For years individual content producers in news organizations didn’t have an easy way to figure out how popular or useful their content was with people.

But with today’s advanced site analytics, content producers have unprecedented data about users and their surfing habits. I wrote a long post about this subject over at BeatBlogging.Org. Consider this post the Cliff Note’s version with a few added tidbits.

What makes this data so important?

With Web analytics, content creators like writers, bloggers, photographers, database developers, etc can find out which content is getting the most page views and visits and from where those visitors are coming from. Content creators can also find out which search terms most often land people on their content.

Analytics will allow for content producers to make content that is more appealing to their users. For a football beat, it might mean creating more previews and Q&A sessions and less feature stories. For an education blog, it might mean writing more about teachers’ issues and less about the school district as a whole.

It also might mean different kinds of content. Your users might prefer posts that are short and comprised of lists. My users might prefer longer paragraphs. The only way to understand what our individual users want is to track their browsing habits.

The timing of posts is also extremely critical, and this varies per beat per news organization:

In general, after lunch and after work are the two peak times for Web traffic. This, however, is not universal, and detailed Web analytics will allow content producers to know the peak times to release content on their Web sites. In fact, different beat blogs at the same paper might have different peak traffic times.

Now, not every news organization allows content producers access to this information. In fact, most may not, but the content producers I have spoken to almost uniformly say it has helped them do their jobs better. Every news organization worth anything already has detailed site analytics.

It doesn’t cost a company money to give more people access to this information, but site analytics can be complicated and hard to understand without training. Some newsrooms have come up with ways of getting around that.

Suzanne Yada said her newspaper, the Visalia Times-Delta, has a daily meeting at 3 p.m. to discuss traffic figures and which stories are getting the most page views. Ryan Sholin says at the last paper he worked at he sent out a daily “Top 5.” Sholin said, however, that bloggers had full access to their stats.

Whether a news organization gives access to this data to every content producer or whether a news organization has a meeting or e-mail to discuss Web traffic, it doesn’t matter. What ultimately matters is that news organizations give content producers vital information that will allow them to do their jobs better.

To all my blogging readers, could you imagine blogging blind? That’s essentially what many news organizations are asking their content producers to do.

If your company doesn’t allow content producers access to this information, I have a question for you. Why doesn’t your company give individual content producers information about the content they produce?

Do copy editors have a future in journalism?

Will that role be drastically changing? Traditionally, copy editors at most newspapers had to do more than just edit copy. They also had to do page layout, fit stories to fixed spaces, write headlines, write captions, etc. Obviously, page layout is not needed on the Web, and every beat blogger should understand SEO for headline writing. And it might make sense to replace most captions with tags.

Don’t get me started on fitting stories to space either. That skill is dead. Stories on the Web should be as long or as short as they need to be. Copy editors no longer need to spend hours trying to fit a 15-inch story in an 8-inch space.

Every journalism company should have some copy editors, but the era of copy editors heavily rewriting content is over. News organizations can no longer afford to have employees whose main job is to fix the mistakes of other employees. It’s one thing to polish work, but another thing entirely to redo it.

Every beat blogger and online reporter will have to know how to write clean copy. It’s still a wise idea to have copy editors, however, but what will their other duties be?

Maximizing headline SEO? Audio and video post production? Making sure content is properly tagged?

Because TwentySomethingJournalist.com just launched.

You know what the worst kind of journalist is? A twenty-something journalist.

You know what kind of journalist doesn’t respect the newspaperman myth? A twenty-something journalist.

You know what kind of journalist doesn’t respect the Paper God? A twenty-something journalist.

You know what kind of journalist is ruining journalism? A twenty-something journalist.

What will the kids these days think of next? A site dedicated to finding innovative ways of modernizing journalism? God Lord.

Timothy Kennedy, the publisher of The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., announced 35-40 layoffs yesterday at the 110,000-circulation newspaper.

But that’s not the real lede for me. In the middle of his memo he writes, “More than ever our financial results reflect the broken business model of the past.”

