Taming Small Dinosaurs

The DJ has a pretty stone-age Internet site: it's subscription-based, with pretty much the same content as the daily print edition. Because of the subscription requirement, casual users can't click through to the articles unless they pay, and therefore Google searches don't drive readers to the site.

What can small, narrow-interest papers like the DJ do to get the biggest bang for their Internet buck? The Daily Journal has a unique service to offer--a database of in-depth reporting of pretty much every significant legal case in California, as well as profiles of judges and important figures statewide--but they're not open to the public, don't appear on LexusNexus and don't get big ad clicks.

Are there companies that newspapers can hire to engineer substantive redesigns? Berg is willing to open the site to freebie users if he can start generating real revenue through ad views. Can someone like Google step in and say "Look, you've got this useful, deep, comprehensive news pool, let's make some money by making the Daily Journal the go-to site for California law searches"?

It presents a Catch-22: do we want to invest money in hiring someone to tell us if we can make money before we know if we can make money? Paying for a big profit model analysis and site redesign could well sink the DailyJournal.com if the answer is "you were better off on a subscription basis."

Another issue: right now the DJ uses arcane, muckily coded shovelware to get the print content out of its proprietary copy desk database, DTI, onto the Web. Overworked reporters are forced to stay until nine just to get the Website up for the following day in a form that looks remotely like the print edition. Clearly, it should be one-click, automatic and clean. Who should the DJ turn to to write software that plays nice with their database and the Internet?

In a larger sense, what should small niche papers be planning for in order to stay in business? This is the question facing big papers like the NY and LA Times, and their solution has been, in part to try to put the up-to-date breaking news on the Internet, and turn the daily dead-tree edition into the second-day analysis outlet. But that doesn't really work for smaller papers, especially ones like the DJ which serve a small audience (lawyers, law students, judges) and are mostly analysis with little or no breaking news.

Who should Berg turn to for advice in positioning his paper to survive the (potential) judgment day when print editions die entirely?

Is it merely a question of trying to widen the niche with video and other click-happy user content?

A recent anecdote: Anat Rubin of the Daily Journal recently wrote an interesting piece about homeless policy in Los Angeles. The LA Times parroted the story. Marc Cooper of USC Annenberg fame picked apart the LA Times' take on it, saying Rubin got it right. A lot of heat was generated in the blogosphere, but the Daily Journal didn't get to profit from any of it because nobody was linking to Rubin's article.

So, to recap:

1) Wide appeal, video content, splitting apart print and online, page-view ad revenue based models work (sort of?) for the big boys. But what about the smaller players?

2) Is there a secondary market of consultants, programmers and media types who can do rebuilds of this scale for existing dot-com papers?

3) Will small papers with niche readerships survive the "go-giant-or-die" problems of Web journalism? If it's not quite hyperlocal blogging and it's not quite national interest news, what is it and can it make money?

Responses: