State Of Local

My original post entitled “Personal Is The New Local” motivated a lot of people to contact me and ask for more info. If I could design a local news web site from scratch, what would it look like?

I won’t drill down into all the details in this post, but this is what I would like to see.

You visit your local legacy media web site, and when you register, you’re asked a number of questions. What zip code do you live in? Do you have kids? What school do they go to? What sports teams do you care about? Are you an alumni of a college? Do you care about news from any other part of the country? If so, where?

Visitors can answer as many or as few questions as they want. But as they answer questions, the web site uses widgets to build a personal page for them that is part news site and part Facebook-like interface. If you kid goes to a particular school, that school’s widget would appear. If you don’t care about sports, most of that content would disappear. Etc.  All the stories would be tagged by Zip Code and in ways that the site could use to reflect your preferences.

And the web site would learn from your behavior and your needs. It would continue to tweak and adjust the content as you make regular visits, often without you even realizing it’s being tweaked.

One frequent question I’ve heard about this approach is why a legacy media site would go to all this trouble? Two reasons, engagement and targeted advertising.

The unspoken truth is that the majority of most visitors to a local news web site visit perhaps one or twice a month. They tend to visit because they’re looking for a specific story or piece of info. But the web site isn’t a destination for them. In many cases it’s just a place they stumbled across searching through Google News.

Giving them a reason to visit on a regular basis is a huge boost to the bottom line of the web site. Doubling the number of monthly visits could be a game changer for a lot of sites. And if you’re able to increase the number of people that visit on a weekly or daily basis, you’re also strengthening your legacy news brand.

This personalization also is a strong gamechanger for online ads. For the most part, what most news web sites called “targeted” advertising either means that you sell ads on a specific vertical section of the site (say, “Auto”). And/or you do geo-targeting to try and prevent out-of-towners from seeing your local ads.

But this level of personalization offers the ability to see the ads with a level of targeting you can usually only find through sites such as Facebook. You could buy ads that are only seen by visitors who live in a specific suburb, who regularly go to the theater, etc. And that relevant targeting is more effective and brings a much higher CPM.

I’ll drill down into more details soon, but let me know what you think. Either below in the comments or by email at Rick@allyourtv.com

While I haven’t really promoted it yet, I’ve managed to wrestle the State Of Local Twitter account from its original owner.

So you can now follow our updates on Twitter at http://twitter.com/stateoflocal

1. Fail to make to befriend potential members before you launch. Who are you going to tell once you launch a community? If you haven’t made friends in the community first, don’t launch it. If you can’t start conversations with your target audience, don’t start a community.
2. Pick a tool that your members don’t like. Don’t use the latest web tools because you want to. Thousands of communities thrive on simple, basic forums. Find the simplest tools available, then force yourself to justify any additions.

I’ve read a lot of smart pieces on why the “paid content” or paywall idea for newspaper web sites is a bad idea. But I think this long take on the idea is the best I’ve read. Fact by fact, it tears apart the idea.

They don’t get it. They don’t want to get it. And in many cases, they’re literally paid not to get it.

America’s journalism infrastructure – from corporate giants to non-profit foundations like the American Press Institute and the Newspaper Association of America – is funded by dying companies. So when you hear about efforts to save newspapers (and, by extension, journalism), understand that answers that don’t return the possibility of double-digit profits and perpetual top-down control aren’t even considered answers. They’re not even considered.

They’ll do anything to survive… so long as it doesn’t involve change. Consequently, for many companies the alternatives to paywalls are no longer options because it’s too late in the day.

The Silicon Alley’s Business Insider has a great chart laying out some grim news for online publishers. Online ad revenue fell 5% year-to-year in the first quarter of 2009. That’s the first decline since 2002.

I was speaking with a local TV executive today, who told me he didn’t understand the attraction of sites such as Facebook or Twitter. “I can’t comprehend why people spend so much time screwing around online, but can’t spend a few minutes every day reading actual news on our web site.”

The problem is that he still thinks of “local” in a geographic way. In his eyes, people will care about his news simply because it involves someone located in the larger Metro area.

But for most people online, their “local” is more personal. Yes, they care about local news. But they also care about their friends and coworkers. They follow sports teams located in all sorts of places, they still keep in touch with the people they went to college with. That mental community they’ve asembled in their mind is their “local.” And while Facebook or Twitter doesn’t have the local news component, it does provide a way to keep track of what’s going on with everyone else in that “personal” local.

The challenge for local news sites is to find ways to seamlessly provide those personal connections to users. To allow them to track not only the latest weather, but the season of their college soccer team, the fate of a company they worked for ten years ago and the schedule of their son’s high school band practice.

This is a concept I’m going to be talking a lot about in the upcoming weeks. What would the ideal local news site look like if you were a start-up building it from scratch?

“When U.S. newspaper industry claims to seek an online business model, what it means is model that in future will sustain its obsolete ways.”

–Vin Crosbie

Poynter’s Bill Mitchell reports on a new seven-nation study that looked at paying for content online.  The good news is researchers found that Americans are willing to spend 68% of what they spend for news offline.  The bad news is they’re most likely to pay for specialized, niche news.

The study suggests that extracting any of that money will require a lot more than simply throwing existing content behind a pay wall. Key findings:

• Since consumers “will choose the cheapest available product with comparable value,” the potential to capture even two-thirds of what’s charged for news in print is severely limited by widespread availability of free news online.
  
• Although most consumers say they’re most interested in general news, that’s not the news they’re inclined to pay for. Highest potential for paid-for news involves “specialized, targeted and relevant information.”
  
• Consumers are more inclined to pay for news provided by “high value, topic-specific publications (as opposed to) newspapers providing general news only.”
  
• Readers of online news “expect to be part of the intellectual debate and to be able to contribute to ‘their’ newspaper, both in terms of commenting on stories and in providing content.”
  

Former magazine mogul Tina Brown launched the web site The Daily Beast last year, and thanks to a lot of money from friend Barry Diller, it is a busy (albeit not profitable) enterprise.

In an interview with the U.K.’s Guardian, Brown says she believes that newspapers will still be around in ten years, albeit in a different form:

“It’s always going to be in the public interest to do that sort of journalism but it’s never going to appeal to advertisers. So it may need either some sort of BBC approach to it, or some sort of philanthropic partnership, or some sort of trust; or company sponsorship of investigative work, like sponsoring television programmes. Maybe that’s a model. Everything has to be tried.”

“I think at this point it’s all about innovative approaches. I think we’re involved in a very, very scary transition, where nothing seems to be working financially, but I’m absolutely confident that a new model will emerge.”

So does she think the printed press in America has had it? “I think there will be some newspapers in 10 years’ time, but with a much more elite and focused audience, charging them more for the papers, going hand-in-hand with a web operation until the generational transition is complete and everyone reads everything online.”

While Brown is certainly successful, I didn’t think that anything she said was really notable or worth reporting. And frankly, I think she’s dead wrong on a lot of what she says.