We feel that these simple steps would be cheap easy to implement:

>OFFERING FREE ADVERTISING SPACE TO LOCAL BUSINESSES (online and in the print version)

We think the ljworld model is very smart: It offers free advertising space to local businesses, and then offers specialized or larger space for a fee. This model would be pretty easy to follow, and is a simple way to attract ad revenue because it encourages businesses to compete with one another. All the Missourian would have to do is create the page, and then alert featured businesses that the “upgrade” option is available, for a price.

>Niche content: MAKE EVERY BEAT A NICHE

First, we suggest that there be niche editions for certain days. For example: Tuesday could be “family day,” in which most of the stories are focused on family news and issues. We understand that with the current format of the Missourian online this wouldn’t work too well, but we think that if there were an online version of the print’s “Second Front,” it could have one or two constant “niche days” a week. Jane Stevens, an RJI fellow, told us in her interview about a newspaper that has devoted their Monday issue to women authors and news, which was very popular with the public (J. Stevens, Personal Communication, December 6, 2008).

> Identify stories for promotion on social networking sites

This will enable the Missourian to target niche audiences and tell them about stories. For example, a reporter could post a link to a story in a Facebook group. A reporter could also monitor those same online communities for potential stories to investigate and report. By routinely being a part of social networking sites, reporters could find third places where people meet online. According to Julia Thompson, Digital Communities Editor for the Tallahassee Democrat, social networking sites aren’t just for the younger demographic– older audiences use them as well. Older audiences are usually more news-conscious than young adults. It would be smart for the Missourian to visit these sites, and learn what kinds of news and issues an older audience would like to see on a news site.

>Go to the community. Market the Columbia Missourian’s image

The Missourian can also exercise self-promotion by setting up booths at festivals, family events, and concerts. Doing so is directly engaging with the community, and could be an easy and not very expensive way to promote awareness of the website. Interviews with individuals both associated with the Missourian and other news organizations all reveal the importance of going to the community, and that journalist can no longer expect the community to come to them.  Also, to echo the previous suggestion, the Missourian could insert its presence into social networking sites by being active in conversations and placing links to relevant stories. Perhaps the Missourian could create an “online social beat” that consisted of reporters who constantly monitored certain sites for ideas, and alerted those sites of Missourian content that would be of interest to a their community.

>Being proud of having a young newsroom

This suggestion is the most Missourian-specific of the others listed here. We have heard that the Missourian’s image suffers under the assumption that it is just a “student paper” that is not very credible due to its young staff and constant turnover. However, we think one way to alleviate this perception is to make it clear to the community that the editors of the Missourian are a permanent part of the community and have established connections in Columbia.

>Encourage and mediate user-generated content.

We suggest that if the Missourian wants to attract more reader involvement and attention, it should play a more active role in reader’s lives. It could do this by facilitating discussion in the comment section offered for articles. Instead of just letting conversations guide themselves, we could post discussion questions after articles that have received a lot of attention. Also, the Missourian could publish not just stories, but a space to communicate (much like they already do in their MyMissourian blog. We think this blog is a great idea, but we do think it could be better advertised to the community.).

>Getting more demographic information

Venable offered one simple suggestion for getting more demographic information: when users sign up to comment, we think they should fill out more information than just their name. It would make sense to ask users a few simple questions, such as race, education level, interests, and their favorite sections of the Missourian (G. Venable, personal communication, November 7, 2008).

CONCLUSION

Our interviews ranged from Missourian staff to NPR; our research ranged from scholarly sources to other online news sites. We found that no news organization has been able to pin down the details of a successful online business model, but we did find that some news sites have figured out interesting ways to glean revenue and citizen attention. While our findings have presented their share of surprises and mostly bad news, we were able to pull out some helpful, easy suggestions that the Missourian could start to incorporate tomorrow.

It became clear while conduction research for this project that there was no simple solution for Missourian revenue shortage; however, the solution may be a series of small answers.  In that spirit, we intend to continue to update the blog component of this project and to engage professionals at other news organizations. There is no clear forum for discussing the future journalism and the Missourian. However, we hope, if nothing else, that in some way our blog will can become a hub for discussing the future of the Missourian and journalism as a whole.

Dave Gustafson, associate news editor for the 
Online NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, has witnessed firsthand the power of incorporating citizen-generated content with work produced by professional journalists. During the historic 2008 election, the NewsHour mailed out 1000 Flip video cameras to viewers so that they could film their voting experiences. Some citizen videos were incorporated into election coverage and feature during broadcasts.  Also, videos were posted online, and according to Youtube, were some of the most viewed content in the video sharing company’s history. 

But it was what Gustafson said about engaging public schools that can most easily be applied to the Missourian.  NewsHour staff members look for ways to engage public schools and talk to teachers about ways to include their broadcast content into their class curriculum.  With such a large portion of the Columbia population involved in education, this seems an ideal tactic for raising the profile of the paper. For example, city council meeting coverage could be included in local high school civics classes.  Or, arts coverage in Muse could be included in theater or music classes.  In order to execute this type of cooperation with school, it would be advisable to establish some sort of community services or community involvement position. 

