News Web sites: Destinations or network hubs?

From Robert Niles on April 20, 2007 at 11:50 AM

From my experience, the key to building audience loyalty and visitor frequency to an interactive website lies not in simply giving them the ability to react to staff coverage, but to initiate content on their own.

Let readers create their own discussion threads. Let them maintain their own blogs. They them create and update wikis. Let them post photos, audio and video. Let them add events to a common calendar. Let them rate and review things. And,as importantly, create reader profile pages upon which other readers can see what they've created and learn a little about that creator. To take it to the ultimate level, allow readers to browse on multiple fields for other readers with similar interests and background, then to connect with each other through small group or one-on-one messaging.

Yes, just like MySpace and Facebook do.

But newspapers would have a huge opportunity that MySpace is, to date, wasting by mining that undercurrent of personal communication for news leads and story ideas. Deploy reporters to identify potential stories, then use crowdsourcing to help report them.

All the while, the community network is generating pageviews, ad impressions and visits at a level exponentially higher than the newspaper.com website could produce with staff-written content alone.

From Pete Carr on April 20, 2007 at 1:13 PM

"Open up the archives." Yes, yes, yes! Even if news sites do not fully open the archives, at least let the article remain for thirty days. It's frustrating, when doing research and coming up against a news article that is three days old, and archived.

As for community building, by forums, 'blogs or wiki's, all can build loyal contributors, however, it is labor intensive on the part of the hosting site.

Many news sites that have set up a forum without moderation have taken the forums back offline, due to rampant spamming and off topic comments. Any news site considering viewer/reader interaction must be prepared to actively moderate the forums. Simply installing a discussion forum and not keeping it tidy and on track invites abuse, and takes away from the purpose of public discourse. There is a difference between moderation and censorship, that is an issue that must be addressed by the individual news sites.

"Web2.0" is interactive community building, and news sites must respond to "Web2.0" by involving their viewers/readers. Sites such as MySpace, my site, and other "Web2.0" sites are growing in popularity due to the interactive nature, and news sites can learn a lot from the success of others.

From Stefan Dill on April 23, 2007 at 2:04 PM

I agree. Newspapers need to get comfortable with (not threatened by) employing the connectivity of the web to serve their readers. But this entails expanding one's concept of authority, ownership, information, and source, which is a huge leap for many media firms to make.

Robert's observation:

"But newspapers would have a huge opportunity that MySpace is, to date, wasting by mining that undercurrent of personal communication for news leads and story ideas. Deploy reporters to identify potential stories, then use crowdsourcing to help report them.",

and Pete's:

"Simply installing a discussion forum and not keeping it tidy and on track invites abuse, and takes away from the purpose of public discourse." -

go hand-in-hand.

To set up forums or discussions and not engage with your readers is hardly interactive. We have to take an active role in bridging the gap between the newsroom and the public we purport to serve. I have gotten many breaking news tips from reader forums, entire civic initiatives have resulted from paying attention to and steering public feedback, etc - its developing that relationship that is paramount IMO.

I think its important to open up the archives as well, and also open them up for comments and discussion. its a great way to collect information or ideas if you ever have to go back and revisit an issue or a topic. I also encourage the development of readers making their own archives - we 've opened up a general local history/memories forum thats pretty popular.

From John Kennedy on April 29, 2007 at 10:30 PM

This is so important and why hasn't new websites picked up on this? I'm not sure if it's considered a news site but my main source of news is DIGG.com. It is a hub for all the news i want to read. There is a great userbase that is very important and tons of constantly updated content with user interaction.

I consider DIGG a social news website, not just a news website. So why don't news websites start looking at successful internet sites and learn from their success.

News websites should be the center of the users experience, they should link in, link out, and comment all over the site. But if there isn't a good user base, then users won't be as likely to comment.

Other than that, many sites need to start embracing what the internet is capable of. We need to start seeing more embedded video, audio slide shows, and photo packages. And at the same time I have seen some ugly news sites. I'm not going to make an ugly disorganized and advertisement cluttered page the huub of my internet experience. Clean it up if you want to be the center of my life!

From Kim Pearson on April 30, 2007 at 4:40 PM

Has anyone taken a look at MySpace News (http://news.myspace.com?) It's set up like Digg.com. So far, it's not well integrated with the rest of myspace, and it doesn't seem to attract much traffic, but it's definitely an effort to leverage their huge user community.

From Jon Garfunkel on April 30, 2007 at 6:59 PM

There's a bit of contorting data to support conclusions here.

Since Peer has the data, I have to agree with him.

Here's the central question: why do readers spend less minutes with online paper than a physical one?

And here's my simple explanation: online, there are more destinations online to jump to. Adding more links, as per the "network hub" model, simply exacerbates this. There's nothing wrong with that, but you can't pretend that this will solve the problem. Having cheaper content to look at (blogs for ~10 cents/word, or bulletin boards / comment threads) keeps readers around for longer.

If you want to measure this, propose a study comparing the minutes readers spent with TNR, The Nation, Salon, Slate, TPM, DailyKos. That would be an effective comparison. And gauging their revenues is still another fair comparison. TPM and DailyKos, while the leading blog liberal political blogs, may be barely grossing six figures.

Also, Robert, you need to answer the question I long ago posed here. It's very simple for a journalism program to do the math. How many readers have the capacity to interact everyday? Yes, people want to interact with their friends, but how do you monetize that as a news company?

From Robert Niles on April 30, 2007 at 9:51 PM

Every survey or focus group I've been a part of at the site where I've worked has suggested a power law relationship for public participation on a website. Thousands of readers in every metropolitan market have the time to interact everyday. Many more have the ability to interact on an infrequent basis. And a plurality will never interact, but anecdotes suggest that many of them feel a greater sense of loyalty to sites where they see others readers interacting (as their proxy, if you will.)

Now, obviously, other factors can elicit loyalty as well: great coverage, engaging personalities on the staff, consumer advice, contests, ads, silly pictures, etc.

I guess I don't see what your question is, Jon. Are you questioning whether there is a market for reader-driven news editing, aggregation and/or coverage? I think Nielsen, et al, have proven that. How to monetize social media pageviews? Well, as more publishers move toward a "time spent" metric, social media has been shown to help that metric (I've seen it on my own sites, too). And the increased pageviews from social media creates saleable inventory as well.

The biggest problem for the traditional news industry is not on the income side, it is on the expense side. Decades of monopoly status have caused too many news organizations to forget how to compete. So they turn to ham-handed cuts instead of reengineering their firms to better produce truthful news coverage in the competitive Internet era.

From Jon Garfunkel on May 1, 2007 at 7:51 PM

Yes, anecdotes and focus groups are good, but real concrete numbers exist. This was our exchange in November 2005. You wrote: "I'm game to publish such a piece if someone wants to pursue those figures."

Now, as I have to make clear, I'm not in the industry and I'm not an academic. But I have a sense what good research looks like.

Here is what a University professor writes: "Add all these network-building ideas together and I think a news site can increase its site traffic significantly -- attracting new audiences, making current users come back more frequently, and increasing the time spent and pages viewed per visit."

Hold on. This *is* being done by certain news sites, particular in special interest magazines. So much of new media writing is mired in the nineteen-nineties, chastising some unspecified tardy adopter. When hard research is done (Limor Peer's paper), somebody else comes along says, eh, I have my own anecdotes to make my own points.