Monday, December 1, 2008

Newspaper 3.0 - 2012 at the Latest

I have been pondering the next "newspaper." It looks something like this:
  1. Standard writers and photographers or videographers, all freelance, assigned to their usual places and roles. Same writing style, same format (sections), same editorial approach. DO NOT FIRE YOUR BEST ASSETS, THE WRITERS AND EDITORS!! Craziness. Adjust designs to accommodate this style of writing. Short articles with no depth are lazy and detrimental to the brand. People read them because that's what they are offered. All that changes is the default distribution model. Masthead still represents editorial value and POV.
  2. Web-based delivery is primary, print version weekly or extra to the house. Cost savings of reduced print/delivery folks offsets reduced ad revenue initially.
  3. Commenting and social media tools attached to each article or editorial.
  4. Free (or greatly reduced-cost) subscription if you fill out a lengthy profile and agree to let us tap it.
  5. Over time your full profile of interests, combined with tracking of what you read, results in the ability to design custom news sites for each reader (based on a common template), with geo-and contextually targeted ads at higher CPMs. All fully trackable. You can adjust what you get by asking for something else (a la Pandora radio) or opting to accept the default view (like what you offer on the street today). New revenue models that center around the juxtaposition of content and product will evolve, like product placements in movies. They will be dynamically generated relationships based on tagging, conditional targeting, and customer interest, like an ad exchange of today.
  6. Video and audio is optional, not a critical component yet. Not strategically good to turn writers into video personalities. They suck at it. Except when they don't like PTI. Maybe develop cooperative relationship with outside multimedia sources for additional color.
  7. I do NOT like what's happening now, where a good article leaves out 50% of the story and tries to push you online for the in-depth coverage and additional 50%. Not cool. Put it all wherever you publish it.
Thoughts??

1 comments:

PodSquadHQ said...

Cool Rusty - this is interesting. I know a lot of photogs in the D.C. market are getting retrained/"repurposed" to create multimedia for regional and national mastheads- adding audio recording and video interviews to the standard written fare. Do you really think this should be secondary? Seems like this is what the web audience is wanting, and where the medium adds value over old-school print.

These guys seem to get it:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk