Online profit? First, earn it

This story was revised on March 1, 2002.

(Editor's note: Screen shots were taken on Feb. 18 and do not necessarily reflect the comments made by the author.)

Forget the gut-wrenching self-flagellation about when local online news sites will be profitable. That's an unimportant argument about things that exist perhaps only in the laboratory: good local news sites. Most of them aren't yet good enough to deserve to be profitable.

Time would be much better spent doing a few simple things to make those sites good.

The more pertinent argument is when are these sites going to drive their audience away?

As Web users get more sophisticated, news sites get more boring. And in a world where 18 percent profit is considered failure, there's probably not much hope that the parent corporation is going to add significant resources to the Web site. Significant improvement, however, can be done on the cheap.

Sites with a bunch of headlines are masquerading as local news sites. Yahoo! and AOL can do more headlines, faster and better than any local news site. That shouldn't be your goal.

It should not be a wonder that most of a local news site's audience visits that site just several times a month. Why keep coming back in search of news that's not there or not easily found or not well presented?

Recently I made some quick stops at a selection of news sites and found a number of common design flaws, most of which could be easily and inexpensively fixed:

1. Not giving people what they came for: News. (Most likely, local news) Sure, there are a lot of news headlines. But there are few summaries of those headlines. There isn't enough explanation of what the stories are about. There are so many headlines the pages are daunting and probably drive users away. A measure of success is not how many page views you can rack up by making a user click to find what he or she wants.

2. Not paying attention to any of the design principles so evident on newspaper pages
   • No dominant visual element
   • Information overload from too many columns, all with lists.
   • Few, if any, photos

3. Not doing something about the really long and uncomfortable time it takes for most of the pages to download. (In the days of 14.4 modems we paid attention to this, and we need to again.) Having a modem four times faster than you used to doesn't help if you make the page 10 times heavier than you used to. Dynamic page serving also is not helping cut download times.

So, who's doing it right?

The BBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Each of these sites makes it clear that there's a thought process behind the presentation of the page. Each sometimes uses layouts that grade the news into the most important story and the other top stories, and each has editors writing summaries of the stories. Each builds out its main stories. The New York Times and The Washington Post have very busy pages, however, with a daunting number of choices.

IowaChannel.com (CBS's KCCI Channel 8) It took a long time to realize that the small box on the left was for news, and all the quadrillion other boxes on the page were for other stuff. Once I found it, the lead story was summarized, and, unlike at many of the others I visited, the lead was "built out" as a package with sidebars and/or interactivity and video. This was a nice example where clear effort has been made to develop the lead into something more than automatically fed text on a page. There were a lot of possibilities for user interactivity. (They did a very good job building out their State of the Union package.
KOMO4 (ABC television in Seattle) The page had a clear lead story that was summarized for the reader. Each of the top local stories also was summarized, but in list fashion, so there was no clear lead or design elements. Wire stories were just hyperlinked headlines. This site recognized that local news was its bread and butter.
WTOP (all-news radio in Washington, D.C.) Terribly, terribly slow page that I'll bet causes many readers to click to another site. But in this site it's clear that an editor or editors have been at work. The layout indicates a lead story. Each story is summarized, and some stories have sidebars.

It's said that lists are interesting on the Web. David Letterman's Top 10 List? Yes. A list of headlines? No.

The Quick Fix

At the minimum, hire two editors for an eight-hour shift each to cover your home page 16 hours a day, five days a week. They shouldn't have any tasks but your home page and the stories on it. Their job should start with the creation of 10-20 home page templates with different sizes and shapes of photos and different plays on the lead story — with designs that span from playing up the really big story to a design that says not much happened today. Then, automate other sections of your site.

The home page editors should select the top five or six stories for your home page, and then build those stories out with photos, sidebars, polls, some multimedia and definitely with message boards tailored for each story. (Don't use a universal link to a universal message board whose only prompt is "What do you think?") The layouts would allow for a summary to be written about each of the top stories. Those news summaries are important to the reader.

Only after sites have a changing layout that grades the news according to importance, top-story summaries (not just headlines), "built out" stories that keep the user involved with the article and the site, and changes reflecting the big breaking news of the day, should we start worrying if users don't check back regularly.

We shouldn't, however, be worrying if the site loses money. That's a totally specious argument. Would a newspaper's Metro section be profitable if it were accounted for separately from the total paper? Would the manager of an all-news radio station decide not to do local news because it's the most expensive, requiring reporters and editors, not just a wire feed?

The Metro section for many papers is the most labor intensive per page, has the most reporters and often the fewest ads. Alone, it's a pure drain on the newspaper's budget. But no one is arguing it should be profitable or be shut down. It's an essential part of the total newspaper. It is the local news franchise, and it attracts users to the entire brand. Similarly, the local news Web site is just another part of the news organization's total mission. It may attract different users to that news brand — newspaper, radio, TV or magazine. The users it attracts may not subscribe to the newspaper, for example, or watch the TV news. Local news on the Web creates whole new business opportunities with new audiences.

The Web's audience is one that newspapers in particular need. It's young, and it doesn't yet have a business relationship with any part of the parent organization. Newspapers in the aggregate lose circulation year after year in part because their audience is dying and not being replaced. TV use is declining as Web use rises. So if you can't replace that audience, you'd better grab it on your Web site before your competitor does.

I hope you'll send me examples or post comments in the NewsFuture Forum about local news sites that are attracting and serving their users (readers, listeners or viewers). You can reach me at garykebbel@aol.com.

Related item: Home pages from hell - December 2001

Links
IowaChannel.com (CBS's KCCI Channel 8)
State of the Union package
KOMO4 (ABC television in Seattle)
WTOP (all-news radio in Washington, D.C.)
BBC
The New York Times
The Washington Post