(Limor Peer)

And, do you want it to be? I suspect that even though the answer to the first question may be "no," your answer to the second is "yes."

RI data on newspapers' Web site usage show that only about a third of the people in a given market read the local newspaper online. Why is it that many don't see newspapers' Web sites as a destination for news? Or, as Allan Mutter put it (almost two years ago):

Here's the conundrum: If people, even young people, are interested in the news; AND, if people, especially young people, like getting it on the Internet; AND, if newspapers are nothing if they are not sources of news, THEN, why don't more people go to newspaper websites?

I'll get to a possible answer later. But let's talk about how people do access news online.

I recently had occasion to look again at a Pew report from 2004 on online news audiences. There, on page 22 of the 106 page report, is a little table and three short paragraphs that caught my attention. The section is titled "Inadvertent news consumers" and opens thus:

It has become increasingly common for Internet users to come across news inadvertently while online for other purposes. Fully 73% of Internet users come across the news this way, up from 65% two years ago, and 55% as recently as 1999.

According to this report, this is even more common for younger people.

Moreover, for some of those who are actively looking for news, the starting point is a search engine. From there, it makes little difference to them what site they end up on once they link to a story. The way they see it, they get the news on Google or Comcast.

In informal talks with newspaper Web site editors we learned that they know many of the stories that are most viewed on their sites come from search engine links. Accordingly, news organizations are becoming increasingly savvy about writing headlines that will turn up on particular search queries. Many invest in software that promises search engine optimization. Programs like Omniture's SiteCatalyst are widely used to track online traffic and help optimize the amount of content that a search will produce.

But search engine optimization is but one strategy. If you put all your eggs in the search optimization basket, you are communicating to the world that you are no more than a content database. If, on the other hand, you work to make your site a destination -- an online space that people want to visit repeatedly -- you can be more than the sum of your (content) parts.

Of course, it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game -- you could develop your site and market it as a "go to" place on the Web while all the while working to also optimize the amount of your content that a search will produce. Working out the right balance may not be easy. Starbuck's is an example of a company that figured that out quite well, establishing itself as the "third place" while at the same time distributing its coffee to almost every supermarket.

But you have to ask yourself: What is the best strategy in the long run?

One key way to judge that is to ask yourself: Which strategy will lead to more engaged users? Users who plan and want to go to your site, users for whom your site is a destination. Think of ESPN as a destination for comprehensive news about sports, OnlineWSJ as a destination for news about finance and the economy or craigslist as a destination for free exchange of information. The 2007 State of the Media report referred to NPR, a growing medium, as "something of an identity unto itself, a destination." Or, from the TV world, the Daily Show as a destination for political and news satire or Keith Olbermann's show on MSNBC as a destination for sharp political critique.

What these particular media have in common is a strong, clear concept that plays to certain experiences the audience is seeking (such as, to feel connected to others, to sense that the site looks out for their interest, to be surprised, to talk to others about it). For the audience, these experiences are conduits -- or different ways to connect with -- the site, or program, or newspaper. When these experiences are strong with a given medium, it becomes a destination. This idea is explained in greater detail on this site and in Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management Professor Bob Calder's book.

We all intuitively understand that it would be good for a Web site to be a destination, but there are some open questions:

1. Wouldn't it be going against the tide? In a piece titled "Is Destination dead?" from November 2005, Dorian Benkoil argued that content is becoming so dis-aggregated, thanks to syndication technologies, that people may be getting your content without ever going to your site. However, as I said before, it doesn't have to be "either / or" -- flowing with the tide and thinking up ways to turn your site into a destination are not necessarily contradictory. Besides, we shouldn't let technology determine our strategy... just because search engines monopolize the online space, doesn't mean we can't call any shots!
   


2. Aren't newspaper Web sites already a destination for local news? According a 2004 study by the Newspaper Association of America, local newspaper sites are a premier local news destination and the audience for newspaper sites keeps growing. Yet, as I mentioned above, RI research shows that less than a third of the people in a given market have ever used their local newspaper's Web site. And the 2007 State of the Media report shows that usage of news online has flattened out, leading us to think that there is a lot of untapped potential here.
   


3. And most important: How do you turn a site into a destination? As we have said many times in this space, it would take a revolution, not evolution. Some media companies are clearly articulating a "destination strategy," such as Condé Nast, which is taking steps to turn some of its sites into destinations, and finding some success. Non-traditional players are also setting up sites with strong concepts in an attempt to make them online destinations. One example, Backfence, described on MarketingShift as "seeking to be a kind of ultimate local destination, combining local news, classifieds, community input, local business reviews, Yellow Pages, an entertainment and events calendar and a good deal more," got off to a promising start, but is recently having some problems.

