1. Build an audience around a link-based social news site for local information.
2. Once your site has some power users, give them blogs.
3. Team up with hacker/developers for special projects.
4. Once your site has built some momentum, hire a part-time ad sales person .
5. Once your site’s earning $300-$400 a week in profit, start contracting with freelance journalists. Scoop local, stuck-in-the-print paper.
6. Add more writers to your blogs.
7. Build enough audience so a front-page link on your site will deliver at least 1,500 clicks to its destination, your blogs are breaking news that isn’t anywhere else, and you have the ability to set the agenda in the community you cover.

Sites that put “community” in a separate tab most likely think of community as an add-on to their business, not as core to their business.

Now I’m not saying everybody oughta be perfect. But, with one of the top-three largest online newspaper operations in the United States, it seems like this is something that someone woulda noticed.

Also, and this I don’t understand: The Washington Post article says YourHub.com was “rolled out” by my employer, The Denver Post, and owned by its parent corporation, Media News Group. This is a new one. Usually, reporters say it’s the Rocky Mountain News on top of YourHub. Neither are correct — YourHub is a product of the Denver Newspaper Agency, which is the corporation that manages the JOA between the two Denver dailies.

And finally: that article does a good job of outlining the impressive detail the Post put into its hyperlocal effort. It is impressive. They’ve got the resources — so will they get the audience?

This paragraph matters big-time to the one-way media, and so does the post behind it:

Strong social sites build value one user at a time. If one user finds value, then they’re much more likely to tell others or invite their friends. Strong sites don’t succeed by attracting “markets”, satisfying entire groups of people with a certain feature set. Instead, they succeed on a smaller level, really focusing on individuals and their immediate social network. Then they can branch outward.

From Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications and How to Avoid Them, on Bokardo.com.

…back to the presentation…

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).

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?

1. “Local” means it matters. Take advantage of it.
2. Newspapers harness and print tons of information. Do more with it.
3. There’s an amazing amount of information available in the community. It’s time to harness it, and then reward the community for participating.
4. If you’re not interacting with your audience, you’re not building much loyalty.
5. If you have an advertising-focused registration system, you’re not building much loyalty either.
6. The article is a decent way to tell a story on paper, but it falls way short online.
7. If a local tv news station’s web site gets more traffic than yours, you’ve got serious problems. Start building community now. Already building community? Start rewarding participation.
8. If your workflow still involves online employees cutting-and-pasting the night away, replicating work already done on the print side, that ain’t acceptable! Fix it! Now!
9. The longer you hang out with inadequate content management systems, the more you become like them. Inadequate.

I was reading Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture, which breaks it down like this: online information is changing from a thing that designers and information architects organized to a thing that the users (people) organize. And I thought, “Man, newspapers haven’t even made it to the architect-defined model.” Most newspapers still follow the information design of their printed product, which is seems to be a problem with getting comfortable and lacking-of-imagination. Most newspapers have yet to meaningfully engage their online community, much less organize information base on their community’s interests. I would say the time is now, but heck that’s probably been said off and on for the past six years.

So, what happens when industries take their time getting up to speed with the internet? Well, it depends on how acute the competition is. Which depends on how profitable and visible the industry is.