Friday, June 02, 2006
It's time to get hip
The organization of a newspaper's interactive website should be a well-planned process. At least that's what I take from reading some of Ken Sands' opinions. Not only does Sands, the online publisher for The Spokesman-Review, believe that a well-organized, interactive website can add depth to news coverage, but also that it can increase the profitability of newspapers. The Spokesman-Review offers online readers more than 30 blogs ranging from sports and politics to the newspaper's decision-making process and ethical concerns. The result is an interaction with its readership that demonstrates the newspaper's respect for the community's input.
I compared The Spokesman-Review blog page with that of the Cincinnati Enquirer, the newspaper that I read online daily. I normally go straight to the Enquirer's sports blogs to catch up on the anecdotes and details that didn't make it into the online news version, and also for whatever news has broken since the paper went to print. The Enquirer's sports blogs seem to follow most of Sands' standards: They are written by a beat writer who interacts with the audience and facilitates the discussion. They generally compliment the morning news story with relevant insight that might not fit the news style. They're interesting, informative and worth visiting daily.
But when I compared the list of blog topics on The Spokesman-Review site and the Enquirer page, it became evident that the Enquirer is not heeding much of Sands' advice. The Enquirer currently has 18 different blogs, but seven of them are dedicated to sports. There is no self-reflection or accountability evident – the blogs are mostly entertainment-based.
Sands describes the future of online publishing in an email posted on Susan Mernit's community publishing and citizen journalism blog: “In the next few years, in my view, online news should become much more independent of that print content,” Sands writes. “If you think about it, posting a newspaper online is giving people a snapshot of yesterday's news. We should instead, give them today's news and a bit of tomorrow's news, as well as making full use of the unique attributes of the web, including: immediacy, interactivity, utility, multimedia, entertainment, archiving, aggregation and community publishing. When you truly take advantage of those attributes, you've got a much different web site.”
These differences between TheSpokesman-Review and online versions of papers like the Cincinnati Enquirer are the basic reasons that The Spokesman-Review has won numerous awards for its online version and the paper as a whole. If Sands is correct in his prediction that blogs and interactive online sites are the wave of the future, many publications like the Enquirer have some catching up to do.
I compared The Spokesman-Review blog page with that of the Cincinnati Enquirer, the newspaper that I read online daily. I normally go straight to the Enquirer's sports blogs to catch up on the anecdotes and details that didn't make it into the online news version, and also for whatever news has broken since the paper went to print. The Enquirer's sports blogs seem to follow most of Sands' standards: They are written by a beat writer who interacts with the audience and facilitates the discussion. They generally compliment the morning news story with relevant insight that might not fit the news style. They're interesting, informative and worth visiting daily.
But when I compared the list of blog topics on The Spokesman-Review site and the Enquirer page, it became evident that the Enquirer is not heeding much of Sands' advice. The Enquirer currently has 18 different blogs, but seven of them are dedicated to sports. There is no self-reflection or accountability evident – the blogs are mostly entertainment-based.
Sands describes the future of online publishing in an email posted on Susan Mernit's community publishing and citizen journalism blog: “In the next few years, in my view, online news should become much more independent of that print content,” Sands writes. “If you think about it, posting a newspaper online is giving people a snapshot of yesterday's news. We should instead, give them today's news and a bit of tomorrow's news, as well as making full use of the unique attributes of the web, including: immediacy, interactivity, utility, multimedia, entertainment, archiving, aggregation and community publishing. When you truly take advantage of those attributes, you've got a much different web site.”
These differences between TheSpokesman-Review and online versions of papers like the Cincinnati Enquirer are the basic reasons that The Spokesman-Review has won numerous awards for its online version and the paper as a whole. If Sands is correct in his prediction that blogs and interactive online sites are the wave of the future, many publications like the Enquirer have some catching up to do.