I agree with him that the old business model that newspapers operated under is broken. Many people agree with that. What I don’t see, however, is a new business model in his memo.

All I see are layoffs. Oh, and, a closing of a few bureaus, and some crap about changing the zoning of the print editions.

But how does Kennedy plan on growing revenue? How does Kennedy plan on monetizing the Web better? How does Kennedy plan on making The Morning Call a more relevant news source in the 21st century?

So, what’s the new business model of the future, besides laying off 40 employees? Oh I know, laying off 40 more 6 months from now. Got it.

Layoffs are not a business model.

I want to relate a story from two years ago about a missed opportunity at a 25,000-circulation daily newspaper.

I was talking with the top editors at this newspaper about my Web experience and some of my thoughts on what newspapers needed to do to make themselves more competitive on the Web. The question of money always arises, however.

How do we pay for this? Who funds research and development? How do we convince the publisher and owner to loosen the purse strings?

The editor in chief had an idea how to pay for some innovation at her paper. The problem was the owner. He didn’t see a need to spend money on the Web.

Contrary to popular belief, working for a family-owned newspaper is not always better than working for a corporate one. The owner, an older gentlemen, had decided his paper needed a new printing press — a $20 million facility.

The editor in chief suggested that he make some sacrifices with the printing press and instead divert some of that money to R&D for the Web site. She reasoned that even $500,000 — 1/40th of the money — would make a big difference at their modest newspaper.

She was unable to persuade the owner to spend some money on R&D for new media. That was in 2006, when the industry was in considerably better shape.

I bet the owner really regrets that decision now. And I’m sure the editor in chief realizes what a massive missed opportunity that was.

In 2006, the housing market was booming in the Cleveland area, but since then the housing market has collapsed and the economy has been hit hard. Now that paper — like papers all over the country — are forced with hard decisions on what to cut to bring expenses down.

It’s tough to justify spending money on R&D when many papers have to make drastic cuts, especially in an area like the Web, where newspapers traditionally have not made much money, if any at all. The economy will get better, and ad revenue will climb again.

The best time to invest in the future is when things are going well. Don’t expect the good times to last forever. Many newspapers did nothing until things got really bad.

Things will get better. And when profit margins are their fatest, we should invest the most in the future. Let’s learn from the past to make the future better.

We have to learn from our mistakes, or else we’re doomed to repeat them.

A lot of journalists got into this business because they like to tell stories.

I think that’s one fundamental reason why so many journalists have a hard time adapting to the changing news landscape. For me, it was never about the story — it was always about the information and news.

So, if the format changes, it doesn’t really bother me. I’m not married to the format or the medium. I’m not here to weave intricate narratives and tell stories.

In fact, I’m not very good at telling oral stories. But I can tell you a lot of facts, figures and information.

This post was brought on by two things. First, the other night I was getting some drinks with some journalists and one said, “I’m not a journalist. I’m a storyteller.” He talked about how he had trouble keeping his stories short and didn’t like taking out quotes and information for brevity.

Obviously, his work was more for himself than for his readers. That’s does not serve our readers well, and it certainly doesn’t help journalism.

The second part of this post was inspired by a post by Howard Owens, “Not all information needs to be crafted into a story:”

Storytelling, whether written or visual, then becomes something that is more about serving your own ego than serving your readers.

So check your ego, whether writing or shooting, and give people useful or entertaining information in an accessible package.  Save the storytelling for when you really have a story to tell.

A lot of journalism seems to be ego driven. Some journalists report on what they want to cover, in the mediums they want to report in. It has very little to do with what people actually want.

But we’re in a business. We have to produce a product that people want. And most people just don’t read the whole story (thanks to Owens for the link):

But here’s the thing: journalists have always been far more entranced by ‘the story’ than audiences. Less than a quarter of newspaper readers claim to read to the end of a story, even one they’re interested in … and of those, over two thirds don’t read every word.

