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.

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 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?

Advice is cheap, and man is this future-of-newspaper problem producing a lot of it. Here is more.

I’ve written about potential products that can be added to news article pages before. That’s all well and good, but there are distinct problems with the article as a means of presenting information too (I have posts tangential to this topic in the Step Away From The Article category).

Article: Before

Taking this theme one step further, I pulled one of the breaking news articles from my employer’s web site today. Here it is, at the time I read it:

What’s distinct to me about this page, this piece of information, is how few links there are within the article.

Many newspapers, the Post included, realized the “Dead-End Article” was a problem online, and took a few steps to correct it. Many cases, the Post’s included, those steps seem to be founded on the “this is what else we can add to the page within our CMS’ constraints, and with little additional effort.” That often results in a list of articles directly related to the current article, a list of overall most’s (popular / discussed / emailed), and a list of recent news from that particular section. Those lists don’t address the possibility presented in the article information itself, which is what I focused on in my re-do of this article.

Article: After

Below is a mockup I made of that article page as it could live on the internet. It’s re-organized and includes additional context and information (all made up for the sake of example). It’s what I imagine would be a useful way to address the presentation of a piece of breaking news on a news organization’s web site. I’m not an awesome designer, and I didn’t want to work hard on the look-and-feel of this, because that’s not what this exercise is about.

Explanation

I didn’t “design” links into this mockup for one main reason: everything can be linked. Each statistic can link to more detail about the information it presents. Each piece of information I added is structured, and structured information is much easier to link with other like-minded pieces of structured information. Much easier to link means much less likely to be a dead-end. Less likely to be a dead-end means much more useful information. For more on this structured data stuff, read Adrian Holovaty’s classic A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change, as well as his article Dynamic News Stories.

What would be necessary to make this information presentation possible

News organizations already have the reporting muscle — that’s not the challenge. Breaking the information into re-usable pieces is. Getting specific is. To get specific, this is a high-level on what it would take to publish the information presented in that mockup:

• Creating archives of all the death-related news published takes people on the online production side.
• Creating the tools publishing county-related news lists takes web developers and online producers.
• Creating and maintaining statistic counts on deaths in a geographic region takes producers and librarians and reporters.
• Creating a means of dynamically publishing relevant statistic counts on news articles takes developers.
• Creating a way to integrate single-point locator maps into news articles takes developers.
• Creating a way to integrate themed multi-point maps into related articles takes developers. Creating and maintaining those maps takes producers and librarians and reporters.
• Creating a way to integrate specific related-news lists into articles takes developers.

It’s worth noting that with the exception of the statistics, all of this data is low-overhead data to produce. Adding an article about a death to a death-article list in a reasonable CMS would take about five to ten clicks, max. The major work is building the tools to allow for information to be published in this way.

Thoughts? Share them here.

Anyway, Kill The Cliche measures cliches in articles from The Boston Globe, New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Financial Times and Los Angeles Times (read more about what they do here). They break it down by publication, by cliche’d word, and by the number of cliches a reporter has written.

Right now they seem to be tracking the whole number of cliches a reporter, or publication, has produced. This isn’t as useful as measuring the cliches as a percentage of total words produced (as in, “1 percent of Jill Drew’s words are cliches,” or, “0.5 percent of the Washington Post’s words are cliches.”)

Also, measuring a ratio of articles with cliches in them and articles without cliches in them could be another useful metric (“5 percent of the Financial Times’ articles have one or more cliches in them.”)

I’d like to see a list of the cliches they’re tracking, too.

And those are my thoughts on KillTheCliche.com.

This is what the lady wrote:

Sure, the Internet is a wonderful place to be. But the digital newspaper shares space with those who post because they have a position to promote, a score to settle, a diet to sell or that voice in the microwave told them to.

Newspapers are better than that. They are apart from that. No, they don’t always get it right. But they are the only daily medium of depth that has the resources and the responsibility to try.

