In less than a year, M.E. Sprengelmeyer has gone from being the Washington correspondent at the Rocky Mountain News — covering everything from 9/11 to the war in Iraq — to owning a community newspaper in a small New Mexico town. He writes about his experience on the Save the News blog, and about his optimism about the state of community journalism. “Think of a community newspaper as a bronze statue in the town square,” he writes. “Everybody in town can look up and see that it’s there.”
Category: Future of news
In this time of radical change for newspapers, you’ll find lots of folk trying to make sense of it all – especially in the blogosphere. These writers are trying to interpret the signs of the media times and to recommend what we should do next. You can’t read them all, but when I see Steve Buttry’s byline attached to something, I always take time to check it out. I hope you will read the entire blog post at the URL above. Talking about the free vs. paid content issue, Steve notes that many people see the Original Sin of newspapers as not beginning to charge for online content from the get-go. But in a typical (for Steve) flash of insight, he notes that the Original Sin was on the ad side. Here’s a brief sample: “The disastrous error that newspapers made early in our digital lives was treating online advertising as a throw-in or upsell for their print advertisers. Helping businesses connect with customers was always our business. We were facing new technology and new opportunities and we did next to nothing to explore how we might use this new technology to help businesses connect with customers. We just offered businesses the same old solutions that we offered in print, but pop-up ads and web banners somehow didn’t work as well as display ads. Which was just as well, because we told our business customers the ads weren’t worth much by the way we treated them.” If you agree with what Buttry is saying, you will definitely want to make plans to attend our Internet ad sales workshop on Oct. 29 with Chuck Nau. Mark your calendars now and watch for more details on the website and in your inbox soon.
The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism has been looking at new models for online news lately, and speaking with online news operations all over the country. In doing so, they’ve provided a great list of ways people are monetizing online content. There is a great deal of information in here, and anyone with a website should check it out.
Shortly after the Ann Arbor News closed, AnnArbor.com went live. The site has an interesting format — it’s rather blog-like — and it screams hyperlocal. It’s definitely worth looking at if you’re a community journalist. And on top of the interesting format for news, they’ve also rethought advertising in a unique way. Check out the articles for more information. The first link, from the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, covers the reasoning behind the sites layout and delves into the ad issue as well. See the other two links for some commentary on the site from Steve Buttry and Jeff Jarvis.
Categories
How newspapers must change
It’s not your father’s newspaper business any more. This business is changing as radically as the buggy whip business changed around the turn of the 20th century. One of our goals in the Around the Web service we provide is to share with you some of the innovative thinking out there related to the business we know and love. This article is one you should definitely read. You may not agree with all of it, but it’s a concept you should think about. Here’s a sample: “20th century news isn’t fit for 21st century society. Yesterday’s approaches to news are failing to educate, enlighten, or inform. The Fourth Estate has fallen into disrepair. It is the news industry itself that commoditized news by racing repeatedly to the bottom. It’s time for a better kind of news. A new generation of innovators is already building 21st century newspapers: nichepapers. The future of journalism arrived right under the industry’s nose.”
Many of you are looking for different approaches to the online product. Check out this one from Columbia, Mo., a combination of a blog-like news stream with in-depth overview pages. Columbia Tomorrow lets members of the community start their own discussions on news posts. And check out the site’s video, which explains more about this project’s approach.
Kevin Kelleher gives a good overview of the free-vs.-paid content argument, then presents his case that this is definitly the wrong time for newspapers to begin charging for online content. Here’s a sample of this thinking: “For the sake of argument, let’s say that news sites are routinely charging readers in five years. By then, the economy may be substantially healthier than now, and advertisers will be looking for sites with large, loyal readerships to sell their ads on. But that won’t include newspapers. They’ll be catering to that 10 percent of their online audience willing to subscribe. The rest of the Web will have long stopped linking to—and talking about—their stories. The dollars will flow right past the newspapers’ pay walls. And then they’ll really be sorry.”
Kevin Kelleher gives a good overview of the free-vs.-paid content argument, then presents his case that this is definitly the wrong time for newspapers to begin charging for online content. Here’s a sample of this thinking: “For the sake of argument, let’s say that news sites are routinely charging readers in five years. By then, the economy may be substantially healthier than now, and advertisers will be looking for sites with large, loyal readerships to sell their ads on. But that won’t include newspapers. They’ll be catering to that 10 percent of their online audience willing to subscribe. The rest of the Web will have long stopped linking to—and talking about—their stories. The dollars will flow right past the newspapers’ pay walls. And then they’ll really be sorry.”
Community-based newspapers — in this cast, alternative newsweeklies — are finding a place for new technologies faster than traditional media, according to a news story coming out of their annual meeting.
One publisher quoted in the article above said this: “As those big guys crumble, it’s an opportunity for us. We know that they are stuck halfway between print and the web. And now they have to figure out what to do about mobile. They have far more resources than we do, but they also are much more bureaucratic.”
At the opening session, Rob Curley of Greenspun Interactive told publishers that they needed to be “of the Web” and not just “on the Web.” Curley said: “It’s not about getting people to your site. It’s about getting your site to the people.”
Jeff Jarvis has an interesting take on new numbers released by The Economist. He says their latest circulation and online audience figures — which look quite good — are evidence that people are still willing to pay for a solid product. This may be the niche that community newspapers fall into.