Advice toward better newspaper sites

Following research to see which so-called "Web 2.0" features newspaper sites use, The Bivings Report offers 10 ways for newspapers to improve their sites. (It used to be nine, but the cell/PDA item was bolted on after the initial post.)

Here's the list of recommendation headings, followed by my reactions. Follow the link if you want more detail and commentary on the recommendations, and also check out what people are saying on Jeff Jarvis' site about them.

1. "Start using tags." I agree. A newspaper site's taxonomy needs to be as fluid as most decent blogware allows out of the box. Heck, I added a new tag for this post alone. This method is much better than a fixed hierarchy overinfluenced by the press-configuration-driven sectioning of the newspaper. And if editors worry about control, tagging doesn't necessarily have to be a consumer-run phenomenon. Editors and librarians (remember those people you have stuffed in what you used to call the "morgue"?) could effectively tag stories to create instant collections about public figures, neighborhoods or recurring story topics.
2. "Provide full-text RSS feeds." Fine, if as the report suggests, we can reliably deliver ad impressions with them, and track traffic. That's not exactly the spirit of RSS, but I sure see a lot of feeds out there with ads in tow.
3. "Work with external 'social' Web sites." OK, it's easy enough to do as described, though I would not expect a dramatic lift in local consumer mindshare from this effort.
4. "Link to relevant blog entries." I like this idea better when I envision news organizations actually finding and managing the relevant links. Sure, you can have Technorati try to match relevant posts to articles algorithmically, as a few news sites do. But isn't editorial judgment about relevancy to local audiences still at least a teensy part of a newspaper's value proposition?
5. "Get rid of all registration." Even for e-newsletters, contests, commenting, customization, personalization or other profile-based preferences? Even some hard-core Culture-of-the-Internet Utopians might resist that. I really don't want to go back to the days when all Web sessions were stateless and generic. Now if you just want sites to scale back on content-access registration "walls," well, I can think of more than one way to do that.
6. "Partner with local bloggers." Sure, nothing wrong with an "all boats rise" link-sharing strategy.
7. "Offer alternative views of your content." Oh, man, I chuckled when I saw "alternative views" in this context -- recalling a whole product development report I wrote about three years ago, in my last job, focused on exactly this point. That report may still be in someone's file cabinet somewhere, slowly yellowing. Yes, I'm for it. But I have seen almost zero traction on this from content sites in general, newspaper sites in particular.
8. "Modernize your site's graphic design." Did you say "modernize" or "weed out"? I agree with the report that it's time for news sites to start taking advantage of wider default monitor resolutions. But, as Clapton sings, it's in the way that you use it. When will we learn that more graphics, more animation, more stuff all speaking at the same volume isn't necessarily better?
9. "Learn from Craigslist." You mean simplicity? Sure, I get that. But the not-so-pleasant lesson from Craig and Co. is how to take the value of a simple text ad message down to zero.
10. "Make your content work on cell phones and PDAs." First, can we just make cell phones and PDAs work?

Here's a big one that's missing: Spend as much effort making the ads usable, findable and useful as you do the news/editorial content.

If sites invested in better segmentation, targeting and ad content development, they wouldn't have to worry so much about the weaknesses inherent in the old "adjacency" model when applied to online. The ads could and would speak for themselves.

That might be frightening to journalists who cling to the belief that all newspaper readers, and by extension news site visitors, come for the editorial content. But who really thinks putting a furniture store banner on a Web page with a local government story adds value to either message?