According to Gustafson, it’s about going to the public, and journalists can no longer expect the community to come to them.  In this spirit, there’s no better way to encourage civic participation and knowledge than using the newspaper as a literally and education tool. 

Matt Thompson is the co-creator and producer of EPIC 2014 and Epic 2015, two 8-minutes long Flash movies that explore the future of news online. In his documentary–if you could call it that– he shows how Google and Amazon, could create auto-generated news, based on readers’ preferences. That would lead, as he shows, to the bankruptcy of print journalism references, like the New York Times.

So we tried to figure out whether a community newspaper like The Columbia Missourian, which has a peculiar model (staffed by but not owned by MU, or something like that) could survive and how editors and reporters could think its future.

We met Matt in his office at the Reynolds Institute of Journalism.

He currently works on research about Wikipedia in the news. He proposed a new concept for daily news:

Imagine if the work of the hundreds of reporters dispatched daily to cover a city didn’t merely fade into an obscure archive, but added day after day to the work that came before it. An online news site in the era of Wikipedia would be a living archive, adaptable to suit any context, growing to encompass all aspects of life in a community.

Read more on Matt Thompson’s blog: Newless.

Tim contributed to this post.

The most successful example of the foundation model is National Public Radio (NPR), which has seen a rapid growth in the number of listeners over the past 5 years.  In addition to having a large endowment, NPR solicits donations for listeners and corporate underwriting as a means to generate operating capital.  However, NPR does little investigative reporting and focuses primarily on news briefs and human-interest orientated content.  The Saint Petersburg Times is one successful example of the foundation model for a daily newspaper, however, the paper is not a nonprofit corporation.  The educational institution, the Poynter Institute, owns the Saint Petersburg Times for Media Studies, and operates on an endowment created by the paper’s late owner, Nelson Poynter.  More recently, the Ayers family, which owns the Anniston Star in Anniston Alabama, created an institute at the University of Alabama that is expected to generate a million dollars a year in contributions.  Journalism students at the University of Alabama are now required to report for the Anniston Star before graduating.

The Anniston Star provides the most applicable example of the foundation model for the Missourian.  However, there is no long term data, or diverse enough data, to support any conclusion on whether this model would work for the Missourian.  However, given the high profile of the Missouri School of Journalism, this option certainly merits consideration.

I just love that little Lawrence Journal World. They found a clever way of selling advertising space on their website that could work well for the Missourian.

In addition to selling ad space on the site, each business in Lawrence gets its own little page–for free. If you click on “restaurants” or “talent agencies” or “chiropractors for asthmatics” or whatever, a page of links pop up to every business in that category. Each of the links leads to a little page with contact info and location of the business. For various prices, the business can pay to put more info on there–menus, hours, pictures, coupons, etc. They can even pay more to have their link put in larger, bolder font so it stands out more from their competitors.

Of course you don’t want to be the one mechanic in town that doesn’t have more info on your page, so you pony up the money to get some prices and coupons for oil changes up there. This is pretty brilliant. It gets around the whole “online advertising isn’t as effective as print advertising” thing because this isn’t just advertising–it’s information, and they make it pretty easy for the businesses.

By Tim 

Julia Thompson, Digital Communities Editor for the Tallahassee Democrat, gets social networking, and guess what, it’s not just for tweens and yuppies. 

Thompson had just returned from a Gannett corporate seminar when she made time to talk about the future of journalism and what not.  Only a few days before, the Tallahasse Democrat laid off or bought out 25 employees, a result of Gannett’s edict for local papers to reduce staff by 10-percent.  Ouch.

But our conversation wasn’t about the past, or the global financial collapse, or short-term investor agendas, or anything that had to do with the past or present – we talked about the future.  Thompson had some fascinating things to say, however, the ah-ha moment came when brought up her paper’s use of social networking for the dual purposes of branding and informing its readers.  Specifically, she cited a lengthy investigative piece about a 23-year-old female informant killed during a narcotic sting. 

(Attn MTV films:  get on the phone and get the movie rights – like get on the phone, now.  Double Attn Brittney:  Call MTV films and re-launch your career with a role in an MTV film based on actual events in Florida, yes, keep the accent – it’s working for you.) 

Thompson was savvy enough to note that this story was interesting for readers in a younger demo, and the paper created a Facebook and Myspace account that posted updates on their coverage.  Yes, this tactic did not garner any added value with regards to advertising dollars, but it raised the profile of the paper in a valuable audience.  Oh, and it didn’t cost the paper a dime.  Take that job cut backs! 

While this was by all standards a well played move on the Democrat’s part, what Thompson said next was the most interesting part of our conversation: older people like social networking, too.  What this audience wants, or potentially wants, is to socially network on cites that their kids don’t go to.  Papers can create their own social networking services, blogs and all that, and hopefully an older demo will show up and use them.

If they do; cha-ching.  

If you scroll down a little you’ll see a slightly snarky post I wrote about recent advertising trends.  Social networking is seeing overwhelming growth, and yes those ad rates suck, but hey, every little bit helps.  

Dear Devoted Followers and Concerned News-Heads:

If you weren’t able to attend our roundtable with Mike McKean, Rob Weir and Tom Warhover, all is not lost!

