We hear it over and over again – “Innovate, innovate, innovate!” But what does that really mean in the context of newspapers, and why is it necessary? Let’s start by stepping back to see where newspapers went wrong.

Like we’ve mentioned before, the newspaper industry is a lot like the railroad industry, which essentially stopped growing because it didn’t transform its mindset. Because they failed to see the train as a part of the transportation business, they lost their customers to highways and airlines.

Newspapers are falling into a similar trap, but college media can change course before it’s too late. We should be the ones experimenting and taking risks. The students should be leading the way.

To quote Jason Calacanis, “Innovation is all you have. Once you stop innovating you lose your talent and you lose the race. Never. Stop. Innovating. Never. Never. Never.”

What is innovation really, though? Innovation is experimenting and taking risks. Innovation is trying what’s radically new.

After you take a look at the video above, be the innovator in your newsroom. Play it at your next staff meeting, e-mail the link to them or even post it to their Facebook walls. We have an entire series of videos coming for you in the following weeks to help your entire newsroom understand how to step ahead.

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

Host:

Guest: Steve Buttry, Information Content Conductor for Gazette Communications

Summary: Greg and Daniel talk with Steve about the radical organization restructuring at Gazette Communications, what the specific changes will be and how it will affect operations, and how some of the lessons learned thus far might apply to student media.

Related: Weekly Forum Discussion – Restructuring your organization

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

Around the Network

In the forum this week, Greg asked about strategies for making your print edition an online feature. The idea came out of a Twitter conversation between Greg and Dane Beavers at The Oklahoma Daily, and the specific questions were:

• After you complete a print edition, do you put a PDF or other such version of it online? Why or not?
• If you do, is it useful? What kind of traffic does it get?
• If you do, do you upload as a PDF or using a third-party service such as Issuu or Scribd?
• If you do, do you tell advertisers that their ads are viewable online?

The most common tool for putting PDFs online mentioned in the conversation was Issuu. Although Lauren doesn’t like the idea because she feels it “defeats the purpose of the web site”, Mo argues that it’s “absolutely important to post the print edition online. Biggest reason: archiving.” He gets requests from all number of people for past issues and having “digital copies of the paper makes it a lot easier, and plus, it’s searchable through Google (even copies as old as 50 years, with proper digital scanning and OCR).” Another good point from Mo for using Issuu instead of hosting on your own site: “you save on bandwidth costs, because the PDFs tend to add up and swallow your monthly usage (lately we’ve been looking at ~50MB per 36-page issue).”

On the wiki, Joey added a bunch of information about the Daily Orange’s brand-new blog network, including setup (they’re using WordPress MU) and plugins. I’m personally looking forward to reading a blog post about the WordPress MU configuration process, and their strategies for expanding engagement.

Congratulations to Jon Schleuss for being hired to the Web Developer position at the Arkansas Traveler.

In the News

Four links you should have clicked on in the past week and should instead read, watch or listen to this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• TWiT 184: Hard Times for Hard Copy – The tech pundit take on the newspaper industry. Want perspective? This is perspective.
• GooseGrade Brings Citizen Editing to WordPress Blogs – Plugin released that allows your community to submit copy edits for your review. We’ve installed it on this blog if you’d like to try it out; the widget should be located in the lower right. 30 second review: I really like the idea, but you shouldn’t be required to authenticate in my opinion.
• Five ideas for display ads – Pretty decent ideas for improving online engagement with display advertising. The best one, in my opinion, is to make the advertisement a part of a CAPTCHA so that the reader is required to read it.
• Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger – Erik Hersman (AKA White African) interviews Alfred Sirleaf, an “analog blogger.” Mainstream news organizations could learn a lot from this guy (read the article for the full deal):

Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger from WhiteAfrican on Vimeo.

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.

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.

“What’s that?” you say.  Sign up and check it out.

Until Tuesday, the group was mostly a listserv for keeping members in the know about CoPress. But Alex Klein (@alexklein), editor for new media at the Duke Chronicle, added a new element that we’re very happy to see: member discussion and sharing experiences.

Here is what Alex asked:

The Duke Chronicle is looking to spend some money on our Online Department, because we currently have no office space, no special software, and no hardware of any kind.

I’m looking for a few items from anyone who’s willing to provide them:

1. How much does all your Online Department stuff cost? (hardware, software, even things like tables, chairs, etc.)
2. What do you have? (computers, audio/video equipment, software, gadgets, monitors, etc.)
3. Where can we find the most cost-effective stuff?
4. What are 3 things we MUST have?
5. How many people are in your Online Department?
6. How much space do you get in the office? (as a percentage or in square feet)

Thanks, everyone. Also, anyone who wants to provide strategies for recruitment is welcome to do so! A/V and developers are our main priorities.

If you work for a student news organization, I strongly encourage you to read the full thread. Nevertheless, we’re here to help, so here is a summary of the six responses:

1. Most organizations don’t know exactly how much their online department costs. It could a simple $300 monthly stipend for the Web editor or thousands in different pieces of equipment.
2. Almost everyone had Macs and Adobe CS3. Final Cut Express HD was the most common video editing software, but Adobe Premiere popped up in one.
3. NewEgg dominated for hardware suggestions, with B&H Photo in second.
4. Essentials were hard to pin down, but audio/video equipment, the proper computers/software and good people were the top three answers.
5. Online staffs ranged from two to six people.
6. As for office space (hey, where’s my stapler?), it varied from two desks to two offices.

Want to weigh in? Feel free to answer the question in a comment below. Or, better yet, join the Google Group and responded via e-mail to add to the thread.

Since launching our new site in late August, The Miami Hurricane has not only used WordPress for our online content management but also to revamp our story workflow process.

It didn’t happen overnight but, by late September, all story editing was being done in the CMS. It’s a process I conceptualized with Editor in Chief Matthew Bunch and Webmaster Brian Schlansky (I advise The Hurricane as editor at large for online and multimedia).

What follows is a breakdown of our system. Enjoy!

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)