Featured

Inspiration for today’s tip hit me with one of those “d’uh!” (slap yourself on the head) moments. The short version is: Online news publishers can learn a lot from TV’s American Idol.

If you read yesterday’s tip, you’ll remember that I was advocating for a “pro-am” form of “citizen journalism.” Pure grassroots or user content, I think, has some serious weaknesses. But grassroots content guided by professional editing and oversight overcomes that, and presents good growth opportunities.

It hadn’t dawned on me that America Idol is a good model for journalism until I read this blog item by Andrea Useem at ifocos.org. Continued

There’s no shortage of bad news coming out of the newspaper industry these days. The latest disturbing headline is from Ad Age: “Biz Sections Dying Off for Lack of Ad Revenue.” Summary: As newspapers continue to make cuts due to declining circulation and ad revenue, some of them are finding their print-edition stand-alone business sections to be expendable. Ad Age cites 8 US newspapers that have stopped publishing business sections.

While that trend is unlikely to reverse, publishers can nevertheless look to business news as a growth opportunity — online, of course. As the Ad Age article points out, consumers interested in business news are more and more getting it from other sources online, of which there are plenty. Local and regional newspapers should refocus efforts on providing more and better business news online, because they can compete — not so much on the national level, but definitely with local news. Continued

So often I see Internet entrepreneurs doing things that traditional news companies should be doing, but don’t most likely due to cultural issues that prevent thinking and acting outside the box. An example comes from Outside.in, which collects, filters and publishes links to local news from a variety of sources (including but not limited to local mainstream media websites).

If you choose, you can receive a twice-weekly e-mail summary of content that Outside.in has found specific to your location. (You give Outside.in your zip code.) Here’s a screen grab of the local-news alert I received this morning:

Continued

In line with recommendations for news publishers to publish outside of their own website, it’s also important to engage on the “outside.” Here’s what I mean:

If you have a news operation, you probably (I hope!) have reporters engage in comment threads and conversations on your site. If you’re an independent blogger, you no doubt do likewise. That’s a good first step. But you should also be watching for conversations involving you or your reporters on sites and blogs all over the web. Join in those conversations! Respond!

The reasons this is important should be obvious… Continued

It’s becoming common nowadays for news organizations to put their videos on Youtube (e.g., NYTimes.com). That’s a smart thing, since it’s increasingly important to reach people with your content wherever they may be. They’re not always going to visit you at your website, but they’re increasingly spending time on social networks and social-media sites like Youtube. So meet them there.

Something that news organizations often miss, however, is sharing their photos on photo-sharing services. Just as you might have a strategy of sharing your videos on Youtube to reach that audience, you also should be feeding your news photos out to sites like Flickr. Continued

Lately I’ve been studying Internet marketing techniques, and there’s lots from that world that is relevant to news websites. One of the most powerful concepts in Internet marketing (well, all marketing, actually) is “social proof.” That simply means that you’ll get more people to buy something — or read something — if they know that lots of other people have bought or read it.

If you’ve got something to sell, a powerful statement to make to your potential audience of buyers is: “Wow! In the latest 24 hours we’ve sold 1,321 Widget 2.0’s!” Continued

In an earlier item I mentioned how some corporate web content management systems lag behind open-source platforms in some ways. One thing I often notice with websites of major news organizations using proprietary CMS’s is that they lack “subscribe to comments” features — which is a common feature on many blogs and websites using open-source platforms, since there are plug-ins available to add this. (This website, built on Wordpress, features subscribe to comments, using a plug-in.)

Continued

As a strategy to grow your news website, developing and deploying smartly designed widgets is an important one. This year you’ll see me write and hear me talk a lot about widgets and the overall concept of spreading your content far and wide online. News publishers by now should have deep-sixed the old notion that their content is sacred and should be restricted to viewing only on their websites. They must get used to the idea that their content can be just about anywhere — and that’s a good thing. Continued

The folks in the online department at the Poynter Institute are working on a major redesign for Poynter.org (aka, Poynter Online). It’ll be the first significant overhaul of the website, a resource and training tool for journalists, in 5 or 6 years. In fact, the last big redesign pre-dated the last two eyetracking studies conducted by Poynter, so this one should incorporate some of the knowledge gleaned from that research. (Disclaimer: I was the project manager on one of those studies about 3 years ago.) Continued