By: Steve Outing It's not easy being in the online news business. While the Internet
world around us has gone crazy in recent years, and a seemingly endless
line of dot-com multi-millionaires and even billionaires has marched by,
those plying the online news trade have largely been overshadowed.
Having been involved in the Internet business for quite a few years now,
I know several entrepreneurs who built successful businesses and now are
fabulously wealthy. But those individuals are not in the news business
(though a couple of people I know who fit this category used to be in
the news biz). Indeed, I'm hard pressed to think of anyone who's gotten
seriously rich from online news, or any online news publishers that have
profited wildly.
Will it never happen? Is news never going to be the foundation of an
online killer app?
Get creative!
I don't think it's that dire. As the online news industry matures and
evolves, I feel confident that business models will be created that
leverage the public demand for news. But it will take a serious effort
by the news industry to muster its creative talents to come up with
future successes in the new-media space.
Is the news industry being creative enough today? This is where there's
cause for concern.
As a columnist covering the intersection of the news media and the
Internet for several years, I've been the recipient of much
correspondence from online news executives and practitioners contacting
me to brag about their latest innovative service or application. But
recently, the amount of such correspondence has dwindled. As an
industry, online news is less innovative and cutting edge than in its
early days, it appears.
"In the last two years, the [Internet] world around us has exploded,"
says Norbert Specker, an industry consultant and conference organizer.
"But the online news industry is much less innovative today compared to
developments in many other areas. When we started, this industry was the
only one moving [if slowly]. These days, other industries are moving
much faster, and online news looks not so exciting anymore. In my view,
the online news industry has become a follower instead of a leader."
"Too many U.S. newspaper Web sites have become rather homogenous," says
digital media consultant Vin Crosbie. He says there's more creativity in
Europe, where news publishers got into the Internet game later than the
Americans and have learned from U.S. publishers' mistakes.
Have we become journeymen?
Recently, I posed the question, "Has the online news industry become
less innovative?", to the several thousand members of the Online-News and Online-Newspapers discussion lists. While some members contacted
me with examples of innovation, I was struck by not only the low
response - historically, that group has been eager to tout their
latest new thing - but also by the examples cited. Most of the
examples of innovative new initiatives do not fit in the "swing for the
fences" category.
Online news is hardly a mature industry, but innovation does seem to
have declined. Let's hope it's a temporary lull - and not an
indication that we've given up on the big hit or resigned ourselves to
slow, steady growth as an industry.
Even if news hasn't proven to be the killer app on the Web yet, there
remains significant potential in new media as a whole - including
wireless Internet. What the online news industry needs is a new dose of
creative will.
That said, I'll use the rest of this column to highlight some of the
innovative things that news sites have been doing recently. There are
plenty of inspired ideas out there.
Get in the game
Convergence of TV and the Internet is a promising area. At
azcentral.com, the Web site of the Arizona Republic, an
interactive contest called "Get In the
Game" gets Arizona Cardinals football fans to compete for cash by
playing an online game while watching the televised contest. The idea is
to get sports fans to rely on the site not only before and after a game,
but also during the matchup.
The Flash-enabled game works like this: When a key football play happens
during the televised game, Web players are given a set amount of time to
get to their computers and "complete" the play. For example, if the
Cardinals recover a fumble, online players have 45 seconds to click on a
ball that is "dropped" into the Flash game window - and get 1,000
points if they do. By the end of the game, the player with the most
points wins $250.
From print to Web to radio
An area of innovation for quite a few news sites - especially
newspaper sites - is Internet radio, and azcentral.com again is one
of the innovators. The site works with online radio vendor Everstream, and is developing a
local news channel. (Everstream provides multiple radio channels to
newspaper sites, and it supports development of local audio content by
its client papers.)
Initial plans for the local radio channel include a local, national and
world news report updated three times per day on weekdays, says Mike
Coleman of azcentral.com. The site has hired a reporter who used to
work at a local news radio station to handle delivering the reports. A
few months ago, the site also launched a channel devoted entirely to
Arizona rock and pop bands, which complements an MP3 music download
page.
