NEWSPAPERS RE-EVALUATE ONLINE COMMUNITIES

By: Karim Mostafa Community Publishing Canned At Knight Ridder, Tribune


When KOZ.com was sold last week for less than $1 million, it
represented another nail in the coffin for online community
publishing. The once shiny dot-com, which raised nearly $40
million since its inception in the Research Triangle area of
North Carolina, had represented the promise of a new era of
connection between newspapers and their communities.

But long before KOZ's financial woes came to light, newspapers
across the country (including those who didn't use KOZ's
services) were re-evaluating the whole notion of community
publishing. Facing dwindling budgets and staffs, many newspapers
canned their profitless community sections. In some cases,
newspapers report that they never got much community involvement
anyway -- their community forums ghettoized far away from the
main sections of their sites.

Now online newspapers are trying to figure out what the next
generation of community interaction will look like. The goal for
many is to fully integrate community with news, with a renewed
emphasis on discussions tied to timely stories.

Digby Solomon, general manager at chicagotribune.com, recently
called around to community groups to find out how they were
utilizing the site's community publishing tools, which were
created in-house. Most said, "Oh gee, I didn't remember we even
had a page up," according to Solomon.

"As time went by, people weren't updating their pages," he said.
Chicagotribune.com's community section now carries a notice that
says: "Effective July 2, 2001, chicagotribune.com will no longer
provide Web-hosting and self-publishing services to non-profit
organizations or schools."

Chicagotribune.com had 450 local groups' sites online, but the
cost of maintaining a homegrown solution was prohibitive. "We
couldn't justify supporting the technology any longer and we
couldn't keep developing new tools that compared with the sites
that do community development as the core of their business
model," said Royce Vibbert, senior producer at the site.

KnightRidder.com also found low usage of its community publishing
sections, which where administered by KOZ. The San Jose, Calif.-
based company cut most of its ties with KOZ on May 31 --
coincidentally, the same day a North Carolina court accepted a
$712,000 bid for KOZ from Community Software Acquisition Corp.
(CSAC), an investor group based in Morrisville, N.C. That sale
and a subsequent reorganization should be finalized in a few
weeks.

Sam Whitt, COO of KOZ, said that in the meantime it will be
business as usual on the back-end. He admits clients are calling
to find out what's happening. "We have customers who are
understandably nervous," he said. KOZ continues to operate with
38 staffers, the same size that they cut down to a month ago when
they filed for bankruptcy. Prior to April 30, KOZ employed 84
people.

Steve Rakes, secretary/treasurer for CSAC, said the new company
would not have further comment until the reorganization is
completed.

"KnightRidder.com continues to use KOZ as a vendor in a more
limited capacity, and they still provide community functionality
for two KnightRidder.com Web sites, Charlotte.com and
Philly.com," said Pete Casillas, regional marketing manager at
KnightRidder.com.

"I don't know if the community was ready to embrace it," Casillas
said of the community publishing effort. KnightRidder.com also
decided that the cost of maintaining the community pages was too
high and that those resources could be better spent elsewhere.
Casillas thinks future technologies might make community
publishing feasible for Knight Ridder.

Integrating news and community

MaineToday.com, a regional portal created by several newspapers
and a TV station, has struggled with integrating community
content and news content, said Joe Michaud, the site's president.
Using KOZ, MaineToday.com built up its community publishing
section, but has found that users, participating in online
discussions or searching for events, stay on the KOZ network and
aren't connecting with MaineToday.com's news offerings.

With a $30,000 grant from the Pew Center for Civic Journalism,
Jessica Tomlinson, community coordinator at MaineToday.com,
developed technology that pulls community content directly into
news pages. Jan Schaffer, executive director at the Pew Center in
Washington, D.C., said that they funded the project because it
attempts to fulfill civic journalism's demand that news be a two-
way street. "If it works, we're willing to give them a megaphone
to share it with the industry," Schaffer said.

"This is about sharing information, not about creating a good-
looking Web page that no one knows about," Tomlinson said. "These
tools will allow users to submit news, photos, and events to a
system that is integrated with our heavily trafficked editorial
content." For example, a parent attending a child's little league
game returns home to post the sports results, accompanied by
photos from a digital camera, on the newspaper's Web site.

And this news will be accessible from the newspaper site's sports
section, instead of burying it in separate community pages.
Tomlinson wants a user to be able to start on a macro-level, such
as sports, and drill down easily to the micro, such as the little
league game, all within their region.

"We're getting out of giving away free Web sites and pushing for
community content instead," said Tomlinson, who starts rolling
out the project this month. By September, after introducing the
tools to the community through outreach, the Feature Community
News boxes will be on section pages such as sports, outdoors,
travel, entertainment, 20Below (another project originally funded
by Pew), and news.

At KnightRidder.com, Casillas reports tremendous success in
generating traffic by integrating sounding boards around timely,
niche content. Slowly rolling out discussion forums attached to
content, KnightRidder.com is using technology that Casillas
described as a hybrid of home-grown solutions and products from
Centerwheel of San Francisco. And the cost is far less than
maintaining the community publishing sections since the message
boards can easily be added to the current workload of Web
producers, he said. The community calendar functions offered by
KOZ will eventually be replaced with another solution, Casillas
said.

Where's the revenue?

As for whether or not this new method generates revenue, only
time will tell. However, everybody agrees that the old model of
community publishing was not attracting the advertising they'd
hoped for. Casillas has had some luck with channel sponsorship,
but the message boards are not being sold straight-up, instead
showing them to advertisers as part of the overall buy that comes
with news pages.

MaineToday.com's Michaud is more optimistic, firmly believing
that advertisers will be attracted to a niche audience that
frequently returns for discussions.

At Tribune, Solomon said they researched various ways of
monetizing message boards. They even tried to sell time to
advertisers, allowing them to buy an hour of live discussions
with users. Only one plastic surgeon purchased the spot.

Elizabeth Osder, a New York-based consultant and former editor at
NYTimes.com, said the jury's still out on the notion of community
publishing. The technology wasn't fully baked and software
vendors capitalized on the hype when they should have been
knocking on the doors of content management systems instead of
newspapers, she said.

"KOZ was ill-fated because it was developed in the newspaper
industry which doesn't have a good track record in technology
development," said Osder. (KOZ officials say they're not down for
the count yet.) As for user-generated content, it's an idea whose
time has come, Osder said, and it's being played out on
Plastic.com and Slashdot.org.

"This content is extremely important, but ultimately it depends
on our ability to manipulate it," she said. Editors must play a
role, determining when to have a forum and asking the right
questions, said Osder.

"I think there's value," said chicagotribune.com's Solomon,
"There just has to be a more valuable model."



Karim Mostafa (kmostafa@editorandpublisher.com) is associate editor for E&P Online.



Related stories:
KOZ.com SOLD TO CSAC (06/04/01)>
KOZ.com FILES FOR BANKRUPTCY (04/30/01)
KOZ.com SHUFFLES TOP MANAGEMENT (04/05/01)
KOZ.com, INTERNET TRADELINE MERGE (08/15/00)



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.