Yes, sometimes journalism is storytelling, but as Owens notes, we should save the storytelling for when we have really good stories to tell. I see so many feature, anecdotal and other non-news ledes on stories that are really just news stories.

Let me tell you something: I have stopped reading a lot of news stories because I didn’t want to put up with another boring feature lede on a news story. I wanted the news, and I wasn’t willing to wait for some journalist’s ego to go by. And I’ve read some great non-news ledes and they were usually on great feature stories.

If you’re a storyteller, it’s no fun to have to truncate your stories. Is it really a good story then? Is blogging a good storytelling medium? Probably not.

But if you’re in the business of providing facts, figures, information — news — you’ll find blogging and Web journalism to be amazing. The Web (and its mobile cousin) provide a great deal of immediacy and depth that print never could. The Internet is an awesome vehicle for information.

Too many journalists think of themselves as storytellers and not as journalists. People ultimately want journalism so they can be informed. I think if we concentrate on making journalism that people want, we’ll find ourselves and our industry in much better shape.

And sometimes people want great stories, but let’s not force every news item into the storytelling format.

Remember them?

The thing about general stores is that they are helpful. You can pick up a variety of things from food to bandages to clothes to live bait. But the other thing about general stores is that they don’t do anything well.

They’re helpful, but they usually aren’t someone’s favorite store, because they don’t specialize in anything. General stores like Woolworth (newspapers) died because of new, more modern titans like Wal-Mart (Google).

Google, in a sense, is a general store for information. The thing is that Google has a lot of information, just as those gigantic Wal-Marts have a lot of items for sale. A Woolworth is about the size of one department in Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart combined the general store idea with a niche — really low prices on non-dollar store goods (like say, electronics). Google has a niche too; it’s the easiest way to make sense of information and find information on the Web. There is just so much information on the Web that someone had to come along to help us sort through it.

The thing is, most newspapers don’t have a niche. Their just like Woolworth. They do a lot of things OK, sometimes even relatively well, but excel at nothing. And without a niche, they’ll be overtaken by competitors who cover those individual areas better.

The rise of mega grocery stores made the idea of having a small food section in a general store obsolete (better selection and better prices are hard to compete with). In fact, just about everything a general store like Woolworth did makes little sense today. I used to buy pet fish supplies at Woolworth when I was a kid, but now I can get a much better selection and better prices at Petsmart.

But Wal-Mart is so much more than a general store. Many Wal-Marts have full-featured grocery stores in them, along with eye doctors, dentists, pharmacies, clothing departments, electronic departments, etc. You can honestly just shop at Wal-Mart and get just about everything you need in your life.

That’s what a typical general store never could do. General stores didn’t go deep enough into any one area. That’s how newspapers have become.

Sure most dailies have local news, regional news, national news, international news, sports, business, technology, etc., but few excel in any of those areas. Think about how many newspapers still have film critics and even auto critics.

These movie/entertainment and auto sections are nowhere near the caliber of niche outlets like Movies.com or Edmunds.com (or Car and Driver magazine). With the Web, why would I want to consume inferior, cursory content? I don’t.

Many newspapers still operate like there aren’t strong niche competitors. This is what I mean when I say that newspapers could get better by getting smaller. Dump all of those sections that niche outlets do better (get rid of all those obsolete critics for movies, music, auto, etc and forget national and international news unless you’re the Post or USA Today). Niche outlets are only going to attract more of your readers anyway as time goes on.

Had general stores like Woolworth found a niche and honed in on it, maybe they’d still be around today. Instead they were left with trying to go head to head against stronger competitors who could purchases goods cheaper from suppliers (this is one of Wal-Marts secrets to success).

Newspapers can find niches to exploit. Local news and sports are big areas. Hollywood movies, cars and news from other parts of the world are not niches a typical newspaper can exploit. .

It’s depressing.

It feels like my girlfriend broke up with me and took my dog with her. Yes, I’m talking about The Wall Street Journal’s assessment of the failure of LoudounExtra.com. Maybe failure is a little harsh, but according to Rob Curley, his sites in Lawrence, Kan. got better traffic than LoudounExtra.com.

