Personal content opportunities: Births

This is the first part of the personal content section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection. Births are huge personal news and they are spending occasions. More important, this is an opportunity for the Complete Community Connection to connect with a family. We should provide the baby’s first web page, created automatically upon the blessed [...]

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Personal content and connection

This is the sixth section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection. A longtime contradiction of life in the news business has been that we ignore or downplay the biggest news in the lives of the people we serve. If someone in your family graduates, gets married, has a baby, dies or has a major illness [...]

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Community-content opportunities: Local knowledge

This is the fifth and final part of the community content section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection. An important aspect of the Complete Community Connection will be to develop the place where people of our communities and perhaps across Iowa turn for answers to their questions about this state and its communities: databases, community resources, services, [...]

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Community-content opportunities: Calendar

This is the fourth part of the community content section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection. The unified calendar we launched this year at Iowa.com, serving all our company products, has barely begun to tap the possibilities of an interactive calendar. It’s providing content on events effectively, but the Complete Community Connection needs to pursue revenue possibilities. [...]

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Community-content opportunities: Conversation

This is the second part of the community content section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection. The experience of MonroeTalks.com, detailed in Newspaper Next 2.0, shows the potential for community conversation platforms. The Iowa.com iTalk section has barely begun to explore the possibilities that the Complete Community Connection must pursue. A community conversation platform needs to [...]

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Community-content opportunities: Home

This is the second part of the community content section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection. Real estate advertising is a long-time staple for newspapers that is collapsing under pressure from multiple directions. Real estate agents increasingly are reaching customers directly. Other digital advertising sites are attracting some of the dwindling real estate advertising dollars. And [...]

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Community-content opportunities: Driving

This is the first part of the community content section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection. Newspaper companies have gone about trying to protect the automotive vertical all wrong. We have tried to compete head-on with the other sites focused on the rare job of buying a car (I did that job last summer for the [...]

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The C3 approach to community content

This is the fifth section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection.  The Complete Community Connection will always have its roots in news and we must maintain a strong commitment to news. But much of our future success will come from our ability to develop useful community content whose value is timeless, rather than timely. C3 [...]

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Assumptions of the C3 blueprint

This is the fourth section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection. Before I go into much detail in this blueprint, I need to address the underlying assumptions: Whether you are an employee, a consumer, a business in our community or a colleague in some aspect of the media industry, your assumptions about the [...]

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C3 needs a new revenue approach for the digital marketplace

This is the third section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection. Revenue generation traditionally isn’t a journalist’s job, but helping develop a business model for the future of journalism is every journalist’s job today. The job cuts throughout our industry (including here) have done too much damage to journalism to cling to our [...]

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Development of the C3 blueprint

This is the second section of the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection. I don’t know whether I’m the right person to help guide Gazette Communications into a challenging and uncertain future. But I do know that I am here because of a vision for the future of what we now know as newspaper companies [...]

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A Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection

This is a vision for transformation of our media company and of media companies in general. A vision like this needs lots of detail and I’ll provide plenty of that in related posts. But most important, it needs a simple proposition — how consumers and business customers will see us: For consumers, we will be [...]

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