Memo to Katharine Weymouth: Put your salon on the Web

[Former Washington Post staffer and frequent OJR contributor Tom Grubisich checks in with his take on the recent near-scandal at the Post – the paper’s attempt to sell access to its reporters and editors through high-priced, off-the-record “salons” at the publisher’s home.

After Tom makes his points, OJR editor Robert Niles jumps in and adds additional thoughts on how this episode ought to provide inspiration to news publishers trying to preserve and extend healthy relationships with their readers.]

The most surprising thing about the Washington Post’s pay-to-play fiasco was not the Jack Abramoff-worthy pitch (“Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate. Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth….”), but that the Post was wasting its time on a brand-building project that ignored the potential firepower of its nine-million-user-strong website.

Could any brand building be more ridiculously behind the curve than salons at the home of the publisher? Weymouth’s grandmother, Katharine Graham, was known for her Georgetown salons, but in-between those evenings she did things like hire Ben Bradlee to create a first-class newspaper, take the Post public but without the Graham family yielding corporate control to Wall Street, and, while the new public company’s financial future hung in the balance, pledge the Post’s fortune and sacred honor by standing solidly behind the initially risky Watergate coverage of young reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Talk about brand building!

Weymouth’s first salon was to be about health care. The now-infamous promotional flier promised a “spirited” evening. But so what? There is “spirited” debate about health care all over the media 24/7. What the Post should be doing is creating a 21st-century democratic salon where health care can move beyond debate to action. The salon should be on washingtonpost.com, and it should go way beyond creating a dead-end talkfest involving health care providers, congressional and administration officials and Post writers and editors.

The missing invitees at Weymouth’s salon were Americans who
1) don’t have health care,
2) don’t have enough to protect them from a major illness or
3) are well covered but whose health isn’t any better for that.

There are, according to some respected estimates, almost 46 million Americans without any health insurance . Add the other two categories, and you probably have a grand total of 100 million or more people who are squeezed in the health care crisis. Their documented stories of denied health services, bankruptcy from uncovered bills and treadmill treatment should count for at least as much as what a health industry CEO or member of Congress has to say.

Washingtonpost.com could build the online salon where those stories could be heard, and, more important, acted on. It could set up sub-sites in metro areas that cover a cross-section of all U.S. demographicsand are known for both high and low health care costs. The recent and widely referenced New Yorker article by Atul Gawande on how health care costs in McAllen, TX, far outpace costs in prevention-focused metro areas but leaves residents in worse shape could be a template for a countrywide examination of medical technology and physician entrepreneurialism run amok.

The goal of this online salon would be not just airing health care issues, but pinpointing what’s broken in the system and coming up with affordable ways to fix it.

This would require a washingtonpost.com committed to engagement, but, so far, that’s not part of the site’s mission. It seems more interested in adding bells and whistles, including trying to be funny, like in this embarrassingly inept political skit inspired by Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” and “Saturday Night Live.”

An online salon about health care that reaches out to the millions of Americans who are uninsured, under-insured and wondering how much health their insurance has bought them wouldn’t produce too many laughs. But it might help prod Congress to pass legislation that would let the U.S. finally join all other industrialized nations in providing for universal coverage. That’s something that Katharine Weymouth’s salons, however good the food and wine might be, would never achieve.

[And now, OJR editor Robert Niles adds his thoughts:]

While I agree with what Tom’s written, I want to add a couple more points: First, let’s not dismiss the power of off-line events to reward, strength and ultimately expand online communities.

Offline meetings represent a powerful and significant development in the relationship between an individual and an online community. It’s the moment when a relationship goes from being casual to representing a more lasting commitment. People so inspired to be willing to travel to a physical space to meet in person with other members show by their action a commitment to the community far greater than simple browsing and posting the occasional comment.

These are individuals around whom you can build new initiatives, support far larger membership and create a critical mass than will make additional classes of advertisers and funders take notice. Online publications from BlogHer to New West to DailyKos have made offline events part of the business and promotional strategy and the Post, like other papers, would do well to consider their lead.

Second, let’s not overlook these offline events as potential sources of revenue, as well. Most folks might not be willing to pay for online content, but they are willing to pay to attend conferences. And sponsors are willing to pay to have their names and logos attached to events that attract their customers.

So how is this any different that what the Post proposed (then abandoned)? We’re talking about building extending a new publisher’s relationship with the public – not with a handful of big-money insiders. And doing it on the record – a record that will be enhanced by the reporting of hundreds, or, if you are fortunate, thousands of readers who take the next step in their relationship with you by attending.

