The background

College news organizations need to move beyond advertising. Now.

Hold that thought.

Some background: The topic of generating revenue to sustain news organizations has begun to consume my thoughts about journalism. There are a number of reasons why, but this mostly came after a little meetup last Saturday in DC called RevenueTwoPointZero (Rev2oh on Twitter).

This isn’t the first time our humble CoPress crew is talking about the business side of journalism. Namely, check out Joey Baker‘s post from December, “But we make all our money from newsprint!”.

But why? Aren’t we just about technology and college news sites?

No. That’s a main theme, but we would be remiss if we left revenue off the table. It’s hard to run a news site without money, unless you’re an exception.

Actually, one of our three main goals directly relates to making money: We want student news organizations to generate more online revenue by having full control over their sites.

Getting back to my opening thought…

The reality

College news sites have mostly been playing catchup to the pros. OK. “College students still read campus newspapers,” according to a 2008 Alloy Marketing study. No real harm done by being late to the video game, for example.

Student media are also looking to the Web as a way to generate revenue, mostly through different forms of advertising. This could mean banner ads, contextual ads, floating ads, video pre-roll (cringe), pop-ups (double cringe) or something else. Nothing innovative, from what I’ve seen. Nothing that’s resulting in a possible paradigm shift, such as the buzz from Russ Stanton’s LA Times onlne revenue revelation.

“But we’re getting along OK online, right?” you might ask. Probably. But the point is that we cannot wait until we need solutions to devise and implement them. Unlike some metro papers, college publications can’t afford to lose a million a week (scroll down halfway).

We need to be proactive. We need to be at least two steps ahead.

The proposal

And those first two steps are really not hard. It’s could be as easy as changing the mindset of the business office and bringing in new people. OK, the first one can be really hard.

In the context of college media, where print revenue appears to be holding up better than the big metro papers (with exceptions: “College papers cut staffs, Friday editions due to lagging ad sales”), there’s still plenty of room to grow online advertising. With this in mind, “an estimated 1-2 percent of total revenue for many college media outlets — if that,” says CICM’s Bryan Murley.

Beyond that, there’s an immense opportunity for generating revenue in other ways, which is the second step. That could be anything from offering consulting on how clients can more effectively reach the 18-24 demographic to selling baked goods in the student union.

So who’s responsible? Everyone on your staff, from editorial to business. That doesn’t mean news reporters will be selling ads, just that everyone should be part of the solution. Contributions could be as simple as brainstorming or as hands-on as consulting in ways that don’t conflict with one’s news role.

“But I’m not a business major!” Rev2oh comprised only non-business people. Participants had a variety of backgrounds, but it was primarily a design-oriented group. At least one person asked why there weren’t any business/advertising people. Alan Jacobson, who organized the event with SND president Matt Mansfield, basically said: They’ve had their chance, they haven’t done enough or haven’t been successful and now it’s up to us.

That doesn’t mean you should “go it alone,” but you don’t need that crowd to get stuff done. In many cases, I’m sure they would provide excellent insights.

Just like we need to take lessons from outside of news in order to improve news, we need to take lessons from outside the normal news organization business office to keep the money flowing.

The idea

We need revenue, not just advertising.

I like many of the ideas Steve Outing has discussed (check out his business model-related posts). Instead of rehashing them here, I’ll just say that all of the following thoughts developed after listening to him on the Journalism Now podcasts and after hearing a number of similar ideas from the small business group at Rev2oh, namely Scripps Interactive’s Jay Small.

• Your college news organization’s newly renamed “Revenue Office” no longer focuses solely on advertising, nor does it serve a single customer — your news organization. It should offer specialized services for off-campus clients.
• This could include everything from helping them establish a Web site and online brand to helping them promote their product or service on campus.
• Regarding setting up a site, there is certainly demand. I couldn’t find reliable statistics, but it’s safe to say that many small businesses in college towns could benefit by having (A) a Web site, (B) a freshly redesigned site, (C) a more interactive site, (D) presence on appropriate social media and (E) better presence on social media, for example.
• Another idea would be to have the revenue office offer research and data that would help the client, from student surveys to conducting focus groups. Basically, as Outing and Small separately referenced, this staff would be like an advertising/marketing department for the client.
• An important note: they would NOT be public relations.

