I have some lessons from ONA 08 over at BeatBlogging.Org (version 2.0 nonetheless), and I wanted to highlight the supply and demand part of the post:

This is an issue facing journalism on the Web and not just beat bloggers. Right now, there is simply more supply of written content than there is of demand for it from advertisers. This means low CPMs for written content. It also means that text-only beat bloggers need to get a lot of page views to make a decent amount of revenue.

On the other hand, there isn’t enough supply of video content on the Web to meet advertisers demands. Advertisers love video ads and pre-roll. They want to stick it on your content, but are having trouble finding enough content.

I’m not suggesting that everyone jump to doing video, but diversifying content can help boost revenue. This could be a once-a-week podcast or vodcast with a few ads in it. It could mean shooting some video for your beat blog. But realize that video content can get a much higher ad rate than printed content can.

News organizations need to diversify their content. This means more audio, more video, more multimedia and — yes — less written content. Now, none of this matters if our multimedia content has terrible SEO and exist within ghettos.

CNN.com understands how to get people to watch lots of video. CNN.com automatically plays a new, related clip after a clip is finished. Users can build custom playlists and watch hours of video — and ads.

Most news organizations, however, allow video and other multimedia content to exist within arbitrary ghettos where that content is not connected to similar content. When a clip ends, the content stops. Related content is not linked together.

And the biggest crime of all: A lot of multimedia content on news Web sites is not properly indexed and searchable. That my friends is one of the worst ideas ever. Search is the key to content distribution.

News organizations need to address this supply and demand issue. Trust me, redundant, non-local news is not in demand. And it’s probably not that in demand by users either.

Sometimes the best way to learn about a subject is just to go out and experiment.

With that thought in mind, I’ve launched a hyperlocal/beat blogging experiment, Chagrin Valley Sports. My goal is simple: provide better and more in-depth coverage of local sports in the Chagrin Valley area utilizing a beat blog. I’m starting out with high school football because it is just me right now, and BeatBlogging.Org is my full-time job.

If the site starts making money, perhaps I can hire people to cover other sports. And, yes, I can already cover football much better than any of the local papers can. Local papers tend to write a sports story about an individual school every few weeks.

These are pretty much just token stories to get schools and names in the paper, but there really is no excuse not to have at least one piece of content each week about each football team. If the site takes off, I’d like to have content about multiple sports teams from schools each week.

I’m not looking to build the coolest features or the flashiest site. I’m looking to build the most useful content. Some hyperlocal projects have been high on the cool factor but lower on the useful factor. But by concentrating on creating useful content, I can produce a lot of it, because useful content often takes less time to produce than cool content.

No, you won’t find fancy Flash graphics on my site. Nor will you find us covering high school football games with multiple video cameras.

But you will find which area players are getting looked at by scouts and which have verbally committed to play college football. If a team changes its defensive scheme, you’ll find out about that too.

My goal is to cover high school sports like professional sports are covered. And that means reporting about scheme changes. That means talking about scouting reports and game previews. It means posting playoff rankings every week.

None of that content takes much time to produce. If you have good relationships with area coaches, they’ll tell you when their players are being offered college scholarships. Playoff rankings are posted each week by OSHAA.Org. All I have to do is find the schools in my coverage area and post how they are doing, and that takes very little time.

Maybe you don’t win awards for this kind of coverage, but I think you can win users with this kind of coverage. This experiment is primarily about driving traffic, and the only way for me to drive serious amounts of traffic is to make my site into THE destination for local sports coverage.

Part of being a destination is about producing more than journalism. This means schedules. This means stats. It means linking to other people’s content. It means owning the conversation. It might even mean maps to area schools.

Ultimately, my goal has to be to make my site into the first place people think of when they think of sports in the Chagrin Valley area. If I can do that, I’ll also become the No. 1 place for local advertisers.

The Chagrin Valley area is a geographic fault line. It’s not in one county, but rather my coverage touches three different counties. I’m not going to cover an arbitrary geographic area, and I think that’s a mistake past hyperlocal projects have made.

I hope to eventually cover news too, but I started with sports because it is easier and less time consuming. It’s also a lot easier to build good will with solid sports coverage. Good will is very important for forging the kind of relationships necessary to have community-driven content succeed.

For instance, I am not taking photos, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want photos for my site. That means I have to forge relationships with people to provide me with what I don’t have. Almost every high school sporting event has at least one dedicated parent or school member who is taking photos.

I need to forge relationships with those people, because I don’t want to duplicate content. In fact, I can’t afford to. I have already forged a relationship with one high school in the area. I’m allowed to use whatever photos they have on their Web site for free, and they take hundreds, if not thousands, a week.

Now, how much has this experiment cost me? Nothing so far. It’s hosted on the same server as the JI, and it is running off a WordPress install with a theme I found.

