05.12
While I hesitate to pick up on anything with Media News stink on it, if you haven’t seen the memo posted to Romenesko about Media News’ new online “direction” it’s worth a read.
I won’t repost the whole thing here but I will pull out the interesting bits…
We will begin to move away from putting all of our newspaper content online for free. Instead, we will explore a variety of premium offerings that apply real value to our print content….
Charging for content is of course is all in vogue these days and in some cases might be smart but I think that if Media News tries it (or rather when Media News tries it) they’ll succeed only in driving traffic (and revenue) to the local (free) alternative media sites. As they sit in the middle of a very technology savvy area I think their risks are crazy high here.
They go on with:
We will begin differentiating our sites from the newspaper and focus on strategies designed to reach younger audiences and extend our reach. The websites, newspaper.com as we call them now, will become a different product. This new site, which we have been calling news.com, will be a regional news site that is actively managed to present breaking news. It will continue to draw a content from the newspaper (but probably in a more abbreviated form), but will also have user-generated content, community involvement and third party content. News.com will continue to serve our existing audience, which spends a lot of time on our sites, and drive significant traffic. They like and depend on our sites for their national and local news. We must not alienate them as we strive to expand our audience and attract younger people and non newspaper subscribers. Obviously, our sites must draw upon the content of the newspaper, but the presentation of that content will be different. News.com will be an entry page to new content offerings, local retail advertising opportunities and premium offerings.
This is the real nugget. I’ve always felt that the newspaper and the “newspaper.com” were different things and so should be handled as different things. Most newspapers today see their web sites as just electronic versions of their print offerings which is (to me) a big part of why many are struggling. Media News looks like they finally want to differentiate the two and I applaud this. They even go so far as to want to take it a bit further (note the distiction in “newspaper.com” and “news.com”).
This is a win but then further down they stumble headlong into 2002.
“We will build a new local utility site (Local.com), which is an ecosystem of local information, resources, user content, shopping guides, and marketplaces.”
Er, a portal? Seriously? In 2009? Good luck with that.
But if throwing back to 1998 wasn’t enough. Then someone had to really stir it up with a rousing game of buzzword bingo:
In order to execute this vision, we have agreed that these new strategies will be done with a template approach, using a menu of common tools and vendors. We will take advantage of the size of MNG to leverage enterprise solutions and build off a common platform that allows for fast implementation and a companywide rollout.
What this means is that they’re gonna build one site and change out the masthead for each affiliated newspaper. Epic fail.
Users know when you’re “phoning it in” and nothing says “half-assed” like identical sites with the word “San Jose” crossed out and the word “San Francisco” in it’s place. Especially in a tech-savvy area like the Bay Area. No, someone was simply buzzword drunk here and, if they really do try to leverage enterprise solutions and build off a common platform they will in reality only deploy mediocracy when they need to be competing against the best and the brightest.
So Media News gets points for the whole differentiating the newspaper and the “news.com” thing but man, they just can’t seem to wait to get their whole face in front of the shotgun with their other ideas. It’s OK though, I figure that in a few years there will be a wicked liquidation sale where I can pick up all kinds of retro newspaper stuff.
