By: Pauline Millard Hitting the elusive youth market is no easy task, especially if you're a newspaper. Recent studies have reported that young people pay less and less attention to news and are unlikely to pick up a newspaper. What's a daily to do?
The first step is to develop a solid online presence, but that alone won't keep eyeballs on your site. If content is key, the trick is finding the right content that young people will be drawn to. The equation gets complicated due to cuts in newsroom staff. Who's going to create all this brilliant content if layoffs and buyouts are the order of the day?
Perhaps this is where outsourcing comes in. One paper that is giving it a shot is The Denver Rocky Mountain News. Denver is a hot spot for young people to live, so there is a definite audience for fresher content. Like the idiom says, if you give the people what they want, chances are they will come.
The Rocky Mountain News is
linking to videos from ManiaTV.com, a Web site that creates its own original programming and lets viewers have their own channels as well. When I checked, the newspaper was linking to an interview with The Fray, a rock group that's orignally from Denver. There were also links to an indie music channel as well as another about winter sports.
It seems that teaming up with ManiaTV.com is a good move for The Rocky Mountain News. They get fresh video content, which younger viewers like, and it keeps readers clicking around the Web site. Maybe there are some old-school newspaper folks out there who would say that outsourcing content might jeopardize the editorial product. From what I saw, the Rocky Mountain News was making good choices about which clips were highlighted on the site.
Has your paper worked with an outside vendor for content? I'd be curious to know how it went.
Here are a few of my past Picks:
Photos Find a Perfect Home on
'The Hartford Courant' Web Site'NYT' Uses the Web to Explain
Midtown Pipe BurstingA Closer Look at the
BaltimoreSun.com RedesignNKY.com Focuses on Local News And Little Else
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here