1. Provide context about the exact place that I live. Context makes information actionable.
2. Make accessible and linkable historical information about the place that I live. News sites are a community resource — time to start acting like one.
3. Give news sites exponentially more entry points to the information they’re already publishing. More entry points makes information more findable.
4. Make local political news and information more accessible. This makes politics more approachable and actionable to those not already disposed to follow it.

1. An index of all the facts included in the articles they publish

This means a list of facts, as well as a means to link directly to the part in the article that fact exists.

Example: McDonald’s buys more than 3 billion pounds of potatoes annually across the globe. This nugget of information is more interesting than the article’s headline, McDonald’s seeks better ‘tater for its French fries, yet it was left embedded in the article body for only the most curious to find.

Indexing facts does more than provide new and engaging entry points to existing content. Facilitating easy citations with facts and links to facts can improve the quality of conversations on news-site article comments, and it can also encourage wikipedia users to cite the news site with the tools that make it easy to cite.

2. News archives. Not just from the last month — from the last year, ten years, fifty years, century.

Every local news-dot-com publishing with a newspaper is sitting on a goldmine of archived content. The New York Times hired reCaptcha to help digitize their archives — sure, the NYT’s web strategy doesn’t always align with that of local news-dot-coms, but in this case, they’re onto something.

3. Indexes of news and information by zip code

Denver’s a decently big city. We’ve got 72 neighborhoods and xx zip codes. If there were a place I could go to get all the news, calendar events, and classified listings in my zip code, I would. Not only that, I would tell my neighbors about it. Indexing by zip codes gives a hook for loyal readers to introduce your site to the people that live around them that may not care for your publication, and it gives the non-loyal readers, the non-news junkies a compelling reason to visit.

4. Indexes of information on local politicians, organized by politician.

I don’t care about your catch-all “local politics” category. I care about about the politicians that represent me, and I want an easy way to find out everything they’re doing. That means not just local politicians either — that means the people repping me in the statehouse, my U.S. House representative and my U.S. senator.

Looking at “local” as a catch-all bucket rather than a collection of specific and distinct pieces is a superficial approach to publishing.

The New York Times’ Represent application approaches local politics in a mature and fully fleshed manner.

Here are some examples of catch-all local politics buckets:

• Denver Post: Local Politics
• Boston Herald: Local Politics
• Dallas Morning News: Local Politics

5. Indexes of major crimes, by date, with crime stats aggregated by month, year and every type of location that’s available (county, zip code, neighborhood, street, block etc.).

Yes, this is the type of information you see Everyblock and Adrian Holovaty pushing online. I’m not saying publish data-driven presentations of all crimes — I’m saying start with the big ones, see how that works, and go from there. Publishing per-capita rates for violent crimes opens a window on urban vs. suburban living, on what’s happening in the places we call home and work, and how these incidents trend over time.

I’m going to repeat that: How these incidents trend over time. Crime drives a large part of the news truck, but so often it’s crime without context. Now that local news is online, it has the opportunity to give context to the information it publishes. What would this context do? Turn crime news from the hand-wringing / rubberneck activity and make the crime information actionable. If arson has increased 200% in my zipcode (80204) in the last year, that’s worth asking my police department and local government about.

When I visit PressDemocrat.com, I go for one thing: Sonoma County news. Someone in Mendocino County might visit the site for Mendo County news, which is great, but not the reason I visit. Ok, with that said, how do I locate Sonoma County news on PressDemocrat.com. Ahh… herein lies the problem. Local news granularity is sorely missing on the site.

When scrolling down PressDemocrat.com’s frontpage, you won’t find sections for “Santa Rosa news” or “Windsor news”

When I worked at the Winston-Salem newspaper, we had sections for each of the counties we covered, and I’m pretty sure we had feeds for each of them. One of our managers suggested getting rid of them — the traffic wasn’t particularly high to any one of the sections…. however, if you added the traffic to all of the county-based sections together, it was traffic worth considering.