If newspapers are to remain relevant in a newly competitive media marketplace, they must not be content simply to inform readers. That won’t help them stand out from the crowd of other information sources. They’ve got to provide information so engaging, so compelling, that it moves readers to action. An offline, physical gathering can be one of those acts. Engagement in the formation and execution of public policy can be another. (Heck, not to be too crass here, but pulling out the wallet and buying something from an advertiser ought to be another action, as well.)

Here’s the good news for the Post: People hated the salon idea.

Why is that good news for the Post?

If you don’t care about the Post and don’t care to have a relationship with it, you wouldn’t care who the Post publisher ate dinner with and how much she charged. The fact that so many people reacted like a jilted boyfriend to the Post’s plan demonstrated that people do care about the newspaper and want it to be in relation with them instead of K Street bigwigs. People want a Post that answers to them, not to the lobbyists.

Why not, then, give the people what they want?

How metro newsrooms can recapture their local dominance

Proliferating blogs and micro-sites are producing so much local news, hard and soft, that the continuing shrinkage and even death of metro papers will leave no troubling void in metro coverage, Mark Potts concludes in an extensively linked post on his Recovering Journalist blog. Potts comes close to putting metros collectively in the past tense. They can’t make a successful transition from print to the Internet, he says, because all they offer are “your basic one-size-fits all metro newspaper Web site.”

But in this case the one size – large – is the right one. The metros’ problem is they don’t know how to exploit their size. For all their cutbacks, surviving metros still have considerable staff and other resources that could be mobilized to do what sweat-equity blogs and micro-sites can’t do nearly as well or at all.

A story crying out for attention is what’s behind America’s broken health-care system. Most health-care coverage comes out of Washington, but the real story of waste and profiteering is taking place in thousands of communities around the U.S. In its June 8-15 issue, the New Yorker zoomed in on health care in one community – McAllen, a city in southern Texas near the Rio Grande River border with Mexico whose metro area has a population of 750,000. The article, by Atul Gawande, said that in 2006, Medicare spent an average of $15,000 on each of its McAllen enrollees – twice the national average and well over the $12,000 wages of the average McAllen resident.

One big reason is that McAllen’s physicians are entrepreneurs as much as they are healers. One local hospital’s medical campus is packed with state-of-the-art health-care centers (specializing in surgery, heart cancer, imaging) owned by the hospital’s doctors.

Yet Gawande, a writer and also physician, wrote there was no evidence that this gold-plated care makes McAllen residents any healthier than people elsewhere. In fact, the outcome was just the opposite: “Medicare ranks hospitals on twenty-five metrics of care. On all but two of these, McAllen’s five largest hospitals performed worse, on average, than El Paso’s.”

What’s especially fascinating about Gawande’s piece is that it’s not built mainly around statistics – the way the media usually cover health care. Its old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting – the kind that one-person and other small websites can’t and don’t usually try to do. But that’s exactly the reporting that metro newspapers, despite their shrinking staffs, still have the potential to do well. Size matters.

But first, metros should quit wasting resources trying to cover everything, and thereby serving up, every day, the same thin reportorial soup that satisfies no one. Leave local restaurants and related coverage to Yelp! Don’t try to compete with on the local-local news front where Web-ified weeklies and micro-sites have firmly planted their flags. And why should papers hire clever typists to review movies – like the bankrupt Minneapolis Star-Tribune ? Where a blog or micro does an especially good job on one aspect of community coverage – like Baltimore Brew and Baltimore Crime two sites cited by Potts — metros can partner with the site or just link to it with a Huffington Post-style promotion.

On Monday, June 8, the Miami Herald went public with a feature recognizing the role of community blogs. Typically for how newspapers fail to use the Web creatively, the Herald is just aggregating blogs without trying to promote the best ones — a la Huffington Post.

By shedding coverage that’s redundant in the market, the average metro should be able to re-deploy enough reporters and editors to do big, long-term projects with major local impact.

Health care, which consumes close to 20 percent of the gross domestic product, is an obvious place to begin. A refocused metro staff would starts its homework by gathering all the data pertinent to the local area (as Gawande did for McAllen), but then reporters would use their shoe leather to translate the often-eye-glazing metrics into compelling narratives populated by people impacted by the broken system – something that Gawande, with just two feet, wasn’t unable to do. The other day, I learned that a nephew of mine eloped with his girlfriend in part to become a beneficiary on her employer-provided health coverage. With the national jobless rate pushing above 10 percent and many small businesses scrapping their employee health coverage, I doubt my nephew is an anomaly. Imagine the stories that would pour in to a well-built, interactive metro website that chronicled the health care crisis so close up and personally?

