joemichaud.com

One of the striking elements about yesterday’s inauguration was the physicality of it.

An estimated 2 million  people traveled from all over the country just to be anywhere near the event.

All over the world, people gathered in front of TVs in their offices and schools, but more significantly, many made a point to go to venues set up just for watching the televised event.

What does this say?

It says that proximity matters. In a time when we can easily gather “virtually” with anyone we know, anywhere in the world, people will still get up off their couches and unplug their laptops, and they will  go stand with friends and strangers to share an experience.

That speaks to a basic hardwiring of the human psyche that we in media need to keep remembering:  Now that everyone knows how to use technology to share an experience virtually, there are times when we choose to gather. Now that it’s a daily routine for many to connect  on Twitter and Facebook, they still go out and find each other.   There’s a shared experience around  the physical space we occupy.

And that brings us to the future of local media. I believe people’s actions   yesterday — they were drawn to proximity with each other, around a shared event — reaffirms the idea that local media can be relevant.  People identify with their geographic communities, and with their virtual communities.

The challenge  for local media is to understand the innate needs of human beings who identify with a physical space. Local media must make itself indispensible to those who identify with the place,  must make itself part of that community, and must make sure it’s always invited along when people gather.

Who knows,  maybe take it a step further, and create a physical community space where people gather?

Also posted at www.AIMGroup.com

Recently I’ve  reviewed a number of small newspapers’ websites and strategies, particularly around classifieds. As you might expect, there are a few common threads. They are not universal, by any means. Some sites need a lot of work, and some just need some tweaking.

Before I get into those  areas for improvement,  I should say I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the openness of smaller newspapers to thinking differently, compared to larger papers. On the other hand, if you don’t have much auto advertising, I suppose you’re more likely to see that category as opportunity rather than risk.

So, a few recommendations for smaller papers to generate results:

1. Clear strategy for classifieds. Many papers still seem to define classifieds as “whatever comes in on the phone.” There’s big revenue opportunity in acting more intentionally about these categories. Why not decide to be the best resource in your region for buying a car, finding a home or getting a job? Why not be the best place for advertisers looking to find those consumers?

2. Classifieds as categories, rather than as a homogenous mass. Neither consumers nor advertisers think much about “classifieds.” They have a job to fill or a car to sell or a house to buy. Speak to those needs in product mix, in site navigation, in promotion.

3. Targeted products. Keep them simple, and focus each on consumer and advertiser  needs in a category. The needs of a homebuyer are vastly different than those of a jobseeker.

4. Simple pricing. Figure out what price points make sense for advertisers in each vertical category in your market. Pick no more than 3-5  and be prepared to shift based on feedback.

5. Clearer site navigation to classifieds. Many sites make it unnecessarily difficult to find that car for sale. Highlight the classifieds categories in sitewide navigation, on every page.

6. Show off your assets. Top Jobs is an excellent model for all classifieds categories. Why? Because it takes advantage of something newspaper sites  have, that no vertical site has: drive-by traffic. Find ways to pull classifieds content onto every page, not just jobs, and not just on the home page.

7. Cleaner branding. Sure, I’m a believer in creating a new brand that says “Hey, our homes site is much, much more than simply the newspaper classifieds.” But if it isn’t, do you really want to put the time and effort into promoting MontanasBestRealEstateForYouOutofTownSuckers.com? Better to keep it simple, and leverage your marketing dollars more efficiently.

8. SEO’d site structure. Why make a site look smaller than it has to be?  Many small newspapers   have a small news site and a small auto site and a small homes site, all under different URLs. Google happily sees them all as separate small sites, and ranks them accordingly. Yet simple URL changes could make the collection look like a  medium-sized site, and earn it the higher rankings it deserves in all categories.