Are you having these conversations with your staff? In what ways are you attempting to be a destination Web site for your users?


By Limor Peer (l-peer@northwestern.edu)
Limor Peer is research director for the Media Management Center and Readership Institute.

(Mary Nesbitt)

Last week I watched a series of short news videos by graduate journalism students here at Medill. It marked the end of their first quarter at the school, an intense 11-week immersion in the nuts and bolts of the craft.

The students -- most of whom have little or no previous experience -- report and write all quarter, take still photos, make slideshows and, as a final project, create a video and write a companion print piece. With just a little training, the students' videos were, by and large, pretty engaging. (You can see one, about three young educators who created the high-performing Uplift Community High in their North Chicago neighborhood, at www.current.tv/watch/24206666.)

Of course none of them was broadcast quality, and that was the point -- the small screen experience is different, as many commentators have observed.

All the talk in newsrooms and the academy these days is a) how to get the Selectric Typewriter Generation (i.e., mine) comfortable with video technology, b) so that it can be used discriminately, c) to make better journalism, d) that will engage audiences better.

Some newsrooms are providing structured training for reporters and editors. Others are using the provide-the-equipment-and-see-what-happens approach. Whatever works. But one approach I don't recommend is to sit back and wait to see so-called "best practices" emerge. Best practices are determined over time, a luxury we don't have.

Training and experimentation don't have to cost much. Assuming you have the equipment and the motivation, here are four free online training resources:

1. At UC Berkeley's journalism school, follow Five Steps to Multimedia Reporting.
2. www.NewsU.org at the Poynter Institute offers several relevant courses, including Five Steps To Multimedia Storytelling and coming soon, Telling Stories With Sound.
3. While its focus is conventional broadcast quality video, much of the content of this detailed and highly structured free online course by the BBC is applicable. Also good is the course on radio interviews. The BBC plans to make more free instruction available later this year as part of its citizen journalism efforts.
4. Chuck Fadely, a visual journalist at the Miami Herald, offers great tips for shooting video on his blog and links to other sources of advice.

Of course the rush to video isn't a rejection of prose. Nor should every story of necessity be told in three different, or even complementary, ways. It's an exercise in judgment, based on the nature of the story, the characteristics and capability of the medium, and -- always -- audience habits and preferences.

Fadely writes:

Very few people at newspapers have a grasp of how vastly different narrative video is from what they're used to doing. Good video storytelling is emotional and temporal. Newspaper editors try to avoid emotion and seek to capture information at a particular point in time. Newspapers' stock-in-trade is providing facts and figures -- something video is ill-suited to provide.

The web is a great publishing platform because story telling can take almost any form. Words, graphics, tables and charts, videos, stills, and who knows what else. But most newspapers have not yet learned how to choose which format to use with which stories. Video is new and novel for newspapers. But stock market tables, after-the-fact police blotter items, and check-passing banquets shouldn't be covered in video. We shouldn't be focusing on doing the video equivalents of 1/2-column mugshots.

By Mary Nesbitt (m-nesbitt@northwestern.edu)
Mary Nesbitt is managing director of the Readership Institute.

(Rich Gordon)

Print audiences are shrinking, and print ad revenue is shrinking faster. Online audiences and revenues are growing, but not fast enough. The results: smaller newsholes, layoffs, buyouts, reduced foreign coverage, the elimination of sections, less state government coverage. At a time when newspapers and other traditional media need to be investing in the creation of more content, instead they are spending less. And the increasing demands associated with serving the online audience put even more pressure on news organizations.

What's a newsroom to do? I'm coming to believe that at least part of the answer has to be a radical restructuring of the news production process. A case study that might be instructive is playing out at the Medill School, where I teach new media journalism.

Besides being an educational institution, Medill operates working newsrooms for our journalism master's students in downtown Chicago and Washington, DC. These are learning laboratories that also produce journalism for client news organizations. Just like most newspapers, our journalists have historically created content in a single format: newspaper students produced text, broadcast students produced video. And just like most newspapers, we have begun asking our journalists to create content in multiple forms -- text, photos, slideshows, audio, video -- and to think of the Web as their primary publishing platform.

