Re: 10 Ideas I Want to Try at the Newspaper Where I Work - Free as in Pizza
Joey Baker
1. Non-free online classifieds. Yeah, well, we have these, and Craigslist has been a problem for that business model. But here’s a gimmick: It would cost money to post a basic free-form listing, but you could bring the price down by providing a more detailed, granular, and professional listing. This is the opposite of the classic model where we charge more if you want to add pictures or extras. Forget that. You want to add real pictures of the apartment you’re showing? Take 10% off for each room you photograph. You could get all the way down to free if you were willing to put the extra effort into it. Reading listings would be free, as usual, and the experience would be better because there is a built-in incentive for people to make their listings better.
Sweet idea. We totally need to steal this.
3. Personalized concert feeds and email alerts. We have really good data on upcoming shows. People should be able to subscribe to their favorite bands and never miss a show because they hadn’t heard about it or forgot to check.
For all college papers that keep track of events in the area, this is golden. And it's easy. Just use a WP plugin for SMS, or a mashup with gCalendar. Combine with the revenue dept. at your paper, and you could even sell this service – $5 for the year.
4. Follower and Audience Relationship Management. Our reporters currently try various things to promote their stories online, and everyone recognizes the importance of building relationships with their audience and other people who cover their beat. And these relationships grow “organically,” as the kids say (actually, the adults say it to me). But it seems like we could do a better job of pushing stories to the right channels if we had a way to efficiently remember who enjoyed and linked to a given story. There are a lot of forms that this could take. I’m thinking of a sort of CRM web app that keeps track of your stories, who has blogged about them or tweeted about them, and who has emailed you about them or commented on them.
Yea… this needs to be built. Sorta a freindfeed meets CRM with some automation. That's a valuable tool that you could sell to corporations. Startup anyone?
7. Mash-up stories, or topic pages consisting of multiple formats pulled together and trimmed into a coherent package. Right now, we do serial stories that run in our blogs, but the typical way to see the whole story is to look at the reverse chronological list for the tag that they share (example). Not very usable. Authors should be able to create a dynamic, sensibly-organized story page by dragging and dropping elements onto a canvas, including the usual suspects like blog feeds (in chron, reverse-chron, or an annotated arbitrary order), comment threads, Publish2 newsgroups, galleries and videos, background information boxes, etc. I think this is basically a “web shell” at the story level. The main thing I want to do is build an interface that makes it easy for a writer to create one.
This really goes to Jeff Jarvis's 'not the article' idea. But, this is a good look at how the backend might work.
9. Content APIs - Enough said, right? The New York Times has a bunch of neat APIs, ergo. We’re a side salad compared to them, but that shouldn’t stop us from implementing some nice, solid APIs that let people grab everything we offer in formats that are easy to manipulate and play with.
I really like these ideas :)
http://freepizza.cc/2009/03/14/10-ideas-i-want-to-try-at-the-newspaper-where-i-work/
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Daniel Bachhuber
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