I customized the theme to make it feel more local for users by randomly generating photos at the top of the page of each school. What says Chagrin Valley sports better than photos of Chagrin Valley teams playing sports?

I also focused on SEO from day one. The No. 1 search result for “Chagrin Valley sports” is my Web site. It turns out the query “Chagrin Valley sports” is a popular one, and it has proven fortuitous already that I named my site after a popular search query.

Maybe I could have thought of a sexier name or a more traditional name like The Chagrin Valley Advocate. But my name, as obvious and blunt as it may be, is an SEO gold mine. I’m already the No. 2 search result for the query “Chagrin Falls football,” behind only Wikipedia. My entrenched local competitors have ignored SEO to their own peril.

And how I am driving traffic to my site? I’m finding the online communities where people talk about local sports and becoming active in those communities. These people are interested in good content, and I need to forge relationships with them.

This site may fail miserably, but it has already been a great learning experience. Making money on the Web is ridiculously hard, and that’s why I have to find a new business model for local journalism.

This is ultimately a proof of concept for a Knight News Challenge Grant I am applying for later this year (this is a tiny fraction of what I am proposing to Knight). Whether or not Knight likes my pragmatic approach to producing Web content remains to be seen. But I’m not going to try to out-cool and out-sexy people.

I’m just going to produce lots of useful content. And I’m going to drive a ton of traffic my way.

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?

On May 8th, I made a post about how a previous post from a year earlier had a resurgence in traffic.

I thought that traffic would eventually subside, but I was wrong. In less than 3 months, that post has almost doubled the amount of page views it has:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, blogging has taught so much about how the Web works. When I made that post, I never envisioned that more than a year later it would still be receiving consistent traffic.

The Web works so much different than print. With a daily newspaper, for instance, all the views for a story basically come in one shot on the day an article is published. The day I launched that post (and the day after) are nowhere near the biggest days of traffic for that post.

That post also never had a huge day of traffic, and posts don’t need to generate giant days of traffic to be able to bring in a lot of traffic to a blog in the aggregate. About 90 was the most page views that post ever received in one day, but it has consistently drawn traffic. It has about 1,400 page views now, and in a year, it will probably have between 2,000-3,000.

A couple months ago I made a big SEO push on this blog. I changed the URL structure, put the post titles before my blog name, made sure I wrote headlines with lots of keywords for SEO, developed a site map and made some other changes to the site. I knew that my summer might be busy (I did BeatBlogging.org and Stripes at the same time during June), but I didn’t want my traffic to drop off that much.

And it hasn’t. While, I haven’t been setting records, July will probably be my second-highest month in terms of traffic for the JI. Not bad, considering I don’t post that much anymore, and I haven’t had a big, really popular post in awhile (BeatBlogging.Org is where my best work is these days).

But what I do have is a lot of long tail traffic. 165 posts received traffic yesterday, in large part due to strong SEO. With each post I make (this is No. 301), that long tail traffic gets more robust. Most of my traffic comes in via search engines and referrals right now.

Every journalist should at least experiment with blogging. I have been doing Web work since the the 90s, but blogging has taught me so much about the link economy of the Web. More journalists need to understand that economy.

It’s how the Web works.

Don’t believe me on how important SEO is for a Web site?

My most popular post today was not written this week. Or last. No, it’s a post from all the way back on Feb. 11.

Ironically, that post was about how “Newspapers need to learn SEO for headlines.” Yes, I would say it’s one of the strongest posts of this month, but that’s not enough to justify it being by far the most popular post on the JI today, especially since that post hasn’t gotten serious traffic in about a week. It’s safe to say that SEO has something to do with the post’s continued popularity (it has gotten traffic every day since its release).

It’s not enough to just produce good content on the Web. Without proper consideration being given to search engine traffic, a Web site will miss out on a lot of users and audience growth.

Some sites get a majority of their traffic from search engines. That’s the organic nature of the Web. Users pull content on the Web, unlike traditional mediums which push content to users.

Look at the headline for the post in question: “Newspapers need to learn SEO for headlines.” It’s not a cute headline by any stretch of the imagination. It’s very matter of fact, which works very well for SEO.

It has newspapers, learn, SEO and headlines in the headline. A headline filled with keywords will drive a lot more traffic. More traffic = more money.

Name one Web site that would benefit from that formula?

For many people search engines are where the Web begins.

Countless people have google.com, yahoo.com, ask.com and other search engines as their home pages, but without good Search Engine Optimization no one will ever find your content. Print headlines don’t cut it on the Web.

Print headlines are often written to be clever or pithy or cute. Headline writing is treated as an art form, where editors work tirelessly to find the most creative headlines. Headline writing on the Web is a science.

Being cute won’t get you anywhere on the Web. Headlines with keywords, people and places matter. Headlines have to have substance on the Web; style isn’t very important.