This is what I wrote:

Gosh, so much hand-wringing. I love newspapers too, and you know what I worry about? I worry about the collective lack of imagination of those (such as Drexel [the author]) who can’t envision a future any better than the present that exists. I feel like I just read 15 inches of my grandpa, on his porch, talking about how things were when he was my age.

This attention to nostalgia is part of same mindset problems newspapers face. Sure, newspapers are in trouble. But nostalgia is not a business model, and it’s going to take local papers some attention to detail and investment online if they’re going to figure out meaningful ways to publish information, build community and make a living out there.

I don’t have any grand predictions, but I can imagine a future of local online publishing that’s more engaging, thoughtful, informative, context-laden, diverse, and meaningful to the members of its communities than the paper-based one we used to have.

Well, there’s another Twitter Piggybacker (hat tip to Adam Howell for the term and the link), this one with a local information bent: Commuter Feed. To quote,

Commuter Feed is a free service that lets you post reports on traffic and transit delays in your local area using Twitter.

Commuter Feed is a community-generated traffic report, published by anybody stuck in traffic with a twitter account and a cell phone. You can subscribe to the traffic reports for your area, and get twits when something new pops up. Will this work? Possibly — seems like exposure will be Commuter Feeds biggest challenge. Do newspaper-dot-coms have the same exposure challenges for the web apps and communities they launch? No, no they don’t.

So while some news organizations (such as my employer) are getting busy doing the shovel-dump publish of their headlines onto twitter, well, there are other people out there looking for ways to share and make local information more useful to the folk who live there.

It’s funny — I was talking with my coworker Doug today about how newspapers forgot to ask how the “Who / What / Why / Where / How” questions change when you’re publishing information online. In print you can be reasonably sure who your readers are. Online, not so much.

Anyway, so this post is about the “Where?” question, and three ways that online changes that question.

1. Datelines mean less: Anybody from anywhere in the world could be reading you, and a reader from King, North Carolina, has little clue what it means for news to happen in Commerce City, Colorado.
2. Context matters more: Nobody expects an essay on Commerce City’s history, people, and flora / fauna to accompany an article about news that happened there. However, that information would be useful, somewhere. In the article, no. But in a related page, perhaps of the wiki variety, yes. Why? Well, because I might be reading this article from King, North Carolina — or I might have just moved to Denver — and I might want to learn more.
3. Maps are free: No longer does it take X amount of hours for a designer to whip out a locator map. With the right CMS, locator maps can be automatic. Why is this important? Once you start pinpointing the latitude and longitude of the news, you give your local audience the ability to find out what happened close to where they live not just by happenstance, but by technology.

Got any others?

• How The Locals Fared: I went to Portland in December for the holidays, and I was leafing through the sports section of the Oregonian when I ran across a column of agate titled “How The Locals Fared.” In it were stats for pro athletes, and what connection (high school / college attended, mostly) the athletes each had to Oregon. Well, the 2008 Beijing Olympics are coming up, and what better way to localize the events than a database-driven web app that keeps track of the performance of those who have called your town “home.” Better yet, get your corporate parent to build / update this app — that way they can repurpose it across all their properties, large and small.
• Fix My Street: Okay, so this isn’t a new idea — it’s ripped right off from FixMyStreet.com, a British site that takes reports of poor streets and sends them to the appropriate municipality. But it’s a good one, and a useful one, and one that’s way too easy to duplicate.
• The Photos Near You: Any newsroom that shoots photos can geotag their photos. If you want to be fancy, you can even get plugin doohickeys that record the lat/lon of the photos you take (Sony’s GPS thing). Geotag your photos and publish them online — then allow people to get the photos that happened 1 mile / 2 miles / 5 miles of their home emailed / RSS-fed to them. It’s a great hook for news: This Is An Image Of What Happened Right Near Where You Live. And, on the advertising side of the coin, what happens when you start organizing your information by the exact-specific pin-point place it happened? That’s not hard to see. But, I imagine, the challenge here is corralling photo / ad departments into participating.