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.

Ted Gup writes for The Chronicle of Higher Education:

I teach a seminar called “Secrecy: Forbidden Knowledge.” I recently asked my class of 16 freshmen and sophomores, many of whom had graduated in the top 10 percent of their high-school classes and had dazzling SAT scores, how many had heard the word “rendition.”

Not one hand went up.

…

As a journalist, professor, and citizen, I find it profoundly discouraging to encounter such ignorance of critical issues. But it would be both unfair and inaccurate to hold those young people accountable for the moral and legal morass we now find ourselves in as a nation. They are earnest, readily educable, and, when informed, impassioned.

…

Then, too, there is the explosion of citizen journalism. An army of average Joes, equipped with cellphones, laptops, and video cameras, has commandeered our news media. The mantra of “We want to hear from you!” is all the rage, from CNN to NPR; but, although invigorating and democratizing, it has failed to supplant the provision of essential facts, generating more heat than light. Many of my students can report on the latest travails of celebrities or the sexual follies of politicos, and can be forgiven for thinking that such matters dominate the news — they do. Even those students whose home pages open onto news sites have tailored them to parochial interests — sports, entertainment, weather — that are a pale substitute for the scope and sweep of a good front page…

Obviously, I’m not so critical of technology, because it is only a tool and can go either way. But I question a few of the premises in the piece.

How can we add good context to news pieces? Do a Google News search for “Iraq.” Where do you even begin to understand the complexity of the past five years? It’s like trying to watch LOST in the middle of this season. Without that background information most of this information is useless. Click on most any story at Google News and you can’t continue to dig for more information about the subject, nearly every page is a dead end; You just get one article about one small piece of the larger picture. It’s incredibly disappointing. On the Web, we should always strive to leave a trail of bread crumbs with relevant links.

Compare news sites to Wikipedia where I can click for hours.

How can we make important information relevant to people that may not normally seek this kind of information out? Too often I feel like this industry throws dry but important information out there without linking it to real human concerns. People aren’t usually one trick ponies. They care about many different topics, some run parallel and some topics cross paths. We should find angles where multiple topics meet, wedge information about one important topic into the conversation about another. And make it relevant!

Citizen journalism and the “We want to hear from you!” aspect of it is kind of silly as an idea. But to assume that because people with cell phone cameras and such can’t commit acts of journalism is folly. This gets back to the broader picture. Gathering information people in our community collect, placed in a thoughtful, relevant context, only adds to the value of our own reporting. Obviously there is a lot of noise out there, but we should strive to act as the filter, to get to the signal that matters.

Just look through some of these photos from the N.D. Democratic convention to get an idea of what acts of journalism people in our communities are doing.

All of this feeds off itself. Broader context through citizen journalism adds more bread crumbs and helps humanize news. Continuity of the overall picture helps target news items to the right group(s) of people. Well informed people can provide more (and better) acts of journalism.

In order to compete you must cooperate

That statement seems counterintuitive, but hear me out.

Consider the prisoner’s dilemma, a classic study in game theory:

	I keep quiet	I snitch
You keep quiet	We both serve 1 year	I go free, you get 5 years
You snitch	You go free, I get 5 years	We both serve 3 years

Let’s say you and I rob a bank. We’re brought into separate interrogation rooms and the cops give us options: snitch on the other guy and go free or keep quiet and risk getting 3 years if we both snitch or 5 if only one of us snitches. Can you trust me? Can I trust you?

Obviously the matrix has arbitrary numbers. The worst case scenario for both of us is if we both snitch on each other, serving a total of 6 years, the best is if we both keep quiet, serving a total of 2 years.

What if we changed the matrix?

	I keep quiet	I snitch
You keep quiet	We both serve 3 years	I go free, you get 10 years
You snitch	You go free, I get 10 years	We both serve 4 years

Let’s assume we were terribly arrogant about our bank robbing prowess or just stupid like most criminals and didn’t come up with a contingency for this scenario. Since we don’t know what the other person will do, we have to base our decision on some simple logic.

It’s now most beneficial for both of us to take our chances and point the finger. At best we go free, at worst we serve only 8 years total. This disparity in this fictional legal system gives us a positive expectation value to snitch. By snitching we can expect to only spend 2 years prison or a total of 4 years divided by 2 outcomes. By not snitching, we expect 6.5 years in prison or a total of 13 years divided by two outcomes. Obviously, we have to assume these options would be given to us ad infinitum to beat variation to get these numbers, but in the short term it makes sense.

