College media is a funny beast. It seems to lag about a year to three years behind the mainstream media. This applies web-first thinking, blogging, web site design, and monetization. So, this weekend, when the CoPress forum became an active discussion of CPM vs CPC vs CPD ad models, I couldn’t help but grin twice.

First, because this is a conversation that the rest of the media had a few years ago (and has never resolved), and second, because this struck on a particular passion of mine – monetizing online media. (Go figure, the Business Director is interested in monetization)

The following post is an expansion of my forum comments, and still worth a read if you’ve already been through the forum.

The Current System

There are really three ways for advertisers: by impression, by click, and by time period (usually day). Of course, there are hybrids of all three models, which the top ad networks utilize (Facebook, Google). The issue, is that all of these models have some inherent flaw. CPM doesn’t reward for the effectiveness of an ad, CPC necessarily reward high traffic, and CPD, while it guarantees a nice minimum about you can make, has both of the same issues.

Take into account that college media has a monopoly over the vast majority of the 18-24 year-old US population. That’s demographic is the most desired by advertisers. And if my rough, non-scientific, survey is to be believed, less that one third of online college readership is actually students, it’s parents and alumni, who represent a middle-class, educated, demographic – precisely what any good advertiser wants.

Translation: you’re serving ads to a very valuable, niche, audience, that you have a monopoly over.

Analytics

One of the things that the forum conversation pointed out was the inaccuracy and the poor quality of the analytics available right now. Different software suites give different numbers, and non of them are really ‘correct.’

That’s a huge issue, because if you’re relying on those numbers to charge CPM, you stand to loose money.

Of course, as Bryan Murley points out, the holy grail of analytics right now is the ability to measure user engagement. Which would tell us how much a user was – using – the site. But, with such poor basic analytics, the challenge to create this data is compounded.

The moral of this story, is to have several different analytics suites measuring your audience. Know you can’t really trust any of them either.

Geography

The huge downside to these awesome demographics is that they’re usually not geographically similar. That means that you’re local adverts may not be your best market for online ads.

Take a look at your analytics, and I’m sure you’ll find that your pageviews mostly aren’t local. Try to serve ads that target all your audiences. Yes, an ad for a local pizza joint is good, but irrelevant if you don’t live near campus. Ads for Macy’s on the other hand, apply to everyone. Not to mention, national ads pay very well.

In the same vein, don’t forget that you’ll have a lot of alumni visiting the site. Go to your alumni office. Tell them you have a lot of alumni viewership. They may not know.

Alumni offices spend ridiculous amounts of money trying to contact alumni to get more money out of them. You can get a chunk of that money too! Make your case, and sell them a decent spot for a long-term contract. Then charge them a hefty amount – after-all, you’re a great way of reaching their market.

Concerned about relevancy for students? Go to the career center, and have them team up with alumni office. There’s gotta be alumni who want to hire interns and grads.

Crazy? I was Crazy Once!

Okay, normal, plain ideas out of the way. Let me present some crazier, more involved ones.

One suggestion of Revenue Two Point Zero, was to limit your ad inventory, therefore decreasing supply. This will allow you to drive up costs. Simple economics, right?

Even better, fewer ads means users aren’t nearly as annoyed by an assault of brightly colored, non-relevant content. A better UX means you’ll get more repeat users.

Another idea out of Rev2oh, was to sell only larger, more eye catching ads. The idea is to help avoid ad blindness.

Our example from the forum, the Tulane Hullabaloo, has 3 display ads on the site, one of which ia Google AdWords. Google Ads, while convenient, don’t have great revenue, and you’ll make much more money from selling ads yourselves.

Of course, that means having a motivated and trained online ad sales team. Who, since they’re paid on commission, don’t stand to gain much by selling online ads. Increase the cost of online ads, and you actually stand to sell more.

The Better Plan

OK, with me so far? Now let’s get out-of-the-box:

Institute a rule that 60% of your ads must be either a coupon, or a notification of a sale/deal (that’s actually legit), with the intention of increasing this to 95%+ in the coming years. I base this off two facts: people describe online ads as annoying, and in my own observation, print ads, which are usually described as informative, are primarily coupons or notifications of sales.

Of course, coupons are really the way to go. They will not only make your users happier, but they’ll drive traffic to your site and to your advertiser’s site and store. It’s a win all around.

Now, how do you serve them? Offer some sort of hybrid: charge for a run time, but make a deal with your advertiser that if you get a spike in traffic, they’ll be charged for the additional views. It’s your market, control it. This clause will allow you to ensure that when high traffic comes, you’re not out of inventory.