As we began to revamp our curriculum, and increase the demands on our student journalists, we realized that we needed new Web publishing tools. Just like many news organizations, we had been publishing news Web sites using antiquated software that made it cumbersome to add photos and multimedia. So we identified and purchased a new Web content management system, or CMS. (For the technology-minded, it's CMS400.Net from Ektron Inc.)

Let me outline the production process for a typical article in a typical newspaper, and of our Chicago newsroom. For simplicity's sake, we'll assume this article has a photo (but the same general process would apply if the article had multimedia such as audio or video):


Typical newspaper

1. Reporter gathers information (takes notes)
2. Photographer shoots photo
3. Reporter writes article
4. Photo editor chooses photo for publication
5. Editor edits article
6. Copy editor edits article
7. Copy editor or designer places article on a print page
8. Copy editor or designer places photo on a print page.
9. Copy editor or designer writes headlines and photo captions
10. Web editor or producer places article on a Web page
11. Web producer places photo on a Web page
12. Web producer writes blurb (teaser description from home page or section front)
13. Web producer places article on home page or section front

Medill Chicago

1. Reporter gathers information -- text and photos
2. Reporter writes article
3. Reporter writes headline, caption and blurb (teaser description from Web home page or section front)
4. Reporter places article and photo on a Web page
5. Editor edits the article, including photo, caption and headline
6. Web producer places article on home page or section front

Clearly, our production process has fewer steps and requires fewer people. Now, I know this isn't a fair comparison, because our newsroom doesn't produce a newspaper -- just a Web site. And I'm not arguing that a reporter can take photos as well as a photographer, nor that a content editor can write a headline as well as a copy editor. But bear with me on those points. For now, take note of these ways in which our production process differs fundamentally from that of a newspaper:

• The reporter is expected to produce all the elements (article text, photo, caption, headline and blurb).
• The reporter is expected to place his content on a Web article page.
• An editor is expected to edit the entire article page, including text, photo, caption, headline and blurb.
• The Web producer's job is just to place the article on a section front.

The key reason all of this is possible is that our content is stored in a database. Beyond that, articles are presented using a single standardized template. Web templates have been criticized because companies like Knight Ridder Digital used them to enforce rigid (and unattractive) conformity in presentation across the company's Web sites. But flexible templates can allow content to look very different depending on what elements are present. For instance, consider these four article pages built using Medill's new CMS:

• This article has text only
• This article has text and two photos
• This article has related text material
• This article has video and some related material

All of these articles use the same template -- but the pages look very different. And it's very easy for a reporter to plug his or her content into the template.

This new kind of production approach has entirely predictable consequences: Journalists discover that a text-only article just doesn't look as good online as one with photos, multimedia or sidebar material. The new CMS, we've found, motivates student journalists to want multimedia elements with their stories. I bet the same will be true of professional journalists.

Now suppose that we did want to create a print publication from the content produced in our newsroom. It turns out that our CMS stores all content as XML-structured data, which essentially means that article components such as the byline, headline and summary/teaser are marked up using a standard set of labels. The truth is, with the production system we're using, we could publish print pages with just one or two more steps.

Page design programs such as Adobe InDesign can read XML and apply print stylings (such as fonts) to the content. So we could build a whole bunch of print pages using standardized InDesign templates -- essentially, the same way we build Web sites.

For some reason, we think nothing of building a Web site using templates, but would never consider doing the same for a print publication. I'm not sure I know why. Certainly, print section fronts -- especially the front page, which drives street sales -- should be designed, lovingly, by hand, every day. But at least some inside pages could, literally, be laid out by a computer following a set of programmed rules. Especially if we could move to modular advertising positions on inside pages.

So should we program a computer to lay out our print editions and eliminate some copy-editor positions? Yes -- and no. I'm not necessarily arguing for shrinking the copy desk. What copy editors do is important. What I'm wondering is why, at most newspapers, we have separate production desks for Web and print (a structure being preserved even in newsrooms that are planning significant reorganizations). A survey conducted by one of my students found that the job functions in Web production departments (online newsrooms) look very similar to those of copy desks. The survey's findings led me to suggest an opportunity for journalism schools to incorporate Web production in the training programs for copy editors.

There is one fundamental difference between print production and Web production. In print, scarcity (limited space) drives and constrains the production process. Editors spend a lot of time trimming articles to fit the space. Copy editors work hard to come up with good headlines that fit into narrow column widths. Photographers and photo editors try to find a single image that can capture the essence of a story. Online, though, the challenge isn't scarcity, but abundance. We can easily add photos and multimedia to text articles, and headlines can be written without so much concern about length. But our newsroom production systems and processes are still on the scarcity principle.

