The New York Times has a fascinating look at the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World, a newspaper that truly, truly gets the Internet.
They have a daily and a weekly. They host blogs written by any community members who care to sign up (and feature them on the front page of their website), have a database of local music, host MP3s of local bands, webcast local music, maintain a comprehensive community calendar, encourage the posting of comments at the end of every story, have full RSS feeds of all of their offerings, podcast daily news/music/talk, list restaurant information (with their reviews and reviews from the general public), host and promote local films, make available audio interviews with their story subjects, and surely a lot more — every time I click on a link, I find something else.
Of course, they include all of the things that other newspapers include — classifieds, obituaries, etc., etc. But they’ve gone way beyond the self-imposed constraints of what it means to be a newspaper — they’re a film distribution company, a radio station, a blog host, a community organizing tool, the hub of their whole town, all wrapped up into one.
And they’re not some huge paper. It’s a family-owned paper, around since 1891. They’ve got a circulation of 20,000 but, of course, that’s only counting dead trees. With a solid commitment to making media a two-way street, a willingness to experiment, and an understanding that my generation gets our news online, The Lawrence Journal-World may well be around until 2091. The same can’t be said of many other newspapers.
I’d love to have the gig of development and running those websites. Maybe someday a C’ville media outlet will get it. Lord knows I’ve been beating them over the head with this stuff long enough.
Why not just start your own, or work in a collaborative manner to piece all this pieces together?
Because the fact that I think it would be a good business model doesn’t mean that I should run the business. :) I think it would work far better for somebody with an existing advertising/community-relations model — probably a newspaper, but also possibly a radio station or a TV station.
NPR covered this newspaper some weeks or months ago. An extensive analysis of the community, the paper, its internet activity, interviews with the the journalists, the whole nine yards. I will have to look it up; it was either The Connection, Talk of the Nation, or maybe This American Life.
I’d love to hear more about that, Jay. I’m of the belief that such an entity can thrive in any mid-sized market, if done right — I’ll be interested to find out whether actual analysis bears that out.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4597203
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/epic
This is a truly amazing look at what will happen with media in the near future. If you haven’t seen it, take a gander and enjoy.