For those keeping score, Lawrence has about 80,000 residents, while Loudoun County has about 270,000 residents. And it’s not that LoudounExtra.com is a complete failure, it’s just that it’s not what it could have been or what was expected of it when it launched (it probably has lost a bit of money too).

And of course Curley and his team have left for Las Vegas, which doesn’t give me a lot of faith that LoudounExtra will be getting much better anytime soon. All the Web talent and vision are gone now — so, who is going to innovate on their forthcoming hyperlocal ventures?

To be fair, LoudounExtra is a site with a lot of information, databases and stories. It does cover Loudoun County better than the Post could have ever dreamed of before. But the site doesn’t have a lot of the user-generated content features that were envisioned when the project was announced, and it never really engaged the community.

Simply put: the return on investment wasn’t very good, and there was a hell of an investment in this site. There appears to be a fundamental divide between the Post itself and Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, and that may have been a large part of why this site is failing (and why the Post may not be able to do hyperlocal properly):

Though LoudounExtra.com seemed to promise an ideal combination of innovation and marketing muscle, it has failed to benefit from the reach of Washingtonpost.com. Mr. Curley says whenever a big story breaks involving Loudoun County, the Post typically publishes it on Washingtonpost.com without a link to LoudounExtra. That deprives LoudounExtra of potential traffic. Nor does the Washingtonpost’s own dedicated Loudoun County page send visitors directly to its online sibling. In September, when Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit announced it was moving its headquarters from Dulles, Va., to New York, the Post linked to the story on LoudounExtra.com for a couple hours before moving the story back to its own site. That window of promotion fueled the Loudoun site’s best traffic day to date, Mr. Curley says.

The Post couldn’t even link to LoudounExtra.com? That’s absurd. The Post site doesn’t interact well with LoudounExtra.com either (there is a separate Loudoun County page at washingtonpost.com that is a hold over from before LoudounExtra.com, which steals traffic from the hyperlocal project).

The mere act of linking to LoudounExtra.com with every story about Loudoun that was posted at washingtonpost.com would have brought in huge amounts of traffic to the fledgling hyperlocal project. It’s called free marketing. It’s also called synergy.

This may be a symptom of a larger problem at the Post — namely the divide between WPNI and the Post. WPNI is in Virginia, while the Post is in D.C. Obviously, that makes combing cultures into a unified newsroom (ala The New York Times) very difficult.

The future of news is a unified operation with the Web (and mobile) taking a lead roll. Currently, the majority of staff resources are still at the print destination in D.C. The Washington City paper had a scathing article about the huge rift between the two operations:

The geographic separation takes its toll on the Post in two ways. It causes frequent communication breakdowns whose remedies invariably involve costly investments in training and outreach, and it creates overlapping functions in which both the print and online operations assign reporters to the same beats. The result is waste, a luxury that no newspaper, including the Post, can afford in this era of slumping print circulation and advertising.

Other newspapers have begun to realize that the idea of separate newsrooms makes little sense. It’s a 1990s-era anachronism when people thought that the Web product would be a rehash of the print product with some Web exclusives filled in. Now people realize that news operations have to be platform agnostic — from the publisher on down to every reporter:

Other papers, meanwhile, have abandoned the Post’s separate-but-unequal model. A year ago, the Los Angeles Times integrated its news and Web functions after an internal report called the paper “Web-stupid.” The New York Times began combining its Web-paper operations in August 2005 and accelerated the process when it moved to a new building last spring. “It’s very much a two-way street,” says Jonathan Landman, the Times’ deputy managing editor and top editorial voice on the Web site.

It doesn’t sound like the Post will be rethinking its separate staffs model, but it will have to rethink how it does hyperlocal if it wants to be successful in that arena. It is going to need to dedicate more reporters to the areas it wants to cover, require its reporters to live in the local areas they are covering at a hyperlocal level, build up a grass roots following, allow for much greater user interaction (allow your local assets to improve your project and become invested in it) and, finally, the Post may have to reconsider its county model altogether.

