By John S. Wolfe
Director of News Development
For about the last seven years, newspaper companies across the country have experimented with how to integrate the Internet in the dissemination of news, the evolution of advertising, and the perpetuation of a market position.
Many companies – large and small – took the approach of essentially putting all of their content online, for free. Not surprisingly, many customers – most with computers or access to one – realized they could get the news they wanted without having to fork over a subscription check every three or six months. (One government spokesman I know recently shared that he had done just that.)
The result has been annual double-digit erosion of many newspapers’ circulations, declines in advertising revenue, and laments about the entire industry’s future. No duh!
Independent, because of our size, decided years ago not to be on the “bleeding” edge of the Internet wave. It never made sense to us to suddenly give one’s products away without a realistic strategy for recouping advertising dollars.
While many companies stepped in line to join the lemmings approaching the cliff, we waited on the sidelines and observed.
Two years ago we made the conscious decision to not create “newspaper” websites for our products. Instead, we saw an opportunity that was a better fit to our company’s mission: to create “community” websites.
We would invite citizens to use the websites as local bulletin boards and offer every local organization and business a free link. We complemented that content with selected front-page stories from our newspapers.
Last year we expanded the offerings with the introduction of Post Your News forums, Post Your Public Event calendars, and Post Your Photos galleries.
The Post Your Opinion forums – giving citizens an online “voice,” crucial to our mission – struck a nerve. It’s been amazing to see vibrant discussions of public issues taking place every day in many of our communities.
The best and most timely news items, comments and photos could be “culled” for use in the newspaper.
Not surprisingly, the number of visits to the newszap websites has jumped in the last year. The number of monthly visitors to the newszap forums has doubled in the last 12 months. The number of registrants to the newszap forums has increased 33 percent in the last six months and the number of posts has consistently increased 5 percent each month.
The number of Post Your Photos users has doubled in the last six months and we now have more than 23,000 community photos online.
We have supplemented this content with selected items generated by the newspaper staffs. Some individuals have begun posting “issue” stories in the forums and daily blurbs in Post Your News to stoke interest in community issues. Comments posted by citizens may be used in the Sound Off and Speak Out columns or provide the staff member with ideas for follow-up stories.
A wide array of photo galleries from community festivals, athletic events and school activities have been created, multiplying the number of names and faces we can “publish” and, thus, touching more people.
Interestingly, many in the industry are coming around to this strategy. Numerous trade-magazine articles in the last six months have promoted ways for websites to engage citizen contributors – by soliciting their news items, their calendar events and their photos. Only a few, however, give more than lip service to the campaign; finding the reader-generated content on a newspaper website can be frustratingly difficult.
Our strategy is to continue to publish viable newspapers with unique, compelling content for a local audience, while offering something different and community-driven online. Each community website can be a hub for news, opinions, calendars, links, and photos.
In this way, the newszap.com websites can serve the community and augment the terrific content we publish in our newspapers. We can use the websites to share breaking news, solicit comments and insights from residents, and disseminate additional information, links and images.
Everyone can be a part of this effort to promote the newspapers and newszap.com!
Every office should have “Post Your …” newszap cards that can be shared with community contributors and contacts. Staff members who take photos can distribute “You’ve Been Zapped!” cards to the people they take photos of, to make them aware their photo will be online. We also have fliers that ask volunteers to participate in the Post Your Opinion forums.
We think the public issues forums are our most unique feature, providing a place for individuals to share their opinions anonymously on local issues. By promoting “Free Speech (with Civility),” we believe newszap.com has the potential to be one of the country’s leading opinion websites.
We will be continuously changing the websites, adding enhancements, improving the design and functionality and encouraging more citizen involvement.
If you have ideas about ways we can continue to make newszap.com stand out, please drop me a line at jwolfe@newszap.com. I’d love hear from you!