And if you like that anecdote, I’ve got another. Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, despite their “Closer To Home” slogan and (some say) general reputation for being more focused on the local, has no place-based online sections or place-based RSS feeds. The Denver Post, my employer, has both. The Post had place-based RSS feeds for the Denver Metro area before I started working there in October 2006.

I don’t get it — you’re a local news organization, you publish most of your information about a specific place on this planet, yet you do nothing to highlight, filter, or organize your place-based information? These city- / county- / neighborhood- / street- / block-based news feeds are just the tip of the location-based information iceberg. What can you do with a dateline? With a locator map? With a photo? A crime blotter? A classified ad? A banner ad? A calendar entry?

I wrote about some of this at the beginning of 2008 in this blog post, Three ways that online changes the “Where?” question, journalistically. I’m working on answers in my day-job, some of the time. If you’ve got ideas for a non-day-job project related to this, let me know.

Check out what he wrote about journalism and the internet, all the way back in 1999:

I do not consider the Internet – and generally the online medium – as a substitute to other media, but as a complement, a new channel of communication which takes its place alongside the others. I am going to position myself here as a journalist and an editor. Because it’s my original profession. Because it’s also the profession I am trying to re-invent (or more accurately, to learn again from scratch) since I have been doing it online. And mostly, because I firmly believe that journalists have an essential role to play in tomorrow’s interactive society and that they are quite wrong in fearing to become obsolete with the advance of the new media.

And this set of bullet points about things today’s journalists will have to deal with:

1. The behavior of online information seekers is very different than the traditional readers: some surf, some search.
2. Geography is no longer an issue.
3. We will have to think of a way to present our information so that it reaches both people and robots.
4. We will have to handle many different types of information that previously were not taken into consideration and which do not necessarily respond to the traditional definition of news: weather forecasts, traffic updates, sport results, real estate markets, transcripts of school board meetings, unedited documents, etc.
5. We will have to face new competitors coming from outside the field of publishing, using different approaches and different techniques.
6. We are going to witness an explosion in the media diversity. It would be incredibly naive to envision the future looking only at what we can see today – the computer as a plastic box with a screen and a keyboard.

Read the article, A New Media Tells Different Stories, here.

Sure, many others have talked about how articles are a shabby content crutch in this information age. But until you can afford that brand new pair of Holovaty-brand bionic legs, build on your success…. no, not your home page — that wreck of a page oughta be put to death, not built on. Build on your article page.

Here are some ideas for apps that can harness and extend the power of your article page:

• An in-house article bookmarking tool. This is Ryan Sholin’s idea, and it’s a good one. I mean, what fraction of a percent of people are actually using those social bookmarking links on every page of your article? Sure, this requires some sort of registration system to handle the data, but you have one of those, right? And think, once it’s done, it’s another way to break the page-view vice and figure out what articles your readers are so interested in, they bookmarked it to come back to later.
• Loomia’s “People Who Like This May Also Like...” widget. Now, I haven’t used this so I can’t speak to its greatness, but I can tell you this: it’s free. Well, okay, not really — it’s $50 a month, if you do fewer than one million views. But hey, that’s cheap. And as someone who is probably cheap themselves (kidding, kidding), I’m sure you appreciate that.
• Add your most-popular article lists. Better yet, integrate your section-specific most-popular lists. If you’re feeling adventurous, put your section-specific least popular lists on there — show the people what they’re missing. Don’t have a most-popular app? Do you have any type of site stats package? Well, get yourself a freelancer and fix that problem. It shouldn’t take more than 5 hours for a freelancer to build an awful-but-works app… make that ten hours if they’re the brother / sister / cousin of someone you know.

Got any you’d like to share? Let me know~

Note: I see the a snarky tone in this post. I can’t say I’m proud of that, and I can’t say it won’t happen again. If you have any suggestions for handling the snark (or a good newsroom “I-can’t-believe-they-said-that”-type joke), won’t you throw it my way?