I know this may shock many a copy editors ego, but search engines and Web users don’t care how clever you are. They just want to be informed. Take this example from my blog last week:

I had a blog post with the the headline “How an election should be covered,” but I later changed it to the more-SEO friendly “NY Times and CNN show how an election should be covered.” The second headline netted me a lot more traffic, especially from search engines. Why?

The second headline has some powerful keywords in it. My blog post was about how The New York Times and CNN Super Tuesday coverage was outstanding. Well, if it’s about those two companies, then they should be in the headline.

The second headline now has NY Times, CNN, election and covered in it. It packs a much more powerful SEO punch, and it’s a better headline because it has more information in it.

Look at the SEO juice for the headline of this blog post: newspapers, SEO and headlines. A headline like “Cute headlines don’t cut it” wouldn’t pack the same SEO punch, and thus would hurt the traffic to this post.

CNET notes The Wall Street Journal had a typical, creative, cute headline on a recent story. The problem, of course, was that the headline doesn’t say anything and thus completely and utterly lacked SEO power. Sure, the headline is clever, but honestly the only people who care about clever headlines are headline writers and headline competitions — users and search engines could not care less.

On January 2, The Wall Street Journal’s Web site posted a story with the headline: “Green Beans Comes Marching Home.”

It happened to be an article about Green Beans Coffee, a company serving overseas U.S. military bases, opening its first cafe in the United States.

Let’s say you were interested in the subject but didn’t know the Journal had written an article on it. You might type into a search engine some combination of keywords like “Green Beans,” “coffee,” “U.S. military,” “bases” and “soldiers.”

Various combinations failed to return a link to the article in the first page of results on Google. Using all of the keywords and terms separated like that did find the article, but not on The Wall Street Journal site. Instead, it was on a blog site that had reposted the article word for word.

Newspapers need all the traffic search engines can bring, and they can bring a lot — a lot. But most newspapers still write headlines for the Web like they are writing for print.  I’ll admit that’s a very clever headline, but it didn’t work on the Web.

And look what happened: a blog got the Journal’s traffic. Fitting. Here are suggestions for a better, SEO-juiced headline from that same article:

To rank high in the search engines, the Journal headline should have included the term “coffee,” “cafes” or even “Starbucks,” said Stephan Spencer, founder and president of SEO firm Netconcepts.

“For one thing, ‘green beans’ isn’t a terribly popular search term,” he said. “Secondly, a fraction of those searchers will be looking for the coffee supplier; most will be looking for recipes.” His suggested headline: “U.S. Military Coffee Supplier to take on Starbucks with Cafes Stateside.”

I know thats not the sexiest headline, but who cares? I know our readers don’t. Our readers are looking to be informed as quickly as possible.

Users don’t spend the same amount of time on our Web sites as they do with the print editions. Users are not looking to decipher what a headline like “Green Beans Comes Marching Home” means. And editors have to keep this in mind: the Web doesn’t have sub headlines to tell the real story.

Without a sub headline, those big, provocative, often informationally-challenged headlines don’t work. In fact, they fall very flat. The Web is a different beast.

Many people view content using RSS aggregators and check dozens of sources daily. Users want headlines that get to the point.

Boston.com, home to the Boston Globe, attributes its high Nielson Net Rankings to SEO headline writing. In November it was No. 4 in the country for newspapers, despite having a daily circulation around 15th best in the country.

Search engines can bring in half of the traffic a newspaper gets, but only if that paper pays attention to the importance of SEO:

Times Online, which is based in the United Kingdom and is a division of News Corp., gets anywhere from 30 percent to 60 percent of its traffic from search engines, Publisher Zach Leonard said. The site modifies headlines it imports onto the Web site from its print affiliates, The Times and The Sunday Times. The company also started training its editorial staff on SEO last summer and is investing in a new content management system that will soon launch with a new Web site, he said.

All that being said, there are some dark sides to SEO optimization for journalism Web sites. Gawker compiled a list of the greatest hits from CNN.com: headlines that were clearly written only for SEO and stories that were only played up for SEO reasons.

Headlines like “Baby pandas! Baby pandas! Baby pandas!” or “Police: Teen raped his mother” or “New York readies for its own Katrina.”

All of those headlines and stories are meant to drive traffic, at the expense of quality journalism. As much as I like the design of CNN.com, the site is home to far too many salacious headlines and tabloid journalism. CNN.com appears at times to care much more about making money than about making quality journalism.

That can be the downside of SEO optimization, but paying attention to SEO doesn’t mean changing your editorial focus. Optimizing a Web site for SEO is a great way for more people to find content. If SEO is used to make headlines easier to understand for both users and search engines, then everyone is winner.

I’d suggest teaching every headline writer in your new organization the finer points of SEO as soon as possible. It can make a big difference in traffic and revenue. Save the artful headlines for print, and put the sweet science on the Web.