There are so many possibilities, but we don’t need to reinvent the wheel as a starting point. Yes, we need to look for new models and think outside the box, but we can start by adapting existing models in different fields.

I’m going to be speaking with The Miami Hurricane‘s business manager about these and other ideas soon. The adviser for the yearbook asked me to meet with those leaders to discuss ideas. I implore you to do the same, even if it’s just to get the conversation started.

Final thoughts:

• Open your mind.
• Listen to any and all ideas.
• Don’t be afraid to fail.
• Read Alan Jacobson’s initial posts on Rev2oh. Contact him. Find others like him. Their out-of-the-box thinking will open your mind. I certainly didn’t agree with Alan on every subject, but within half a day I saw the business side of news — and the possibilities — in a whole new light. He and Matt didn’t simply put us in a different pair of shoes. We were in a whole different outfit.
• Live long and prosper.

UPDATE: Check this out, Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet.

Link-tastic

Here are some links to help provide more context and background on Rev2oh:

• RevenueTwoPointZero » March 21st Manifesto
• RevenueTwoPointZero » The Opportunity
• SND Update – An effort to find new revenue models launches

The results on Rev2oh site:

• Display advertising solutions
• Classified solutions
• iPhone solutions
• Small business solutions: Beyond the click

More details about the results on SND Update:

• Small business solutions: Beyond the click
• How news organizations can take back classifieds
• Rethinking advertising + the homepage experience
• Mobile: Paying for functionality in news apps

Other related links

• Putting the search for a business model into perspective – Visual Editors
  
• RevenueTwoPointZero posts prototypes – Visual Editors
• Day after Revenue 2.0 #rev2oh – Patrick Cooper
  

Links that were passed around before and after:

• Online Payment Plan? How About a Print Print Payment Plan? (Matt Mansfield) – requires free registration
• Huge New Ad Unit Spotted In The Wild At NYTimes.com (Patrick Thornton)
• 27 Huge Publishers Join To Replace The Banner (Patrick Thornton)
• iList and Micro iList (William Couch)

Podcasts about revenue for news

• This Week in CoPress: Monetizing Online Student News
  
• Journalism Now Podcast – Making Money without Micropayments

I had previously participated in blogs that had used the CoverItLive software and wanted to try it out for myself. I signed up and it could not have been easier. They even have a way to launch a “practice session” to test out everything. For an upcoming event, the software shows an e-mail reminder form where the live coverage will be.

Preparing for the live event, you can add many media items in folders. I used this to post a map of campus I edited to show where everything would take place. I also used the pre-written text feature to write a welcome message, saving time when we went live.

Another nice feature is saved links. I used these to remind my readers that there was a live audio and video feeds also available to see/hear the event.

I set myself up in the middle of the action, outside the simulcast, across the street from the actual lecture to watch the protests outside. I had my laptop, cell phone and a card reader for photos. I designated one of our reporters to be a runner while I texted others to get updates.

For about an hour I posted every few minutes. For photos, I found a tiny Java program that resized and watermarked photos very fast. (Fast Image Resizer for Java). I used this software to quickly copy photos off of memory cards before using the CoverItLive media uploader in to post them.

With more readers came more comments. In CoverItLive, pending comments appear in the right of the window. You then have the choice to show (or not show) the comment, to allow all comments from a certain reader and to send a reader a private message. Many comments were about problems with the audio and video feeds (set up by the university and TV station, respectively). It was interesting to know that I was some people’s only source for the news.

I should add that CoverItLive uses Javascript, so it works for just about everyone. They even have a mobile version to post updates from any cell phone, including the ability to upload pictures and video directly.

Most of the protesters left by the time the actual lecture started, so things quieted down as the night progressed.

By the end, CoverItLive’s statistics indicated we had about 25 viewers. After stopping the live blog, the event can be “replayed” with everything listed just as it happens. You can see this on the post of our live coverage.

