By: Steve Outing My New Year's resolutions mostly involve health and fitness. But why stop at personal goals? I've got some resolutions for the online-news industry in 2003. While I can't do much about these personally, I can toss out the ideas and encourage you to add them to your list of resolutions -- for the sake of your business and the industry as a whole.
No. 1: Fix the archiving messMost people pick out their most glaring problem -- like being overweight -- and make tackling that their No. 1 New Year's resolution. For the online-news industry, the big fat problem that most needs to be addressed is archiving and expired hyperlinks. We need to find a solution that keeps initial URLs for news articles alive long term, even when an article has been moved into a paid Web archive (which is common practice among sites that offer their current content freely, but only for a set period -- often a week or two).
All Web users have experienced this: you find a link on a Web site to an article at another site, but when you click on it, the story is no longer there. Depending on how the news site handles this, you may get a "Not found" error or a generic error message indicating that you'll need to search for the story in the news site's paid article archive. If you're lucky, the article you seek might be on a site that's smarter about this -- so you'll see a message indicating that the story has now been archived and you'll need to pony up some money (or buy a subscription) to see what you seek.
That last approach -- which is the exception rather than the rule, even among the biggest news sites -- is OK, but still far from ideal. Here's the ideal solution: When an article on a news site "expires" for free access and is moved to a paid archive, keep the original URL alive -- but redirect those who click on it to an article summary that features the first paragraph of the original story, plus an offer to pay for the full archived article.
Currently, most free-access news sites don't make this user-friendly. To resurrect that old buzzword, "user-friendly" would be to make any once-published article easily accessible, without undue extra hurdles to jump. Don't do this (example found on Boston.com): "If you are looking for a
Boston Globe story more than a month old, it may have been moved to our premium archives, where searching and summaries are free, and you can purchase the full text of any story." Instead, do this: offer the user a preview of the article, and a convenient and quick way to pay to see the full article (e.g., "View this article in full for $1").
No. 2: Paid-content sites should get on search enginesI'd like to see news sites that charge for their content get on the Web search engines and (especially) the news-specific search engines. A serious shortcoming of the Web -- and it's getting worse as more content sites begin to charge fees -- is that the most popular Web search engines don't cover content that users have to pay for. For instance, on
Google News you won't find articles from
The Wall Street Journal Web site (except for a handful that are published on MSNBC.com and made available for free).
But in an ideal world, when a user went to look for coverage of the latest headline news about Microsoft, say, the choices would be stories not just from free-content sites but also from paid ones, like WSJ.com. Imagine Google News results showing links to all the free news sites' stories, plus links (with a special tag indicating a cost) to paid content. Now that's useful.
To accomplish this, several things need to happen. 1) Paid-content news sites need to work with the likes of Google News, and convince them that it's in their interest to add paid online news to their services. (Some sort of revenue share should do the trick.) 2) The news search engines need to get access to behind-subscription-wall content for searching and indexing. 3) A system must be devised to recognize referrals from Google News (and similar services) and deliver a custom page featuring the headline and first paragraph of a story, and a payment form to quickly give a user paid access to the full article.
Not only is this a good resolution because it better serves consumers, it's also a potentially lucrative revenue source for paid news sites. Think of all those Google News users -- some of them willing to fork out money to view paid articles.
No. 3: Stop the animation on advertisementsI really hope you'll resolve to make 2003 the year when some of online advertising's glaring deficiencies are eliminated. Here's one that I rank high on my list because it addresses such an annoying problem: add a "Stop Animation" button on all animated banner ads on your site.
Animations on Web ads aren't a bad thing -- without some movement, online ads would perform even worse than they already do. But most Web users will report being distracted by movement in ads that sit adjacent to article text. It's just plain difficult to read an article that's right next to a gyrating or flashing monkey or slot machine.
So resolve this year to demand that your advertisers include a means for users, when they are ready to read an online article, to halt the movement. Not to offer this simple user convenience renders the advertisement an annoyance -- and that is no favor to the company paying for the ad.
No. 4: Ban pop-ups and pop-undersI've harped on pop-up and pop-under ads before. My points: consumers mostly hate them; common Web user behavior is to close them immediately, before even looking at the content; applications written to defeat them are increasingly popular; and ISPs offer their users features to block them. This is an ad format that is reviled by a large segment of the user population. Pop-ups and spam (junk e-mail) have much in common in terms of user perception. Ergo, it's time to retire them and move to other, better online ad formats (including promising rich-media ones). Even if they return decent response rates, no format that so angers your customer base is worth generating so much ill will. After all, spam mailings often perform well -- but I bet you don't support the practice of spamming or allow your advertisers to spam via your servers. Then why tolerate pop-ups?
Resolve to obliterate pop-ups and -unders from the face of the Web in 2003.
No. 5: Make every article a conversationWe've been immersed in the Internet revolution for nearly a decade now, but still too many publishers treat online news as a purely one-way experience -- we give you the news, you read it. Resolve this year to invite your readers to participate in discussions about every news or opinion article you publish. Add a discussion forum to each piece of significant content on your site.