But… don’t be evil, if your advertiser wants to opt-out of the deal, then let them. With no hassle. Just be sure to sell enough ads to have an inventory ready if you do spike.

No One Really Knows

The single biggest issue with online media is monetization. I’ve noticed college media becoming more interested in the topic over the last year or so. That’s a good thing, because the mainstream haven’t cracked this nut yet, and it’s very possible that the niche, high-value demographic, monopolistic market of college media will be the one to solve it.

Ideas: lots of infographics, blogs, and user interactivity.

I’d like to propose a simple rule:

Tags should never contain a proper noun.

This is a maxim is intended to avoid frustration from both users and content creators by implementing tags in a useful way.

Tags are the darling child of the social networking, web 2.0 community. The concept is simple really: words or short phrases that, as metadata, can be attached to anything on the web to enable easier searching, better SEO, and greater user ease of use. But, when misused they become overwhelming, hard to use and irrelevant.

Here’s the logic behind the rule to never put a proper noun in a tag: the term you’re entering is likely already in the article and therefore searchable. If it’s already there, then putting it into the tags is not only a repeated, wasted effort, but it is going to confuse the reader by culttering up the tag cloud.

• Wasted effort. If you’ve already put the proper noun in the article than the information is already there. Likewise for photos, the information should already be in the caption. Why would you spend the extra time trying to get the information in two places?
• You’re giving the reader too much info to sort through. A ton of information is good for computers, but if you want tags to be user-friendly (often the argument for putting proper nouns into the tag cloud), you need to limit what you choose to use.
• The whole post is already searchable. If you’ve got the person’s name or the place in the article, caption, description, whatever it is you’re writing, the data is searchable. Tags are there to add additional information that you couldn’t writing directly into the post.
• There’s no way you’re going to be able to remember every single proper noun that could possibly be affected. Let the semantic web (when it finally comes about) take care of that for you.

What should be tagged

Tags are meant to be used for conceptual information that you would never write in the post, but you’d like to attach to your data.

For example: If you take a picture of three friends at Disneyland, you don’t need to tag it, “Larry, Moe, Curly, Disneyland, Mickey Mouse, Magic Kingdom.” Instead tag it, “Outside, Group Picture, Portrait, Silly.”

The former list you’d easily put into a half decent caption. The latter would likely never actually be written anywhere else.

Try building a tag library that contains names and places is nearly impossible. How can you ever possibly account for everyone/thing that you could ever need? Stick to concepts and generalizations.

It’s a good rule

There are, of course, exceptions. If a proper noun becomes a concept onto itself, then it likely belongs in you tagging scheme. For example, during the Mumbai terrorist attacks, people were tagging their tweets on Twitter with #mumbai. Yes, a city name is a proper noun, but as a concept, #mumbai was the best common way to describe what was going on.

SImilarly, if you’re writing a article about social networking, then “Twitter,” is a good tag to include. As the service has become so popular that it has a host of meta-information out there.

Let me boil the rule down for you Twitter users. When you go to tag your next blog post, photo, video, github project, or any other piece of data online, ask yourself: “Would this tag make a good #hashtag on a post?”

CORRECTION: This post initially used the term “pronoun” instead of “proper noun,” as intended. All references in the headline, text and URL have since been corrected.

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”

WordPress

We’re still actively searching for WordPress themes to use for our hosted Web sites (and of course, to recommend to you). That search has turned up this recent post on Running Design listing some top-notch news themes. We also came across a plugin called Pods that allows you to manage a database of information from the WordPress back end. It’s still a bit rough, but offers a lot of potential to news organizations looking to easily manage and present relational databases.

The Journalism World

The New York Times is running a blog-style debate from some of the top minds in journalism entitled Battle Plans for Newspapers. This seems like a constructive contribution to the debate over the future of newspapers, which has been raging anew since the TIME cover story on the topic last week. Jeff Jarvis has a good summary of all of the arguments so far in a post from earlier this week.

Further, Jim Stoval argues that the death of newspapers will lead to better journalism by giving rise the the digital newsroom—allowing journalists new and better ways of telling their stories.

Upcoming Events

• BarCamp NewsInnovation galore is occurring in both Portland and Chicago this coming Saturday (Feb 21).
• The Online Journalism Review is hosting a News Entrepreneur Boot Camp in LA from May 16-21. Apply now.

