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?

I have quite a few opinions about this Kurtz piece. If you haven’t already, you should read it before moving on with my disjointed rant below.

Regarding the Web stuff at the bottom of this article: I think fear of what others in the community have to say is not an excuse to try to quiet their voice.

By simply turning off a blog on your site, you don’t do much. There is absolutely zero cost involved for a blogger to a new site. They can set one up for free. Then they’re competing for the same attention every site, newspaper or otherwise, is vying for. To me, embracing blogs is more important than trying to compete with them in the long run.

Because some projects fail (by what measure?), does that mean newspapers shouldn’t try new things? No. Dozens of television programs get canceled every year because they don’t meet audience expectations. But that doesn’t mean TV programmers necessarily fall back on producing the same types of content over and over. Each new program tries to serve a specific segment of the overall market. You have winners and losers and hope that the balance keeps you in the black.

First: Be the best source to the most valuable markets, then branch out

Sometimes I feel like the newspaper industry tries too hard to be all things to all people, but ‘all people’ really turns out to be current, vocal subscribers.

There’s too much talk of ‘The Readers’ when we really mean ‘Some Readers.’

I’m tired of the vague subtext from editors that readers read the entire paper. I have never seen evidence to back this up. In fact, it’s quite the contrary on the Web.

People have habits, cater to them

Each section, each piece of content (articles, comics, games and even advertising) is serving only a segment of the entire readership. Most people don’t say ‘I want to be informed of the world around me.’ They say ‘what happened in last nights Twins game?’ ‘What stupid joke does Mallard Fillmore have today?’ ‘Why did Playmakers change it’s name?’ ‘Why were the police on my block yesterday?’ Readers want to know about content that is relevant to them in some way (individual interests, subjects, proximity all play a role).

I think the serendipitous nature of learning something new about the world from a paper or a Web site is secondary to the reason people actually pick up the news. It comes after they’ve done the crossword, checked the box scores, cut coupons, read the obits or scanned the front page.

The real ’silent majority’ don’t read your product (yet)

The man who talks about the ‘silent majority’ of subscribers is probably right. But, personally, I don’t think that group of people should be the largest slice of readers. Think of it like a pie chart. This man represents only a slice. The business objective is to grow the overall diameter of the pie, regardless of why people read the paper or go to a Web site. The way to do that isn’t to just listen to your readers. Listen to the people that aren’t reading, too. The San Jose Mercury News is on the right track.

None of this changes the fundamental role of the newspaper. We are still providing information to people who need it. We have to ask what information people want and package it in a way that serves a segment of the community.

Somewhere along the line, this industry forgot to ask that on a daily, monthly and quarterly basis.

Part one of this series can be found here. Part two, here.

Anecdotal evidence

A few of my colleagues in the journalism business refer to their jobs as “the paragraph factory.” These people are all under 30. Notice how, even though they’re gainfully employed by a newspaper, they don’t make reference to the printed product, rather their output.

Without knowing it, they’re starting to see the separation of content and form. Their job is to write words, they don’t really care about where those words are going to end up. So long as they get paid.

* * * I often spend lunch at a small Chicago-style deli about a block and a half from my office. There, I grab the local alt-weekly paper if I haven’t yet read it and sit down in front of the big screen TV that always has CNN on, unless there’s an afternoon Twins game. As I wait for my greasy, delicious food, I page through the paper, looking for something that interests me. I’ll listen to the TV, in hopes that some news comes up that I didn’t catch scanning the wires earlier that morning.

I imagine a lot of people in this field spend their lunches like this.

But there’s something new. I have a MotoQ. And I have a data plan through Sprint. And Google Reader has a mobile version.

When the alt-weekly, or CNN, or fails to provide anything to relevant to me, I turn to my phone and fire up my feed reader.

* * * As a freshman in J-school, I remember my Intro to Mass Communications professor talking about mobility.

You can’t easily carry a TV with you, he told us. Laptops are nice, but finding a Web connection is difficult. A newspaper is inherently the most mobile form of news media because you can fold it up, stick it under your arm and read it on the bus to work. You can read it at the table during breakfast, on in the afternoon on the crapper.

He might have been right then, but he’s not anymore.

* * * In the first part of this series, I talked about the synergy of the Web. Data and content are separate from form. Information on a newspaper page is stuck on a newspaper page. Information in a database can be output to a paper, to a Web site and to a mobile device.

When my journalist friends write news down, it ends up in a repository that gets put onto the Web, and into a paper. It is syndicated to readers via RSS and possibly picked up by other papers in our company.

When I’m at lunch, I can pull down any news I’m subscribed to via RSS. On a mobile device. Text, pictures and video come together on my phone. I can do the same on the bus…or on the crapper. And I’m engaging with the news. I’m sharing it like this.

As the technology gets better, so will my bathroom reading experience.

So it goes.