9. Better use of space. Encourage your web designers to think in terms of “static” and “dynamic” content.  Dynamic  means story headlines that change regularly, and ads that change regularly. Static means logos, navigation, lists that don’t change,   basically things your users will quickly learn to ignore. The first screen of every page — from home page to classifieds verticals — should be heavily weighted with dynamic content.  That first screen is prime real estate. Be ruthless. Every pixel should be there for a reason.

10. Less clutter. Somewhat related, but mostly about ads. Cut down on the number of display ad positions. Tiny rectangles aren’t effective for advertisers. If you have small advertisers who need a low-priced solution, find one. Reserve your display ad inventory for those who need, and can pay for, high visibility.

11. Reposition as a partner. Newspapers in small markets have an opportunity that their large-metro brethren have long since lost: They can be a real partner to local merchants, employers, realtors and auto dealers as these businesses seek customers online. Done right, this opportunity represents real growth for small-market newspapers.

Taken together, these points mean smaller papers are leaving significant money on the table in classifieds categories, and the amount is probably just a function of their market’s economics and demographics.  The good news is, those smaller publishers seem much more willing to make the changes required to go get it.

(also posted at AimGroup.com)

Some truly sad news in the past week: Bluffton Today, the start-from-scratch, let’s-try-a-new-model newspaper in Bluffton, S.C., is going to start charging for home delivery of its daily newspaper, srtarting Dec. 1.  For three years,  Bluffton Today  has been delivered  to every household, free.  The announcement is here.

Much of the attention on Bluffton Today, of course, has been its heavy focus on developing a voice for the citizenry of Bluffton. By opening up blogs, photos and other contributions to local residents, BlufftonToday.com became the center of local dialogue. One of the more powerful learnings  of this model was the emergence of a community of local moms in Bluffton, a learning that led directly to the launch of local moms’ sites by newspapers across the U.S. in the past two years.

And the online-print loop was also innovative. The website is almost entirely community-driven, while the printed newspaper is a combination of professional journalism and community voices.

Still, it was the saturation-home-delivery concept that I personally found intriguing. Bluffton had the potential to test a game-changing story for advertisers: in a time of increasing  fragmentation of both media and attention spans, we’re going to guarantee that your message gets into every home in this attractive area, every day. Since advertising pays the bills at any newspaper, local advertisers’ perception of value is key. The model of saturation delivery is relatively widespread among weeklies; it’s rare among dailies. With Bluffton being a high-demographic area attractive to advertisers, and combined with the intense community focus of the publication,  it could be the perfect test case for the concept. Alas, it won’t be.

But the saddest thing of all is this:  not only will the newspaper start charging for printed copies, it also will begin charging for access to parts of BlufftonToday.com. The community’s response is predictably harsh, as seen in this exchange on the site between the editor and readers.  Note the people who feel they’ve helped build this community resource through their contributions of content, and now they’ll be charged just to use it.

So the experiment is over, and Bluffton Today will become like other newspapers, including its struggle to survive.

As newspapers have flailed around in recent years, Bluffton Today was a source of inspiration and hope. So the end of this experiment is not just an isolated incident. I fear it could be a significant setback to those who continue to experiment within newspapers, not only adding to their own doubts, but also undermining what little support they get from their sponsor organizations.

To them, all we can say is: Please don’t give up.

Also posted at the AIM Group blog.

Howard Owens posted a very thoughtful, and thought-provoking, blog item arguing that “local” as a media strategy will  make even more sense in the future because of societal changes that are drawing people toward smaller geographic communities.  He’s talking about the reasons behind Gatehouse’s new site The Batavian, (which was covered in this blog a couple of weeks ago)  but he could be talking about any community:

The beauty of the web for local news is not only does it give us a new chance to refocus on true local news, but it makes it easier to enable the strong civic engagement that only comes when people talk with each other. Through comments and blogs and UGC video, we have a chance to pull people away from “American Idol” and into a real dialogue about the issues that matter most to their home towns.

