After four months of planning and hacking and testing, I’m proud to announce Revamp, a niche vertical aimed at the homebuilding, renovation and repair industry
After launching a self-contained social network about a year ago that was half community, half business directory, we learned that the product lacked consistent reader activity and was difficult for non-blogger business owners to use.
So I and a colleague regrouped and tried to distill the essence of what businesses might want from the Web. Our answer? Personal contact with potential customers. It’s why they join Facebook and do branding advertising and buy a listing on a newspaper social network.
The problem? These are plumbers and designers and landscapers, not writers. So we trimmed down the options to three categories: news, events and offers. We integrated an “Ask a Pro” feature as a way to put experience front-and-center to start the conversation with primed customers. And we always have a way for people to contact our pros to ask in person or schedule a bid.
We can also work with networks like Facebook, Twitter or existing products like a company Website or blog. We want to be the hub for our advertiser’s various work on the Web. We want to bend like the reed and help local businesses understand the social Web.
What it isn’t
Seems like a funny thing to explain, but it’s important:
- Revamp is not a business directory. Why reinvent the wheel? Get into the stream where people are looking for information.
- It also uses some newsroom content to provide relevant local information for people who search the network, but is not driven by editorial material.
- Revamp is also not the most important part of the network. Yes, we want people to find our network aggregator useful, but if we can teach local businesspeople to tag and categorize regular postings correctly in order to maximize their exposure to local search traffic and a local customer’s first stop is their profile, we’re successful.
Take a look and see if it meets your needs. I’ll be following up with the kind of feedback we get from the pros who join the network.
A lot of posts about doing modern journalism are surrounded by technological solutions. That’s fine, since there are so many new and pervasive tools to choose from. But sometimes making a connection with a networked, busy reader involves simply tweaking the process of news to fit a modern lifestyle.
One reader recently suggested that our local news organization would do readers a much better service if we focused more on events that were upcoming rather than on what happened at the event.
“Instead of covering what happened in the news, which people are seeing all over on facebook, Twitter and online, for a small town, cover what will be … All too often we miss events from not seeing them and increasing publicity might be a good thing all around.”
About half the work of covering a beat is preparing advance stories that tell people what to expect from meetings and forums and entertainment events. But they’re not always written as regularly as they could be (they’re not very sexy) and they aren’t given any real prominence (no news is broken in them).
What this reader suggests is that the only thing that’s really important with some items is when, where and who. Online calendars (when they’re updated religiously) can put events, meetings and shows front-and-center. But in print, that information gets scattered all over the place.
Long-time readers might know to cruise through the fine-print notices for local land-use hearings or understand that a cute name for calendar like “News and Notes” holds relevant information, too. But for people who adhere to the mantra “if news is important, it’ll find me,” it’s not enough.
I’m in favor of a standing column in print that pulls out events and other go-and-do items. And maybe while we’re at it, we can start calling calendars by their rightful name.
Thanks to the folks at IGNITE Corvallis 2 for taking video and posting my presentation from the event.
So I submit to you my mini-manifesto for why I think the best times for journalism are right now:
News that Google is considering gobbling up Yelp has everyone twittering about how nothing’s safe from the search-blog-mail-chat-office-data giant. I generally avoid leaping into this kind of fray since I don’t really have a dog in the fight and don’t care to add to the hype.
But when I saw this tweet Friday afternoon, I had to come out swinging:
http://twitter.com/pachecod/statuses/6807927866
Newspaper business directories are losers. First off, I speak from experience that newspaper community-based business directories are impossibly unwieldy to manage (you never get everyone included, so you’re not really the authority) and are about 10 laps behind the big-dog search industry that is always innovating ahead of your game.
And tying a directory to a walled community is a non-starter. Think you can compete with the draw and activity of a 350-million-and-growing active community? Come down off your high horse. Now try again.
Actually, newspapers should be concerned if their advertisers aren’t calling them to ask what the news means for their business locally and how they should respond.
For years, newspapers ad reps were the captains of a local business’ strategy to reach customers, for obvious reasons. While the Web disrupted, expanded and democratized the channels, we panicked and threw stuff at both readers and advertisers with the hope that we’d get the water back behind the dam.
Meanwhile, local advertisers were bombarded with SEO snake oil and social media hype and left out in the cold by their long-time allies if they weren’t convinced by confusing print ad pricing or iffy online banner campaigns.
Seth Godin wrote this morning about how effective it is to fight the natural flow of market forces, especially in a disrupted market like newspapers:
Competition and the market are like water. They go where they want.