This is definitely not a new idea. But old as it may be, it remains good advice -- it's just that most news site publishers still haven't taken action.
Further, you might resolve to take article discussion areas to the next level. If your site requires user registration for access (as is increasingly common), then archive each reader/participant's comments and index them, so that each of your site's readers has a page showing an archive of their contributions to your site. This kind of site feature is increasingly easy to pull off if you use a decent content management. (An example of this feature can be found at
Poynter.org. Disclaimer: I work for Poynter, in addition to writing this column.)
An additional feature worth considering is to allow users to "subscribe" to discussions, so that when others have responded to a comment that you've posted to an article discussion area, you get an e-mail alert about follow-up comments.
No. 6: Tap some Weblog talentYour Internet connection would have to have been down all last year for you to have missed the Weblog frenzy. Yet despite all the hoopla, blogs are still few at the news sites of traditional media companies. While many have paid lip service to blogs by adding one to a Web site, few have truly embraced the concept.
One notion worth acting on for 2003 is to seek out the cream of the Weblog crop. Some of the best bloggers still operate on a hobby basis, or are struggling with ineffective business models to make a living from their blogs. 2003 could be the year that mainstream media companies acquire the best blogs, underwrite them, and turn them into viable businesses. This is not only an interesting business opportunity, it also is a great way to get innovative, "non-mainstream" content onto the Web site of traditional media. It's potentially a way to make your site more appealing to younger consumers -- who, as is well known, find traditional media (especially newspapers) less relevant to their lives.
For local news companies, look for and identify the best local bloggers -- and offer to bring them on board. Local bloggers don't have to be a purely online expense. The best ones produce content that's as good as what your staff produces -- perhaps even better -- so consider publishing an acquired local blogger in print as well as online.
(I take no credit for this idea. It surfaced recently in
this column by
Rafat Ali, in his Paid Content Weblog/newsletter.)
No. 7: Stop offering only subscriptionsPlease resolve this year to get rid of the subscription-only mentality for paid online content. Too many news sites, when they decide to go to a paid-content model, offer online users only one option: pay for a subscription in order to get access to any of our content. Just as when you go to the grocery store you can pay with cash, credit card, debit card, check, money order, food stamps, etc., you the consumer should have multiple options for paying for an online article that you wish to read.
For example, look at
this article that's part of Salon.com's "Premium" content. Interested in reading the full article? Then be prepared to pony up for a subscription to Salon Premium (for as little as $6 for one month). There's no option to pay just to read that one story. There should be, in my view, because entering into a subscription relationship is a step not taken lightly by most people. Paying for a one-shot requires less commitment, obviously. I contend that subscription-only requirements drive some potential paying customers away.
To understand why I recommend this strategy, go back to Resolution No. 2. When potential customers come to a paid-content site via a news search engine, you don't want to scare them off with demands to establish a long-term relationship.
No. 8: Experiment, some moreAs I write this, I realize that I could go on, and on, and on. I won't. I'll close with one last proposed New Year's resolution: pretend that we are still in the earliest days of the Internet, where experimentation was a way of life. Well, we are still in the earliest days of the Internet, and experimentation and research should still be front and center.
Resolve to invest a larger share of your budget into new-media R&D. Resolve to focus on the areas where the most promising technological development is taking place -- especially the wireless Internet and Tablet PCs -- and scout for future business opportunities for your news company.
Resolve not to give up, just because the last couple years have been rough and the Internet has not turned into the cash cow you'd hoped for. Good luck in 2003.
Letters
My previous
column of 2003 predictions prompted these responses:
Charge or loseMy prediction is that the online executives who make high-falutin' proclamations about not wanting to charge for content will be looking for jobs a year from now!
Mark Potts---
Times not right for everybodyGood article; the free vs. fee part was particularly interesting. One concern I have with using
The New York Times as a primary example is that the site is their most "cost-effective and efficient" method of obtaining new print subscribers.
Naturally, that benefit isn't available to other types of online news, such as online-only content networks or even local newspapers, so I'm not certain the [
Times] model will translate effectively. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised to see the subscription plus advertising model become commonplace.
Kudos on advocating the use of free "teaser" content. It's been very effective for Blogging Network, and brings in a lot of visitors via Google and other search engines, so I'm surprised sites still don't use it.
Humayun LariShaycom Corp./The Blogging Network
Other recent columns2003 Predictions for Online News Biz, Wednesday, Dec. 18
Walking the Convergence Talk, Wednesday, Dec. 11
Convergence For the Common Good In Rochester, Wednesday, Nov. 27
Have Newspapers Lost Help-Wanted Ads For Good?, Wednesday, Nov. 13
News Sites Need To Go On Diets, Wednesday, Oct. 30
Out With the Old Advertisers, In With the New, Wednesday, Oct. 9
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