A daily folds

A very wan "Yay"

I just collected thirty-four fake dollars by correctly forecasting that this would be the year that a daily paper would shut down.

Jeff Jarvis posted the question a while back on Hubdub. It's just been settled with the shuttering of the New York Sun.

This is not a contest I'd hoped to win.

Added for clarity: Jeff's question talks about a daily with circulation of 50,000. I believe he meant paid circulation, but the question is not explicit on this point. Wikipedia: "...according to April 2007 article in The Nation, its [the Sun's] own audit indicates that "the Sun is selling 13,211 hard copies a day and giving away more than 85,000."

A right-sized newspaper

At my local Starbucks this morning, I noticed this:



It's one sheet of newsprint, folded to about six-inches square, focused on one topic, published once a week, distributed free.

To a non-print reading public, this may be the perfect newspaper.

To be fair, this is probably not where our local papers are headed, but it is a step in the right direction. After all, what's the number-one reason people give for canceling a newspaper subscription? Not enough time to read. A typical metro daily has hundreds of entry points and dozens of topics.

The Good Sheet has one topic and dozens of entry points, presented as a quick primer on key issues for the upcoming U.S. election. It's hardly a purely objective vehicle, but the issue I picked up - on immigration - attempted to focus more on facts than cant.

But what interests me more than the content is the form. Designed to be a quick-read for when you're waiting for your latte or as a conversation-starter for the table-hogs, The Good Sheet makes it incredibly easy to dive into a single topic. Imagine if a local news organization - paper, tv station, talk radio program - took a similar approach to offer hooks into issues of local interest.

There's decent web presence for the Good Sheet as well (mercifully free of the assault of headlines you'll find on most news sites), though I don't like how the only response to clicking the "discuss" link is a message that says "You need to be logged in in order to do that." Also, the paper could benefit from suggested links/sources for further reading, but all-in-all, I think this is a worthy print experiment.

And, it's sponsored, by Starbucks, of course, which underwrites the distribution, but also by Lenovo, which has a full-page ad that, smartly, picks up the theme of education and empowerment. So, as Navin Johnson would say, it's a profit deal.

Any other examples of micro-editing in the print world?

Imagine if a mainstream site acknowledged the existence of blogs

Tip of the hat to the folks at bthesite.com for including prominent links out to Baltimore based and Baltimorecentric blogs in the main well of the recently redesigned site.

(Disclosure: I helped create bthesite.com and argued loudly for the inclusion of local blogs)



The local blogs have been there since day one, but were somewhat hidden in the left rail. Now, they're pushed out front and center.

It's great to see a major-market news organization showing signs that it realizes it lives in a wider web.

A peek behind the curtain at Curley's lasvegassun.com

In a post that seems to have largely gone unnoticed, Rob Curley wrote a detailed summary last week of what goes into a typical day's work at the innovative lasvegassun.com. The paper itself is just a few pages - with no ads - inserted into the competing Las Vegas Review-Journal. So the web site has a lot of ground to cover on its own.

A local newspaper filled with lots of local journalism that matters and no ads. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen. Hell, it’s probably the craziest thing any of us have seen in regards to local media.

One of the things that we’ve found since being at the Las Vegas Sun is that a lot of that amazing journalism that works so well in the print edition (it’s essentially a kick-ass “A” section of all-enterprise local and state stories) doesn’t always translate to big online traffic numbers.

Because of that, our new-media journalists and editors have a ton of focus on writing lots of breaking news stories and essentially the other sections of a typical newspaper (metro, sports, entertainment/lifestyle). Those are all stories that because of the JOA, the Sun just doesn’t cover in print like a typical newspaper.

What that means, with the exception of all of the crazy alternate delivery and multimedia we do, is our new-media news team is about as old school as it gets.

It's a long piece, rich with detail and examples. If you're at all interested in the intersection of traditional and digital journalism, there's much of value here.

Hyperlocal won't wait

Newspapers and TV stations have been throwing around the hyperlocal buzzword for years. Some have actually done something with it and launched web sites focused on tight geographic areas. But many of these are thinly-resourced and dependent on user-generated content that's been slow to come.

So what happens when a media-adept resident of a neighborhood looks around and realizes that there's an opportunity unmet by the local publisher or broadcaster?

In Cory Bergman's case, he and his wife launch a neighborhood news site that winds up netting more readers than the local print community paper.

Bergman, who runs the excellent Lost Remote media blog, describes how he used off-the-rack tools to create what he calls his own hyperlocal experiment:

Soon after we moved to the Seattle neighborhood of Ballard last year, my wife Kate reserved MyBallard.com after we noticed there was no daily news source dedicated to the community of 35,000. We rolled out a standard Wordpress blog and started writing about news in the neighborhood. We added an events calendar, restaurant guide and a forum, too.

The lesson: There's an entire subset of people who are absolutely comfortable with the tools of content creation who, when they see a need for news or communication, don't wait for someone else or some vast media company to create it for them.

How is your neighborhood being served by your local newspaper? Is there an opportunity to do more? Have you already reserved the URL?