Google owns search; it’s a habit. Hell, it’s a verb. No local directory is going to touch that kind of reach. Instead, a complete strategy for a local business should include a Google business listing, a Facebook fan page and a branding campaign in the paper and online.
Like the proverbial reed that bends in the breeze but survives the typhoon, the local news organization’s best bet is to be the conduit for that work — the first call an advertiser makes when they hear of a new method to reach customers.
And, because technologies change, merge and shift, our advice and platforms must be flexible enough to adapt. Local business doesn’t need another business directory, they need a partner and a media hub. (I’ve been working on one version. More to come on that soon.)
So if Google buys Yelp, fine. Go out to your restaurant clients and teach them how social media works. Get them into the data stream, help them understand why it’s a good thing that people are talking about them and be available when the landscape changes. Because it will.
But you’ll be there. If you build relationships, that is.
I’ve been following the past couple of posts by finance blog Get Rich Slowly about how to negotiate better deals with service providers and more. The latest post outlines, in detail, how guest author G.E. Miller worked with Comcast to cut his bill through a couple of simple techniques.
It’s worth a read to learn from the conversation as well as the takeaway points Miller draws out. But Miller also cuts-and-pastes the complete chat conversation that he had with the customer service rep. What a cool idea.
Companies (ISPs, airlines, insurance, employers) have the upper hand in the marketplace because they limit information. For years, we’ve had to resort to hearsay and rumor about what other customers pay for goods and services in order to have enough information to negotiate anything.
Every time I get on an airplane, I wonder how different my ticket price was compared to others on the flight and why. When I call to order service from my cable company, I just want to know the best price so I can make an informed decision.
So what if everyone who negotiates with companies posted a transcript online for everyone to learn from? What if we post the price we pay for airline tickets and cable service, too? My guess is that this would at least shine light into the pricing structures for services and might head toward a flat rate structure. Simple is better.
Thoughts?
Some of us within the news organization I work for and a sister organization nearby (both owned by Lee) have been talking about how we’d remake our news products and news-gathering.
One of the things that has come up, though not with any kind of serious consideration yet, is the impact that a land-grant university’s news machine has on a small-town newsroom.
The Gazette-Times is in Corvallis, OR, population 49,807. We’re also the home of Oregon State University, home to 21, 969 students and 2,918 faculty.
That means that just a few blocks from our newsroom is another team of communicators in News and Communication Services working 40 hours each per week to promote the university and its mission. Their OSU Web page lists as many full-time staff as we have reporters.
One of our former reporters who is now working for OSU send a tweet today that spurred some thinking (and this off-the-cuff post): the university is using Skype to connect news organizations with faculty experts. Cool idea.
But the bigger question here is how we as a tiny newsroom should cover the university. Is anyone looking to us to break stories about research breakthroughs in our town? We already cover the hell out of athletics, but can only pick and choose about the rest of the work happening on campus.
I’ve been starting to think that we use the well-crafted science reporting directly from the university. Build a science page in the paper and link to news releases online.
Obviously, the news and communications crew has a pro-university slant that they’re working with the marketing department to put forward. Why is that so tough to swallow when it comes to news about research, but we readily gulp it down when it comes to athletics?
I’m not saying that we stop covering budget impacts, town and gown issues and on-campus enterprise reporting. I’m suggesting we emphasize that over the half-hearted (and often half-understood) science churnalism that we’re often reduced to.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Leave them in the comments.
I’m really pleased to be part of an interesting panel discussion happening this afternoon on using Twitter for journalism. The discussion was put together by University of Oregon Assistant Professor Tiffany Derville Gallicano (@derville) and Instructor Suzi Steffen (@SuziSteffen) and features a great range of folks.
Aussie working the herd. Round em up, pup!
Rescuing The Reporters, shirky.com
This is a great post. Clay Shirky breaks down the hometown paper and asks hard questions of what’s locally produced and puts some of the “newspapers should do x to survive” into context.
The Audacity of Free, chrisbrogan.com
Hey, I like free stuff as much as the next guy. I like getting paid, too.This post makes a great case for charging something for stuff. But the tricky question is how to boost value of the something enough that someone will part with sheckles for it.
NPR lands $3M grant for hyperlocal initiative, lostremote.com
Look out.Take a look at this report about how National Public Radio’s growth has tracked over the past few years, most importantly in how they’re working to create bonds with audiences.
With msnbc’s purchase of everyblock and local tv stations poised to launch local blogs, local is going to get pretty crowded. NPR will be a force to be reckoned with.
Google unveils new local search for mobile, lostremote.com
This is great: star stuff while searching and get an interactive list on your phone. But it skews toward chain stores in my quick tests. Will have to experiment to see if local joints can be preferred.