Mathematically it looks like this:

Snitching = 0 + 4 years / 2 possibilities = 2 years.

Not snitching = 10 + 3 years / 2 possibilities = 6.5 years.

Without worrying too much about silly math games, the point is that the matrix changed in our favor (insert obvious The Matrix reference here). Duh. Change happens. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. No matter which way it breaks, you have to adapt.

Change happened to our industry and now we can’t continue making the same decisions. If we continue to keep quiet, we’re making a bad decision in the long run. We have to adapt our way of thinking to a new world model. We shouldn’t ask how change happened or what we could have done to stop it–the world we live in is a much more mathematically complex place than these games–we should ask how we can leverage our situation now.

Now consider the Tragedy of the Commons.

I have a cow. You have a cow. We all have cows. And we all live in a community where we raise our cows on our own lawns. We drink their milk and what we don’t use, we turn into cheese and trade for other items like bread, meat, Wii consoles and Diaper Genies.

But one day, I get the bright idea that I can take my cow out to pasture in the common park. I do this at night, in secret, while the rest of you play Wii and raise babies. My cow does much better than your cows and starts producing more and more excess milk, which I sell to buy cooler Wii games and expensive meats. As long as I can keep this secret to myself, I’m going to do better than you.

But then one day someone I like, say, Howard Owens, comes over to my house. He asks, “Hey man, how do you afford all these delicious meats?” I decide to let Howard in on my secret and he starts producing more cheese and eventually buys some sweet gold chains. He tells Ryan Sholin and Ryan blogs about it, spilling the beans to everybody. The common park fills up with all kinds of people and their cows. It has been democratized and we’re back to where we started, except now we ruined the park. You ruined everything, Ryan…

That’s the old way to think of media. We had a few people hogging the park, dominating communication and most of us were stuck there watching from our homes. The park had certain barriers to entry (like broadcast licenses or high costs of production). That’s just not the case with the Web.

We live in a post scarcity economy (a.k.a. abundance economy) now. Now, grass that’s already been eaten by some cows still has value to cows, forever. The grass never goes away and grass grows every day. It’s always green for the cows that want it, so long as you don’t put up a fence (which is futile). But this new world gets crazier, your cows can now occupy more space faster. They can be two places at once. Your patch of grass can also be your neighbors’ patches at the same time. These cows can teleport, man. It’s nuts out there.

Ground Zero

The old investment edict “buy land because they’re not making it anymore” no longer applies to our community. All because of a little number: Zero.

Gone are the days of false scarcity (i.e. airwaves, static parks) and expensive resources (i.e. ink, paper and shipping) where the prices continue to rise. The falling costs of technology make distribution easier. Chris Anderson recently wrote about this phenomena in this Wired article and he’s been working through the problem for quite some time on his blog. As bandwidth, storage and processing power drop in price, they approach zero in cost and we’re free to waste it by giving away free email, free video hosting, free content, free software, free everything. Obviously the cost of bandwidth, storage and processors isn’t technically zero, but because of the shear volume of it there’s an economy of scale where it’s more valuable to give one product away in exchange for market share and (this is the tricky part) find something else of value to profit from.

If you want to learn more about how free economies work, Mike Masnick covers free in a fun series here.

Free works best in the aggregate for companies like Google who don’t need to worry about how to create content. They just sort data and make it easier to find. For those of us in the paragraph factories, we must find a way to make our content easier to find. But it goes beyond search engine optimization and findability once you’ve got people on your site. You must control a niche (i.e. local news, or regional farming, gadgets, anything). To do that, you must cull the best from others, be where you’re readers are and help your readers help you. That means being a part of a community.

Listen to your mother: share

I know I keep harping about this, but we have to get in front of the conversations going on out there. The whole damn point of the Internet is share media and to “create copies,” as Kevin Kelly puts it; Content can be two–or two million–places at once. Be where your readers are. Unbundle your media. Separate it from your site. Ignore copyright. It sounds like heresy. Creating and controlling information has always been our bread and butter. It still is, but the game has changed. Distribution pipes no longer work and any attempt to fake them on the Web only obfuscates our inevitable failure.

The number one thing you can do to increase readership on your Web site is to make all your content freely available. Get rid of the pay walls tomorrow and I’ll personally guarantee you double digit growth within 18 months. You don’t have to change any processes in your organization. You don’t need to rewrite for the Web. There’s no corporate philosophy shift that needs to happen. Keep posting items at midnight, don’t do video, do absolutely nothing more than open your archives to Google’s and your readers eyes. Just stop trying the transaction model. It worked for old situations, but now it harms your bottom line. Give your site away and they will come in droves. They will find you.

