FiTZBiTS
Photography, media and community
January 27, 2008 at 3:14 pm
filed under Newspapers, Technology
I just got back from a swing through California-touching down in San Diego and LA with stops at the L.A. Daily News and San Bernardino Sun. I had the opportunity to meet with Ron Kaye, editor of the Los Angeles Daily News, and several other editors with the Media News Group’s Los Angeles News Group (LANG). Interestingly, both Kaye and Daily News sports editor Gene Warnick worked for the Yakima Herald-Republic (Wash.), where I served as chief photographer.
The purpose of my trip was to talk to editors about the technology and development of a on-demand community publishing platform they are currently implementing. These guys are doing some very interesting things around the twin concepts of social media and the melding of online and traditional publishing. In fact, I’d say that the transformative changes they are now engaged in will generate a lot of talk and imitation by the end of 2008.
Like many other US newspapers, the MNG papers owned by Dean Singleton are very familiar with the revolutionary (for newspapers) concepts put forth by the Newspaper Next (N2) project.
The idea is to change the way they traditionally serve their readers, concentrating as well on new ways to deliver tailored news products to non-readers. Think of what cell-phone manufacturers did to AT&T, who first developed wireless technology almost thirty years ago but dropped it due to a lack of imagination. They simply couldn’t fathom that cell phones would ever catch on and enjoy widespread use.
If newspapers can change and learn to reach out in new ways to customers–utilizing the Internet to its full potential–then to that extent they may be able to “disrupt” their own product and thus capture more marketshare and readers. If they wait, someone else will do it for them (indeed, they already have).
It’s a refreshing concept that some newspapers have been eager to jump on–others, decidedly less so. Most want to, and they certainly have the brain power to make it happen. The problem comes in when the patterns of the past–the DNA of the paper–prove difficult to break out of.
At the LA Daily News, the first sign of transformation is clear from the outside. Literally. Taped on the glass doors of the building is an N2 poster, advertising something that no civilian, or non-journalist, walking in would understand. Many newspaper initiatives get no further than the posters tacked to every cubicle and wall throughout the building.
Luckily, at the Daily News and San Bernardino Sun, the changes go much deeper. Beginning in the past couple of weeks, the sites have begun displaying one- to three-column widgets on the front of their high school prep sports home pages. These widgets show the names of all the high schools in the paper’s coverage area, along with sports statistics and schedules for football and boys and girls basketball. Clicking on a sports team takes to the team’s individual community web site, served under the branded banner of the newspaper.
What you see there is still simple, but amazingly powerful and far-reaching. A community site, complete with social networking tools, built around a team. The statistics, articles, photos and videos are available to the newspaper editors, who can reverse publish them into the paper or the paper’s website with the click of a button. The platform can go two ways, with content from the newspaper eventually being pushed down to the community site level, along with hyper-local, targeted advertising.
Full disclosure–I’m fully involved in developing this technology solution, and I admit I’m biased here–but I think that this thing is going to fly. Imagine more community features, the addition of a dozen or more sports and the potential is huge. We’re talking many thousands of organized, online communities that value the newspaper’s brand who get a product specifically of interest to them.
More on these sites later, since there promises to be many updates as we move forward.
It’s exciting to see that papers like the Daily News and editors like Kaye are supporting initiatives that enlist the collective talents and energies of the communities they cover. The goal, as always, is to engage the community in meaningful communication and to provide the revenue that makes news-gathering and fact-checking possible.
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