Three things you must click on

• Watch The Internet has turned the world on its head because because it destroys the traditional definition of economy: “rational actors maximizing their value through the acquisition/distribution of scarce resources.”
• Listen Journalism Now podcast. Episode number two is describing a community much like CoPress.
• Read Nationwide classroom No. 1: Writing for the Web Fantastic first steps to get your newsroom writing for the Web and breaking some habits that make sense in print, but not online.

Our hosting project is aimed at giving schools fast, reliable service on a well-supported open source platform. We’re doing this because we see a distinct need in college media to move online in a meaningful fashion and we believe that many current solutions are poor.

It’s our thinking that a centralized place to share resources among many newsrooms can benefit everyone, and apparently we were right. There is a very widespread need for services just like these, and we’ve been growing a lot faster than we had anticipated. While this makes us ecstatic, it also means that we don’t currently have the money to support the growth on our own.

CoPress is a non-profit initiative that has thus far been funded entirely out of our own pockets. We’ve come to realize that our small group of college students alone isn’t capable of raising the money necessary to do all that we want to do, however, so we’re asking for your help.

We’d like to offer you this challenge: the next time you go to buy a soft drink, a bag of pretzels or think about super-sizing that burger, pocket the cash and pledge it to helping us. We could really use the extra dollar.

Bloggers are the anti-journalist.

Or at least that was the thinking at newspapers several years ago. Now that blogging has gained at least tacit acceptance among “true” journalists, newsrooms are encountering the very two same problems that have plagued bloggers since the dawn of… blogging: consistently producing good content, and getting that content the exposure it deserves.

The good news, however, is that creating content comes relatively easy for journalists who are already used to having to meet a daily deadline. Once they accept the idea that a blog can be true journalism, they can adapt it as a less formal news article, a summary of their notes, sharing of a pitch that didn’t work out, a conversation with their readers, a series of relevant thoughts, or whatever gets ‘em blogging; most journalists seem to take to the new tool with gusto.

Now, some strategies for getting readers engaged.

Look at me! Please?

Part of the problem with blogs is that they have developed a stigma among the public — very similar to the way journalists used to feel. Therefore, getting your audience to click to a new area of your site that doesn’t necessarily have the latest “news” can be a challenge.

Case in point: at The Daily Orange, we’ve recently relaunched our Sports Blog network. The sports department has not only taken to the whole blogging experience, but they’ve really embraced the platform as a way of publishing a ton fantastic content that just does not fit into normal news articles. See this great video post example.

The issue here is that the blog network receives relatively few visits when compared to the main site. It also suffers heavily in the search rankings because it doesn’t have the Google juice of dailyorange.com.

Possible Solutions

What follows is a summary list of ideas that we’ve been brainstorming at The Daily Orange for getting our content noticed online. I’ve expanded it a bit to serve a general purpose audience.

Write for your niche audience. Don’t worry about entertaining the “average” viewer. Blogs are for the folk who want to know all there is to know about a singular topic. It is important to include your personal voice. The occasional post to let your readers see a “behind the scenes” view generates a lot of loyalty.

College Publisher users will note that there is no blogging system built into the platform. The best way (read: only way) to make up for this is to run a separate blogging platform. The problem with this is that, as a separate website, you loose all the previously mentioned Google Juice that your main site has gained. There are ways to help with this: 

• Link to the blog in the main navigation bar of the College Publisher site
• Put a tease for the blog (including links to the most recent posts) on the front page of the main website (this can easily be done with a widget)
• Link back to the main site on the blog
• Mention relevant blog articles in main news articles (with links, of course!)

Adopt Facebook. Love it or hate it, Facebook is the best platform to reach college students online. Positive steps include:

• Start a Facebook Page for your blog or news organization, and be sure the videos and blog posts auto-post to that page
• Have someone in charge of that page! You can rotate the responsibility if you like, but just as it’s important for your blog to have constant content so that it feels live, your Facebook page needs to have the same tender lovin’ care. All it takes is getting the status update changed a few times a week, or just sending out a message every week pointing people to a good blog post
• Be sure that all your relevant content reposts to your Facebook Page. This includes blog posts, videos and news articles. It’s also a good idea to link to content that you don’t generate. (Do what you do best, link to the rest.)
• Send out messages to your fans. Topics could include: a contest to ask for photos of some theme of the week (mid-terms, craziest fan costume, etc). Promise to run the top photo on the blog and in the print edition. You can also send out breaking news alerts via Facebook; the truth is that you’ll probably get more viewers on Facebook than on your main site.

