Ten suggestions for my local papers

Is this post a bit audacious? I suppose it is, but damn it, I like my newspapers and I want to see them do better. I'm concerned, because the Dem-Gazette laid off 60 in February, and the trend is sweeping the country. As a citizen who relies on the papers for my news, I want to see them adapt, not go under.

Some people might charge for this kind of advice, but I'd rather ensure the continuity of my local news sources than make a quick buck. None of these suggestions are particularly difficult or costly to implement, but if your tech guys don't know what these words mean, it might be time to hire a new team. (If you're a tech guy and you find yourself in that position, it's time to get educated. You're way behind.)

To the editors and publishers of my local papers, please consider this list a kind donation, since I don't own a subscription to your print edition, and probably never will. Sorry, that's just the way it is. Don't lament over me and the rest of Gen Y; instead, use me as a case study to grow your business.

Without further ado, here are my suggestions:

1. Put social media buttons on every article. Newsweek did. I don't think this iis so important for hyperlocal content or blogs with relatively few visitors, but when it comes to authoritative news sites, its essential if you want your story to spread beyond your typical demographic.

2. Use Facebook Connect to allow users to login with their Facebook accounts. And if you don't have comments enabled, you better do that first. A justification for comments deserves its own post, so I'm linking to a website I trust.

3. Fix your RSS feeds. (Both local papers make grave errors with RSS. Seriously, routine 404's and site-wide only feeds? I'm embarassed.) I'm a busy guy, so I use RSS to read news as fast as I can. I can skim more than 650 headlines in an hour, while annotating the ones I find remarkable. If your RSS feeds suck, I'm going to visit your site less and show it to my friends almost never. Until they are fixed, you have removed the convenience of marketing your articles to my networks.

4. Insist your writers supply links and header tags with their content. Web publishing is just as important as print, and it requires more work on the part of the writer than the print edition does. Prioritize attractive design, typographic formatting, and semantic markup, or your online adspace will never be worth enough.

5. Publish Flickr/Picasa photo sets on your website. Adopt a bounty model for selecting photos for print, and publish the rest of the submissions as a slideshow on your webpage, for value-added goodness.

6. Invite ten multimedia journalist students to intern with you. Offer them an online-only column, with selected articles appearing in the Editorial print section. They know more about using multimedia than you do, and they'll act as volunteer marketers to boot (kids these days are like that).

7. Launch a regional classified network with affiliate opportunities for all newspapers and blogs. Investigate making ads from individuals free and only charging from businesses. Learn from Craigslist and from 67 Montana newspapers.

8. Publish historical reviews and other anthologies as eBooks. Charge for them. Include lots of pictures and links. Invite community members to contribute in a revenue-sharing model.

9. Give every writer a Twitter account, and insist they Tweet their headlines and other thoughts throughout the day. Tweets should be used in advance of articles, not just to promote what has already been published. If you're waiting until after the print edition is at newsstands to market to me, you've already missed the premium opportunity. I have gone out of my way to buy a paper because the journalist's tweets convinced me it was worth it. (Thank you @cspencer75 and @SkipD, you guys lead the pack.)

10. Implement trackbacks. You're complaining about bloggers using your content, well, if you had trackbacks, you'd get a bit more credit for all of those links. Just sayin'.

11. (I lied when I said "ten.") Never, ever, ever charge for your regular content. If you have to adopt an online subscription model, then your content must not be valuable enough to monetize in other ways. Don't make the mistake of thinking of your readers as customers; they're your marketplace. That's a profound difference.

In closing, I am effing tired of this newspapers vs bloggers mentality. I think it's a bunch of horsepuckey, and we should be working together to push newsworthy information to a wider audience. We have much to gain from collaborating, and little to gain from complaining about each other.