Newspapers
A sea of change for paper's web sites
By Samantha Melamed
Jul 14, 2006, 14:50

As newspaper circulations tumble, publishers increasingly are looking online for readers, especially the younger readers who appear to be skipping their print editions entirely.

To do that, they're trying just about anything these days, and it's just short of a revolution in the way newspaper publishers think.

Indeed, where newspaper web sites were once just online extensions of the paper, they're fast becoming hotbeds of experimentation in the face of increasing local competition for readers' attention and advertisers' dollars. That's really happened in just the last year or so.

Here are just a few examples: Now almost all the nation's top newspapers' sites offer video, including The New York Times. The Times Co.-owned International Herald Tribune is linking to citizen journalism content from OhmyNews, based in Korea.

Blogs like those offered on USAToday.com are increasingly common, and more and more newspapers are merging their web and print news operations, most recently the Financial Times and the Boston Globe, to name just two. Also increasingly common are community forums, and some papers are even testing photo sharing and chat services.

"Our philosophy is that when a new thing comes out, and there's a lot of buzz about it, let's try it," says Jim Brady, executive editor of Washingtonpost.com. "You have to try new things. Media is changing by the day."

The Post recently added PostGlobal, an online panel discussion by international journalists, and it has created comment sections on stories, added dozens of blogs and hosted hundreds of hours of live discussions. The site handed out 50 video cameras to reporters to capture content for the web. It's also creating its own MySpace-like social networking site that will enable users to create pages and communities.

The key, says Brady, is to seize the opportunities the print editions can't match. For the Post, that means a new international audience, which is driving content like PostGlobal. It also means opportunities for a new kind of interaction.

"Journalism on the web is a conversation. Why should we put a story on the web and have 50 blogs chattering about it, when we could host that conversation?" Brady says. "In the print world, the publication of the article is the last step in the process, and on the web it should be the first step."

But the aim, at the Post and others papers, is to make the site the place where users begin their day, as they might have once turned on the radio. Says Brady: "Our goal is to get people to use us as a starting point every day."

Newspaper sites have lots of work still ahead in that regard. Belden Associates, a newspaper research firm, reports that just 37 percent of newspaper site users are regular visitors, and only 27 percent visit daily.

In its study, Belden also found that newspaper site audiences have aged five years over the past five years, even though overall newspapers' online audience continues to grow. That, says Greg Harmon, Belden's director for interactive, "is pointing to the fact that newspaper web sites are drawing people who are already newspaper readers."

Harmon says publishers can change that by offering the right content on their sites. "The battle for 18-34s is by no means lost if publishers take advantage of the content-building opportunities that are available to them," says Harmon.

Beyond news, he says, sites must offer a full multi-media experience of the sort provided  by photo- and video-sharing communities like Flickr and YouTube. Users will head there for local and breaking news, he says, but they'll come back for the online communities, the dynamic content and access to classifieds.

The Belden study finds that newspaper sites typically don't have great reach in their local markets, even though a great majority of users are local or instate.

 "There's a wide variety of opportunities for newspapers online. But we're so concerned about shovelware—taking your print content and shoveling it online, and acting like you have a web site," Harmon says. "If sites are not generating tremendous amounts of web-only content, it's not a web site."

At the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., that paper's site now offers everything from a large-scale blogging effort to webcasts of the paper's daily news meetings. The paper is hosting conversations on its 35 blogs and posting web-only content to supplement its print edition. Says Ken Sands, online publisher at the Spokesman-Review: "From the beginning we realized that putting the printed newspaper online was the least interesting, least important thing we could do."

Sands says some of the simplest initiatives have proven the most effective. One is a MySpace page for the paper's entertainment site that links to the MySpace pages of many local musicians. Another is weekly podcasts and music downloads featuring local bands.

But Sands says the key to attracting daily visitors is likely what the best blogs do well: aggregating information and linking outward and away. That's something newspaper people are loathe to do, but the irony, says Sands, is that sending users away may be the key to getting them to come back each day.

"I really think one of the biggest challenges for us in the newspaper industry is to figure out how to aggregate better, and that's really counter-intuitive for us old print guys. You have to make peoples' lives easier and more effective, and the only way to do that is to make web surfing easier and more effective for them. The sites that are most successful on the web are the ones that aggregate."