The second thing you need to do: Ignore copyright. No this doesn’t mean letting your competition post your stories without crediting you. Don’t let the local high school post your photos without crediting you. Don’t let Yahoo! News take your content unless they provide a link to you. Give it to them on the condition they provide links back to you. Free of any other charges. Links, in the eyes of search engines, are points. The more sites that link to you, the higher your points, the more relevant Google sees your page. When someone searches for content you can provide, you show up first or second or third and they will come.

The third thing you need to do: Give it away. Unbundle your media. Put it on other sites. Right now, take your content and feed it out to people. Let other sites syndicate your content. Let people find it where they are. Those that don’t find you in searches can find you other places. All links should lead to Rome. They will come.

Lastly, you need to take what others offer you. Pull in the headlines from your competition. Scrape craigslist for classifieds. Syndicate local bloggers. Pull event listings from Upcoming.org. Link to anything and everything you can. Every day. If you don’t have content, link to someone else’s content. If you only do original reporting, you’re doing your site and your community a disservice. Look at how popular blogs like BoingBoing and Kottke constantly link other sites. Hell, look at Drudge right now. What do you see? Links upon links upon links. Sending people away secures page views for yourself. You just have to curate links for your target community.

B-b-but that not journalism! Correct. Journalism isn’t dead, far from it, but the game has changed. We still need to produce content. But we are in the media business. Journalism is just a part of that. Sorry to break it to you. This is good in ways not many people can comprehend yet, though, and we’re on the cusp of some very interesting times in the years ahead.

If you want to really secure your future as a leader in whatever content you provide, start by being a good neighbor.

End game

When I reply to someone on twitter, in public view, the message is meant for the recipient, but others can listen in. One-to-one conversation can also be a one-to-many conversation at the same time. I haven’t read Clay Shirky’s new book yet, but from what I gather this is part of his thesis. This is what I mean when I say the game has changed. We don’t broadcast or have conversation over a few drinks. We do both at the same time. And boy does it sometimes lead to awkward social situations.

But fear of doing something wrong or fear of losing control of the conversation shouldn’t detract us. We’ve already done something wrong. We’ve already lost control. We’ve been trying to play a new game with an old set of rules.

Now, I know so much of this just sounds silly. We should curate conversations?! We talk a lot about attention economies and jostling for eyeballs because on the Web, every site potentially competes for the same people. True to a point. We need to step back and look at the bigger picture.

Yes, people spend a certain amount of time on the Web per day/week/month and what they find is usually all they get. If they’ve found someone else’s content, then they probably aren’t looking at yours. I get that. But we should ask a different question than “How do I get the people looking at site A to look at my site, site B?” We should ask how site A and site B can complement each other, distribute the workload, maximize audience and share in the benefits.

Before we look at a couple examples, I want to get back to ground zero: Free. Giving your content away doesn’t mean you’re going to lose the value of that information. If an article is worth one dollar and you give it away for free, you have to make that dollar back somehow to break even. This is the trade-off. Market share has no business value if you can’t convert size and type of community into dollars.

In reality, a page view has a cost of only a tiny fraction of a cent. Thousands of eyes on an article costs basically nothing to distribute, so charging anything more than a micro-payment flies in the face of market wisdom. And micro-payments don’t work for most products. They create a psychological hangup many people can’t or won’t accept.

So then, who takes on the costs of production and distribution? Advertisers.

Because the cost of producing a page costs so little, you can sell ads for huge returns. But, unfortunately we’re hung up on an old model that involves selling banners or tile ads or large formats to larger companies in our communities. We put ad reps feet to pavement and we go looking for big dollars.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. Well, not so dumb. Yes, do that for your high profile, network-wide advertising or vertical sales, but think smaller. Every Tom, Dick and Harry sells their stuff on eBay and craigslist. There’s about bajillion craft shows all over the Midwest in the summer. These people have things to sell and they can’t afford TV or newspaper spots. They have local goods they want to sell locally. So they go to Google. They go to Yahoo! They go to Facebook. They fill out a form and drop $5-$20. The simple, highly-targeted ads direct people to sites where these merchants sell their products using freely available Web tools and you get none of that money. Web forms don’t need a commission. Nearly pure profit slips out of your grasp every second you delay.

There’s a new game in town. Your advertising needs to be as granular and as unbundled as your content. It needs context. Impressions are great, but advertisers are catching on. They want click-throughs and conversions, so make it easier for them to tap your communities. If you target your ads right, your users might actually find advertising useful rather than a nuisance.

