Reading this followed my discovery of the Kankakee Daily Journal‘s site, which allows comments on the two or three grafs of articles they provide online — the rest of the word-based news is tucked behind the pay e-edition wall.

I’m asking myself: Is PDF-style delivery really the future of newspapers? The e-edition PDFs are attractive to newspapers — they look like the print edition, and they contribute to print-circ numbers. But they also ignore the possibilities of online advertising, which is a glaring problem with many newspaper-dot-coms.

When you hide your information behind a pay-wall or registration-wall, you’re penalizing people’s money or time for access to your stuff.

Charging for your content penalizes all involved in the linking / recommending of that content.

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.

The Onion’s making a push into the online local entertainment markets of ten cities — Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago and Austin already, and Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Denver and the Twin Cities to come, says The Onion’s press release from PR Newswire.

They’re changing the name from AV Club to The Decider. You can see Chicago’s “Decider” site live here. Notice the decider.com domain — why they decided to use a new domain name and not cash in on the existing search-engine cred of theonion.com I have no idea.

So, beside the news that there’s another face in the local-entertainment-guide information game, the other interesting bit (which I heard from a friend of mine) is The Onion is taking all the market-specific articles they’ve published in the AV Club’s archives, and publishing them anew online. The advantage there is that these sites launch with more than just a front page and a handful of articles… also, it’s more information for search engines to index… also, and this is just me thinking out loud, I wonder why other print media with extensive archives don’t take advantage of that gold mine of existing, low-overhead, local information?

1. The Front-Page Mentality: All the most important stuff goes on the front page of a newspaper. But lookee here, on the web we can make our front pages as long and as big as we want! Let’s put all our important stuff on that front page! Make it huge! Yeah!
2. The Deadline-And-Its-Over Mentality (also known as “The Print-It-And-Its-Done Mentality”)
3. The It’s-Got-To-Be-As-Perfect-As-Possible-Before-It-Launches Mentality: This is a sister of “Deadline-And-Its-Over,” and it comes from years spent publishing information with a printing press. With a printing press, the only way to revise information that was published was to issue a correction, which was one of those Bad Things That You Did.
4. The We’re-The-Only-Game-In-Town Mentality: Competition was much easier when the competition was just radio, tv, maybe another daily. Now well … the entire internet is your competition. The.entire.internet. And, know what? There are some folk out there putting a whole heckuva lot more thought and effort into what it means to publish local information than you. Okay okay, that’s just a guess.
5. The Our-Content-Can-Only-Exist-In-One-Place Mentality: This takes a little explaining. A few of the print people doing online work who I’ve talked with about stuff say they have a hard time conceptualizing that an article headline link can be both on the home page of our site *and*, say, the opinion page section front.
6. The We-Don’t-Have-To-Listen-Unless-We-Want-To Mentality: This is a holdover from the days when the letters to the editor were the only place readers had a chance of sharing ink on a page with the professionals.

Got any more? Please, share:

Sure, that’s a remarkably old-media, one-directional call to action. It doesn’t encourage fraternization among the other letter-writers. But it’s different. I’d like to call it “a quality example of how the verbs and labels in an interface can influence the action” … but I don’t have any proof.

1. You’re not afraid to type a URL in the address bar of a web browser.
2. You know what “URL,” “address bar,” and “web browser,” mean.
3. You’ve used a browser that doesn’t have “Explorer,” “MSN,” or “AOL” in its name.
4. You know how to copy and paste a URL (From the page you’re on or from a link on a page) into an email.
5. You know that “http://” goes at the start of every URL.
6. You know how to clear your browser cache without looking up instructions on the internet, and you understand which situations a clear-the-cache can fix.
7. You know how to (and you do) add commonly-used links to your browser link bar (you get half points if you use your browser’s “favorites” in horizontal sidebar).

Read the article from the Lexington Dispatch about the cease-publish here.
(via Otterblog, “Five Days a Week”)

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?