This first videos is the “meta” edition of highlights, featuring answers to questions including difficulties associated with online revenue streams, and that pesky relationship between ownership and unreal revenue expectations.  Stay tuned for Missourian specific highlights.
Our participants in the roundtable discussion had a variety of backgrounds to answer our questions: Mike McKean chairs the school’s convergence journalism faculty and the MU Information Technology committee. Tom Warhover holds the title of “executive editor for innovation” at the Columbia Missourian, which means that he’s there to help “transform the newsroom for the future”. Rob Weir is a Knight Editing Chair Fellow, whose self-described professional interests are “digital journalism, information controls and the freedom of information, and the intersection of technology and popular culture.”

One thing that I love and hate about the web is the sheer volume of STUFF out there. It’s dizzying. But it also creates a new role for journalists: aggregator. Someone’s gotta go through all that STUFF and find the bits that are meaningful to a specific community.

Hence, the new converged aggregator model of online journalism. Talkingpointsmemo.com is a good example of this, a website that regularly puts analysis and articles next to content from other news organizations. It’s not unlike use of the AP by newspapers, except it’s like having a thousand wire services to chose from. Website founder Joshua Micah Marshall describes his reporters as “narrators” for stories that unfold slowly. They post short articles reminiscent of blog posts, often less than 800 words and easy to read.

The financial viability of this model is unknown, but the staff is growing. The website’s loyal audience pitches in money to finance in-depth reporting projects, a testament to the trust that exists between the site and its readers.

I am a romantic when it comes to newspapers. Newspapers are noble. Newspapers last. Newspapers are a physical record of the community. I’m one of a staunch number of young people who do not want them to go away. Plus, the internet scares me.  I am a luddite who can barely operate a computer–I didn’t even have internet in my home for the last two years.

Jane Stevens has no romantic notions about newspapers. “Why would you want a print product that’s old the moment you pick it up?” she asked.

Jane is a “web-centric journalist” and RJI Fellow here at the Missouri School of Journalism this year. She graciously agreed to sit down with me and while I throw lots of totally biased and self-righteous questions at her, questions like “but Jane, isn’t online news elitist?! Aren’t bloggers self-centered and selfish??!!”

A conversation between me and someone like Jane is like a discussion between a caveman and Stephen Hawking. I’m totally outmatched and hopelessly outdated. This woman knows a lot, and she easily deflects all my silly questions. By the end of the conversation, I’ve pretty much converted to her web-centric theology.

Jane doesn’t seem worried about whether or not the print product will exist in the future. She offers some examples of the kinds of changes she’s seeing in the industry.

“The future is local and targeted,” she said. She points to the Lawrence Journal World, which has devoted its Monday edition to women. The advertising space for its first special Monday paper sold out, despite the common knowledge in the industry that Monday editions typically have the lowest sales of the week.

She shows me a bunch of community news websites that I’ve never heard of but apparently everyone else knows about—Village Soup? West Seattle Blog?—making me realize how behind the times I really am. I told you, I’m a caveman! Er, cavewoman. Anyway the West Seattle blog is awesome. It has crime reports, events, lost pets, traffic updates, and just about every kind of hyper local and helpful information you could imagine. The blog has 20,000 readers and was just awarded a Citizen Appreciation Award from the Seattle Police. I think the Missourian could probably pick a thing or two up from this website.

I try to suggest that blogs are big on opinion and short on news, an idea that Jane has clearly heard before. “A blog doesn’t have to be about opinion,” she explains patiently. She’s a big fan of reporters blogging about their beat.

What does Jane have to say about the columbiamissourian.com? She thinks it has improved, especially in the visual department. Jane said she’d like to see more “focus on webshells, like health.” Of course I have no idea what a webshell is, but I keep mum. She also likes the idea of separate websites within the news website for topics like sports. She shows me the very cool sports website affiliated with the Lawrence Journal World. Another site, lawrence.com, has developed a following among young people and college students in town. Its focus is on music, entertainment, nightlife, restaurants, arts and culture. Interestingly, the website has spawned a print product, which is hung on every dorm room door at the University of Kansas once a week.

After showing me a few more eye-opening websites, Jane pretty much has me convinced that I should not be afraid of a world without printed newspapers. “The web is just an astounding invention,” she said, and I have to agree. These sites are a position to really serve the community, which is something the Missourian strives for.

I tried to lob one more argument at Jane, about the accessibility of the internet. Isn’t it kind of just a little elitist to have news only online when some people don’t have internet access? A quick Google search provides Jane with plenty of ammunition against this one. She shows me a map of broadband internet service across the country, and yup, it’s just about everywhere. And she wisely points out that the library provides free internet access and gives me some stats about how many Americans have internet access in their home.

I’m too embarrassed to admit that I didn’t have internet at home for the last two years. I don’t want to look any more ridiculous to this very smart and savvy lady.

The discussion will take place at 2 pm in 308 Lee Hills Hall. All are invited, but space is limited. So come early, and bring questions!

Tim and I (Tara) will be MC’ing. And Mélissa will be recording the event, so check back soon for a video post.