Once you have the hang of that, seriously consider sharing your business model. Let other sites handle your advertising. Google does it. Amazon does it. There’s no reason you shouldn’t figure out how to share advertising, too. Build a relationship with your community to keep it healthy. This one really flies in the face of common sense and may not even work for smaller communities. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

Tying everything together

Ok, I think this has been the longest post I’ve written yet. So let’s take a second and breathe deep. In a nice digestible list, here’s what we’ve covered so far:

• Pick a community. It can be a geographical region, like North Dakota or it can be a theme like Tech news.
• Start creating content. Make it evergreen. Let people into your archives.
• Start curating content when it is relevant to your community.
• Give others in your chosen community opportunity to share what you’ve got. This is how you build a relationship within the network.
• Once you’ve built up a large enough community of readers, you need to fill space with advertising that favors the content.
• Keep your community healthy by creating advertising markets to stimulate its growth.

Does curating work? Compare Drudge to the NYTimes.com. Last July Drudge had one-third as many readers as New York Times. Love him or hate him, He’s Just One Man.

Does opening up your archives work? Hell yeah it does. See that bump in people on the graph linked above? I bet you can guess when they opened their archives.

I want to talk about some sites that embody many of these principles.

The Hype Machine aggregates music posted to music blogs. It does nothing more, really. Just hit play on a song on the main page and listen to music bloggers post. But the site does some awesome stuff. Firstly it links to every blog it culls music from. Giving exposure to some great music blogs in a very, very crowded niche. Secondly, it supports itself financially through music sales at iTunes, Amazon and eMusic, as part of their ad networks. Lots of songs have links to where you can buy the tune.

Exposure to music blogs, so they benefit with link juice and spill over from click throughs. Exposure to music merchants, so they benefit through sales which also have kickbacks to the They Hype Machine. The whole site is a sharing machine. Just turn it on and let it do magic.

Everyblock aggregates data on a local level, breaking it down to the street level. The site culls information from official government sources as well as craigslist, Upcoming.org, flickr and others to give you a picture of what’s going on in your neighborhood. Throw in some story-based news and locally targeted advertising and you have a whole new way to think about news Web sites.

Lastly, this one is small potatoes, but it’s worth noting, because we’re going to start seeing more of it. There’s a small group of papers in Minnesota that started Minnesota Reader. Using only Drupal and some freely available feeds from newspapers across the state (including papers from Forum Communications, my employer), they’ve started aggregating Minnesota news. It’s basically the Google Reader OPML file we’ve set up for our editors in the state turned to face the public. It’s a bit clunky right now, but I think the concept has some interesting potential.

Take a look at the page for Woodbury Bulletin, one of the Forum Comm papers. On some of the posts, our RSS ads show up. On their page, with links back to our marketplace product. Some people may feel very uneasy about something like this. I don’t. It’s our RSS feed, so we basically control our content on their site.

Go out and grow your audience. Expand your network. People will gather around your content. Some of those people will support you by clicking on ads, more will given the right ad in the right context (either on your product or from somewhere else in your network).

All links lead to Rome.

If you hope to beef up your Web staff this year and have big plans to build sweet, dynamic, ongoing projects, I have some helpful hints for your newspaper’s Human Resources departments:

What to Expect When You’re Expecting

Creating Web sites isn’t like journalism. You can’t have a curious mind, an ability to write well and expect to learn the Internet in two weeks. Look outside the journalism field. Seriously. Don’t send out an email to your staff asking if anybody wants to be the Web reporter/editor/producer/guy/girl with the full intention of hiring the person most interested. If you end up hiring someone who doesn’t know HTTP from FTP, you’re off to a bad start. If you want to do that, teach your staff how to use the Internet, not how to build it.

Don’t expect to find an Adrian Holovaty. People who know journalism and also know programming don’t exist in large numbers. And they’re expensive people anyway. Find someone who knows the Internet and teach them journalism.

Beware Online Journalism programs and Graphic Communication programs. In my experience, both of these fields of study rely too heavily on Flash, site design and video. You don’t necessarily want a page designer, a Flash expert or a videographer. You want someone who can do write in some or all of the following (and someone who knows many more acronyms than this short list): PHP, Javascript, mySQL, Python, XHTML, and CSS. You don’t just want someone who just knows HTTP and FTP, you want someone who knows how to write a Cron script or someone who can tap into an API. You want someone to solve problems. You want a developer.

