SeanBlanda.com » How can newspapers get the most out of their Web site?

How can newspapers get the most out of their Web site?

add to del.icio.us

Fresh off of Nashville, members of The Temple News will be attending the College Media Advisers conference in New York City this weekend.

My adviser John DiCarlo and I have been asked to present on the topic of “getting the most out of your newspaper’s Web site” on Sunday at noon. This is admittedly a very broad topic, but I plan to bombard the attending advisers with practical, not abstract, advice. For example I’ll say “heres a tool to use for slideshows” before something like “embrace multimedia”.

Below is a list of things I have already come up with. I came up with these through my own brainstorming as well as rooting through or recalling blogs I’ve read.

I was wondering what would you add? Are there any resources you and your paper use that I didn’t mention?

Know ad rates for your competition, this includes blogs
Your site should enable your staff to easily post video, audio, soundslides, slideshows, pictures, and infographs
Utilize the Flickr slideshow tool (its free!)
Start a Facebook page
Make sure your article page is not a dead end (credit to Ryan for that one)
Offer an RSS feed for AT LEAST news and sports.
Use all of your properties to refer each other, i.e. blogs, newspaper, video, the web site etc…
Make sure your article page title is your headline (and other SEO advice…)
Publish web comments in the newspaper
Use the web to promote and make “evergreen” content such as dining guides
Make sure article pages have a print view
Take full advantage of tagging systems to lead readers between a columnist’s articles or a series you are running
Have an “online only” section so readers can see the content they missed
Have no registration, and have the barriers to comment and interact as low as possible (some may disagree, I know)
Set up a wiki to add to what my friend Christopher Wink would call “institutional memory”
Don’t forget that your paper’s Web site is still a Web site and should be crawlable by Google and Google News.
If you have beats, make them each a section of your site with tags
Make every byline link to all of the writer’s articles
Some pictures may be black and white in the paper, put the color version online

This list is evolving as fast as I can write in my notebook.

So what’s missing?

This entry was posted on 3/13/2008 at 3:54 pm, filed under College Media. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

7 Comments to “How can newspapers get the most out of their Web site?”

Greg Linch
Posted: Mar 13th, 2008 at 5:07 pm

Great list. This will be helpful for our redesign. Here are some other principles we’re following:

-Don’t overwhelm your readers on the homepage, keep it simple and clean
-Avoid a static homepage
-Hyperlink e-mail addresses for writers, photographers, etc.

Reply to this comment.

pingback:
Posted: Mar 13th, 2008 at 9:12 pm

How can newspapers get the most out of their Web site? | How to make a website

[…] goinglikesixty wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptMy adviser John DiCarlo and I have been asked to present on the topic of “getting the most out of your newspaper’s Web site” on Sunday at noon. This is admittandly a very broad topic, but I plan to bombard the attending advisers with … […]

albert
Posted: Mar 14th, 2008 at 11:07 am

Put teasers in the print paper pointing out your unique online content.

Brad Luttrell
Posted: Mar 14th, 2008 at 1:34 pm

My biggest suggestion is to keep all of your content together. Often you see newspapers splitting their media to one section or an entirely different Web site. I say you have to be able to keep that together. You basically mentioned that with being able to load up slideshows, but I think it’s really important ot keep it together.

The Kentucky Kernel will be launching a new Web site in the Fall so that we can drop our media site and have all of our content in one place. But it is amazing how many great newspapers actually have a visual site. The Mercury News and the Lexington Herald-Leader are among those.

This is by far one of my favorite posts of yours. Keep this stuff coming.