I thought the coverage was a success, and I would encourage any web team to look at this — maybe set up a breaking news plan-of-action to use CoverItLive when news breaks. And it’s not just for news- just think of how a sports reporter can cover a game with this kind of software.

Joe Moore is a sophomore meteorology major at Millersville University. He built the Web site for The Snapper using WordPress. The site is hosted at Site5. The weekly newspaper has a circulation of 4,000 and the Web site has about 1,000 weekly visitors.

Breaking the News

Once the story was posted and the official announcement by the President’s Office was made we started to spread the word through a variety of means: posting on Twitter, sending emails to the student list-serve, and good old word of mouth. Our goal was to get students and community members onto the site to read about the decision and comment on it. The results showed some interesting information concerning the roles these different modes of communication played.

First, Whitman is far from a “Twitter-heavy” campus. I know of a few dozen students and staff who use it, and most of those don’t post too frequently. Thus, I was definitely interested in what type of traffic our posts on Twitter would drive to the site. The results aren’t so encouraging though. Out of over 1,200 visitors over a 3-day period only 9 (less than 1%) came from Twitter. Furthermore, these visitors only spent an average of 2 seconds on the site. Not very heartening to someone trying to use Twitter to increase traffic to our site.

While the community may not be awake to the power of Twitter, Whitman is definitely fond of email list-servs. Over the course of a couple days we posted multiple announcements to the general student list-serve about the article. This drove over 100 visitors (more than 10% of our traffic). Also, these visitors were much more likely to spend time reading the article as most spent over 2 minutes on the page.

We were also interested in seeing how word spread about the article over Facebook. We didn’t post anything to the site, but it appears that others used it to send the link to friends. Over the 3-day period we received 19 visitors from Facebook (about 2%) without having to do a thing. College students may not be using Twitter to communicate yet, but they definitely use Facebook.

Finally, it seems that the best method for getting people to visit the site was to place a banner on the top of the homepage. This linked directly to the article until we were able to put together full coverage of the event. This method resulted in more than 700 visitors (or, 68%) over the 3 days. Furthermore, this visitors spent far longer (almost 4 minutes) on the page.

Takeaways for Next Time

Overall, the whole experience was very informative. Our new WordPress-powered site really made it all possible because, were it not for having a quick and easy way to push out content digitally, the Pioneer would have had to wait until Thursday to print an issue with articles about the cuts. It was also a bit of a reality check for my expectations of Twitter. Ultimately, if the campus community isn’t using it, then updates sent out via Twitter will largely be irrelevant.

Also, with more than 20 comments left on the main article this really showed the need for the site to have a forum feature (which I’ll be adding over the coming weeks). If we had this in place at the beginning, I think that student and community discussion would have been much more productive.

In the end, this was our first real test of covering breaking news digitally and then covering in print later on. We seem to have done alright, but I know there’s things we could have done better. Anyone else cover a recent breaking news story on their campus? I’d love to hear suggestions, ideas, and solutions.

>Why deep-information journalism?

The Internet is awash with information that is, too frequently, miles wide and only inches deep. News organizations add to the problem when they bombard readers with commodity news (only the “facts and updates,” says the AP’s 2008 study on news consumption, as opposed to depth and breadth).

Deep-information journalism is one way to balance out shallow coverage by providing context, background and analysis for topical issues. BBC’s Special Reports accomplishes this with a clean design that encourages exploration. News wikis are another promising development that would achieve a similar goal if implemented well.

Economic Stimulus 101: The project

At the Amherst Wire, we wanted to turn an analytical lens on the federal economic stimulus bill that passed last month and capture various aspects of the questions and debates surrounding it. We also hoped to frame the topic in a broader context including historical parallels and general economic theory distilled into simple terms.

To do so, we interviewed six professors (five in economics and one in entrepreneurship) from UMass Amherst and Mt. Holyoke College, edited the videos into short clips, and arranged them by subject in an online guide.