Meanwhile, another site is taking that very tack, this time more of a grassroots approach. The West Seattle Blog covers that neighborhood like a small community newsletter, except it uses video, crisp writing, and instant coverage. This morning, for example, I’m reading coverage of a neighborhood association meeting, and it was posted about midnight last night — with video. According to coverage in TechNewsWorld.com, founder Tracy Record was an assistant news director for the local Fox affiliate, and left in December to focus fulltime on her neighborhood blog. She has since been joined by her son, and her husband, selling ads. “We say that we’re sustainable,” she said. “We decided on a leap of faith to live on this job last year. We had a 401k, we were living off savings for a while. We’re not drawing on that anymore.” Record is now able to pay freelancers, and she hopes to hire an additional staffer by the end of the year.

Two models approaching local as an opportunity: one from a media company looking for new growth, one from a  citizen looking to meet a need in her neighborhood.

A lot of this stuff runs under the radar of typical industry coverage because it’s so small. And that’s too bad, because taken in the aggregate, it’s big. There’s a lot happening at the community level that adds up to significant experimentation — and possibly, oppportunity.

Another sign of the maturing of blog technology as a solid publishing medium. (Anybody remember the 365 Days’ War over what was or wasn’t a blog?)

Now here’s a WordPress blog layout that looks more like a newspaper or magazine than a blog.

As a format within a local media site, this has potential. The all-important first screen  displays multiple entries, stories, or photos. Comments are on a continuation page, keeping the home page compact.

A lot of blog layouts serve up one post in the first screen, which is fine for a solo blogger, but it’s limiting if you have multiple entries per day, or even per hour.

I haven’t spent any time poking at this  to see advantages over the many other excellent WordPress skins, but it’s is worth checking out if you’re running a site with multiple entries. If you try it out, please share   reactions in comments below.

Sometimes the bad news contains some positive patterns worth digging for.

Advertising Age magazine (subscription required) reported earlier this month that U.S. magazine ad pages were down 3.1 percent for the first half of 2008. The usual culprits hitting all media were blamed: declines in ad spending by auto companies, financial, real estate, etc.

You have to read through the list of losers to get the gainers. But check out these titles showing double-digit increases over 2007:   Cooking with Paula Deen, Every Day with Rachael Ray,  Relish, Cookie, Parents, Fast Company, Body & Soul, In Touch Weekly, OK Weekly, Southern Accents, Veranda, Spin, Technology Review, and Working Mother.

(Pop quiz. Which title had nearly 50% growth from 2007? Answer at the end)

See any patterns? Let’s toss out Fast Company and Technology Review for this exercise. What I see are some clear patterns of publications targeting hard-to-reach audiences, and drawing advertisers who are finding it harder and harder to reach them. The audiences:

Young moms: Cookie, Parents, Working Mother.
Food-conscious women: Cooking with Paula Deen, Every Day with Rachel Ray, Body&Soul, Relish.
High-end home design fanciers: Southern Accents, Veranda.
Young people obsessed with celebrities: OK Weekly, Spin, In Touch Weekly

The point is, there is advertising money out there for those who can draw the right audiences.

How many publishers, both online and in print, continue to make incremental changes in their products, rather than identifying a valuable unserved audience and going after it?

It’s like what Willie Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.”

(Answer: Cookie – targeting hip, stylish moms — up 49.5 percent this year vs 07)

Update from my last post. The Baltimore Sun is doing some very interesting work in video advertising. It’s not really about advertising per se — as in getting a message in front of a consumer who’s not necessarily looking for it –  but about enabling local businesses to establish a video presence, which can then lead to video advertising.

Check out the demos here.

It’s a good example of a local media company going after a line of business that nobody’s in right now. Essentially, the folks at BaltimoreSun.com create custom video microsites for clients, hook the microsite into the baltimoresun.com URL for SEO purposes, and then obviously try to get the client to advertise the microsite on their site. It’s profitable. Is this something a TV station would get into? No, it’s too downmarket. Is it something a video production company would get into. No, for the same reason. Might a wedding videographer get into this? OK, maybe. But the folks at the Sun are there first, and they have the ad programs and SEO muscle to make their clients successful online.