Get on Twitter. If your newsroom is low on Twitter acceptance scale, (we’re at stage 1 at The Daily Orange), believe me when I tell you that will not, and can’t last. Twitter has proven on three separate occasions (Mumbai, Plane crash in Denver, Plane crash in the Hudson) that it’s a valuable news source. Welcome to the future.

More importantly, Twitter is a hot-bed of early adopters right now. Want to get noticed? Want Poynter,Romenesko, CICM, and others to recognize your work? Twitter is a great medium for that.

Twitter is much like your Facebook profile: it must be personable. This takes someone deciding to truly use the tool. Shoveling links on to it, is poor form, and really doesn’t encourage people to follow. @latimes and @missoulianphoto do a fantastic job of using Twitter. Check ‘em out if you wanna see how it’s done.

If you don’t want to manage accounts at Twitter and Facebook and [enter social network site here] check out Ping.fm. They can help make a lot of the status updating automatic.

You’ve got great content, now be great bloggers. No matter how you feel about it as a medium, blogging is going be here for quite sometime, and it’s got it’s own rules and culture associated with it.

Linking is key.

I’ll go ahead and write that again so that you don’t miss it:

Linking is key.

You’ve got to fill up the glass of Google Juice with links. Bloggers figured this out a long time ago, it’s why we’ve got things like blogrolls and Technorati. Some of the best ways of getting noticed are to start commenting on other related blogs. Say something relevant (“nice post” doesn’t count) and perhaps point them back to one of your own blog posts.

If your local city paper covers the same content, leaving a comment there can make the local community aware of the fact that you even exist.

Generating a conversation between blogs is beneficial for both parties, and serves the audience by inciting conversation. It’s a win for all involved (not to mention, good journalism).

credit: New York Times

Visuals are not optional. People like pretty pictures. If your blog is pure text, you stand the risk of looking very user-unfriendly. You’ve got a photo department – use ‘em.

Oh, and shooting video is cool too. A 3 minute recording of two reporters wrapping up a sporting event is easy, it’s something they do anyway, and will give a ‘behind the scenes view’ that your viewers will enjoy.

Ideas?

This has by no means been a comprehensive list of ways to get your content noticed, but at 1,200 words, I figure we’d better call it quits. If however, you’ve got a strategy you’ve used to get your blog readership up, please share in the comments.

edited by: Daniel Bachhuber

update: Feb 7, 2009: added iBlade image.

In an e-mail forwarded to the CoPress Googe Group, Dean wrote: (emphasis added)

I don’t like the idea of sharing a server with other papers, the primary reason being that if another site receives record traffic the response time of our site will suffer as an result. The specifications for the server hosting all the virtual servers is actually lower than what I was planning for our site only. To put it in perspective, the desktop in my dorm is much better configured than that server.

Their hosting plan also seems to be geared towards wordpress, which i much less demanding resource wise than drupal.

After receiving so much good press lately, it sure is refreshing to have someone take us to task on a technical issue — something that we’re supposed to be teaching other people about.

Dean makes some good points and got the CoPress team talking on New Year’s Eve. We’ve realized that there are several things that our organization, which strives for transparency, hasn’t made entirely clear.

We’re in beta

CoPress should have emphasized that our hosting plans our in a beta stage right now. We do have the server capacity to host three to five college news organizations and we will be capping our initial service there.

Yes, part of the reason we are doing that is because we don’t think that server can handle much more. Yes, it is possible that our server might not be able to handle even the relatively small number of organizations.

That’s why we’re in beta. That’s why we’re going with LiquidWeb, which will allow us to expand our server capacity almost instantly to deal with problems if/when they appear.

With all due respect to Dean’s dorm computer, LiquidWeb servers offer enough bandwidth to allow roughly 1.2 million visitors a month to a newspaper website. We think that’s plenty to start with.

CoPress isn’t trying to host the world, but we’re going to give a solid start to a few folks who sign up with us. If we become popular, we’ll be expanding our plans to more news organizations and thus increasing our server capacity.

We are equal opportunity CMS users

CoPress is currently focusing on WordPress-based solutions, but we’re not exclusive. As a matter of fact, we’re not in anyway convinced that WordPress is the long-term solution. It is, however, the best solution that we’ve seen that can be deployed now, and that is valuable for those who want a more dynamic site.

We’ve taken on a long-term project to evaluate many different CMS solutions available (there are several we’re excited about), but our priority to help organizations using College Publisher or other less-than-desireable platforms as soon as possible. WordPress offers a good, workable solution that does much of what we’d like.

