Prosthetic Device

Sand Bucket and Shovel Buy From Art.com

In a fine contrast to Vic Crosbie, Howard Owens rants against “shovelware” on newspaper websites that offer content identical to print editions.

The rant was spurred by the Philadelphia Inquirer deciding to withhold print content from Philly.com. Mr. Owens doesn’t think that newspaper websites should be duplicates of print editions.

An excerpt explaining how he thinks that newspapers should put their websites to use:

Your online product should focus on:

• Frequency. Plenty of updates. Web-first publishing. Tell me what is happening in my town right now.
• When there is a big story, hammer it. Own it. Frequent updates, a flood of information, video, blogs, forums, public documents, databases, maps, graphics.

On a pure news basis, those two approaches are proven audience growth winners.

Reproducing the print edition online, not so much.

I can confirm the truth of his bullet points from my own local news & commentary blog. Traffic spikes when people want the news and that site is the place to find it.

Provocatively, Owens agrees with Crosbie that the decline of newspapers started before 1991, when the Internet went public.

And this made me laugh:

As much as it pains me to say it, we still haven’t found the business model that can support and sustain current newsroom operations.

Bloggers haven’t found a sustainable business model either!

Vickie Robinson at the Readership Institute passes along this nugget from the recent Unity ’08 Conference regarding blogging and money:

Popularity first, then pay: “Your blog is your prospectus,” said Sree Sreenivasan of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Funders are looking for audiences, not ideas.

(Link in original.)

Keep yer day job, kid!