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.

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.

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?

1. Create an index of your corrections that include the correction made and a link to the original article (like the Washington Post, or the Albany Times-Union, Raleigh News-Observer, Rocky Mountain News, Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Reuters, and Christian Science Monitor)
2. Start an editor’s blog, or ombudsman blog, or some blog written by somebody with the authority to write about the decisions the paper makes.
3. Write a guide to your content — online and off. Your readers don’t know and understand your product the same way you do: that’s a gap. A guide helps bridge that gap.
4. Provide a public place for readers to ask questions about news judgment, and a public place that people from the newspaper respond.
5. Give meaningful background on the people writing your articles. Tell the reader what potential ethics conflicts the authors have. Anonymous-but-for-bylines does not inspire trust. The Wall Street Journal did just that on their tech blog: author bios and author ethics statements.

I don’t think many newsrooms have much to hide — but I don’t think readers really get that. The more information newsrooms make available about who they are, what they do and why, the less room there is for faulty thinking. A see-through newsroom can only help.

There’s nothing remarkable about the way they organize or present information on the site, but heck, does there need to be? They’re just starting. The one interesting bit: Their member profiles allow you to share how many children at home you have. I hope they do something non-ad-related with that information.

Mediafade writes an extremely cynical post about TribLocal, calling it “a disaster in the making” and “ill-conceived.” That feels unwarranted and premature … the only reason I saw to complain was the bevy of broken links on the site. Sure, it’s their first day, but it looks like there’s a fundamental problem with the way TribLocal’s CMS writes links on the “web root” level (Go to the home page, click “Learn More,” and try clicking the “share stories,” “post photos,” “post events,” “news,” “events,” “photos,” “how to use this site” links).

I was in the middle of writing a guide on writing a guide for online news content (how meta) when this came across the radar:

The editor of the Greensboro N.C. paper spent time interviewing loyal, 7-day subscribers to the paper last week. More than one reader confused letters to the editor with editorials:

Occasionally, readers mistakenly assumed that letters to the editor reflected the paper’s position. One person said that our editorial on the Imus statement showed our liberal bias. (We’ve taken no such position.) Another said our constant anti-war editorials did that, too. (The editorial board, embracing the importance of editorials on local issues, has rarely written about the war.)

Newspapers have some explaining to do.

Read the whole post, “Changing (and not changing) with the times”.

This question aims at the idea that newspapers are in a unique place online. No other legacy medium publishes so many words and letters online (if you doubt words are the main way communication flows on the internet, take another look at your monitor). What other forms of publishing are tied to one place on the map? Yellow pages, local television (tv news and cable access), some magazines and local radio. Which of those forms is most capable of harnessing local communities? Well, that remains to be seen.

So here’s the question: How have online publishers innovated with local community?

In the face of all the challenges newspapers have, “silver bullet thinking” is attractive, and is responsible for a lot of half-baked plans and superficial stabs on newspaper web sites.

Tangential: Steve Yelvington’s post, “Little things that mean a lot”

This is a goofy way to use newspaper content — it’s goofy, and it still means something. “Metaphor watch” is a theme that has come up before… I’m sure it’s possible to chart the rise and fall of the “perfect storm” metaphor in news articles…

Okay, and here’s the point: There’s gotta be more, worthwhile ideas out there like this. It’s “meta” stuff that papers can do with their content that (hopefully) give more context to their content.

» Visit Today’s Rock Stars

In the spirit of inclusion, I’d like to invite folk in the Denver / Boulder / Colorado area who are interested in building web apps with newspaper data and with public data to work with me.

Here’s what you would be doing:

• Building new ways to handle newspaper content online.
• Finding and harnessing public data, giving it context, making it interesting. (Some public data will be provided from the newsroom as well)
• Building tools to involve the community in, well, the community in interesting, meaningful and meaningless ways.
• Building tools to help the newsroom use and publish information more effectively.

Here’s what I’m looking for:

• Experience programming with Python (know Django? that’s a plus).
• Interest in doing cool stuff.
• Database design understanding / experience.
• Knowing why semantic HTML matters is a plus.
• Knowing how CSS fits into the picture is another plus.

Is this position paid? If you consider gratitude and interesting stories payment, then yes it is paid. I’m sorry, this is the attitude that most news execs have toward their online newsrooms, I’m just passing it along… seriously, the tongue is 20% of the way in the cheek. If you freelance, drop me a line.