It has become the practice of some Cole Papers correspondents to sleep in ... oops, to leverage our NEXPO show floor hours by buying tapes of early morning seminars we missed, to play back during the post-show writing frenzy.
Usually, for seminars like "Circulation Builders" or "Care and Feeding of a Publisher," this approach works fine and everybody's happy.
But when the seminar is "Newspaper Connections to Online Services," (held Sunday, June 16) and you wind up listening to an audio tape of a multimedia presentation on how to create a Web site, it's an experience straight out of Fellini. A sample:
(click)
(click)
"Now let's put in some text"
(tappety tappety tap tap)
"Whoops...."
(delete delete delete)
(tappety tappety tap tap)
(click)
(click)
"There!"
All that notwithstanding, some nuggets of wisdom did make the jump across media:
Everybody's favorite on-line question:
Can you make money?
Everybody's least favorite on-line answer: We still don't know.
Marcia Stoltman, of Editor & Publisher magazine had some suggestions for making a few bucks, and more importantly injecting growth into your Web presence.
Sell Internet access as part of your Web package.
Collect subscription fees for specialized content and archival information such as searches of back issues of your newspaper.
Sponsorship advertising, with certain pages or features sponsored by an advertiser.
Classified advertising -- when you have it set up as a searchable database, and particularly when it's linked to other databases in other cities, Stoltman thinks this could be "the killer app" -- the application of Internet technology that makes allows the newspaper Web sites to finally fulfill their potential.
Personalized newspapers, where search engines scan thousands of stories for those in which you've expressed an interest.
As another speaker, B.C. Krishna of Future Tense, explained it: "If I were delivered a newspaper that had lots of information on India and cricket, I would buy it; I would subscribe to it -- it's of value to me. I think the economics of print production cannot allow for that kind of content model. But on the Web, it's trivially possible."
(The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times are among the papers experimenting with just this kind of personal newspaper.)
Cyber coupons -- print 'em out, take 'em to the store.
Obituaries.
Kids' features. "You're making a big mistake if you think they're tomorrow's consumers," said Stoltman. "They're today's consumers."
Get Yellow Pages and conventional "White Pages" phone directories up on your Web site, whether by yourself or in partnership with the local phone company. This is the same allure as that of classifieds on the Web -- searching instead of browsing.
New tools, new methods
Krishna, whose firm makes a Java-based Web server, was understandably excited about Java, the technology that lets different parts of the screen run little programs (called applets) simultaneously.
One use of Java Krishna showed at NEXPO was a newspaper page where each story was updating separately. In the on-line world, every second is a deadline, so constant updating like this is a big advantage.
Another new wrinkle Krishna expects soon is screen-customized type fonts, designed to be readable in 72 dots-per-inch resolution, as opposed to what you're reading now, which is an ink-on-paper font that has been adapted to on-screen use.
Rolling your own
Chris Jennewein of the Knight Ridder New Media Center had tips for newspapers designing their own Web sites:
Do not make your home page a menu. Most of the Web looked like that only a year ago. Make your home page like your newspaper and put the menu somewhere else. Give people the latest news and stories first.
Do use newspaper design expertise. "We know a lot about this," Jennewein said. "In fact, I think sometimes we don't give ourselves credit for how much we know about this kind of design. And on that same subject,
Do not hire HTML programmers. "HTML is not a programming language, it's a markup language and it's people who know design who are going to be the best at it," Jennewein said.
Do design for Netscape's Navigator browser. Netscape has between 75 and 90 percent of the market and its product cycle times are still the fastest in the industry, dwarfing those of even the mighty Microsoft.
"Don't be afraid to push the envelope," Jennewein said. "It's very important at this time and in this medium to get the newspaper industry out front."
-- John Bryan
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