The Modern Journalist

Lifestyle 2.0: At the Movies

I’m not going to tackle the entire arts and entertainment section at once because I’m less familiar with this section than I am with the others.

That realization has been a strange for me since John and I wrote a book about video games, have a quarter-finished book about anime and the United States and we have the idea for a comic book, uh, book.

You’d think I’d spend all my time in that section. The fact that I don’t goes to how narrow and out-of-touch that section is.

Honestly, if it weren’t for the complete vacuousness of that section (and maybe local politics), the American weekly newspaper probably wouldn’t exist. Weeklies are — and I don’t mean this negatively because I started at Cincinnati Citybeat and have a fond place in my heart for it — primarily arts and entertainment listings with some stories and profiles.

Music and movies offer an interesting pathway for newspapers. That’s too much though so I’m going to start with movies.

The first thing you have to ask yourself is what people want with movie coverage. For most of us, we want to know what movies are playing, when they are playing, if we can get tickets and what others are saying about the movie.

If we think in terms of tools, then, the online version of the paper should have some version of each of those (and maybe there are more ideas out there).

If you’ve ever bought a ticket online, you’ve likely gone to Fandango or Moviefone, two online brokers that have much of what I described above.

What they don’t have is the local and social component — and in many cases, they don’t have the official trailers as well. Nor do they let people know what DVDs are coming out and when.

So if you’re building an online movie section, it’s probably worthwhile to see if you can partner for the data that is already available (and if not, you’ll need to recreate it) and localize what isn’t. If the price is too high to syndicate content from one of the ticket buying sites (and I’d be shocked if it was since they make money — like everyone makes money — by selling physical products), then your reporters’ jobs will be a bit tougher.

The user software tools are what is really important for papers.

Mashable has a post about Communipare, a widget tool that enables someone to have a side-by-side comparison of 4 movies.

Mashable discusses the downside of this particular widget, but if we think about the arts section in terms of tool building, it’s very simple to see how this might play out, particularly if your junior reporters’ job entailed getting every trailer from the movie studio.

Now you have a centralized way for people to compare movies, but that’s not enough. I’d add components that enabled people to create a friends list (and don’t get me wrong, this should use OpenID or some technology that allows your identity to follow you as much as possible), see what their friends are saying about the movies, remind the user when a movie is coming out, when it’s coming out on DVD, when there are books or games coming out related to it. In other words, it’s an information source for me about the movie.

It’s not enough to think that the review is the most important part of the information process or that an interview, landed at a junket, is the most important thing.

Movies are social. At least that’s what the Motion Picture Association of America used to tell me when I worked at Wired. They are big extravaganzas. If that’s true, then the arts page should be set up to allow people to see what their friends are doing and watching.

Now, I wouldn’t go whole hog on the social networking but it might not be a bad idea to include an Upcoming or Yelp function in the tool as well, giving people the opportunity to set up group outings.

Young people do that sometimes, you know.

I’d also actively encourage site users to apply for a movie reviewer status. I’ve never actually liked movie reviews because art to me is quite personal and there’s no way to write about art without bringing in your opinion.

And I’m not advocating for the demolition of the movie critic (Okay, I am just a little. But only a little.), but I do think it would be worthwhile to have a rotating panel of citizen reviewers who were paid — PAID — to contribute their thoughts.

There’s a variety of ways to pick them but the most obvious would be to track your site’s usage, announce a contest of some sort and see who develops the biggest following with the tool.

Those people are supernodes and it’s good to reward them.

This doesn’t even touch on opportunities such as a predictive market, set up on a weekend, weekly, monthly and quarterly system, giving real movie buffs the opportunity to guess which movies would do well.

Throw in two tickets to some big Hollywood premiere or opening every quarter (thank you marketing department) and you would likely have a rather active board, one that may even attract people from outside the local demographic.

For large companies such as Gannett, owners of my hometown paper, you could pit cities against each other, for instance, with one team from each town competing in the month before the prized event.

Long-term, I would think about tying a predictive market into the software tool for comparison information, allowing people to predict what movies will do well in their individual markets.

Is there more? Absolutely. As I said, this is the area I feel least comfortable with, which is why I’m going to break down the section component-by-component.

I’m anxious to hear what are thinking.