Are you still making these mistakes?

A couple of weeks ago, Howard Owens posted a list (!) of eight historic mistakes the newspaper industry made. It’s a good list, not just because it highlights some of the missteps the news industry has made, but also how prevalent some of these mistakes are, even now. Before you continue reading, I’d suggest you head on over to Howard’s blog and read his comments and suggestions.

I’m going to point out some college media-specific questions you should be asking about these mistakes. Mainly, are you *still* guilty of making them, even today? If so, why? And, more importantly, how can you get past these things.

Newspapers were slow to embrace blogging.
I’ve been following weblogs since 2001, and have co-written two academic papers and written a chapter for a forthcoming book about weblogging. That doesn’t make me an expert, but it does mean that I’ve heard most every complaint journalists have made about weblogs. Despite those complaints, weblogs have proven resilient and popular. Howard is right that the failure of newspapers to embrace the weblogging format has been a significant shortcoming, fostering an “us vs. them” mentality - journalists vs. the unwashed masses. Instead of fighting the platform, find ways to involve your student media into “blog-like” activities on the web site.
Failure to protect vertical categories, especially auto and real estate, by building robust, content-centric, user-centric vertical sites.
For college media, this translates to vertical categories that are important to students - entertainment, college sports, and apartment and dining guides. If you don’t do it online, someone else will. I know we don’t all have the vast resources of major media conglomerates, but we do have the advantage of knowing our audiences (I hope!). Use that advantage to develop your offerings in “verticals” (gad, I hate that word!).
The failure to invest in search.
The issue here isn’t so much a problem with news sites that are on College Publisher, but more for sites that have their own content management systems. Search is important for your site, as it brings in readers who ordinarily wouldn’t find your content. If you think your search is adequate, try this experiment: Take a topic that was controversial on your campus two or three years ago and enter a search term in Google (i.e., “tuition increase at Vanderbilt University”) and see where your media outlet shows up in the search results.
It was a mistake to view content as something we do and audiences read, take it or leave it.
If you think your online audience is passive, you’ve missed the boat. College media needs to figure out ways to involve the audience in the online news site, to develop “sticky” features, and also respond to the audience when legitimate questions arise about coverage. See also: shovelware.
The newspaper web operations that did discover how to get five percent or more of newspaper revenue from up sells and forced buys should have been reinvesting that money in online operations, instead of trying to juice the bottom line.
For college media, the key takeaway from this is that you should be selling more online, even devoting ad staff to online only sales days or something. Upsells (adding web onto print buys) are fine for many, but if we don’t figure out how to turn up more pure web ad dollars, we’re missing a part of the puzzle. And when you get those ad dollars, use them to invest in multimedia equipment or training for your staff, don’t just throw it into the general operating budget.
Newspapers did not want to believe that the web was pull rather than push, so simply dumping each days edition of the newspaper online seemed like a good idea.
“Shovelware” as it’s called is still a major part of online operations on student media web sites. That’s changing, but it’s a slow process. Creating a rich experience for your online news site means more than taking the stories from the day’s paper and putting it into a CMS. You’ve heard it here before, but I’ll say it again: the web editor should be on par with the print managing editor in your organizational structure. Editors should expect and demand “extras” on major stories - extras that will be available online only (links, documents, audio, video, slideshows, etc.).
Newspaper sites have long suffered from a lack of utility.
I’ve seen numerous sites that are difficult to navigate, where content goes to die. If your student web site hasn’t had any usability testing done, that’s a good place to start. Get some random students, professors and staff to spend some time surfing through your site. Observe their interactions and ask them what works, what’s confusing, and what makes no sense at all. This is a simple version of usability testing, but it will reveal a lot about how you might be frustrating your audience. You wouldn’t do this with your printed edition, why do it online?