If you’d rather host a Drupal, Django, Ruby on Rails, CakePHP or any other sort of site on our servers, please let us know! We’re not making any money off of our hosting — we just want to help you host your own site. It’s up to you what CMS you want to use.

CoPress = easy

Alex Klein, The Chronicle’s editor for new media, and the gentleman who forwarded Dean’s e-mail, said he’s a little disappointed with their progress developing a Drupal-based CMS.

Their project has a lot of support from the school, including a $100,000 budget (there’s politics associated with that number, but according to Alex it’s probably still there). Yet, despite the large budget and institutional support, and a working mockup of their new site, Duke’s nine-month project still hasn’t launched.

This is where CoPress can help!

We’re here to help you avoid these problems. We’ve designed our hosting to be about getting your paper online as quickly as possible on a platform that works.

We’re as transparent as Windows isn’t

(Pardon the geek humor in the subhead.) Here’s the point: we don’t want to make money. Our motivation is based on the idea that the more college media outlets that keep pace with the “new media” evolution, the better off we’ll all be.

Our hosting plan is just an extension of this philosophy. It seems to us CoPress folks that many schools have not been able to adapt to the Internet quickly due to a range of technical barriers.

We’re here to remove those hurdles.

Now.

Keep it coming

We really, really appreciate any and all feedback. The more honest the better. Keep it coming and we’ll keep using it.

What Dean’s criticisms pointed out to us it that

• We need to make it clear that we’re going to be taking just a few schools on our servers to start. We’re not trying to host the world (yet) but we think speed and reliability are critical, so rest assured, we’ll do our best to keep the servers at full speed.
• We think WordPres is a pretty darn good solution, but we know there are others out there. We’ll continue to look at them as they are developed. But if you want a site up quickly, WordPress is a great solution that is ready now.
• We need to step up our efforts to prove to college media that there is a solution to your technical difficulties. We’ve got it ready to go and are more than willing to help you out. Mostly because we’re hoping that you’ll jump far enough ahead to help us with the next big problem we all face.

CoPress is here to advocate for college media. One of the ways that we can do that is offering cheap, well supported, easy hosting. We’re still working on other avenues of support. Look to us to be the community that supports college media.

edited by Greg Linch

Update

Jan 1 14:36 PST — Link to The Chronicle test site removed per their request. Apparently, there was some miscommunication on that link being made public.

We’ve got a problem at The Daily Orange: our ad revenue is shrinking.

Sound familiar? A newspaper that’s having trouble making ends meet!?

We were having such difficulty balancing our budget, that we cut our print Friday edition (we still publish online).

The Daily Orange is an independent student newspaper. “Independent” means that we receive no money from the academic institution that we cover (well… they don’t charge us rent; but, that’s the only help we get). We pay a heavy price for the freedom to set our editorial content – we rely on print advertising for nearly all of our income.

This is a problem. As we’re forced to slowly transition toward an online newsroom, we risk abandoning the money making print edition. This scares our business manager to death. It frightens our board. We all know that the internet is the future, but can’t see a way to monetize online content.

Some choose to bury their heads: we receive roughly half of our daily eyeballs from our website, the other half from the print. That’s means we’ve beat the 10% problem. (Though we don’t come close to the average online revenue percentage of 10%.) Why is it that we seem to be bucking the national trend? I’ve got three guesses.

1. College newspapers are freesheets. The freesheet experiment has been going on for a while now in Europe, and is getting another serious look in the US. The internet has gotten people use to the idea of getting their news for free. The freesheet model gives them this access in hardcopy. Since college newspapers already use this model, they might already have a leg up. At the very least, a high subscription cost is not problem.
2. Colleges represent a niche market. If the internet is leading to a need for hyperlocal news coverage, college newspapers have already mastered the skill. This is a perhaps the one area where we’re ahead of the curve.
3. College students work for cheap. I’d imagine that most college papers pay at least some of their staff (we pay just our editors), but that payroll is extremely small. Therefore our expenses are much less than a professional papers that must pay a living wage.

But, this trend can’t possibly last. Like I already mentioned, we’ve seen ad revenue slip. It’s going to continue to do so unless we come up with an online revenue model.

On a macro level, there are three ways a newspaper can make money.

1. Advertising. Both online and in print.
2. Subscriptions. Charging for the print product, or following the freemium model and charging for premium content online.
3. Donations. From the public (i.e. spot.us) or from a foundation (like ProPublica or a college newspaper).