Is the revolution over?, collegemediainnovation.org
Is it safe to say that the rehash of micropayment proposals or bitching about comments signals a completed technology distribution curve. Game over.
I’m not so sure. In fact, I’m afraid there’s much more pain as advertisers really get a handle on (and more savvy than ever about) what they really want for their dollars spent.
I do think, though, that the pace of change in types of new tools will slow. That means microblogging as a concept will stick around, but self-hosted solutions or outright competitors to twitter, for example, are likely. Mobile as a viable platform is established, but how people interact with it is sure to change. Etc.
That circular talk, though, will continue as long as the old guard is still waking up to the discussion and cycles through the phases of how to “save journalism.”
Someone ought to make a primer! “So you think you can save journalism: A primer on what’s already been talked about so wired journalists at the bar don’t roll their eyes when you walk away.”
Happier, getrichslowly.org
There’s a whole blog post wrapped into the concepts that come to mind with this post. Until then, chew on this:
The shift from being a rat racer to pursuing happiness is not about working less or with less fervor but about working as hard or harder at the right activities — those that are a source of both present and future benefit.
In a small fit of clutter reduction this morning, I made the command decision to drop the New York Times and Washington Post national news feeds from my RSS reader, two long-time daily reads that began years ago before I discovered feeds at all.
Today, I monitor some 150 feeds daily (of course — and thankfully — not everyone publishes that often) and I just realized that in a week of news consumption, I’m more apt to just mark the feeds as read than to actually read, let alone click through to, anything on it.
Most interesting is that I’m not really missing anything. Between twitter, other blogs and news alerts there’s just not much new information in either feed by the time it comes around.
To be honest, I don’t have a single feed from a traditional news organization’s main online product. Blogs and others fill the gap. Full disclosure: I work in a newsroom, so there’s plenty of talk about big headlines, too, plus it’s my job to know what’s news locally, but I know I’m not alone in this.
I’m not the first to ask the big question of how news organizations can remain relevant when even their online news isn’t fresh enough. I guess it just hit home today.
I was asked by my boss this week to respond to some strategic planning coming from the company, specifically related to crafting distinct roles for print and online in newsrooms.
I think it’s a great idea and I’m really hopeful that the concept moves forward. The big issue is deciding how to divide the two products and what they’re naturally good at doing.
Here’s an excerpt of my reply:
First, we’ve got to know the things we do in print that really work:
1) condense a lot of information;
2) create a product that combines good writing with a familiar structure. And it’s portable!
3) take the time to slow down, put things into context, tell stories and draw some conclusions;
4) invite readers to slow down, draw connections, take a journey through information and craft thoughtful responses;
4) deliver a lot of our product to a lot of places in a big damn hurry. Daily.Next, look at the Web’s unique strengths:
1) immediate delivery using reader-supplied hardware (low overhead);
2) interactivity invites people to help report the story with tips, corrections and original reporting (contributed photos, etc);
3) can offer text, audio, video to provide other angles, tell stories in different ways;
4) searchable;
5) transparent (more on this later).Print stops and takes the long view. The Web is a stream of networked information. That’s how they are distinct and how we craft different roles for them.
I think we stop posting full print stories to the Web and instead post incremental updates, heavily linked, with reporters standing in the stream splashing information out, if you will. We become curators of the information stream, highlighting interesting bits and directing people to the right places and conversations.
This also means that we’ve got to be taking part in the conversations to make the most of tips and feedback that come over the transom. (Here’s where we break the notion that a blog is not dirty word nor a reader comment stream nor a dumping ground for reporters’ musings. They are a powerful CMS tool that reach a large audience and invite a particular kind of give-and-take.)
This is where the transparency comes in: people can see where our tips are coming from, how we’re reporting a story, and how the organization has reported it in the past. They can easily read more by following links, etc. Active consumption of news. (Read David Weinberger for more on this.)
In print, we do what we’ve been doing well and what people depend on, while ramping up our game on all fronts. We tell important stories and guide people through complex subjects. We focus on crafting dynamic designs that grab people’s attention and energize them. We present vetted feedback and general interest information. We understand the gravitas of print and make use of it by offering some exclusives and reprints suitable for framing.
This isn’t mutually exclusive. Short posts online as a news item develops can lead to an in-depth story in a few days. A series of quick hits on government decisions can culminate in an analysis of the kinds of issues a council takes up and how it discusses them. Multimedia of an event can drive interest in a printed feature story.
Even if all of this became top priority, it’d take a lot of work to get newsrooms to embrace them. But that’s part of the fun.
Other ideas? Send them my way and we’ll discuss.