1. Preparation

We did extensive research and planning before setting up the interviews so that we would know the right questions to ask. This was particularly important when tackling a topic as complex as the U.S. economy — we had a lot of ground to cover, but at the same time, didn’t want to stray too far afield.

During the preparatory stages, we compiled a FAQ about the stimulus package from students blogging for a journalism class. This gave us an idea of what college students were wondering about the bill and shaped some general themes that ended up in the final project.

2. In-person interviews

To land interviews with professors, we simply scanned department contact lists and sent e-mails to faculty whose areas of expertise lined up with our topic. Out of maybe twenty professors contacted, six replied saying they were interested. We sent our questions in advance to give them time to prepare, and then conducted the interviews in their offices over the course of two weeks.

Each interview lasted 30-45 minutes and covered areas the professor was most familiar with. We didn’t follow a strict Q&A format or ask the questions in any particular order, but let the interview unfold more like a discussion. We would be reorganizing everything in the editing room later, anyway.

3. Video editing

This was the most time-consuming part of the entire project. After capturing about 3.5 hours of raw footage in Final Cut Pro, it took approximately three all-night sessions between three people to cut the interviews into short clips for the web. The average length of each clip was 1-2 minutes, with no clip longer than 5 minutes. We intentionally kept the clips short and to the point, catering to the attention span of most web users.

Once exported, the clips were uploaded to Vimeo along with some basic metadata (professor and subject in the title, pull quote in the description). We chose Vimeo for their high video playback quality and because they have one of the cleanest embedded players around.

Around the same time we were cranking out video clips, I got started with designing the page layout.

4. Layout and design

I always begin my web design process with some sketches on paper. My first thought was to build something like a mindmap, grouping clips by topic and sub-topic in a nonlinear format.

But the information might be too hard to find that way. So we came up with a dashboard of sorts at the top of the page that would let users jump to the sections they’re interested in, using simple anchor links.

At this point, I usually open up Photoshop and start playing around with graphics, because once I have a banner in place, the rest of the page’s design and color scheme tends to fall into place.

The layout itself was hand-coded in CSS and HTML, using a single-column WordPress page template as the base. All editing was done from the WordPress admin panel, with copious amounts of page previews and refreshing to test the design before it went live.

5. Putting it all together

The final stage of the project was to plug all the videos into the page layout. This turned out to be easier said than done, as we ended up with more video clips than we knew what to do with.

Ultimately, we came up with a decidedly low-tech solution to organizing the 70+ clips into the proper categories and questions: cutting up little strips of paper, writing a clip’s title on each one, and moving them around on a table until every clip had a home in the final presentation.

From there, it was simply a matter of going from section to section, copying the embed codes from Vimeo into the source code and adding thumbnails and pull quotes.

We used the Shadowbox JS plugin, which supports multiple types of media, to achieve the lightbox effect for launching videos.

A note on usability

In the project’s initial release, the thumbnails were actually embedded videos that could be played on the page without needing to launch a full-size version. Vimeo’s elegantly designed video embed options made this possible, and we all agreed that this was a very cool thing to include.

Unfortunately, within hours after launch, we received reports that our feature was causing browsers to freeze up on slower computers. Loading dozens of embedded videos on one page was too resource-intensive for a large percentage of our audience, so we had to scale back to simple image thumbnails.

Lesson learned: usability and accessibility always trumps coolness factor. It’s a good thing to keep in mind for any multimedia journalism project on the web.

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.

When section editors tell me they don’t think their copy desk is ready for Web duties, I know how they feel, too. I know because I’ve felt the same way at one point or another in the past couple years. My background is primarily in copy editing, and I’ve made the move to the online side of our paper only in the past year. In that time, we shifted our Web uploading duties to our copy desk. It’s not a perfect system, but I think it’s a start.

The old system vs. the new one

We used to have one person come in late at night and upload the entire issue shovelware-style: no links, no related stories attached, no Web-first mindset.

Now, copy editors upload stories one at a time after they’ve been edited.

It’s not a perfect system and it’s not necessarily built to accommodate a 24-hour news cycle, but it’s an improvement. When most of your staff is in class during the day, it’s tough to keep the site fresh during the day, but we’re working toward that goal.