The Sun’s program reminds me of  the concept outlined in the book Blue Ocean Strategy, by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgneit.  Basically the subhead tells it all:
“How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant.” In other words, you can be like a shark trying to outdo the other sharks in a feeding frenzy,  turning the ocean red.  Or you can  swim to some blue ocean water and dine in peace.

Of course, you’ll swim around in the big blue ocean for a while before you find dinner, so conserve some  resources for the hunt.

But it’s a concept worth thinking about for troubled media companies: what are the  assets you have that can be used to “create uncontested market space” and make it yours? In the case of the Sun, their assets included some basic video skills and equipment, some excellent web design skills, lots of customer contacts  and excellent search-engine rankings. They’ve used those assets to develop a blue-ocean kind of business.

As they say in those video ads on the telly: “What’s in your wallet?”

Arianna Huffington offers a thought-provoking analogy to help rethink the endless debate between new and old media. I don’t usually just slap quotes up as blog posts, but I thought this one was worth sharing (thanks to Bev Crandon for flagging it):

The shifting dynamic between the forces of print and online reminds me of the relationship between Sarah Conner and the T-101 in the Terminator movies. At first, the visitor from the future (digital) seemed intent on killing Sarah (print). But as the relationship progressed and the sequels unspooled, the Terminator became Sarah and her son’s one hope for salvation. Today, you can almost hear digital media (which for some reason has a thick Austrian accent) saying to print: “Come with me if you want to live!”

(OK, now your turn. What does the liquid-metal-cop-guy represent?)

Well, today (April 30) is my last day at MaineToday. To be honest, Dan Dinsmore has been running the show since March 3, and I’ve been just helping in the background. But today I turn in my badge.

I’ve been thinking of what to write here on this day. It occurs to me that the best thing I can do is record for posterity the cool things that the people at MaineToday did over the years, things that are fairly common now but at the time were “out there.” We didn’t intend to be “out there” — they just seemed like the right things to do. I’m happy to say that MaineToday is still, and will continue to be, out there. So consider this simply taking stock up till now.

I’m not going to attach individuals’ names to these things, because if you know my “circle of life” drawing, you know that we’re all in it together. On the other hand, comments are open on this blog, and I hope current and former MTers will feel free to take or give credit, or to add items I forgot about.

This is going to sound like bragging, but it’s not. I’m the longest-serving person here, so I feel an obligation to write this down before it’s all forgotten.

So here goes.

It starts with the whole idea of (what later became called) MaineToday.com in 1995, which really was a couple of questions: “What does this community need? and What could a website be if it had the assets of a newspaper to start with?” Those assets being, for example: a wide range of content, superb photography, connections to the community, an existing wide readership, a broad advertiser base, creative people, and more. The answer was a site that started with some newspaper content, but aimed beyond. In 1995, and well into the next century, most newspaper companies focused on getting better at “putting the newspaper online.” The folks at MaineToday.com did that, but mostly focused on what else people might want or need. We didn’t invent anything unique (that I’m aware of) but we often tried to find examples to work from, and instead found ourselves making it up as we went. Some examples:

