Newspaper Outsiders Offer Tips for Web Sites

By: Carl Sullivan Our annual preview story on newspaper interactive media is typically an insular (narcissistic) affair. To avoid another therapy session, E&P turns outward to find out what non-newspaper folks think of the industry's Net efforts. What advice do experts from other fields have for us?

"Newspapers should continue to push forward the paradigm of what news is," says Kathy Yates, president and chief operating officer at CBS.MarketWatch.com in San Francisco. A founder and former executive of Knight Ridder Digital, Yates says most publishers still think of themselves as print newspapers first and Web sites second. It's time to change that, she suggests.

"Newspapers should look at their online sites as one-stop-shop information and community sites that extend the paper's brand," says Gary Kebbel, news director at America Online. "News is a key part of why people come to the site, but it's just one of the many lures that get readers and customers through the virtual door."

Once they come inside, readers should find a real community. "A local newspaper has the ability to bring together people who want to talk about the latest scandal involving the mayor or whether to close a middle school or the fact that the Lions Club needs volunteers for its next project," Kebbel adds.

To attract readers, papers need to improve cross-promotion of print and online, advises Tolman Geffs, CEO of Internet Broadcasting Systems Inc., a New York-based provider of Web sites for local TV affiliates in 50 markets. "TV is very good at promoting itself to its viewers, our TV-based Web sites thrive on promotion on the TV stations, and we spend a lot of [effort] on the sites driving viewers back to our TV stations' programming," he says. "In contrast, I still keep a copy of The New York Times from the morning after Election Day 2000. The biggest political news story since Watergate was hanging in the balance, the paper went to press while the midnight Bush/Gore election call was still swinging, and the front page of the paper basically says, 'Hey, last night, we didn't know what was going on.'" In such cases, print papers should be prominently pushing readers online for the latest updates, Geffs says.

When readers go to online newspapers, they should find more interactivity, says Mitch Gelman, senior vice president and executive producer of CNN.com. He encourages newspapers to use more photo galleries and Macromedia Flash-based applications, like CNN.com's Match Game, "in which users link newsmakers' faces to their names or causes."

And when readers go offline, they should still have the option of connecting with their newspaper. "2003 will be the year when the mobile Internet starts taking off," says Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group in Fremont, Calif. "This is the year to learn how to serve the mobile market with alerts and mobile information services, both of which need to be different [and shorter] than similar services for stationary computers, such as e-mail newsletters and Web sites."

Speaking of e-mail, newspaper publishers need to do more of it, Nielsen says. "[E-mail] newsletters can become far more advanced and customized than they are now," he observes.

To help readers navigate the wealth of content on newspaper Web sites, Nielsen suggests the creation of "information centers" for local topics of particular importance. "Use archives for cross references and background to news stories," he says. "Archives are a great place to launch micropayment systems without the risk of disrupting traffic to the site while the payments are still new."

Nielsen praises newspapers for having consistency across Web sites, fairly simple page designs without a lot of bloated graphics, meaningful information architecture in terms of topic sections, and clear and concise headlines.

Eric Umansky, who trolls newspaper sites in the wee hours of the morning prepping Slate.com's "Today's Papers" column, suggests that papers stick to one page per story. "Some sites break up long news stories by making you go to a second page, to pump up page views," says the former MotherJones.com and Brill's Content editor. "This is pretty annoying and off-putting."

Yates' colleague, Larry Kramer, chairman and CEO of CBS.MarketWatch.com, thinks newspapers should invest more in news gathering and online classifieds technology in 2003, to protect their franchises. "If I were running a local newspaper, I'd make sure I covered every local sports event on the Web," adds Kramer, who was executive editor of the San Francisco Examiner from 1986 to 1991. "Those are the kinds of coverage that newspaper Web sites should own."