The Modern Journalist

A (Partial) Model for Modern Media

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Ever since I wrote the link journalism post a few days ago, I’ve had an idea percolating in my head. I’m not sure that it’s fully formed, but I wanted to get it out into the wild because I have a feeling there are those who have already thought this through.

One of my main points has been this: in a modern world, people will go directly to the source for information and can easily bypass more traditional outlets (re: newspapers) to get the news they most need.

That notion is partially built on the idea that URLs are so important. Modern outlets realize that search-to-find is vitally important. If you’re looking for the weather report, you go to Weather.com

Clearly that’s what people are doing, at least some of the time. Here’s an analysis (PDF)of Weather.com’s solution to its traffic spike’s during disasters and other anomalies. There are some terrific traffic numbers here:

1. 15-20 million page views per day
2. 70 million page views in one day during the back-to-back hurricane’s in Florida
3. From 2002 until 2004, peak page views during hurricane season grew from 26 million to 70 million

So what does it all mean?

My local paper, the Cincinnati Enquirer, has a weather page powered by AccuWeather.com, which I assume is a competitor to Weather.com. There are some links, but nothing much to it.

I’m not even sure if there can be anything else to it. That’s the big quandary.

All that keeps running through my head is this question: how do you compete with Weather.com, the Associated Press, Thomas (federal legislation), CBSSportsline.com’s Fantasy Page, WhatIfSports.com, MLB.tv, the Cincinnati Reds home page, Citizen Logistics, Fandango, MovieFone, Live Stock Tickers, Yahoo Finance, the New York Stock Exchange.

At some point, these groups are going to wise up and create APIs for blogs and other personalized home pages and — for instance — I’ll use an RSS Reader to create my own personalized experience for news and information that comes straight from the source.

I’ve decried the lack of technological innovation at newspapers. Maybe that’s the future.

Aggregating these data sources of information in one place, developing user tools to allow people to syndicate that content outside of that, creating new platforms that allow people interact with the data (fantasy sports, ARGs) while setting up affiliate retail programs so that people can purchase directly through the paper, geo-locating local information delivered on mobile and Web platforms, opening up developer kits so that people can create new applications…

…and then work on stories.

It’s the very same idea as creating an online publishing system that feeds print (I refuse to call that reverse publishing for the same reason I reject new media; I don’t define on other folks terms). If, as my writing partner suggests, the thesis of my book is to use the medium for what it’s good for, it seems like papers need to completely rethink what it is they do online and the types of people they need to do that.

As I said, the idea is percolating in my head, but lots of things bang around in there.