Local Internet radio isn't restricted to larger newspapers. The Corpus Christi Caller-Times of
Texas also recently launched an afternoon audio service called Radio
News for its Web site. The report is updated just once a day with a
reporter reading a mix of local, national and international stories.
Original content
A number of online news publishers who I contacted for this column cited
their original online content as being the most innovative thing they
do. For example, at Connect
Oklahoma, the Web site of The Oklahoman newspaper, Oklahoma
University quarterback Josh Heupel is interviewed each week by an
Oklahoman columnist for an online exclusive.
At three McClatchy newspapers in California, the Fresno, Modesto and
Sacramento Bees recently published a yearlong investigative
package about methamphetamine problems in California. In addition to the
print articles appearing online, the Web sites includes lots of
online-exclusive features, such as interactive mapping where a reader
can type in their address and find drug bust sites from the past year
within a specified radius of their house.
Just for fun
Online news sites could definitely have more fun. One successful and fun
innovation is the Moose Hunt on the Web
site of the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet. The paper planted a
Web-cam in a forest, and Web users check the page regularly to see if
they can spot a moose. When they do, they enter their name, e-mail
address and time the animal was spotted. Winners get a moose steak.
Old is new?
I found it interesting that some of the "innovations" that online news
executives cited were actually old ideas. For instance, Our-Hometown.com founder
Stephen Larson touted his company's ability to get print display
advertisements on the Web sites of client newspapers. (Here's an example.)
The advantages of this approach include that it's an easy upsell of
printed ads to the Web, with no extra creative production necessary for
the new-media component. But the idea - which has been tried by
other companies over the years and never seemed to catch on in a big way
- doesn't exactly fulfill the common recommendation to match the
advertisement with the characteristics of the medium in which it is
placed.
At the Web site of the St. Petersburg Times in Florida, an
experiment began this week of teaching Internet classes in large
auditoriums. Web general manager Ronald Dupont Jr. ran a series
of successful classes in his previous job at the Charlotte Sun
Herald, averaging 400-500 attendees in the small Florida town of
Port Charlotte. He's hoping for big turnouts - he's renting
auditoriums that hold up to 900 people - in the big city. Dupont is
teaching the classes himself.
Dupont says he's already gotten inquiries about the classes being taught
in Spanish. And he's partnered with Time Warner's RoadRunner division, a
cable-Internet provider for the Tampa-St. Petersburg area. The classes
will be taught using a demo PC with a cable modem, and RoadRunner is
advertising the classes on their cable network.
Isn't there more?
Hearing what online news developers think is their most creative and
innovative current work was an interesting exercise. But I came away
disappointed that there's not more "big picture" stuff going on. Most of
the innovation is of the small variety - noble attempts at
increasing usage of existing sites by adding new services or content.
Where some news companies could be said to be innovating is in adapting
their publishing processes to distributing their content to multiple
platforms. News companies like Dallas-based Belo, for instance, are
spending millions of dollars on new publishing systems that will support
distributing news and advertising content out to multiple channels
- from the printed page to the wireless phone screen, and
everywhere in between.
But where are the other ideas that will propel the news industry to the
heights achieved by Internet entrepreneurs outside of the news industry?
Perhaps the industry's visionaries are taking a breather - in
preparation for the next great round of innovation.
(Have I missed some great innovation by a news industry player that is
truly significant? Then let me know. My e-mail address is at the bottom
of this column.)
Other recent columns
In case you missed recent Stop The Presses!, here are links to
the last few columns:
o The Reporter As Researcher: The Time Is Now, Wednesday, Oct. 4
o Industry Discussion Forums Not Thriving, Wednesday, Sept. 27
o Make New Money, Don't Just Replace Old, Wednesday, September 20
o Archive of columns
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Got a tip? Let me know about it If you have a newsworthy item
about the online news/interactive news media business, please send me a
note.
--
This column is written by Steve
Outing for Editor & Publisher Online. Tips, letters and feedback
can be sent to Steve at steve@planetarynews.com
Copyright 2000, Editor & Publisher.
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