Little Bits of Paper Everywhere

The newspaper hasn’t been so much destroyed as it’s been exploded. The roll of grey woodpulp we used to find on our doorstep every morning is being replaced not by one online news source, not by Google, but by a million websites of different shapes and sizes. Some of them happen to be newspapers, some TV stations, some blogs, but there are also lots of bits that make up the new “newspaper” that don’t look like news at all. Twitter and Facebook are the examples du jour, but it’s not just social media that traditional news organizations are competing against online. It’s also YouTube (mostly not for AP newsclips), Ebay, Weather.com, CraigsList (and not just for the classifieds), podcasts and more.

People put together their own “newspaper” out of these sites in a variety of ways, via their bookmark list or their RSS reader or from one or two of the sites they start from every day. And sure, plenty of them create it ad hoc using Google, as well.

But the thing to remember about Google is it’s dumb. It’s a machine. There is no brain, no editorial voice deciding what gets onto Google or Google News — just a bunch of algorithms tweaked by engineers to deliver the most precise results possible based on users’ search terms. Google isn’t the enemy; anyone who says it is apparently doesn’t understand how search works. It’s just a tool.

But anyway. The question facing us all is: How do you get people to add you to their custom digital paper, and do so regularly if not always?

I don’t have all the answers to that. But I know a few things that’ll help.

1. Produce compelling content.
Sure, we’re all trying to do that. But we’re all trying in different ways, to varying degrees of success. To do it well, we’re writing with personality, and we’re specializing, either by covering a niche or finding some other unique selling proposition (to borrow a phrase from the marketers).

2. Respect Your Audience.

• Don’t build a walled garden — let your readers leave. If you’re worth reading, they’ll be back.
• Don’t annoy them with bad or intrusive ads. No punch the monkey, no pop-unders, no flash interstitials wandering across the page. It cheapens your site and and annoys your audience. Do it often enough and they may not be back.
• Don’t resort to pagination and other reader-hostile tricks to increase pageviews. What, do you think we’re stupid?

3. Promote!
Get involved with your audience, live and in person if possible, but most certainly online with social networking options. There’s no glass wall or moat separating media and the audience anymore, and readers will be more loyal if they feel like they have a connection with a publication. And don’t forget to interconnect with other media. One of the biggest differences between online media and the old print and broadcast media is they link to each other — that means giving credit (simple as a “via” at the end of a story) where credit is due, and acknowledging that we’re all part of the ecosystem of news.