That said, don’t hire the biggest nerd you can find. Someone with a basic grasp on design theory will go a lot further than someone who only lives and breathes code. Hiring a lopsided developer can lead to overly complex interfaces. Balance is key.

Look for a developer with the mind of a journalist. Developers are usually curious people anyway, but you want someone with a broad range of knowledge, too. Someone who can just as easily work with your crime reporter as he or she can work with your features or business editors.

Again. You don’t want a webmaster. You want a developer. Period. Make it a point to grab the best talent from your local tech schools.

What to do when he/she has arrived

You don’t want a knowledge hoarder. Make sure this person doesn’t become a gatekeeper. Someone else should have a grasp on the developer’s work. You don’t need to know computer languages to know how a Web site works and how to fix minor problems. Pair the developer up with someone like a producer, a videographer and/or a database reporter.

Give them projects that last. Don’t think in terms of a short series of articles. Think in terms of ongoing value. Give the developer some small problem to chew on and then build on it from there. Where do ongoing sources of data come from in your community?

Give the developer access to the police blotter. Have them output the list on the Web. Then have them map that data in useful ways. Then have them attach articles to certain pieces. Then photos. Then think of tools you can build on top of that platform. Next thing you know, you’ll have chicagocrime.org.

A developer is not a producer or a videographer, per se. Let them work on the bigger projects (solving problems like how to get video on the site efficiently and quickly). Teach your reporters and producers and editors how to do those other things. A developer should build the tools that your editorial staff uses on an ongoing basis.

Don’t talk in terms of design right off the bat. What the public sees is only the tip of the iceberg. There’s a lot more going on under the hood. Design talk should happen near the end of a project.

Lastly, give them every opportunity to tell you your idea sucks. They are the experts on the Web. Tell them the problem you want solved, not how to solve it. Let them question you. You may find you’ve been asking the wrong question, or that the problem you want solved is part of a bigger question.

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.

Fargo Star is back! from Zac Echola on Vimeo.

This is a little project we started last year at The Forum of Fargo Moorhead, one of my employer’s (Forum Communications) flagship papers. Without getting into too many details because of my blogging agreement with my employer, it was successful at bringing younger people to The Forum’s brand. More so, I’d say, than those stupid “For Teens” pages that were all the rage in the 90s. Seriously. When I was a teenager in the 90s, they made me feel like jumping off a cliff.

Anyway, I hate to pimp out my work, but it’s a pretty cool little idea. Basically. (I’m really not the target demo for this sort of thing. I am way too snarky).

Users create tapes of themselves singing a capella, upload them to a site like youtube or vimeo or whatever and then send us the link.

On in-forum.com, people can go online and vote for their favorite singers. The top 10 move on to a live concert a couple months later at a popular night club in town. The winner gets a few pretty sweet prizes. Last year we had about 1,500 people at the venue (with zero out of house ads, mind you) and we didn’t even think about how to monetize that.

This year, we’re planning to take things out beyond just our sites and papers. And this is really why I’m blogging about this.

First, we’re not just promoting on our sites. While we love that our current readers see the contest and follow it (really, we love you for reading!), the object is to also show outside readers that newspapers aren’t necessarily boring. We’ve set up a Facebook page for Fargo Star that will be monitored by real humans. Our YouTube channel will also be watched by real people. We don’t want these to fall stagnant, to become brochures. The idea is to get out there and do something instead of talking about it. The key word here, obviously, is real.

Also, I’ve kicked around the idea of helping users along with posting video to their myspace profiles and personal Web sites. We already have the embed code from youtube that we’re using to display the video, so why not point that back at the public? Give them a snippet of code of the video and a permalink back to the Fargo Star page (which is in the early stages of production, I’ll post a link when we launch).

Lastly, merchandising. Last year, the staff at the live event all wore these hideous pink shirts with the Fargo Star logo on it. They were horrible. I had at least 6 people from the public ask me where they could buy one. And I was behind the scenes in a video control room most of the night worrying about a live web cast!

The single most important part about this whole project, though, is getting Web, editorial and advertising staffs in the same room and keeping everybody focused on a singular goal: Promote The Brand To A Tough Demographic In A Way That Doesn’t Suck. Turn our readers (old and new) into cheerleaders for our products. Because these products aren’t just ours, and we’re starting to understand this. This is their videos, their votes and their comments. We’re just providing some tools and some prizes. Community.

We aren’t worrying so much if the people who watch Fargo Star videos also read city hall stories in the paper. We hope they do, but we understand that people want what they want. The technical and philosophical lessons we learn from this project vastly outweigh any other reason for doing it.

