We’re talking about progress on the internet? The product newspapers offer up online these days could barely be described as marginally better than the product three years ago. Steve Outing gives newspapers a B-, which is generous enough to keep newspaper-dot-coms thinking maybe if they do blogs better and new video each day then they’ll be on the right track.
I can’t say I know for sure that newspaper-dot-coms aren’t moving fast enough, but it sure feels that way. And judging by all the shovelware out there…
Anyway, here are my thoughts on what newspapers need to do to make some progress on the internet:
- Break the addiction to the article as the main model of information distribution.
- Figure out ways to build community that don’t involve message boards, blog / story comments, online polls and community photo galleries.
- Start breaking down and organizing all their information in ways that matter to people (geographically is one good place to start).
- Newsrooms need to break their desperate grasp on the daily news cycle if they want room for meaningful change to take root.
- Deploy online advertising models that are flexible enough that every business in your circulation area could (and would want to) buy an ad.
- Too much time of night producers on online news staffs is spent recreating, reformatting, and re-associating content. Most of that is work that could and should be done by computers — I say get the robots doing the things the robots should be doing, and humans doing the things humans should be doing.
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