Jim Romenesko pulls this quote from Doc Searls' weblog:
"I can't find a single newspaper that doesn't have a slow-loading,
hard-to-navigate, crapped-up home page. These things are aversive,
confusing and often useless beyond endurance."
That design critique is part of a Newspapers 2.0 essay that Searls wrote a couple of days ago. (John McNair, UT's College of Communication & Information
technology director pointed me to the same item yesterday, but I just got there
today.) Searls emphasizes more useable design, alternatives to old marketing models, and steps that empower readers and connect with news-focused bloggers or citizen journalists. That's what I've been calling pro/am journalism. Good example: Doc followed up that Newspaper 2.0 essay with an item today, describing a news aggregator that kept track of news about the latest California wildfire when local 'pro' media came up short.
Searls is a pro: an insider technology journalist, marketing consultant, blogger and Cluetrain manifester -- one of a group of smart folks who saw the 2006 two-way Web coming back in 1999.
So here's a compressed, gently paraphrased version of Doc's 10 tips for online newspapers; like most things on the Web, they link or overlap a bit:
- Open up the archives for free.
- Use those archived past stories for background links and in-depth stories
- Use Web linkage more.
- That includes reading and linking to local bloggers and competing papers.
- Enlist the best of the bloggers as community correspondents.
- Use citizen journalists on urgent local stories.
- Junk the industry jargon word "content." ("Your job is journalism, not container cargo.")
- Use the "live" power of the Web, including rapid updates, links and RSS subscription feeds.
- Publish simplified "river of news" pages for small-screen devices.
- Well, actually this was #8 on Doc's list, the one Romenesko quoted. Here's the full item:
Uncomplicate your websites.
I can't find a single newspaper that doesn't have a slow-loading,
hard-to-navigate, crapped-up home page. These things are aversive,
confusing and often useless beyond endurance. Simplify the damn things.
Quit trying to "drive traffic" into a maze where every link leads to
another route through of the same mess. You have readers trying to learn something, not cars looking for places to park. And please, get rid of those lame registration systems.
Quit trying to wring dollars out of every click. I guarantee you'll
sell more advertising to more advertisers reaching more readers if you
take down the barricades and (again) link outward more. And you'll save
all kinds of time and hassle.
Doc also offered a batch of suggestions for 21st century public radio with similar themes; here are the top five:
- Radio isn't about "content delivery."
- Quit copying commercial broadcasters.
- Face the fact that everything you broadcast will, and should, be
available on an a la carte basis to everybody in the world,
eventually.
- Look to relationship for saving the local stations.
- Get in front of the citizen journalism movement.
I see some of Doc's suggestions already in operation (and others not so much) in the dialogue between our local paper and local bloggers, as well as this year's redesigned New York Times -- and its new "futurist," who calls the blog "one
of the first truly original forms of Internet journalism" and neatly summarizes why: "The blog
energized static text with two unique Web elements -- outbound linking
and close audience interaction, creating a form that by its nature
can't be duplicated in print."
Related: Doc's free advice is considerably more economical than the $2.5 million time machine Vin Crosbie saw delivered to American Press Institute members recently. Vin suggests the group could have saved the consulting fee by just buying all of the attendees individual copies of the presenter's book. I think they could save even more with free copies of the online Cluetrain Manifesto, and a link to Doc's blog (and Vin's too). On a similar theme, see Time's 10 questions for Rupert Murdoch.
1:13:25 PM 
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