Ohio Newspapers Share Content
April 29th, 2008 | by Brad King |The Modern Journalist reader TJ, webmaster for WWJ 950 in Detroit, instant messaged me a story about the top eight Ohio newspapers sharing content with each other.
It seems the top papers, which are spread geographically far enough that there is little competition between them, have set up an Intranet that enables each paper to treat the other seven as a news service, cherry picking the stories they find most interesting from around the state.
It’s made quite a splash in journalism circles. Check out NPR’s podcast right here.
Still, my initial reaction to the piece was: so what? This does very little to address the technological needs of the readership of papers, nor does it address the fundamental disparity between online resources and offline resources.
The more I think about it, though, the more I see some benefit to this particular model.
One of my biggest complaints with newspapers — and I think many readers would agree — is the increasing number of wire stories, which never quite go as deep as a local reporter on the scene can do. Add to this the Associated Press‘ move away from traditional news content and into modern content and it’s clear that newspapers need to find a new model for content sharing.
This — at least in Ohio — actually addresses that problem in a unique and innovative way.
So far, I haven’t seen anything written about revenue sharing, a topic that surely will come up if one or two papers continually provide mega-traffic for the group. Still, it’s hard not to be impressed with this particular grouping.
I’d imagine the next step — if the organizations can get this right — is to bring all their community presses into the fold, which means developing a content management system which can handle all of the day’s news. Imagine how much distribution the smaller presses could get if they were given the same type deal.
There’s no saying that the Cleveland Plains Dealer would pick up news from the Loveland Herald; however, these presses could share with each, pulling stories that have some similarity to localized stories.
It goes without saying, though, that this content sharing isn’t a substitute for creating new, interactive tools for readers. I’d imagine coordinating such an endeavor with 8 competing papers would be near impossible.
But it will be worthwhile to watch how this partnership plays out.
