Save Our Press

Many newspapers treated the Web as a fad or “add-on” when it came along. Now it’s “web first, print second.”

The speakers here at the Next Newsroom conference seem to suggest that traditional media are missing the boat again by failing to host and nurture social media networks and other useful online applications. Can newspapers become the “local information connection utility”?

Rusty Coats, director of strategic initiatives at Media General, says that new business models suggest 60% of the content in the future will be generated by staff and 40% by non-staff, i.e. users of the Web site.

“The most important thing we can bring is the field of data,” Coats says, such as local crime and real-estate data. In addition to data, journalism organizations can play the role of being a community facilitator or aggregator of other media content.

It’s a natural evolution, from Coats’ perspective. During the first phase, news web sites sought to be the main portal for information in their communities. In the second phase, news web sites learned they needed to optimize their stories to draw traffic from Google. And now we’re in the third phase, in which news web sites are trying to draw traffic through widgets in Facebook and other social networking platforms, he said.

Is that a sustainable business model? “I don’t know what is a sustainable business model in the next three to five years,” Coats said.

Rob Barrett, of latimes.com, says his website is trying to create a community conversation model (sounds like civic journalism to me) in which the newspaper hosts online conversations, facilitated by reporters, that include activists, policymakers, and people on the front lines of the debate (teachers, doctors, etc.).  “It’s a much more efficient way of finding out what people are concerned about,” Barrett said.

This new model requires an investment in selecting informed, thoughtful participants and moderating the conversation. Start-ups that seek solely to aggregate comments from the community can implode from a lack of management, he said. In the coming weeks, his website plans to launch a site with 800 neighborhood pages on it, integrating content from LATimes.com, community blogs and some of the features found on sites like Citysearch.com.

As one of the panelists put it: “Daddy smells page views.”