• What now are called “citizen media” and blogs: We started a niche site in 1995 called “BayNet” later renamed “Casco Bay Online” that was almost entirely content contributed by ordinary people. My favorite piece was “A Day on The Bay,” a brief item written by various captains on the Casco Bay island ferries, capturing some event or observation of that day. He’d write it on paper, fax it over to us, and someone would type it onto the site every day. I’ll never forget the item describing a clear sunset, and in the distance, a deer swimming toward the mainland. That kind of outreach became standard across the MaineToday network, whether in Business, Sports, reader comments on news, and of course it’s now common on sites around the country.
• Multimedia, video, audio: We had a lot of fun trying out different types of media early on. In Casco Bay Online, we had video of Portland Head Light from the air, underwater fish in the Gulf of Maine, and historic footage of a boat race. Elsewhere, I recall a story about a gospel singer, written for the Maine Sunday Telegram in 1997, and the reporter had the foresight to take a tape recorder. The resulting package showed me a new way of storytelling.
• Ad formats: It’s almost funny to say now, but early on, it was controversial to put ads on web pages, as an offense to the “web community.” But we experimented anyway, and first came up with a “tile” ad, the dimensions of which I believe we copied from the Houston Chronicle site. (Those units are all standardized now) Before long, we came up with “web margins” which everyone now calls skyscrapers, and discovered the power of a large space to tell an ad story. One very cool tool was a way for an advertiser to update the text of their ad easily and immediately, from a form on a web page. That was a breakthrough.
• High School Sports: The idea of capturing results from every game, in every sport, with every player, at every high school in Maine, was pretty outrageous. But we gave it a shot in 1999, and it became one of the biggest traffic drivers on the site. The system is still in use today, and now powers both the printed newspapers and the websites.
• Events calendars: OK, this one we invented. Newspapers run events calendars for their communities, and they’ve always been simply long strips of text, both in the way they are input, how they are saved in the publishing system, and how they are output for print. Which didn’t work very well online. We had the crazy idea of capturing the events in a structured database — as they were input — so they’d be easily searchable and sortable online, but also easier to edit and output for print. In 1996 there was no such thing, so we built it. The system is still in use today to produce the calendars for the printed Press Herald, as well as the online searchable calendars.
• Low-cost ad programs: There’s always been a challenge meeting the needs of small advertisers, those who can’t afford and don’t need a skyscraper. Hey, we developed microsites, a yellow-pages product, ecommerce, real-estate agent pages, text ads, who knows what else. All gone now, but not without a good try. The good news is all that learning is informing the next generation of products like the new MaineYellowPages.com.
• Classified “verticals”: This was radical at the time, but in 1998 we split the online “classifieds” into four sections for autos, homes, jobs, and “other stuff.” It immediately became clear that this approach spoke more clearly to both consumers and advertisers, and allowed us to develop content and technology to serve each category’s unique needs. This didn’t solve the real problems in these challenging categories, of course, but simply acknowledging them as unique categories was an important first step.

I’m going to stop at that and let others add more in the comments below. Or maybe I’ll think of more and add some.  I tend not to look back much, so I probably forgot something.

I said I wouldn’t attach names, but I’m going to mention three anyway, who deserve recognition and my personal thanks:

Jim Shaffer was CEO of Guy Gannett Communications, a traditional media company with newspapers and TV stations, when he had the vision in 1994 to start trying to figure out what was coming, and how to respond. Few in his position even suspected something was coming, let alone dedicating resources to try figuring it out. Jim’s leadership led to the creation of the “skunkworks” division that became MaineToday.com, and it would not have happened otherwise.

Lou Ureneck was executive editor of the Portland Press Herald, where I was city editor at the time, when in 1995 he decided the newsroom needed to get involved in the initiative that Jim Shaffer had set in motion. Things were already in motion, and let’s just say it was a bumpy transition. But the direction would have been much different had Lou not injected the newsroom — and me along with it — into the mix.

Chuck Cochrane took over as CEO when the Seattle Times Company bought Guy Gannett in 1998 and created Blethen Maine Newspapers. Chuck was new in town, and didn’t know me except by reputation. It took a big leap of faith to put the title of “president” on a guy who had no real business background, and I can only hope Chuck hasn’t regretted that decision.

Lots of other people deserve my thanks, all the current and former employees of MaineToday and Blethen Maine Newspapers that I’ve worked with — hundreds probably, if you include all my peers around the country who I’ve leaned on and learned from other the years. If you’re one of those, thank you.