A big job: fixing classifieds

For years, newspapers thought Monster was the enemy. And for a while, it was. After enough people in the business had their "Holy crap, Monster's stealing our business!" moment, Careerbuilder was created.

It was a classic defensive move: stop the outflow, then recover the share. And it worked. Careerbuilder and Yahoo's newspaper-centric HotJobs both are in the game with Monster, often beating it. Mission Accomplished.

So, why then is this chart still going in the wrong direction? Why is the money-pump of recruitment advertising sucking air?

It's Craig. Starting around 2000, Craigslist went national with a largely free ad model. Over time, businesses discovered they could fill their open positions with an ad on Craigslist. Money that once was spent on a newspaper ad or a Monster or Careerbuilder ad simply was not spent. Hundreds of dollars per ad did not change hands. And yet the position was filled.

How do you compete against that?

Like the Grinch standing atop Mount Crumpit believing Christmas would never come without packages, boxes or bags, newspapers scoffed at the Craigslist model: "It can't possibly work"

Well, it does. Mix in vertical job sites that do charge, but at a much lower rate than newspapers and online megasites, and you've got the makings of the swoon the newspaper classified business is currently in.

And can you really blame the hiring manager, who fills a job without spending a dollar in a newspaper or on Careerbuilder, for never spending there again? Especially in an jobs economy that's becoming less of an applicant's market with each passing day?

This should not be news to anyone in or out of the newspaper classified business. Yet the slippage continues, accelerating even in the past year. We shouldn't need to say this almost a decade into the 21st century, but we do: We need to change. Fast.

If I had P&L responsibility for print classifieds, these are some options I'd consider to shore up one critical category, recruitment, still the largest slice of the classified pie:

1. Get out of print. The "Want Ads" of previous generations worked well because the classified section was a reliable database of most available positions. A printed database, yes, but for most people well into the end of the 20th century, a printed database was the most accessible database. Today, however, when huge swaths of our population are online with devices both tethered and wireless, a printed database is a museum piece. Convert to 100% digital classifieds now and use the paper to promote the heck out of the online product. This will cost in the short run, but so will doing nothing.

2. Create a weekly tabloid which aggregates the best local classifieds and distribute it along with the paper on Sunday, then free on Monday. This may simply be forestalling the inevitable, but there's also the possibility that it could pump new life into the old beast, rebuilding the teeming marketplace of old through sheer volume:

• All 3-4 line ads are free if users create them online. If a user wants the traditional phone support, there's a $20 fee for the service.


• Offer aggressively-priced upsells for both print and online.


• Aggregate classified content from other sources, either through partnerships or straight-up content-scraping.


• Surround the ad content with original editorial content. Give the publication a voice and an attitude to encourage readership by more than just the hard-core jobseeker.


• Extend your reach outside of your paying newspaper customers, but still give them the early look by holding off the free edition for one day.


• If your newspaper owns community papers or other niche publications, use them to distribute the new classified tab.

(Note: a variation on this option recently launched at The Baltimore Sun. I had a small hand in the development of the idea. The Sun's product as launched does not contain free or aggregated ads, a critical difference to my mind.)

3. Be your niche. Take a look at the Sunday jobs section - a great deal of the jobs there are blue collar and entry-level. Under the current model of the newspaper employment section as an omnibus job source, this is a bad thing. But what if we embraced the reality? Move all of the professional listings to online and focus the printed product on helping employers fill the manufacturing and service jobs in your market. Publish it in English and Spanish to better meet the needs of the workforce. Distribute it outside of the traditional newspaper rack system, employing hawkers at major work sites and home improvement centers, for example.

4. Charge for leads. This is Lucas Grindley's idea, and I think it has a lot of merit. It starts with free online and in-print ads. Then it gets interesting:

After those ads are printed for free in the newspaper and posted online for free, numerous people will obviously respond wanting to apply for the job or buy the merchandise.

When that happens, notify the job poster or car seller that someone has responded. If they’d like to view the response, they’ll have to pay a fee.

That’s right. Charge them to view responses.

To encourage usage, maybe give away the first response for free. Then charge per response after that.

These are just a few ideas. I imagine Steve Outing at Reinventing Classifieds will be assembling quite a few good ideas about fixing classifieds now that he's created a $500 bounty for the best idea.

But we've got to do something soon - that trend line's moving far too quickly toward zero.

Aggregation works

Newspapers need to be dragged kicking and screaming, but Drudge knows it and Google knows it. Aggregation works. An outstanding way to build audience is by sending people away.

One of my favorite recent arrivals on the web has been Guy Kawasaki's Alltop.com. The model is simple: aggregate the best of the web in vertical categories and organize it in a clean and logical presentation.

In six months, he's grown his site from nothing to more than five million page views by pointing at other people's content:

You can think of an Alltop site as a “digital magazine rack” of the Internet. To be clear, Alltop sites are starting points—they are not destinations per se. The bottom line is that we are trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed. In other words, our goal is the “cessation of Internet stagnation” by providing “aggregation without aggravation.”

Some legitimately question whether Alltop is merely riding on the back of content created by other sites, but I think that the careful aggregation itself - the curation - does add value and makes it easier for me to find the content I'm looking for.