What I learned

I won’t pretend we’re perfect, but here’s some bits of wisdom I’ve picked up during our transition:

Quit making excuses

This is Rule No. 1, and it’s one that took my a while to get over. If you’re waiting for the ideal time to make the switch, you’ll be waiting forever. Take Nike’s advice and just do it.

Make a illustrated step-by-step guide

The more detailed, the better. If you’ve worked in WordPress or another CMS before, learning a new system can be easy-peasy. But I’m guessing this will be a first for more than a few of your copy deskers, so make things as painless as possible: Include screen caps with each step so they can see what to click and where to type.

I’ll admit, It’s not exactly fun to put together this kind of a guide, but multiple staff members have told me they like to have ours on hand as a reference. One who’d never worked on our site even used it as his only guide to upload a story while I was in class and no one else was around to help him. The copy editors who I’ve trained keep it in front of them as they upload stories, too, so it looks like it’s getting used.

Keep section heads in the loop

Let your higher-ups know that copy editors may be a bit slower at getting to their normal duties while they get the hang of things. No matter how much you prepare them, this is going to happen. Just ask your staff to be patient.

Getting people to show up for training can be half the battle

I’ll admit: Only 40 percent of the desk actually showed up for our mandatory training. That meant I had to do one-on-one training with the other 60 percent throughout the week. (Read: Inefficient use of time.) Advertise your mandatory training like crazy.

Show copy editors the benefits of these new duties

Internship recruiters want applicants with Web skills, and that’s exactly what this shift in duties will teach them. They should be playing this up on their resume.

A recent post by Mindy McAdams (@macloo) and a year-old classic post by CoPress member Greg Linch (@greglinch) both highlight the need for journalists to have a diverse skillset. And if you’ve worked in one CMS, it’s much easier to learn another. If it’s between you and another internship applicant, you never know when your Web skills might just give you the edge. That rationale can be a good morale-booster if your staff feels a little hesitant or overwhelmed.

Nothing will ever go off without a hitch – and that’s A-OK

When you alter your newsroom’s copy flow, try to avoid any foreseeable problems, but realize some will pop up nevertheless. Each night will be a learning process, so relax and enjoy the adventure.

An unexpected perk: Better Web headlines

Our copy desk was already writing Web-only headlines, but they weren’t very SEO-friendly. Training sessions and handouts didn’t seem to do the trick.

What did, I found out, was giving them complete ownership: They were the ones writing those headlines and they were the ones actually putting them on the stories.

I did give them a short list of pointers:

1. Be specific and use keywords.
2. Kill the cute stuff. (Search engines don’t grasp puns, plays on words, etc.)
3. Be clear and concise.

So how about you? Do you have any tips from when your news organization consolidated editing duties? What problems have you run into? Comment away!

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”

In a conversation I was having with Joey Baker the other day, we were talking about micropayments, monetization, and how news differs from music, movies, and other forums of content. His argument is that news is “read once, and then file away” while the other forms have “repeat use” value which makes them easier to charge for. This got me thinking. Journalism shouldn’t just be about broadcasting the most recent event of the day, but also providing accurate, vetted, and independent information to educate the community. In fact, news websites are pretty bad with this other side of journalism. If I want to understand the context for an issue’s current situation beyond what’s presented in the article, I’ve got to use an atrocious site search tool to find previous articles on the issue. There has to be a better way to get me to the information I need to know.

Enter: the wiki.

More specifically, a topical wiki that would emphasize finding information by subject as opposed to date. I’m building off of two examples that do part of what I’m thinking about: NY Times Topics and the Guardian website. What I like about the Times Topics website are the *pedia-esque articles that synthesize the latest information into a two to three minute summary. It’s a good starting point, much like Wikipedia, for learning more about a subject. The Guardian website strikes my fancy because of the ability to choose what I’m interested in by subject, and then be able to drill down deeper a la Delicious:

I think these ideas should be merged with a few more in the mix. The context for the design of this news wiki is student government on a university campus, specifically the Associated Students of the University of Oregon (ASUO). This is what I would call a real-life example.

