Kalamazoogle

(What I’m Thinking, Part 7)

Is that headline offensive? I don’t know. Whatever.

So, we have all this info and all these posts and images and video and such. What do we do with it? Well, I’m glad you asked, because there are lots of ways to distribute the news. I’m going to split them out into three categories: Past, present and future.

1.    The Future!!!

The web is so last week. Seriously. You know once Booth Newspapers begins re-evaluating its web strategy, that boat has already sailed. That doesn’t mean the web won’t be a significant part of our portfolio, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

There are several future-tools I want to invest significant time and effort in developing. The most significant of these is mobile technology.

a.    Mobile
Cell phones are becoming bigger and more powerful while laptops are getting smaller and more portable. There’s bound to be a convergence at some point. Mobile technology improves on traditional computers in several important ways. First, it’s mobile (duh), which means it can be anywhere you are. My cell phone is less bulky than my laptop, which means I can access it it tight spots or when I want to do so surreptitiously. Also, cell phones like the Blackberry or the iPhone include many of the functions of a laptop with all the capabilities (camera, calendar, SMS) of a cell phone.
We can distribute news to mobile equipment through traditional RSS subscriptions, custom news applications like some outlets are doing with the iPhone, and text messaging such as Twitter. There are bound to be more options as this technology develops. I have no doubt that this is where the technology is going and if we want to get a jump on everybody else this is what we should be experimenting with now.

b.    eReaders
Sony has one. Amazon has its Kindle. Supposedly there are some very fascinating things being worked on in this sphere. I don’t have a whole lot of faith in this (some people do), but I think it’s an interesting area of technology to watch and possibly get into as it develops. I kind of hope this merges into cell phone development.

c.    Desktop App
Imagine if every time you turn on your computer or flip open your laptop all the latest news is right there ready to go. This could be sort of a browser-RSS reader type thing but specifically dedicated just to news aggregation and display. We could open this up so users could subscribe to other news outlets as well. This would improve on the browser by being smaller, faster and always-on in the background. It would improve on the RSS-reader by beefing its the display capabilities.

d.    Collaboration
We have to start taking our product to where people are instead of trying to make them come to us. What this means is hooking up with Google News, Technorati and the like. It also means maybe developing a Facebook app that would actually be a tool for distribution.

e.    Immersive Web
I’m a little vague on this one. But, you know that scene in Back to the Future II where Marty sits down at his future TV and turns on, like, 20 channels at once. I’m imagining it kinda like that but with less overlap, more text, graphics, options… I’m still working on this one. Basically, though, we could have an always-on AVT (that’s Audio-Video-Text) stream that just shoots out like a hyper-caffeinated CNN. You could choose to interact with it if you want — skip a story, click something to find out more, explore comments, pause, rewind — or just sit back and let it wash over you while you’re making dinner.

2.    The Present

Everyone is on the web now, or at least it often seems that way. But there are multiple ways of distributing information over the magical series of tubes.

a.    Homepage
Current wisdom is that most people do not enter a web site through the homepage. They get to a site through search or links. Nonetheless, the homepage is the definitive face of our organization. Our homepage should be simple and streamlined with a basic overview of what’s going on within the site itself. The goal of the homepage is to get people to dig deeper into the site.

b.    Custom Homepage
Subscribers could customize their own homepage to display what they choose. Imagine this like the iGoogle homepage, filled with widgets. Speaking of which…

c.    Widgets
We should develop a news widget that users could customize to display just the news they want. They could put these on their iGoogle homepage or their own web site.

d.    API
That stands for Application Programming Interface. Basically, an API describes how people can interact with a web site’s backend. It’s what allows people to customize Google Maps or do mashups with things like Flickr and Twitter. The philosophy behind this is it would allow web developers and geeks direct access to our raw information (or at least some of it) so they can program their own systems for interacting with it.

e.    RSS
Obviously, we would need to have a wealth of customizable RSS feeds.

f.    Email
Like the RSS, people could sign up for email alerts on subjects of importance.

g.    PDF
A daily or weekly downloadable “print” edition? Maybe?

3.    The Past

Just ’cause it’s dead, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use some of the legacy systems to distribute our products.

a.    Print
Believe it or not, I’m a total print fetishist. I love well-designed printed materials. The key here is to do it better, smarter and prettier than the newspapes. That means we are not going to buy a giant multimillion dollar press. We will probably never do a daily edition. We should rack our imaginations to come up with a dynamic and changing printed publication. I envision a weekly mini-magazine that would come out on a Thursday or Friday that would be professionally “designed” by local artists using some of the longer lasting content from our web site.

b.    Radio
I’m not planning to buy a radio station anytime soon, but we could produce a local events program to run on WIDR, or an interview program to run on WMUK, or something along those lines. I don’t know that this would do any more than help promote our web product and brand.

c.    Television
Similar to radio, we could buy time on local TV stations, produce a program for cable access or promote one of our own staff as an expert guest on existing news programs similar to how James Sanford would go on WWMT to review movies.

d.    Live
We could produce live forums on important public issues and involve experts from academia as well as other local news outlets. We could also host debates during election season (in fact, I think we should do this!).

Note: I’m sort of leaving out social media as a means to distribution, but I think that is an essential part of anything we do. Editors should be encouraged to interact through Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and anything else that comes along. I also think we as an organization should develop a social networking strategy, but I’m not going to go into that right now.

Tomorrow: Growing Pains (how we start and how we expand)