The D.C. region is largely comprised of transplants like me who have little history in the area. I still consider Ohio my home and probably will be out of D.C. in under five years. D.C. is a very poor area to try to establish a local project, ala small-town Kansas.

But I do think hyperlocal projects can succeed. How about a project dedicated to politics and the political elite/junkies in D.C.? How about a site dedicated to the Redskins? Those are areas the Post could really clean up in.

I do not have high hopes for FairfaxExtra (the second hyperlocal site from the Post has coming this summer), unless the model is drastically changed. We’ll know soon enough if the Post is mixing things up with hyperlocal.

Curley, on the other hand, will probably find Vegas a much better place for his innovative brand of journalism. Honestly, it was probably a good move for his sanity, happiness and career. He told me he is going to work harder than ever in Vegas to make successful products, and I think he will. It sounds like he has gotten a lot of inspiration from what transpired at the Post.

In a year or two the dust will finally settle on the Post’s hyperlocal efforts, and maybe they will be successful with some tweaks and hard work. Or maybe WSJ will write an even more negative piece about the Post’s efforts.

Will Sullivan, myself and others have argued that newsrooms should consider switching to GMAIL because of its interface, search capabilities, advanced filtering and tagging and other features.

Honestly, I am much more productive with my GMAIL and Google Apps e-mail (used with @patthorntonfiles.com addresses) than I am with my work e-mail at Stripes that runs off an Exchange server. And if I was forming a start-up, it would be a no-brainer to go with the cheaper, more Web-friendly e-mail client.

GMAIL just works better. But there are reasons why Outlook/Exchange are so popular in corporate environments.

I’m going to write some posts weighing the pros and cons of a newsroom making a switch from Outlook to GMAIL, but before I do, I wanted to harness the wisdom of my blog readers. What are the advantages of Outlook over GMAIL, especially in a professional environment?

A few that I can think of are:

• Push e-mail - Exchange has it and it works well. Is there a way to rig this up for GMAIL?
• I can’t imagine it being easy to transfer years worth of Exchange e-mail to GMAIL. A lot of newsrooms want through headaches when they went from Lotus Notes to Exchange.
• LDAP support. GMAIL has a really cool contact manager that remembers everyone you have ever contacted, but I’m not sure it supports a company wide contact list. I know GMAIL does support CSV files, and each employee could manually upload a CSV file of contacts, but this seems less elegant than using LDAP.

Please leave information, suggestions and comments in the comments section of this post. Your help would be greatly appreciated.

Marc Matteo proposed the radical idea on a comment earlier today:

In the same vein that there are requirements w/in newsrooms to subscribe to the paper, I’d like to see the “online desk” staffers barred from taking the print edition.

Why? Because it clouds online news judgement. When online staffers are still happily existing in a 24-hour news cycle of monologue presentation, they fail a lot of times to expand their thinking to a web-based, constant news stream, dialog model that will, it seems pretty clear to me, define the future of news online.

In short, they become liabilities.

I recognize the value both financially and functionally of a print product, I truly do. I don’t think such a restriction should be permanent by any means. It’s just that since many newspapers are not hiring “web natives” for their web positions — and therefor crippling themselves — a “print ban” on online staffers seems like a good way to whiplash them into starting to think like web natives.

Sort of a “total immersion” type of approach.

It’s a crazy idea. So crazy, it might just make a lot of sense. The idea, as I see it, is simple: Web employees will think about how to present and produce content differently if they live in a Web-vacuum.

Their only way to disseminate content will be the Web. It will also force employees to forget about print models of distribution, which are entirely one-way.

The Web is two-way, and maybe the only way for newspaper employees to fully grasp that concept is to force themselves to be apart of that two-way conversation without a one-way conversation to fall back on.

Can a “total Web immersion” strategy work?

What do you think? Agree? Disagree?