Viva new media in Las Vegas

By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor


LAS VEGAS - The online arm of the newspaper industry is beginning to flex its muscles as a concerted effort is under way to make Web sites more profitable.

The number of people attending this year’s NAA Marketing Conference reflected the industry’s need to adapt - and quickly - to new Web technology.

More than 2,500 industry participants traveled to Nevada in an effort to answer one of the industry’s thorniest questions: how to redesign a product whose print version is losing market traction but whose online popularity is soaring (see related story, page 20).

More than 120 vendors were on hand to exhibit their wares, ranging from new media applications to syndication services.

For some exhibitors, the conference provided a chance to introduce their products to newspapers.

Topix.net, for example, said it would power Tribune Interactive’s online classifieds for general merchandise advertising. The co-branded classifieds were expected to roll out last month at baltimoresun.com and will be available across all 12 TI newspaper sites by June.

The vendor also forged agreements with newspapers such as The Indianapolis Star to underpin the comments section of the paper’s online stories.

For others like AdPay Inc., the conference gave it a chance to reconnect with its customer base.

“About 80 percent of our clients are attending the show, so this gives us a chance to see how they are doing,” said Mike Heene, AdPay’s founder and president of strategic ventures.

A more personal Web

Still, the main action in Las Vegas concerned how newspapers can exploit the myriad changes transforming new media.

Case in point: the integration of Web 2.0 services to woo visitors and advertisers alike. The standard refers to an Internet that will deliver a full range of Web applications to users, altering the current model of individual Web sites.

That will transform how newspapers currently view the interaction between readers, advertisers and themselves into one where dailies must support more of a one-on-one relationship, speakers said.

“Consumers want and need transparency and empowerment. It enables them to declare their intentions,” said Edward Kost, division manager for Trib Total Media.

TTM, which publishes the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and a host of other daily and weekly publications, recently launched MyPghLIVE.com, a site that sends customized and tailored information to users based on their preferences.

The site uses a device called memes to determine the type of content recommended to readers, who also see why the page made the suggestion. Memes, a scientific theory that gained stature in the ‘80s, essentially attempts to describe why some terms and cultural phenomena gain popularity, while others don’t.

“The consumer is empowered to declare their intentions, the advertisers can engage consumers at a one-on-one level and the publisher can deliver individualized content and ads,” Kost said, describing the site’s use of the technology.

But papers aren’t the only news-generating organizations out there trolling for eyeballs. There are plenty of sites competing with newspapers to attract readers and advertisers, including traditional and non-traditional media organizations.

One potential new competitor is Wikia, which plans to launch local community sites that will give anyone the ability to post and edit news in an open-source environment similar to Wikipedia.

The company is initially planning to offer “hyper-local” news sites covering specific regions, cities or ZIP codes, said Gil Penchina, Wikia’s chief executive officer.

Penchina said that users looking over the site’s content would handle issues like false news stories or derogatory posts.

Focusing on strengths

Still, even as competitive pressures build, newspapers retain a formidable competitive advantage - one that shouldn’t be ignored.

Kelly Dyer Fry, director of multimedia at The Oklahoman’s NewsOk.com, said a newspaper’s brick and mortar existence gives it an important community presence.

Its archives, meantime, houses a bastion of content that can be repurposed several different ways.

“Gathering and presenting information is the only trick pony we have left,” she said.

User-generated content is an important part of the mix, she said, citing NewsOk.com’s photo feature, which lets users post and share images online.

The Oklahoman’s Web site uses software from Inform Technologies that relies on a series of algorithms, natural language processing and other analytical mechanisms to tag and score each component, ranging from industry and topic to organization and people mentioned (see Newspapers & Technology, September 2006.)

Bottom line, said Fry and other newspaper representatives: Don’t be afraid to experiment with new online services. Testing pages online is much cheaper than testing them in print.