12 ideas that work (in some way or another)

I’ve blogged a lot over the past few years, either here or via the Cyberbrains, about different pieces of the puzzle that the news industry can use to pull out of the current economic challenge it faces. My recent posts about Google and the AP got me thinking about maybe pulling some of those ideas together, and then one of my bright students who follows me on Twitter (@tdankmyer) gave me a bit of a nudge on this.

Obviously it’s really easy to point out misguided ideas, but putting yourself out there and talking about what you think will work is a little bit harder. I’ve been here at MU for almost five full years and had access to knowledge, resources, great minds, and some really cool future-looking projects. A lot of different ideas are swirling in my head as a result as I’m winding down my time here.

In reference to AP and newspapers/online sites in general, I’ve cobbled toether some ideas that I’ve read about or witnessed in action firsthand that offer a glimpse of a better future. Three caveats I offer:

• These aren’t “the” solution but rather a set of working principles based on what I’ve seen work.
• Philosophically I don’t buy into the notion that there is one answer out there. Media are evolving to reflect the diverse ways in which our communities are constructed and maintained; my firm belief is that media in this new era needs to be as customized as the communities they serve (and, in fact, the lack of customization in legacy media is a big reason why the old giants are struggling). Trial-and-error has to be part of the process, as in any entrepreneurial venture.
• Because this is intended as a conversation and not a solution, if you have any responses or things to add then I’d welcome you to do so in the comments.

So here we go …

1. Forget the AP: Rather than let them fight your battles, realize that the AP model is part of the problem. You’re all paying too much for a service that duplicates a lot of what others are doing. It’s eating into your profit margins. Doug Fisher at South Carolina has chronicled ongoing battles between AP and publishers, and it’s worth looking over what he’s organized on the subject. After all, when is the last time you felt it was urgent to link to an AP story?

2. Don’t fight aggregators; be one: It seems obvious to me. If you’re so mad about aggregators taking your content, then figure out ways to aggregate. Don’t look at the problem (they’re stealing content) but rather the lesson (people value organization of content from various sources). This doesn’t mean steal others’ stuff. Partner with bloggers and writers in your area and look for ways to cross-publish material and link back to the original source. Who doesn’t love getting picked up by a bigger news organization? I got linked to on a post by Kos last week and was ecstatic … more attention for your work is never a bad thing. We learned this lesson with MyMissourian when we started working with area bloggers to give them a second platform. The reason people express themselves is to find others; be a vehicle that facilitates this. And, yes, profit from it.

3. Open up and customize: Take down the gates of access. Stop fearing the unruly crowds. If your news site doesn’t allow comments, you might as well just shut down now. But more than that, take advantage of interactivity on the Web and let your audience and journalists interact with one another in more direct ways. Give users the ability to sort and organize what you publish so it fits what they want or need, not what you want to present. Develop engines that “sense” this for them based on past habits so you can anticipate what they want; but always give them the option to choose. Amazon does it – why can’t you?

4. Local, local, local: On the Web, you’re competing with everyone. What is your leg up on the competition? You know your own community better than people 10 states away. Get back to covering your community with a vigor. Give them the fuzzy stuff for free, but work to raise funding for important coverage of public policy and investigative stories. Spot.us remains one of the most inspiring ideas I’ve run across in the past year because it shows people will pay for quality content. So will advertisers that sense people want it.

5. Think of yourself as a service, not a news organization: We talk about journalism as a public service all the time. But perhaps we need to think of our sites as more than that. Offer services that pull information onto one site that they might have to otherwise hunt down on their own. Offer free classifieds, funeral home obituaries and dating services rather than robbing them blind like you’ve been doing for years (don’t make me tell the story of me trying to sell my car through the newspaper classifieds). Make yourself so valuable that people consider you their home page. Capture their loyalty and give your advertisers a defined audience.

6. Reimagine print: Print is not necessarily your primary delivery vehicle. Use the print product to build online traffic. Make it advertising heavy. Stuff it with the best stuff you can find, whether it comes from your staff or from other sources using some of the ideas above. Low cost, high profit margins. Drop it on every doorstep, give advertisers something to grin about.

7. Serve your advertisers: News publications like to think their core mission is the creation and dissemination of news. Steve Yelvington has it right: the core mission is to create relationships with consumers that can be vehicles for advertising that lets businesses sell their products. Does this mean we serve advertisers above citizens? No. But we are looking to create ways to find and reach our audience so our advertisers know they are. Free registration might be a start, but you have to offer something of value that makes people want to take this step (such as customization).

8. Partner with other publishers: Tandem with #1 and #2. Throw out the AP, partner with publications in your region and state and fill your publication with news your readers want by sharing copy that is branded on your own site. Remember, you are providing a service, hunting down what they want to read. Don’t make them find it. You can keep them on your site and serve your local audience.

9. Your audience is a valuable resource: Make use of them. Dan Gillmor, in his excellent We The Media, makes this point well. Your audience is a sounding board for story ideas and can help shape your story. They can even investigate or tip you off on things that are happening (witness the #amazonFAIL crowdsourcing from yesterday that pushed the story into the news). Forget this journalist-as-expert stuff, tap into audience expertise instead. Listen to them on your comments pages, bulletin boards, and via social media tools. Let them do citizen journalism to fill gaps in your coverage (and stop talking about their credibility, an old and tired argument).

10. Realize it’s not always the medium’s fault: The dirty little secret of the newspaper decline is that many papers in trouble would be making money if they weren’t overleveraged via their debt loads. Newspapers still make money. Newspaper conglomerates with huge debt loads to service, not so much. This is not the economic climate for overreaching.

11. Offer context amid information overload: Matt Thompson makes the excellent point that in the age of information overload, context becomes harder to find. His excellent Money Meltdown experience showed that journalists don’t have to always produce the content to give people the context and sense-making they crave amid the noise. Packaging and narrative ordering matters. Does this sound like the aggregating that AP is trying to fight? Absolutely.

12. Value is everything: Clyde Bentley pointed out in some of the discussion that small monthly subscription fees might be doable and also give advertisers a workable sense of reader demographics. This is a point I might concede, but I would still argue that getting users to pay even $2 per month means the site has to have value. That means you need to be producing must-have content that people can’t do without or find somewhere else for free. This means figuring out what users value, and journalists have traditionally been too detached from this topic.