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.

More meaningful metrics would translate visitor interest, disinterest and loyalty into numbers that can be viewed as a whole and within the context of particular site content types, classifications or products (home page, article page, sections, photos, photo galleries, data ghettoes, etc.).

Even more meaningful metrics would measure all of the above among visitors from the particular local news site’s circulation area. In the case of my employer, that’s specifically Denver, and generally Colorado. Forty percent of our site visitors come from Colorado, and that number’s rising, which is good. But those numbers don’t tell what the churn rate is, or what percentage of our Colorado visitors are repeat-daily visitors, or how the repeat-daily number has changed over time.

This is an incomplete list of meaningful metrics for a local online news site, written in the context of a Denver Colorado online news site:

• What non-branded search terms are Coloradans using to find our site content? Once they come, who stays for a second click, and what search terms result in the most second-clicks? What search terms result in the fewest second-clicks?
• What’s the return frequency of Coloradans? Among Denver residents? Among Aurora residents? How has that number changed over time?
• Which sections (news / sports / business / entertainment) have the highest percentage of visits from Coloradans? Are any sections declining in that number? Is that decline a seasonal issue or is it longer lasting?
• What’s the bounce rate among visitors who enter at articles? Does that change based on the section the article’s in? Does that change based on whether it’s a Colorado visitor? How has that rate changed over time?
• What’s your homepage bounce rate among visitors who arrived at your homepage for the first time today? What’s the rate among visitors who have already visited your homepage today? How does that number change over time?
• This is something that is more difficult to measure: How many readers make it to the end of an article? Some javascript that hooks into the y-position of the last paragraph and measures that against the scroll of the window would be necessary to get into this metric, and even then it wouldn’t be wholly accurate (the bigger the browser window, the shorter the article, the less accuracy)

Note: All of these metrics, and any metrics at all, become much more useful when keeping a site log of incidents (breaking news, special projects) and site changes.

Got any more metrics to add? Share ‘em below.

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.

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:

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

A reader submitted that photo, which looks great. But, when the photo editor was readying it for print, well, the image told a different story:

Read the full story at Otterblog.

Related: Hackzine posts on how to detect forged photos algorithmically. Also, Ken Otterbourg wrote a part-two to his eclipsed post.

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.

Or, there’s video. Or audio. Reporter shoots video, hands it off to online team. Neither online team or reporter have time to produce video. Video goes nowhere.

By my count there are currently six active ways the newsroom participates online:

• Getting online breaking news stories
• Writing blogs
• Shooting video
• Recording audio
• Building photo galleries
• Making interactive graphics

And some of these turn out pretty awesome. The Denver Post’s graphics department produced print-out cut-up fold-together dolls for the majority of the Colorado Rockies baseball team through the course of the Rockies’ World Series run. Including one for the Rockies’ mascot, a triceratops.

But there’s gotta be more. What are some novel one-off ways to get the newsroom involved online? What are some new ways to get newsroom continually participating online?

So while positive attention can build credibility within an organization, recognition makes people feel special, and awards look pretty, I don’t know what else they do. In fact, they may give the appearance to the big suits that it’s not necessary to invest more resources in the online product because hey lookee! we’re up for as many awards as the Washington Post.

That said, if you’re an ONA judge and you’re somehow reading this, I love your no-nonsense fashion sense and ginzu-like intellect. Let’s do lunch.

Related: Are Online Journalism Awards Old Hat? (Poynter)

Update: We won the award for General Excellence among medium sites. Beat out som excellent competition, too: the
Des Moines Register,
Globe and Mail, and
NewsOK.