Reuters reports that “medical bills are involved in more than 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, an increase of 50 percent in just six years,” and that most of those driven into bankruptcy actually had insurance – but it wasn’t enough to cover costs that exceed overall inflation. Metros can repurpose that story in thousands of people-specific ways.

Newly deployed reporters would talk to local doctors who set up the mall-like health-care centers that Gawande says are a major cause of the super-high cost of care in places like McAllen. These stories, too, would generate a lot of interactivity with the community – pro and con, to be sure.

Not all the coverage would be negative. Gawande cites communities – Rochester, MN, home of the Mayo Clinic and Boulder, CO, among others – where health care hasn’t become a profit center and doctors are trying to forge care- as opposed to cost-driven treatment. Metros would talk to the patients in care-driven treatment to find out how they benefit. Interactive discussions would draw more patient response – and maybe entrepreneur-doctors defending the system.

This smarter coverage would generate more traffic and give metros a strong shot at re-establishing themselves as a dominant news medium in their communities. More than that, it might, if enough metros got on board, help force policy makers and legislators to confront the real reasons behind the health-care crisis.

Metros could use their new playbook to cover other long-term stories with high social impact, including all those under the umbrella of an economic/financial crisis that is likely to continue for many years. Right now metros do report-and-run stories on foreclosures and business closings, but they don’t use their resources to show how these events are reshaping entire neighborhoods and maybe the American dream

How is the $800 billion from the federal stimulus legislation being spent in each metro area? Who are there winners and losers, and why? How much waste, fraud and conflict of interest are occurring? Report-and-run stories won’t answer those questions.

Metros must become like Gulliver – not the shipwrecked Gulliver who came to his senses to discover he was ensnared by the six-inch-high Lilliputians, but the Gulliver who later outwitted his captors and escaped to freedom.

Gulliver got smart. Will the metros?

Newspapers should become carnival barkers on their Google-linked pages

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has tauntingly suggested that newspapers could keep their stories out of the search engine’s omnivorous maw by the simple expedient of inserting a line of anti-spidering robot text. But newspapers don’t have to commit hara-kiri to keep others from making a free lunch (and breakfast, dinner and snacks) out of their expensively produced content.

Yet so far they haven’t been creative enough to exploit the potential of having their stories turning up as links on the heavily-trafficked Google News homepage. In her recent testimony [PDF] at a Senate committee hearing on “The Future of Journalism,” Google Vice President for User Experience Marissa Mayer gave a virtual tutorial on how newspapers could do that.

She said:

“Publishers should not discount the simple and effective navigational elements the Web can offer. When a reader finishes an article online, it is the publication’s responsibility to answer the reader who asks, ‘What should I do next?’ Click on a related article or advertisement? Post a comment? Read earlier stories on the topic? Much like Amazon.com suggests related products and YouTube makes it easy to play another video, publications should provide obvious and engaging next steps for users. Today, there are still many publications that don’t fully take advantage of the numerous tools that keep their readers engaged and on their site.”

A browsing of Google News proves Mayer’s case conclusively. On May 20, the Google News homepage promoted news of California voters’ rejection of measures to close the $21 billion deficit in the state budget.

One of the links included a Los Angeles Times analysis. But the link leads to a page that gave searchers no reason to stay around and look at what else the smart and sprightly LAT website offers. With a little bit of code added to the linked page, the Times could have embedded an example or two of what has made the site so popular since ex-International Herald Tribune Web editor Meredith Artley took over as executive editor in 2007 – like this multimedia feature that was promoted from the Times homepage:

I’m sure “the return of distressed denim jeans” come-on, with a swatch of distressed denim, if it had been also promoted on the linked page would have prompted a lot of searchers to click on it, and – who knows? – maybe browse more LAT web pages. Some of those browsers would surely end up bookmarking the Times, putting them in the highly desirable category – especially for advertisers – of frequently returning visitors.

Every day, there are numerous other examples of newspapers not exploiting the links they get on Google, and thereby failing to convert the fast-clicking Web searcher into a leisurely, frequently returning browser of their sites.

To be blunt, what newspapers have to do is emulate the marketing savvy of the carnival. When you came to the freak show, you were greeted by spectacularly clothed, fast-talking barker. Standing next to the barker was the “bearded lady” or “wild man of Borneo” or some other bizarre creature – a tantalizing sampling of what was insidethe tent. Buy a ticket for 50 cents, and you could satisfy your socially incorrect curiosity.

Newspaper barkers would have an easier job than the carnival barker. They don’t have to sell tickets. But they do have to do a better job of selling their content.