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.

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?

There are two sites worth thinking about that do local and do small well: SignalMap and CleanScores.

SignalMap maps out the cell phone reception strength of the major providers. “Find user-generated cell phone signals by major service providers. Find dead spots, and compare signal strengths,” the site says. It relies on people to add the data that it maps out, which is a pretty easy action for anyone with a cell phone to perform.

CleanScores charts restaurant health-inspection scores over time for restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles (they say they’re coming soon to every metropolitan market). Inspection scores is a simple, concrete, uncomplicated chunk of information. It’s also a useful hook for anyone that goes out to eat. That data would be a great beginner-database / community service project for any local news website…

(Hat tips to Adam Howell and Infothetics for the pointers)

Much of news aims at the “what’s new” angle, but that’s not always the most informative way to look at what’s happening. Sure, a fire claimed an apartment building and two lives yesterday. What does that tell me about the place I live? Besides “tragedy struck,” and “fires happen,” not much. However, that story could also include data on:

• How many people in my city die, on average, every year
• How many people in my city die accidentally, on average, every year
• How many people in my city die in fires, on average, every year
• How many of those people died in apartment fires
• How many apartment fires in my city happen, on average, every year
• How many of those fires destroy the entire apartment building
• What the different causes of those apartment fires were
• If the rate of fires in my city is going up or down
• If the rate of fire deaths in my city is going up or down

What’s the point of that? It puts what happened (the fire) in the bigger picture. It shows the reader where that fire fits in the community picture. If more than one newspaper in more than one city assembles this information then it becomes possible to compare fire deaths and fire rates between cities, which gives additional context, and can raise new questions and give reporters new fodder to evaluate local public services with.

How would this information happen? To deliver context dynamically, that data has to exist in a database. To get there, first, newspapers have to start synthesizing and organizing the news in their archives (ala Adrian Holovaty’s post, A Fundamental Way Newspaper Sites Need to Change). Yes, this won’t happen until newspapers start synthesizing and organizing the news they publish daily, which won’t happen until newspaper-dot-coms get content management systems that address the diversity of the information newspapers publish. No, articles do not cut it, and every day spent on the current article-based model of publishing is another day’s content that misses its potential.

Online newspapers do a shoddy job of connecting like-minded information. The internet opens many possibilities to connect like-minded information. The context that newspapers can build with all the information in their hands is deep and broad. It’s something television news can’t do. Video doesn’t break down in the way that the information in articles do. But it’s something that won’t happen without investing in online and in library staff.

Would this be profitable? Heck if I know. Here’s another question: What kind of news-gathering operation can current online revenues on their own support? There is a somewhat urgent need for product in the online news world: something that’s more than what we’re doing now, something that we can do on a regular basis, and something that builds on itself. There’s gold waiting to be mined in newspaper archives, and that gold isn’t in per-article sales. It’s in the information, names, photos, ads, illustrations, events, businesses — the life and times of a town. This is information nobody else has, and it’s time to start doing something with it.

There’s a world of local actions that newspapers, with their breadth and depth of information, can facilitate. Right now most newspaper-dot-coms allow you to view articles, photos, video, calendar events and classifieds. You can vote in online polls. You can (probably) comment on articles.

What other actions (probably “local” actions) would suit a newspaper-dot-com?

There’s been some talk on the web about the failings of the article as the main way newspaper-dot-coms deliver information. There’s been some good talk about all the other things you can do with information than put it in a big blob of text.

Here are a few common instances where articles aren’t enough.

• Reviews. Music, restaurant, book, video game. Put ‘em in a database, don’t let that information go down the article-hole.
• Any type of Q&A-style column.
• Letters to the editor.
• The sports agate / stats.
• Profiles.
• Calendar listings (are newspaper-dot-coms still doing this? Yes, yes they are).
• Any type of story that runs in print on a regular or semi-regular basis.

If you’re interested in more reading on what more you can do with the information in articles, check out my “Structured Data” link-library on furl.net.

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.

• A quote from some newsmaker,
• A photo-thumbnail index of the top people in the news,
• A photo-thumbnail index of the top organizations in the news,
• A photo-thumbnail index of the top places in the news,
• And a top-story list (with a little more context to the information than most top-story lists provide).

For reference, DayLife defines “top” as “The stories appearing most often in the world’s top news publications.”

I’m working at my job to get more types of content than “stories” indexed and dynamically displayed on our site. The further newspaper-dot-coms move from the article as the main delivery mode of information, the more exciting the online product gets.

(Via CraigBlog)