Enterprise RSS

Buzz on Local newspapers

Jarvis on where local newspapers.  Excerpt, highlit for emphasis

A new model for LOCAL NEWSpapers

: Try this on for size:

Imagine a newspaper that is only local news -- no sports, no business, little or no entertainment, and commodity national and international news treated as the I-saw-that-already commodity it is: only local news.

Why? Because we need to seriously consider new business models for journalism. See Murdoch's speech yesterday. See Merrill Brown's Carnegie report. See a hundred posts about media here. And see the two posts directly below about editors not even noticing the revenue that supports their enterprises disappearing and about putting out one-size-fits all products. We need to stimulate radical discussion of radical new views to rethink this business before it's rethought without us. This is just one example, an exercise that leads to a point:

As I said in the post below, by my recollection, some readership studies say that only about 20 percent of newspaper readers read sports sections ... and those pages get unimpressive ad revenue aside from tire ads ... and they add tremendous cost to editorial budgets ... and there are new competitors on TV and especially online that are more current, more animated, more complete, more conversational than a piece of paper can ever be.

In the old, one-size-fits-all view of news, you had to have a sports section to vacuum up as large an audience as you could to sell that mass audience to your advertisers, including classified advertisers. But now classified advertisers are finding less expensive ways of transacting their business online. And retail advertisers are finding new ways to target efficiently online. So one-size-fits-all is not a model for growth, to put it gently. …..

….And what are you left with in this exercise? You are left with your core value: local news. That's not a commodity. That's a uniqe value. And that's the point.

So now take some of your savings -- net savings after, yes, you do lose some sports fans and elderly mutual-fund owners -- and plow it into reporting. But find new and efficient ways to get more local news: Harness the power of your public and get news and information from new sources that you help support with information, promotion, training, trust, and most of all revenue. Pay the person who covers the school board if the audience agrees it's valuable. Become the meeting place , as Hugh McLeod says, for everything local, all the news that matters to you -- and the conversation about it. Become a better local news operation than you've ever been with more news and more reporting and more engagement from the public you serve. …

…So you become the great aggregator and distributor -- and, yes, editor -- of local news that is necessary to the community.

That's just one model, for argument's sake -- and I look forward to hearing your arguments about it. We're seeing others with Dan Gillmor's new effort to support independent journalism, with Backfence, with others that are bubbling up out there. I have no idea what will work and what won't. No idea. But I do know that we need to consider new models and try them and invest in them or else someone else will: What Craig Newmark did to classifieds -- and the newspaper business, in turn -- others will do to the rest of news. This isn't just about newspapers; TV news has already undergone the beginning of a restructuring (see FoxNews v. CNN) but that isn't over yet, not by a long shot: See Bob Garfield's piece, which I mention again because it's now online. This is what I meant the other day when I replied to Jay Rosen's post firing me from panels to hear new people who are actually doing it: Exactly right. There are new models bubbling up everywhere and now is the time to find some to embrace.

: LATER: Terry Teachout takes this and Murdoch's speech and has advice for artists who used to depend on media for exposure: He tells them to start their own.

Related...

[BuzzMachine]

Internal RSS

Keeps catching on:

Shel Holtz shares that the Amsterdam-based ING Groep got the early lead in using RSS for internal communications when it launched a pilot test with 200 employees early this year.

Ten Ideas for Corporate RSS Feeds

Smart, worthy of re-posting entirely;

Here are 10 ideas for corporate RSS feeds to (mainly) external audiences. Most of these reasons are good ones for deploying RSS internally as well as part of your employee communications, knowledge management, content management, and other systems.  [Cross-posted at Blogging Planet]

1) Email is an increasingly problematic communications tool due to the growth of spam and the overwhelming amount of email most businesspeople receive. More effective spam filters can also create a greater risk of missing important emails. Today, RSS offers a way for users to organize incoming information – on their terms (they have to actually subscribe to receive anything). While ads are increasingly entering RSS feeds, but they remain relatively free from spam at this point. Therefore, organizations should consider offering RSS feeds for many different information categories. Ideas follow!