At the moment, if I as a student want to have any idea of what’s going on in student government, what bills are being voted on, and where my money is being used, I’d have to do some sleuthing. The most recent articles about the ASUO in the Daily Emerald will get me started, but I’d have to search across multiple sites, sift through a lot of information, and draft my own conclusions.

Instead, a landing page for the ASUO (and, a la the Guardian website, with nested topics) that was provided, developed, and maintained by a student news organization would be the first place I would go to get myself better acquainted with where the student government was currently at. Here is how it would present information:

• A *pedia article moderated by the beat reporter that anyone in the community could contribute to. To keep the conversation civil, all edits would have to be verifiable. This article would be a four to six paragraph synthesis of what the ASUO was about, what the history was, and what the current issues were.
• Content (including articles, images, and video) within the news organization by most recent, most commented, and most favorited. You’d be able to visualize all of these across a timeline too, in order to get a better understanding of what conversation was happening when.
• By bringing in the conversation from the community. If bloggers used “ASUO” as one of the tags for posts about the student government, that content too would be automatically pulled in and linked to. The same thing would apply for tweets, images on Flickr, and video conversation on Seesmic.

The cool thing is that you could have topics nested within your taxonomy, too. For instance, as a student wanting to educate myself about the student government, I’d start with the primary topic page. If there was an issue that caught my eye, I could click through to get a more refined *pedia article, list of posts on that specific subject, and maybe even the ASUO documents related to their discussion. 

I present the student news wiki, a living topical archive to inform the community.

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.

This got me thinking quite a bit about exactly why that is. Many who write about the murder of newspapers at the hands of digital media make it seem as if it is inevitable. As if to say, it must be so, because the Internet is much more shinier and newer than newsprint, and therefore must obviously be newsprint’s destroyer.

I find fault in this attribution of Darwinian evolution to our forms of media.

For the most part, our industry has looked at the Internet as either an opposing force or a distasteful side-dish that has to be served in order to appease the people. Again, I don’t believe that either has to be the case. There are ways of harnessing digital content and making it work in partnership with your print content, meshing the two together.

So, recently while searching for ways that people play with information on their phones, I came across an article on property realtors using 2D barcodes to promote their home listings. The idea of using these little codes commercially is to me, nothing short of genius. Realtors print the codes on their signs, along with instructions on how to use them, and the person walking by can instantly download the full information sheet on the property as they are standing in front of it.

What’s even cooler is that these squares of data can be embedded with links to pretty much any content online you can think of — a full Web site, an MP3 file, a video clip — and printed at the end of an article or in a side box. This, needless to say, opens up a world of potential between bridging the gap between our news site’s content and our print content.

The Vanguard will be using them to hardlink our articles to audio clips of speakers at presentations or events we cover, audio content from concerts or bands we review in the arts section, as well as allow our readers to download the location, time, and directions to an upcoming show or speaking event we preview, to name a few uses.

There’s a few code types out there that can be scanned by phones, but for our purposes we decided to use the QR code popular in Japan, over the U.S.-based Data Matrix or any of the other options such as Beetagg or Aztec. Mostly this is a comfort thing.

Our news editor spent 6 months in Japan this last year and said that the codes were all over the place on billboards, store fronts, magazines, etc. and frequently used by all kinds of people with phones. We ran a test series of QR codes on newsprint at varying sizes, and at all sizes they successfully were picked up by a code reader.

Code generation is free and generators can be found all over the Internet in many formats. Google even has an API you can download for the task.

Code readers are also free for people to download to their phones, and they work with your mobile device’s camera. Some phones come pre-installed with them now (Nokia has about half a dozen models that come preloaded with a code reader), but for those that don’t, either a visit to the manufacturer’s Web site or (in the case of the iPhone) a trip to the App Store will take care of that in about five minutes.

Next week we’ll be debuting the codes to our readers and running instructions regularly for awhile on how to use them. Everyone here is pretty excited to see how the codes are received by people, and I’m even more excited to find more new ways to mesh print with digital.