At a time when the industry needs to do more with less, it's time to reinvent the journalism production process. A 21st century production system can and should:

• motivate journalists to produce multimedia;
• make it easy for reporters to produce and package related content themselves;
• enable the production of multiple products from a single content database;
• allow production to be more efficient;
• and enable news organizations to reach more people using more distribution channels.

By Rich Gordon (richgor@northwestern.edu)
Rich Gordon is Associate Professor and Director of Digital Technology in Education at Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University.

(Steve Duke)

"Wake up and smell the coffee" was the late advice columnist Ann Landers' favorite admonishment to correspondents who refused to see the obvious. Several random encounters and comments over the past week make me think the newspaper industry won't smell the coffee even when it's burning.

I led a seminar last week on growing online readership for newspaper Web sites. Some key moments:

• Talking about changes that should be made to drive online user experiences, one of the participants worried that "change might alienate our current users." Now, I've heard that comment repeatedly when discussing changes to the print newspaper, but this was the first time I had heard that idea applied to a newspaper Web site. Wake up! You haven't got enough online users to worry about alienating them! You've got to make huge leaps just to become relevant online, particularly with the heaviest online users, those under 35.
  
  
• When talking about opening up the newspaper Web site to reader comments, blogs, social networking, another participant asked, "how do we control what they say? It's our reputation that's on the line." Wake up! On the Web, you've got to give up the idea of control. You can let go of control and join the party, or you can remain a wallflower and watch the party go by. John Robinson, editor of the Greensboro, NC, News-Record put it this way in his Editor's Log nearly two years ago: "What you need to care about is the message -- the journalism -- you're delivering, and the way you're helping readers connect to each other. We see blogging, podcasts, audio and video as an extension of our mission. The integrity and credibility of your report -- this is key -- will not be harmed by moving aggressively into participatory journalism." He goes on to say, "Let loose of the reins... Embrace it. Open the doors to interaction and listen to the people coming inside. These are your customers, after all. It's risky, yes, but be bold. You'll learn something and be able to do better journalism." You can find the rest of John's insightful post here.
  
  
• We talked about making the newspaper Web site the go-to local source for everything a reader might want by including links to local government sites, entertainment resources, and other things. As an example we looked at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune's wonderful public records links. One of the participants objected that the outside links would reduce readers' time on the newspaper site by sending them off to other sites. Wake up! Your readers are going to use all the riches of the Internet whether you help them or not. Don't you want to be the source they think of first when they need something? (This comment was reminiscent of the vigorous arguments in many newsrooms in the 1950s against including TV listings in the newspaper because it would drive readers to the competing medium. Hey folks: They are going there anyway.)

I was particularly conscious of how our audience is slipping away while all this hand-wringing goes on because of my conversation with a taxi driver the night before. I know, the clichéd wisdom of the hack. In this case it wasn't his wisdom that was enlightening, but his behavior.

My driver, in his mid- to late-40s, no longer has any land-line communications devices. No phone. No cable. He has a cell phone, and he carries in his cab a laptop with a wireless card.

"And I've got a small TV under the seat, but I don't watch it much. My favorite show is 'Bones,' and it's on at 8 p.m. Wednesdays. That's a busy time for cab drivers, so I can't watch it then," he said.

But he never misses an episode. Fox also airs the show on MySpace, so he catches up with his viewing on the wireless laptop.

The world is changing fast, as my cabbie demonstrated. While we worry about losing the tech-savvy young adult audience, we're losing the tech-savvy middle-aged audience. Research by media consulting firm Frank N. Magid Associates cited in Broadcasting & Cable shows that nearly half of people 35 to 54 turn to the Internet first for weather information and sports scores. This is no longer a young person's medium.

Final note: The March 5 New York Times reported that the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily News had launched quick-read digest pages for the time-starved reader. The tone of the piece poised between excitement and angst, asking "Any chance the digest will discourage readers from opening up the paper? Or that it is another step toward the reduction of print journalism to the equivalent of television sound bites?"

My reaction is different. First, why did it take new owners to get the Philly papers to do this? The Miami Herald adopted this very format more than three years ago, when all three newspapers were part of Knight-Ridder. Why didn't they just steal the idea from their corporate sibling then?

Second: too little, too late. The Times quotes Jay Devine, a spokesman for the papers, saying the idea came from former readers who canceled their subscriptions. The digest will probably improve satisfaction among current readers, but it's not revolutionary enough to bring back readers who have given up. You can find the Times article here.


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