2) RSS is perfect for the online press room. Added to your newsroom, RSS provides a great channel for delivering press releases to the journalists and analysts who are covering your company without clogging up their email inboxes. You can also use this channel to deliver information that might not be worthy of a press release, but which you deem could be interesting to press/analysts nonetheless. For example, you can post information about an upcoming show your company is exhibiting at and offer interviews.

Some companies using feeds successfully for their newsrooms include:

• Cape Clear Software
• IBM
• Intel
• USA Cycling
• US Dept. of State

(Renee Blodgett on PR and RSS here -- ed.)

3) Keep your partners informed. Add an RSS feed to your extranet or partner area and keep it populated with press releases, announcements, product detail, meetings, etc. This works great for user groups as well. Organizations doing this include National Public Radio, which uses RSS feeds in its extranet for station owners/managers and Genesys Telecommunications Labs which offers RSS feeds for its user group.

4) Keep your customers informed. Journalists and analysts aren't the only people who will subscribe to your news release feed. Customers are very likely to as well. You should ask yourself what kind of information your customers want, besides news. One likely target is product support information. Product tuning, specs, troubleshooting and security updates are just a few of the topics that companies like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and UserLand Software provide in their RSS feeds.

5) Provide specific informational categories so people can just receive what they are most interested in. Most companies deploying RSS today are using it in newsrooms and for product support. Some also offer feeds for overall website changes, for new articles or white papers. If you have multiple products or services, having a feed for each product might make sense.

6) Make your resource centers/online libraries dynamic! Use RSS to inform audiences of new case studies, white papers, and presentations. By providing a feed specific to your library, people don't have to visit the website to see what's new.

7) Put your events to work for you online. Create an RSS feed for each event you plan, as well as a general event feed that keeps your audiences up to date on where and when your organization will appear. Populate the feeds with executive schedules, photos, onsite reporting, and news. You can even produce an audio podcast with interviews from the show floor.

8) Capture and publish the buzz. By setting up an RSS feed that captures and publishes everything that is being said about your organization online, you can keep your audiences up to date on the buzz in an automated, easy-to-manage manner. This also provides a great way for your employees and executives to listen to what people are saying about your organization. Now, clearly, this type of automated feed will also capture negative commentary as well, and may not be for everyone (do a manual feed in that case). But in the growing spirit of communications transparency, it might be a great way for your organization to acknowledge issues and address them publicly. You can easily capture feeds from Feedster, PubSub, or Technorati about your organization and make them available to internal and external audiences. Or, hire a company like Intelliseek to do buzz tracking for you.

9) Set up a feed for special promotions. Provide limited-time only product discounts, early-bird specials to events, prizes and more to key customer sets.

10) You can just as easily create private (password-protected) RSS feeds as public ones. These can be a great way to keep employees, partners, customers informed of company happenings, events, promotions, office closings, and other information you don't necessarily want widely available. You can use a feed for a final press release distribution 24 hours before it hits the wire, for example. [Update:  This would be for internal audiences for final approval and/or executive knowledge, not to external audiences.  You don't want to run afoul of SEC laws.  Thanks to Bill French for pointing out this needed to be clarified.] Many content management and knowledge management software vendors are planning on adding RSS to their product suites in the near future.

Whither newspaper?

Where will newspapers go?  Debate continues: 

Dead paper walking

: My friend Merrill Brown just wrote an excellent report for Carnegie on the future of news.

It finally brings together so much of what we're all talking -- and in some quarters, wailing -- about these days: young people finding their news in new places and leaving newspapers, new competition from citizens' media, new expectations of transparency, new financial pressures.

But what Merrill makes clear -- to people in the news business, I hope -- is that the change is irreversible: There's no going back. This isn't just a wake-up call. It's a two-by-four over the head: Change now. Change fast. Or die.

I'll write about the piece more later; I'll be out at meetings all day today and not blogging so I wanted to link to it now.

For the report, Carnegie commissioned a survey; the provocative results are here.

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[BuzzMachine]