(Steve Duke)

I find that watching the work of our Medill journalism students, both their in-class and independent efforts, gives insights into where news media may go, and where they need to go to reach audiences. While we teach the students journalism, they demonstrate to us how they use and think about media.

Brad Flora, a Medill master's candidate, provides a recent example. In early July, 7-Eleven partnered with 20th Century Fox to promote "The Simpsons Movie" by turning a dozen of its U.S. stores into Kwik-E-Marts, the high-cost, low-service mini-marts in Bart Simpson's world. One of the stores is in Chicago, and Flora saw little local coverage of the promotion, so he covered it for his Web site, Chicago Methods Reporter.

In one brief story, Flora employs many of the available Web tools. The story, is written in chunks, instead of a single long narrative, each chunk being a separate Web page. There is a short overview, plus segments on fans, store decor, the food, Jasper Beardley, and the Chicago outlet's own "Apu."

Flora has a picture gallery, sound bites of people interviewed so you can hear the quotes he uses in the story, a Google map to the store, and links galore. He has enabled comments, and engages in dialogue with contributors.

To enable readers to customize their news consumption, he provides an RSS feed, email subscription and a link to add his feed to your technorati favorites.

To drive traffic Flora enables users to email the story, StumbleUpon, Digg it, add it to NewsVine, add it to Reddit, share it on Facebook, bookmark it on del.icio.us. He encourages bloggers to link to the story, and rewards them by providing links to their blogs. As my colleague Rich Gordon wrote in April, Flora is trying to build a network, not a destination.

Flora isn't familiar with the Readership Institute's newspaper experience research or our online experience research, but his storytelling approach and the Web functionality he employs naturally tap into a large number of the experiences that we know motivate reading and Web audiences.

He's got a clickable five-reasons countdown image that adds surprise and humor:



The whole story, from subject matter to execution, is designed to give readers things to talk about.

Enabling reader comments and the links to the multiple networking sites, such as Digg, Newsvine and Facebook, make it possible for readers to connect with others.

A closeup of a Frosted CrustyO's box reveals the fine print, and a tip in the Jasper Beardley segment could garner a store visitor a free Squishee. Both make me smarter.

The whole approach makes the story entertaining and absorbing.

Many in this new generation of journalists are more business-savvy than their predecessors. Flora pays close attention to the business aspects of Web publishing. He sells advertising on his site and the Simpson story is accompanied by text-link ads, display ads and context-sensitive advertising from Google AdSense and Ebay ads through a company called Commission Junction. Simpson ringtones, DVDs, movie tickets, and five other context-sensitive ads flanked the story on the day I last looked.

Context-sensitive advertising is common on non-news Web sites, but still an opportunity many journalism sites have not taken. (On Monday, a related Simpson movie story on CNN was accompanied by a United Airlines ad; on ABC by a Hyatt ad, a Botox ad and a mortgage broker ad in rotation; newspaper sites I checked had the usual mix of job, auto and retail ads.)

I asked Flora about context-sensitive ads as a Web user, a publisher and a journalist. As a user, he said he isn't consciously aware of contextual advertising, but will sometimes think "that's dumb" when he runs across a particularly malaprop juxtaposition of editorial and advertising. In other words, it's the non-contextual advertising that can be jolting to this younger user.

As a publisher, he says "I check my (ad) stats every 10 minutes" using an automated Firefox application that provides real-time information. He pays close attention to what works and what doesn't and is continually experimenting with ad formats and placements to improve click-through rates. He says pretty much regardless of placement, the non-contextual advertising gets far fewer clicks than the context-sensitive ads.

As a journalist, Flora says "I understand in a magazine you would worry about a guitar review and an ad for the guitar being side-by-side. The two departments are under the same roof. But I couldn't get Google to return my phone calls," let alone influence the editorial content.

As a blogger, he knows "sketchy ways" to manipulate Google ads onto a page, Flora says, but like every serious journalist, "I want people to trust that they won't be tricked" on the Web site. So like every publisher, he walks that line between driving revenue and maintaining credibility and trust.

Some of his content decisions are simultaneously reader-friendly and revenue friendly. "The average visitor looks at one-and-a-half pages. I would like to drive that up." Chunking the Simpson story was an experiment to drive up page impressions. It made the story easier to absorb, but it also spread it over six pages, exposing readers to more advertising as they navigated through it. Another way that thinking about audience can be good for the bottom line.

Most of the master's students like Brad range in age from their early 20s to their late 20s, so they were in or entering their teen years when the Web launched in 1994. The Internet has been part of the media mix for most of their lives, although they still aren't entirely digital natives as described by Rupert Murdoch in his 2005 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. The true natives are five or six years younger and never have known a time when digital communication didn't exist. So Flora and his cohort represent the leading edge of how audiences and new journalists think about the Web, but there's a lot more to come.


By Steve Duke (s-duke@northwestern.edu)
Steve Duke is managing director for training at the Media Management Center and Readership Institute, and an associate professor at Medill.


» Brad Flora responds.