with a local angle. Or, conversely, compete for national/international markets on a different platform and scale that caters to people in the market for that kind of coverage.

Interesting stuff. I’ll have more analysis later in the week.

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?

InfoWorld mag folds print edition!

SF Chronicle in Trouble?

Would you pay for the news?

These are the news items of the weekend in my feed reader. Over and over again these three stories came up. Theres a subsection of bloggers that get some kind of sick pleasure out of the death of print. They sit on death watch and rarely come up with solutions. It’s highly annoying to read on a Sunday afternoon.

Still, I’m left feeling that these three memes share a common talking point. How does a print product make money online, while slowing the decline in readership of said print product?

At the beginning of this year, Scott Karp made the prediction that a major newspaper would fold its print product and go strictly online. A bold statement, sure, but he makes an apt point.

Newspapers are struggling in multiple areas of their business. Craigslist and eBay have left many classifieds sections in shambles. Why read the source, when you can get the spin from your favorite pajama media personality? Display advertising dollars are moving towards away from the shotgun approach and are targeting ads with pinpoint accuracy on the Web.

While this all may be bad news for newspapers, this certainly isn’t bad news for news business.

InfoWorld has some tough competition with TechCrunch and GigaOM, but the magazine won’t have the kind of trouble with the move to online that a small weekly newspaper would. Its market is with people who probably already read TechCrunch and GigaOM and who would relish the idea of pulling in their InfoWorld news to their favorite newsreader.

If anything, the move will make more money for InfoWorld, since serving up Web pages offers so much more bang for buck than printing a magazine page.

People who read newspapers, really, really like newspapers. Which is why this shouldn’t be happening (via Tim O’reilly):

Apparently, Phil Bronstein, the editor-in-chief, told staff in a recent “emergency meeting” that the news business “is broken, and no one knows how to fix it.” (”And if any other paper says they do, they’re lying.”) Reportedly, the paper plans to announce more layoffs before the year is out.

Such gloom and doom is unnecessary. Newspapers have hardly become irrelevant. TV news doesn’t have the manpower to go out hunting for hard news, so they swipe it from the papers. Bloggers, god bless them, have yet to show they can do much original reporting (techmeme exists for this very reason!). David Lazurus is right. Most bloggers just comment on work done by others. 90% of the time the link trail leads to original reporting from a newspaper.

So instead of bitching about this and complaining about newspapers being irrelevant, old newspaper fogies need to figure out how to harness the blogosphere.

The answer, I’m afraid, is not to make people pay for content with a short life span like news. Especially once that content is purchased by one or two people, it can be “commented” on by bloggers giving the gist of the ideas therein. Here’s a great explanation if you don’t get what I’m talking about.

If newspapers want to make it online, they should do what they do best: gather information for readers. It’s not the content people don’t want. It’s the delivery mechanism. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Build a better mousetrap instead of complaining about the inefficiencies of the one you already have.