Newspaper Web sites can grow with calendars and video

Robin “Roblimo” Miller, of Slashdot fame, writes an article for USC Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review on how newspapers can use the internet to their advantage. Slashdot is nearing its tenth birthday — making it positively ancient in Web terms — and even predates the modern blog era, so it’s safe to say that Miller knows what he’s talking about. He has a great love for online media, and, as a tech pioneer, he has hugely influenced the modern internet (and me — I was reading Slashdot back in the day, when I first got on the Web in 1998).

Miller’s advice boils down to a few things newspapers can do online to really distance themselves from their old-media peers. For the most part, these are things that are in striking distance for mid-market papers or for new media startups trying to carve out a niche for themselves in larger markets. The entire article bears reading, but here are a few points that I find particularly useful as I’m heading off to school this fall.

The first thing that Miller targets is the calendar, a staple of “weekender” Saturday editions or Sunday arts pages. Online, event calendars are often hard to find on newspapers websites, and even then they’re usually not as complete as their dead-tree cousins. This is a situation that newspapers need to fix, because calendars provide useful services for readers:

A website that can tell me about every upcoming meeting of the Bradenton City Council and every upcoming appearance of my favorite local bands and alert me to the next meeting of the Tamiami Trail Business Association is going to get a lot of visits from me — and from a lot of other people, too.

Maintaining a comprehensive local calendar takes work, but it is not highly-skilled work that requires a journalism degree or other specialized education. Anyone with good typing skills, the ability to send and receive faxes and emails, and enough self-discipline to call organizations and government agencies regularly to check the accuracy of their listings ought to be able to handle it.

I suspect that one of the reasons why it’s not often emphasized is precisely because it doesn’t require much specialized education. But neither does maintaining the classified pages in the print edition. Since there are already sites out there that blow the classifieds away, why not provide people in the community with a resouce they can use? Besides, if the newspapers don’t someone else will, eventually:

I suspect that two or at most three people could maintain a comprehensive online calendar for all of Southwest Florida or any other medium-sized metropolitan area. Add one or two aggressive salespeople who understand ad targeting (and a targeted ad-delivery system), and you not only have a valuable local resource, but one that ought to bring in substantial profits.

Newspapers don’t need to leave this one to chance. Establishing a locally-based service like this is one way to both aggressively expand an online presence and grab visitors — once they’re looking at the calendar, it’s easy for their eyes to wander over to a bit of sports news listed in the margins, and then they’re hooked. Not maintaining a convenient, up-to-date calendar is a big mistake for newspapers, and the clock is ticking until a tech-savvy entrepreneur comes and takes that market away from them.

Miller also wants newspapers to take on the local TV news. Text is something old media can do, maybe better than new; video is something old media can do, maybe better than new. But put them both together, and new media blows old out of the water. TV news items are short and consist mostly of talking heads — even when placed online, they don’t make for a very good viewing experience. But, Miller writes:

Meanwhile, the Washington Post and New York Times run interesting and engaging news videos, made by print reporters who often do their own camerawork. Post and Times news videos don’t look like TV news at all. For one thing, the average story length is minutes, not seconds. For another, they have better and more probing interviews, and use more ordinary people and fewer official sources on-camera than most TV news shows. Sometimes the camera movements are a little more casual than what you see on big-city or network TV news, and the reporters aren’t nearly as dolled-up as TV reporters, but that’s okay. It helps give these newspaper-based videos a “take you there” quality that formulaic TV news lacks.

Plus, technology makes new media videography a heck of a lot cheaper and lighter than TV:

It is now possible to outfit a reporter with a “backpack video” newsgathering rig, including a high-definition digital camcorder, all necessary sound equipment, and a compact tripod, for less than $3000. This equipment is nearly 100% “point and shoot,” too. It doesn’t take any great technical skill to operate.

…

For a fraction of the cost of running a single news helicopter, a newspaper could field a veritable army of “backpack videographers” who could provide intense, close-up coverage of events that now get overlooked by TV news operations — or that are covered only from 1000 feet in the air instead of from ground-level.

This is how newspapers with online video can make television obsolete. One of the local news stations here runs ads for their news team that show a man struggling to run with an enormous video camera to the scene of a breaking news story. TV stations continue to use huge, expensive satellite technology while a new media reporter can fit all her gear in her purse. This one area where new media can really make a killing. TV stations refuse to change with the times and are stuck with a mid-1990s business model, one which new media can exploit to their advantage.