How the Seattle P-I Could Survive

I'm suffering through the twice-a-year, week-long torture of public radio listeners better known as "Pledge Week."  I donate once a year to my local NPR station.  Each year I want a secret code that would allow me to tune into the real news rather than suffer through days of on-air solicitations.  I already paid!  Gimme my radio back!

It occurs to me that an online newspaper would be able to do exactly that.

On St. Patrick's Day, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its final print edition.  Hearst Corporation has said the P-I will continue life an stripped down form on the Internet, making it the largest daily paper to make this transition.  To make it in the brave new online world, the P-I will need to do three things well: report local news, build community and make money.  I would like to suggest the following to the powers-that-be at the new online P-I:

• Do what you know:  The Seattle P-I's core competency is local news reporting.  No need to deal with national stuff -- that's what the AP or NYTimes is for.  Stick with Seattle, King County and Washington State.  So far, that seems to be what they are doing.  I hope they expand their local coverage with the occasional in-depth investigative style report.
• Work that network:  The P-I's reader blogs are a good start, but the P-I's current count of 14 Diggs, zero Del.icio.us saves and a Google PageRank of five is pathetic.  (For the most part, it beats the Seattle Times' rankings but loses to the Seattle Weekly).  By way of comparison, the Oregonian has a PageRank of seven.  Social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and aggregation sites (Technorati, Digg, etc.) make excellent publicity tools.  In addition, with a higher PageRank the P-I's advertising space would be worth much more to a new business or an old business with a new Web site -- incoming links from highly ranked sites increase the rank of your site.
• Know thy audience:  This is probably the least useful advise I can give as I'm sure they are well aware of the need to target ads at specific demographics.  Just keep in mind that various parts of the new P-I Web site will attract different types of people.  While the cooking section may not get as many page views as the sports section, the people reading recipes are the ones that do the shopping.
• Run pay-per-impression instead of pay-per-click ads:  This is closer to the dead-tree newspaper business model so it should be an easy transition for those in the ad sales department.  Placement on the page, size and black-and-white vs. color were the old selling points.  In the new media world add to that list animation, moving the ad space with the page (eg: pinned to the upper-right of the browser window even when the reader scrolls) and sound.  Personally, I hate ads with sounds and tend to bounce off those pages immediately but those are things for the online P-I's sales staff to experiment with.
• Run fewer ads:  More is not always better and by having fewer ad placements, you can demand a higher price for them and readers are more likely to pay attention to them.  Like most people these days, I time-shift my TV shows and jump through ads in 29-second intervals a là TiVo.  Hulu has shown me the value of fewer ads.  My wife wanted to watch the series Damages so we pulled up Hulu and watched the first series over the Internet.  Where the broadcast version would normally insert three to five minutes of ads, Hulu puts in exactly one 30-second spot.  Since you stream the video using Hulu's player, there is no way to fast foward through the ad.  Since it's only 30 seconds long, there isn't even enough time to run upstairs and grab a beer.  Instead, I found myself watching the ads.  More importantly, I didn't mind watching the ads -- by the time I had rearranged the blankets and nudged my wife awake the show was back on.
• More about less:  Occasionally Hulu would give us the chance to watch one two-and-a-half minute movie preview at the beginning of a show in exchange for no ads through the remainder.  Again, the interactivity of new media opens opportunities that didn't exist in the old media world.  We were happy to take Hulu up on this offer and, since it was a movie preview, we were happy to watch it as well.  Again, more isn't always better.
• Dual revenue streams:  Like the public radio model I mentioned at the top, I believe the online P-I should ask people to pay what they are willing to pay once or twice a year for unfettered access to their content.  Go ahead and get in reader's faces about this: for the whole week, obscure the text and show a window telling readers that "this news source is powered by contributions from readers just like you."  (Sorry, I've been listing to Pledge Week torture all week...)  Make the reader click the "maybe later" button to continue reading.  Or they can make a donation of $5 or more to be released early from the Pledge Week torture chamber -- no more in-your-face solicitations when they come to the Web site.  Obviously this would be ideal as a non-profit -- tax breaks for donors, access to foundation grants -- but it would work find in the for-profit world.
• Release early, release often:  In the online world, you can release things that are half-baked -- just be sure to label them as beta.  Experiment with pricing models, ad placement, citizen news features, in short, everything except your core competency: reporting the news.  To make it work as a local online new source you cannot follow the known patterns and business models.  You need to invent your own.  Try things out and yank them if they don't work.  Look at everything that happens in the course of reporting news and figure out how it can build more community.  Can photos of an event be posted before the text?  What about reporters using Twitter to give play-by-play accounts of contentious School Board meetings?

I hope the online P-I succeeds.  Strong competition makes all our news sources stronger.  I have no faith in our local glam-bam-thank-you-ma'am TV news; the weekly papers are great, but they're weekly.  So, it's daily reporting that is left to be the fourth estate.  Relieved of the burden of printing schedules and cost of delivery, I believe local online news reporting can be successful.

I hope it is because the local TV news doesn't do anything near in-depth investigative journalism.