Howard Owens says something mobile could be the newspaper killer. I think mobile technologies in general are the newspaper killers. It is just a matter of time for smart phones with cheaper data plans and RSS and WiMax and whatever happens after the FCC’s 700 MHz auction to spread beyond the techy, business, and uber-user worlds into the hands of general consumers.

So it goes.

The game is changing…fast

This is bad news for news media, right? Wrong. It’s all opportunity to make money. It’s an expansion of reach. It’s the possibility of a wider aggregate audience.

This is a time of abundance of information. And want of information. Lots of want.

The news business has two purposes: 1) To provide information for its community. 2) To sell ads around that information.

Anybody who thinks this industry is more than that is greatly overreaching. Anybody who thinks this industry is less is vastly underestimating the business.

Many of the complaints I hear and read about money moving from newspaper and television advertising to the Web is that the dollar amount for a Web advertisement is substantially smaller than the dollar amount for a newspaper or TV spot.

I think the problem arises because newspaper types are still hung up on treating the Web as a digital copy of the paper; It is treated as another place for yesterdays news or an up-sell for print advertisers.

The Web is a wholly new product. Therefore it is a wholly new way to generate revenue.

The paragraphs and photos (and in the case of TV, the video) are the same in both products, yes. But the Web offers more opportunity than that.

“But there’s 80 billion things on there,” Larry King said of the Internet. That’s exactly why advertising is cheaper on the Web than in print. Resources aren’t scarce. Space is a commodity. Web ad inventory is determined by the size of your audience, not space or time.

Another point: because “there’s 80 billion things on there,” one Web site doesn’t cut it in the overall picture of the Web. Think about your local news providers. In your geographical region, there’s only a few sources for media. Scarcity necessitates top-down control of information.

But on the Web, we, meaning your former newspaper community, can fragment into communities bound by interest, not necessarily by location.

Hyperlocal news is an attempt rebuild communities, but don’t get hung up on the word local. It has little to do with physical location, and everything to do with relevance of a subject to a potential reader.

You’re no longer a part of your community

The news business has two purposes: 1) To provide information for its community. 2) To sell ads around that information.

Market fragmentation means that your former readers are looking more and more to other sources for information, because you do not provide the information they want or because you are no longer a member of their community.

These two issues are related. First, not providing information that people want makes you irrelevant to their community. Second, if you are providing information that is relevant to their community you are not where they are on the Web.

One Web site doesn’t cut it in the overall picture of the Web. You need to get out there and actively engage with your communities:

That means full text RSS feeds, active Facebook profiles maintained by real live staffers who drive discussions and answer questions, full-fledged mobile versions of newspaper.coms, Flickr accounts, YouTube channels, podcasts and videoblogs formatted for iTunes, and paying close attention to whatever’s next. (Ryan Sholin)

Bringing it all together

The paragraph factory mentality serves to coldly separate content from form. This is a good way to move forward by technically providing content across multiple platforms. But it feels top-down, megaphone, WE ARE MEDIA AND YOU ARE AUDIENCE. We need to move beyond this.

As reporters, producers, editors and publishers, we need to actively engage with our communities–our readership–on as much of a personal level as we can.

We, as news consumers, are also reporters, producers, editors and publishers. Give us a platform to share our content and information with you, as well as tools to share your content with others in our communities. We know our communities interests better than you do, so let us share easily. Let us be your megaphone.

This is how you grow an audience. And yes, it will be hard to meet our second purpose (to sell ads) on some platforms (like youtube or facebook) because we do not own those sites. But we’ll be engaging our communities, building relationships, and giving people opportunity to discover our products that pay our bills.

In that same Intro to Mass Comm class, my professor spent a large chunk of time one day talking about the letters to the editor section of the newspaper. It serves as a community bulletin board, he said.

Now, I think, all our content is a conversation.

Alan Jacobson takes a critical look at EyeTrack07. In his post, he notes that the study, which tracks via nerdy glasses what articles people look at when reading the news.

The study notes that when people choose to read something, they tend to read it (duh?). But the critical flaw in the study is that it doesn’t offer much on why people select certain news items over others, says Jacobson:

The key word in this sentence is “selected.” I don’t believe EyeTrack07 provides any data that speaks to how or why test subjects made selections – which is what editors really want to know.

The most amazing thing is the banality of this finding. Did we really need a study to tell us that people read most of the stories they select?

Moreover, what is the practical application of this information? How can an editor boost the readership of his or her newspaper knowing that people tend to read most of the stories they choose to read?

It’s an interesting study, but what about the mounds of data showing that readers on Web sites tend to be in and out of a site in a matter of minutes? Clearly, when people read the news in their natural habitat (early morning in their underwear, most likely) they don’t wear crazy glasses and linger over the material for 90 minutes.

Remember that PEJ study I keep talking about? Top reason people don’t read the paper is that they don’t have enough time.

Maybe the correct solution to declining subscriptions is to force your readers to read for 90 minutes.