http://www.scoopingthenews.com/2009/03/five-suggestions-for-how-newspapers.html

Here are five key elements present on the best blogs that newspapers should adopt:

1. Two-way communication between the writer and the reader. Reporters wouldn’t be obligated to respond to every comment posted, but how about trying to respond to at least a few.

2. Links to similar stories being published elsewhere on the Web. What’s wrong with acknowledging that other publications are providing their own perspectives on whatever the subject is that’s being written about?

3. Show us reader comments on the very first page of your Web site. That accomplishes two important tasks: One, it lets us see what other readers care about and how they are reacting to the news, which can only enhance our news consuming experience by providing more viewpoints; and two, it helps bridge that invisible barrier between reporters and readers, which will enhance the sense of community that newspapers used to provide when everyone read them around the breakfast table.

4. Tell us, the readers, about the people writing the stories.

5. Don’t worry about the presentation. Worry about giving us well-written and well-edited content.

Re 4, The audience CRM – I’m working on a prototype, and it’s more or less exactly as you describe, a friendfeed-style wire plus some CRM bells. I first want to get it going for really basic inbound links and referrers first, and then maybe add things like twitter followers, rss subscribers, email correspondents etc as the model becomes more clear.

Re 7, Yeah, I am all about Jarvis’s proposal for topic-centric pages, though I haven’t built hardly any of them yet. But I think it goes to the heart of why newspapers have been struggling with revenue on the web. Newspapers have traditionally gathered and organized information through narrative and layout. The product is a trusted central place to find information about a topic (region, etc) and stories that help you make sense of the information by placing it in context. The narrative and composition of the page open a channel of trust between the publisher and the reader, and there’s enough leftover bandwidth in that channel for well-designed broadcast advertising.

The web, by being linky, inverts the whole thing. Because we click all over the place when we’re looking for news and skim articles, we’re constantly writing our own narratives to make sense of it — more than we do with print. On top of that, the compositional aspect of newspapers doesn’t translate well to the web. Ads make sense in the context of the book, not in the context of a single story. The channel of trust opened by a web story is too narrow to shove a crappy banner ad though. And as a programmer, I’m always looking for ways to make it narrower–by disentangling the data from the narrative to some extent and trying to make it more sharable with fewer restrictions.

And yet, as Scott Karp says, at the end of the day, you don’t want to buy the car parts, you want to buy the car. You want something to help you understand what’s going on. Narrative is still a great tool for doing that, but we need to organize it in such a way that it respects the fact that on the web, the reader has more agency in assembling information. Web shells or topic pages seem like a promising stab in the right direction, and may also have the effect of opening the channel a little wider, so as we can sell the extra room to the highest bidder and buy 30″ monitors and food.

Re 1, classifieds. Please steal this. I have little hope of actually building it.

We need a way to take the information to the consumers, not the other way around. Email newsletters are a step in the right direction.

1. Sweet idea. I’m gonna steal this someday.

3. This is golden. And it’s easy. Just use a 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. 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. This really goes to Jeff Jarvis’s ‘not the article’ idea. But, this is a good look at how the backend might work.

9. Anything you build needs to have an API.
‘nough said.

Cheers!