1. Got elevators? If your newsroom isn’t on the first floor, odds are you’re taking an elevator to get to it. Every second spent in the elevator is a second not spent working. Can that elevator move faster? What about the elevator doors — think of all the time wasted while those doors close. If you could just shave a half-second off the speed of the doors closing and opening, man, those seconds are going to add up.
2. Give tours? I bet you do, and I bet you’re giving them away for free now. For shame. How about some “value-added” on top of that tour? The tour of the newsroom is free, but sitting in on that morning budget meeting’s an extra $10 a head ($5 for children and seniors). Afternoon budget: $15 / $10. Of course some adjustments for market size ought to be made…
3. Give your loyal print readers computers. An internet-ready computer can be had for $300. A year’s subscription to the newspaper costs about $100. Hook your loyal readers up with a computer (sure, they have to shell out for the internet), and you’ve got a reader for life (whatever’s left of it).
4. Go black-and-white. Do you really need color on *all* your section fronts? Really? The Philadelphia Inquirer doesn’t: I caught the Monday Inquirer last month, and its business section was all black and white.
5. What about the snack-room vending machines? Those are profit centers waiting to happen. If you’re not charging a buck for a can of coke, it’s nobody’s fault but your own when your newspaper goes under.

On a tangent, yesterday I pitched three categories for the information we’re displaying on the Denver Post’s online community home page:

• What’s new and recent
• What’s hot
• What’s featured and important

That new / hot / featured is a solid set of filters for any online publication.

Poynter released part of an eyetrack study that says “Readers select stories of particular interest and then read them thoroughly.” That’s cool — and that opens the door to another type of most-popular metric. In addition to ranking the most clicked-on articles, how about ranking the articles that readers spent the longest time reading?

Local can’t be universally defined by mileage — that’s obvious. To a person living in the suburban sprawl outside Los Angeles, a business 20 miles away could be “local.” But to a resident of Brooklyn, a “local” business might be one that is within a 15-minute walk.

The cool part about “local” is it depends on you. It’s not circulation area, it’s not county line, it’s not zip code. It’s specific to you and the way you live.

Here’s my definition of local, broken down into four tiers:

• First-tier local are the areas I go on a regular basis: my home, my job, my friends’ places, the gas stations, the parks, the bars, the grocery stores — and the places I commute through to get to those places.
• Second-tier local are the areas around those areas — or the places that wouldn’t be much out of my way to be at. I pay less attention to what’s happening in the second-tier local spaces than the first-tier, naturally.
• Third-tier local are the places that are first-tier to my family and close friends.
• Fourth-tier local are the places that *used* to be first-tier local to me and still matter for one reason or another.

If you got to blow up your newspaper, effectively immediately, meaning even the potential elimination of the traditional, nuts-and-bolts beats – cops, city hall, school board – and if you then got to rethink completely how we harvest stories …

What would the “beats” be?

Great question. It got a bunch of responses too, here are my favorites from the contributions:

• Stories Where People Voluntarily Get Out Their Old Yearbooks
• Collision (cars, people, ideas, whatever)
• Pieces of furniture that cost under $500
• Contentment. Or, what people do when they don’t have to do anything
• Politicians who are (not) helping
• Businesses that are not chains
• Secrets
• Things we accept but shouldn’t
• The things we do, but do not talk about

And these are the ideas I contributed:

• Red: News and local ephemera that has to do with that color.
• Last Month, Last Year: What matters now about what happened around here 13 months ago?
• Oooops: Who out there is making the ‘best’ mistakes, and how do they do it?
• PGs and QBs: Point guards and quarterbacks in the news.
• Five Years: News and ephemera about five-year-olds.
• Running on Empty: “Running out of gas”-related news and stuff

What I like about the Gangrey post and the ideas it sparked is the idea of the world worth talking about that doesn’t fit within the usual definitions of what makes a news or feature article.

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.