A part of my job over the last 4 months has been to blend these sources of revenue to generate new income. While I don’t claim to have come up with a solution, here are some thoughts:

• Experiment. Leading off with the most important point. Yes, budgets are tight. Yes, it costs money to experiment. Do it anyway. No one is really sure how to “do” online news. Chances are your budget is only going to get tighter before it gets figured out. Spend the money now ’cause you won’t have it later.
• Video doesn’t make much money. Ouch. Yea, I know it stings. Video takes a lot more effort from the staff, and requires a lot more infrastructure. Translation: it’s expensive. It also doesn’t really pay for itself … yet. But, video is hot. People like it; it’s an area that demands experimentation. We’ve started a few video podcast shows with our sports department. My pitch to convince them to do it? “You guys sit around and talk about sports anyway, just do it in front of a camera.”
• We’re not in the newspaper business, we’re in the media information business. This is the scary part that no bean counter wants to hear. But recognize the truth: if you’re producing online content, you’re not trying to sell a paper. You’ve got a different product all together. A newspaper’s biggest asset is its reporters. They’re experts in their field and have information that the public wants access to. A video podcast may be a good way of distributing that information, but if it doesn’t have a means of monetization it’s not a good business decision. In the same way you wouldn’t print an insert for your paper without selling ads, don’t produce new content online without a plan to make money.
• It’s all about the version 1. If you’re a perfectionist, take a step back a breath, you’re not going to like this one. Experimenting means getting some things wrong. Which means perfecting a new feature before you launch it, is a waste of time. We can’t afford a video camera (yet). So we’ve been shooting nearly all of our video podcasts on the iSight built into our laptops. No, the video quality isn’t great. But, it was affordable, and it gives us an all digital workflow. Not having to transfer video off tapes saves us a lot of time every night. Getting something out the door at 80% is more important than holding it to achieve perfection. Plan on getting better as you do more. You’ll be learning by doing. By the time you get around to version 2, you’ll be ready to tackle the harder stuff. It’s more important that you can deliver regular, ‘just okay’ content, than amazing content that you can only pull off once a year.
• Online publishing doesn’t mean a smaller staff. For small organizations like college papers, you’re going to need just as many people to publish online as you will in print. Trade your designers in for developers, teach your editors how to use your CMS, and get some reporters to blog. Publishing online is cheaper not because you can cut payroll expense, but because you don’t have to pay for newsprint.
• The link economy works. The copy-paste website method that most papers practice isn’t going to cut it in a web-centered newsroom. In order to be a first-class web citizen, we’ve got to start linking out in our stories. Abandon any rules you have about only linking internally. Link to as many places as you can. Google is the number one way people enter our site. Which means SEO is the name of the game. All of this means more site impressions, more impressions translates to more ad dollars. It’s worth your time to train staff on how to embed links because it directly affects your ad revenue.
• Local advertisers need to have incentive to buy online ads. The majority of our site traffic comes from parents and alumni, so local advertising doesn’t make sense. Or, they don’t have websites to advertise.Offer them alternatives to banner ads. Consumers generally find online ads annoying where print ads are seen as informative. Since print ads are usually coupons or notifications of sales, bring those kinds of ads to your site. Students will gladly to to your site to print a buy-one-get-one-free coupon for a local business. Even if that’s all they visit your site for, it’s still a win for all involved.
• Use the free stuff. There’s lots of good, free sites out there that can make your life easier. Vimeo or Blip.tv will gladly host your (HD) video content. Google Calendar will gladly host your community calendar. WordPress will host blogs for you. You can almost run a website for free! Furthermore, putting your content on web 2.0 sites gives you access to a social network greater than your own. This will get your content noticed by an audience that might otherwise have never seen your hard work (especially true for videos). Web 2.0 is your friend!
• Consider alternative forms of online revenue. Some newspapers have setup sites that help students find housing. Sites like this can help replace/supplement classified revenue that newspapers are struggling to account for. This is also a great opportunity to use the freemium model. One idea: let users post one housing listing for free. But charge for more than one listing (landlords with multiple properties).

Producing online content now will prepare your newsroom for the eventual day when online, instead of print, is their daily grind. It takes a while to setup an infrastructure, and with your cash flow unlikely to increase in the near future, now is the time.

Update: Link added to show that coupons are in demand.

Update2: There’s now a page on the wiki about this topic, but it does need to be expanded. Go go crowdsourcing! (Dec 4, 08; 18:10 EST)

Update3: Added alternative forms link. Added “One idea:” (Dec 5 08;, 00:58 EST)