What’s black and white and dead all over? (Hey you, get your mind out of the gutter)

I’m talking about local newspapers, which have suffered tremendous losses in distribution and ad revenue. Last year, Business Week reported that “the Internet’s effect on help-wanted classifieds cost newspapers $1.9 billion in revenue between 1996 and 2004.” In addition to these losses, according to a 2006 iMedia study, 58% of all internet users look online for news content, while 39% (57 million american adults) get news and opinions from blogs. With online technologies like RSS, Craigslist, Digg, Google News, and so on, the Internet is rapidly becoming the public’s preferred news source.

One explanation for the decline is the difference in life span between a story in print and a story online. A printed story spends between a day and a week on the kitchen table before it’s discarded in the recycling bin. A story online however, can travel through several different types of media, each with different benefits to circulation and permanence:

• Publisher’s Website: This is the closest thing online to picking up the publication on a newsstand and reading it, as the stories are delivered in the publisher’s look and feel.
• RSS: RSS-enabled publishers allow stories to be fed directly into news aggregators. In this model, look and feel are stripped away, only to be customized by readers who opt-in to receive live updates of news content for comment or redistribution.
• Blogs & Web 2.0: Next, blog and other consumer-generated sites pick up the story and re-publish it as it relates to them. This type of evangelism builds a footprint around the publisher’s website, which in turn helps SEO rankings.
• Normal Search Engine Index: Though a new story may show up in news search immediately, it can take days and even weeks for the story to be indexed by the search engines, where it remaines available for retreival indefinitely. It might show up for niche-topic searches months, even years, after its original post.

While it takes time to get presence in the search index, publishers often overlook another, quicker option to getting lited on search results pages: Paid Search. By bidding for placement on keywords related to breaking stories, publishers can ensure that readers will be able to find them when they turn to a search engine on the day a story breaks. Furthermore, contextual advertising networks allow these publishers to promote their stories on a wide network of blogs and content publishers – where the true dialogue about a story is taking place.

From the first hour to the first month (and beyond), a story can be repurposed over and over again online. For local papers, especially those with low-ranking websites, an initial paid ad campaign captures the audience at their first point of information. As the story becomes less immediate, organic search gradually replaces paid ads. Though newspapers will need to experiment with new revenue models, digital distribution can extend the visibility of a news story. For local publishers, that could be the competitive advantage that keeps them from going out of business.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.