One day it’s sharing videos for a contest, the next it’s sharing news videos. One day it’s participating in the Fargo Star chats, the next day it’s posting a restaurant review with a rating and some photos. Same philosophy. Same technology.

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Flat-footed in Omaha

It’s simply unacceptable. The site still takes upwards of 2 minutes to load today. It looks like the site’s been hit by digg.com or slashdot, but I don’t believe that traffic would sustain like that for this long when nothing is loading. There is probably some other mess going on behind the scenes.

TV stations in omaha had live video online all day there and was on top of both stories, so I don’t buy the argument that there wasn’t enough staff to cover the shooting. That they couldn’t shift from Bush coverage tells me something is wrong with their entire process. KETV (which isn’t even the market leader) nailed the shooting coverage and I can guarantee you they didn’t need 20 people on either story. I’m betting it’s because they’re simply more equipped to handle breaking news environment.

The blog they’re talking about was a free blogger.com blog that had a handful of nothing on it. One post, a few comments. Nothing… Makes me think they had no blogging strategy to begin with. http://omahaworld-herald.blogspot.com/

There are two shining examples of recent that I can think of on how to cover a huge local story on the Web: The Strib had a several stories, a video, graphics and maps all up within 2 hours of the bridge collapse and the Virginia Tech shooting coverage with its twitter.com-like fast updates on the Roanoke homepage.

Zac Echola talks #2 – Mobloging?

This just may be the future of breaking news.

Here’s a great thing about this whole Web 2.0 thing. You hardly have to program.I’m serious. This podcast used absolutely no programming, just free Web services. It’s unbundled media, too–meaning you can find the content where I want you to find the content (or where you want to find the content): On my site, in a widget, at twitter, iTunes, Facebook, wherever. It’s fed to all those places via RSS, and hell, you can sign up for that too if you’d like.I’m using a service called Gabcast, but there a bunch of other similar products out there. All you need is a phone. Magic makes the rest happen.

Stuff like this adds a whole ‘nother element to mobile journalism.

This is news as fast as you can say it. This is audio from an entire press conference or the sounds of a crowd at a rally. Sure the quality kinda sucks, but I guarantee you there isn’t a professional news organization within 400 miles of me that’s doing something like this.

And I’m just me. Just think about what kinds of awesome things an entire news organization could do with something like this.

Where’s the revenue come from? Who knows? Who cares. It didn’t cost me a dime. Try it out.

40 Downloadable Open Source Social Software Applications by Max Kiesler:

While large scale social sites like Flickr, Digg, Youtube and Myspace have predominated the web-o-sphere over the past few years there still is a need for narrow content verticals in this arena. This list will give you links to 40 open source resources to get you started building your own social bookmarking, networking, filesharing or search application. The following is a list of what I consider the be the best open source social software that Ive found over the past year.

Newspapers.com, you have no excuse.

Save and share links have cropped up all over on news sites this past year, especially from web services del.icio.us, digg and Facebook. Examples here, here and here.Some newspaper sites are displaying track backs from blogs. And you’d be hard pressed to find a news site that doesn’t offer XML syndication, even if it’s truncated to headlines only.

I’ve even heard rumblings from some news organizations planning to offer headline widgets for bloggers, in the hopes news sites can tap new audiences.

That’s all fine and good, but what invariably happens when someone follows a link to a web page is that they immediately leave it once they’re finished with it, especially when they come from digg, del.icio.us or Facebook.

So what’s a Web site to do once they attract an audience through these referrals? There’s always been talk about providing interactive news for online reader, through slide shows, video and Flash whatnots. Related content is nice, but who decides what’s related? Robots and producers, that’s who.

Jeff Jarvis got a look at the new USA Today where the site begins using machine generated tags. Jarvis ponders, “given the biorhythm of news, I wonder whether a folksonomy can take hold in time.” But that “biorhythm of news” is mostly a byproduct of traditional news media: TV and Newspapers, one with limited time, the other with limited space.

The Web has neither restraint. Articles and photo and video can sit on a server indefinitely. News becomes evergreen. Old news may be new news to someone and even if it’s not, that content may still be relevant to someone else.

So why not make the news itself interactive by letting users decide where it should go? Why not break free of the traditional categories (news, sports, business, features, etc.) and let readers create their own categories?

And then set your Web team loose on building XML feeds and headline widgets based around those categories, or blocks of categories, thus making those tools relevant to people looking to syndicate and share specific types of information.