CoPress

This is something the news tribe did not understand went it first went online around 1996. It saw the Web as a good way to re-purpose its content from the old platform; and while the Web can do that, the idea of re-purposing news content had a huge intellectual cost. It did not help the tribe understand the ground on which it had to rebuild. It permitted the press to delay the date of migration.

– Migration Point for the Press Tribe, Jay Rosen

Newspapers got it all wrong when the went online—simply shoveling their content from the print product into a template Web site and saying, “There, we’re online.”

They’ve never really been ‘first class citizens’ of the Web, however. Newspapers are still not doing simple things like linking or tagging or using social media. They’re online in that they have a Web site, but they’re still using a print mentality to maintain it.

I propose that this is because news organizations still haven’t realized that the Internet has changed the definition of a journalist. During this week’s #collegejourn chat I proposed that:

“Journalists, at least in the new media sense, are nothing more than experts in a field that have the ability to create mass media based on that expertise.”

Based on this definition, journalists should be viewed as community leaders; people that know a lot about a topic and are therefore respected enough by the community to inform others. This makes them something of a mixture of a columnist (read: blogger), a reporter (read: blogger), and a content creator (read: photographer/videographer/designer/infographics-maker/databaseminer/developer).

If we extrapolate this out to the newspaper as a whole, the future might very well be an organization that consists of many journalists who can provide mass media to a relevant community.

Newspapers are used to being limited to geographic communities because they were limited by their physical product that never could reach outside that demographic. The Internet gives us a publish button that puts content up for the whole world to instantly see. The word “community” is no longer limited to geography; it can now apply to any niche of information.

The company Gawker Media has taken advantage of this new definition: they host nearly a dozen Web sites that cover a specific niche. From tech news to celebrity gossip, each site has its own coverage of a particular type of information. This includes both original content and aggregation. Anything—just so long as their site gives a complete picture of the niche they’re covering.

A Geographic Niche

With that model in mind, let’s get back to newspapers, who are best at covering the geographic niche. There are ways for newspapers to turn their Web sites into first class Web citizens and stop re-purposing of print content, because that doesn’t do a good job of serving their community.

The goal is to become a platform. In Web speak, that’s a dubious term that has come to mean just about anything. For our purposes, let’s make it simple: newspapers should strive to become the online entry point for their community.

If Google is the entry point to the Web, then your news organization Web site should be the entry point to your community. Taking a page from Jeff Jarvis, the first step to Googlifying news sites then is to index everything.

That means taking lessons from Gawker, Slashdot and the New York Times, and aggregating everything. If there’s a story online that’s relevant to your community, link to it. Who cares if you wrote it or not? The idea is to be the source of news. If people know to just come to you first for their information, it doesn’t matter if they eventually click off your site. They will keep coming back to you for more.

The flip side of that coin is to serve only news that is relevant to your niche. Slashdot, still considered to be the geek’s corner of the Web, rarely ever has any news on politics except where it would directly affect the life of a technology-minded person.

That is true hyperlocal. It’s okay to link off to relevant national news stories, but certainly don’t devote your resources toward covering them. Even coverage from a local angle may be a waste of time. Largely, assume that if a reader is coming to your site, they want local news.

Becoming a platform is good news for your advertisers too. Ads are almost guaranteed to be relevant because you know that only a select audience is interested in looking at your site. Selling ads to local vendors becomes easier. How great is the line, “Everyone visits our site.”

Being the local platform for information means more than just a Web site. It also includes your organization sponsoring and running events that are relevant to the community—hosting local political debates or providing moderators for a town hall meetings or holding a conference for the local dairy farmers. The idea is to keep your customers thinking about you as the source of information around the community. What better way to put yourselves forward as experts who are knowledgeable about the community than to actively engage it.

Don’t try to run the community, facilitate it. Let the users add their own content to you sire. From a Craigslist list/aggregator to a Flickr pool for community events to a Yelp-like service, recognize that as a platform you’re there to serve the community in the whatever capacity they need. Chances are good that they know what they need better than you.

Becoming a platform represents a radical rethinking of the way your organization views itself. You’re less of a business, and more of a community advocate. Which is not to say that you can’t make money—Google does.

Relevant Links

25 ideas: Creating An Open-Source Business Model For Newspapers

A suggestion for The New York Times: Monetize your superior platform by sharing it with smaller news outlets [video]

update:

Another related link: SEO is still job number one at newsites.

John Bryne had a great tweet during #editorchat, “Ultimately, I think local newspapers can only largely survive if they become local Googles. #editorchat”