Slashdot Mirror
How Should News Magazines Make the Jump Online?
uctpjac asks: "A friend of mine, a deputy editor of a 1/2 million plus circulation serious news magazine, is responsible for determining what they should be doing online. They already do the usual - selected free articles, subscriber only articles, archive search, some online-only material that is regularly updated. She asked me to think about what more they should do. My first simple suggestion would be to improve their RSS feeds (longer, better article summaries): I imagine the newsreader is the application through which most of us will be reading bitty things like weblogs and news stories, and competing for attention there needs a nice juicy inducement to click-through. I actually think that a traditional news magazine like this should also be using its reader-community more extensively. Again, Slashdot is my model for this: the readers, as long as their comments are well organized, are often at least as interesting as the writers. Are there any examples of old-fashioned papers/magazines making good reader fora? What else will the magazine be doing online? What should it be doing in 3 years, when we all have our low power, high quality, ePaper editions?"
So what happens with the other 85% of comments?
Goo goo g'joob.
What should it be doing in 3 years, when we all have our low power, high quality, ePaper editions?
Printing a review of Duke Nukem Forever on the Phantom Gaming Console?
seriously I got lost around "...Slashdot is my model for this..."
I would recommend that they not setup a reader forum at this stage (assuming they don't already have one). If they're still trying to even sort out what they're online strategies will be, they are presently not adequately staffed to deal with a forum/bulletin board (hint: they'll most likely need one full-time person to moderate/admin this). Sure, it can be something to put on the list as a future option, but they need to make sure they're equipped to handle it. Quite honestly, unless they seriously plan to change the scope/focus of the publication, what they are doing now is probably enough.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You're only talking about the appearance.
Slashdot runs on Slashcode (http://www.slashcode.com/). If you want to, you can change the appearance of it with skins and whatnot. I would also recommend Drupal (http://www.drupal.org/ and Zope (http://www.zope.org/). Hire somebody to create a nice skin for it, and any one of the above systems should be able to neatly handle the backend work.
We run The New York Review of Books on OpenACS which does a nice job for the sorts of things an online publication needs.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think that any magazine who publishes articles and does not allow people to publicly make comments on those articles should fail. My favorite major news site is Yahoo News because it allows commenting.
I would love to see a site have a pretty magazine and then have a "commmenting area" where you can read all the comments, in the same way that some magazines today have a few pages of comments at the beginning of the magazine that talk about last weeks articles.
Magazines need this method of creating trust with the reader. On the internet, trust is the number #1 issue I think.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
() Torrents to the full stories
() Animated Page 3 girls
() Stories intrusively referring to us "John Anderton"
() CowboyNeal
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Useful, printable sections and chapters were available free and shipped with every copy of samba.
The result? The printed book leaped off the shelves.
You see, it's a total pain to read a laptop in the bathtub, and if you print a book ar magazine yourself on normal (thick!) paper, it is too big and clumsy to carry.
I don't expect one-page newsletters to survive web publishing. I do expect newspapers, magazines and books to continue to exist until I can get a 300 page ebook 1 inch thick. Which means each page needs to be less than 0.003" thick.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
If you're looking for something dead-simple, use Wordpress, stuff it with plugins, and skin the hell out of it.
U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
You realize Drupal is actually what runs The Onion? You can have it up and running smoothly in a day--a week if you're doing substantial skinning or have to write SQL scripts to import previous content (though some are available). If you do go with Drupal and stall out in the forums, feel free to email me with questions.
U.S. War Crimes blog. Email for free Mandriva support.
You know, this has become a major pet peeve for me: problems with print or radio news media translating themselves online.
I live in a major metropolitan area, and we have a newspaper here I really love. I don't think it's the perfect paper, but I really like it. I think the print version is great.
However, for some reason, they can't get the online version nearly as good as the print version, and it drives me crazy. It's gotten better in recent years, but not nearly as good as the print version.
What especially drives me nuts is that the work that needs to be done is really basic. Things like layout and appropriate advertising.
In the print version, for example, you can tell that they really pay attention to every square millimeter of paper, and what goes there, and how it is processed visually by the reader. In the online version, in contrast, they pay almost no attention to it. There isn't the same amount of photographs, stories aren't organized, outlined, and highlighted to the same extent, so visually sorting material is impossible.
The online version of this paper is actually what made me realize that advertising can actually be enjoyable and useful. It took me awhile, but I eventually realized that many times, when I learned about a cultural or arts event, it was from an ad placed in the Arts and Entertainment section. In the online version, in contrast, you get ads for random things, that are totally unrelated to Arts and Entertainment--online, I could be reading the Arts and Entertainment section, and be surrounded by ads for power tools. Why do I want to see power tool ads when I'm obviously interested in arts and entertainment? They would never do such a thing in the print paper.
So my recommendation is this: before you get too worried about RSS feeds and nonsense like that (which aren't critical to most readers anyway), worry about getting the basics right. Test, brainstorm, improve, and test again things like presentation, layout, navigation, and advertisement. It's much more important.
Maybe after that point, work on customizable portals and things. But worry about the basics first.
My production manager and I were just talking about this today.
What you really need to do is find a way to prove to advertisers that going online will give them the same or more exposure to readers than print ads do. In the print world, nobody really knows how much of an effect an ad has on readers...advertisers just take it on faith that it works. But for some reason, when you try to convince them to buy an online ad, they say "But how will we know if it will reach the readers?" (even though you can give them scads of statistic to show how many readers are seeing the ad).
If you get all your advertisers to "drink the Koolaid" of online ads, you won't have to worry about having a subscription model or restricted content. For some reason, traditional advertisers (not porn) are the slowest to come around to the online distribution model.
Transistors and Beer!!
The Economist is already online. You mean there's others??
[Insert pithy quote here]
Comment removed based on user account deletion