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, history, unique aspects of local life (attractions, institutions and events) and a user-generated encyclopedia of local knowledge.
Databases
I have detailed the possibilities for databases in a separate report for Newspaper Next: Be the Answer: Using interactive databases to provide answers and generate revenue. We will develop databases to provide content throughout our digital products as well as to provide information we would use in print and broadcast. Interactive databases would be the cornerstone of the a massive answer center we would develop where people in the community could seek answers to nearly any question at the state or community level.
Zack Kucharski is off to a strong start developing such an answer center in the Data Central portion of GazetteOnline, providing answers about such matters as flood buyouts, Hawkeye football history and salaries of government workers. We need to continue development of this resource, both through answerbases we develop ourselves and through links to answerbases provided elsewhere. For an in-depth look at the possibilities for anwerbases, read the full N2 report. (API charges $19.95 for the report; Gazette Communications staff who haven’t read it can see me for a copy.)
Some topics on which we need to develop answerbases (priorities and needs will vary for each media organization; you need to provide information that’s important to your community):
I have detailed the possibilities for databases in a separate report for Newspaper Next: Be the Answer: Using interactive databases to provide answers and generate revenue. We will develop databases to provide content throughout our digital products as well as to provide information we would use in print and broadcast. Interactive databases would be the cornerstone of the a massive answer center we would develop where people in the community could seek answers to nearly any question at the state or community level.
- Health (complaints against doctors, nursing home violations)
- Business (development, executive salaries, building permits, professional licenses)
- Politics (fact-checking, campaign contributions, candidates’ positions on issues)
- Local government (votes by elected officials, public property)
- Public safety (meth busts, sexual assaults, drunk driving, motorcycle accidents)
- Education (state test scores, school discipline, graduation rates)
- Recreation (summer camps, eagle nests, boating safety, boat thefts)
Neighborhood resources
This content differs from at least two other types of content that might also operate at the neighborhood level: hyperlocal talk sites and news sites. These would be places you can go to learn useful timely and evergreen information about your neighborhood. The content could follow a combination of existing models such as Everyblock, Washingtonpost.com Local Explorer and CinciNavigator (described already in the section on homes) and Jacqueline DuPree’s JDLand’s Southeast Washington, D.C., development site.
Local Explorer, CinciNavigator and Everyblock are great examples of how we should be able to assemble and present databases to provide lots of answers on the neighborhood level – crime, schools, home sales, services, restaurants, local calendar, local news, basic local info, local photographs, permits, etc.
JDLand is a great example of using citizen journalists to present the information that many of them already are gathering out of self-interest. This site is more sophisticated than most will be, because of DuPree’s skill as a professional journalist in her day job for the Washington Post and because she happens to live in a neighborhood that’s undergoing such dramatic change. But lots of neighborhoods have activists, busybodies and gadflies with similar passions whom we can recruit and provide a forum to build rich, lively, detailed neighborhood sites.
Especially in neighborhoods rebuilding after the flood, connections to neighborhoods are strong in the communities we cover and we can provide forums and tools for people to compile and share information. Depending on the neighborhood or the source, we may bring some of these folks onto our sites as participants or we may link to their independent sites. Either way, we become the place to find all the neighborhood resources.
We will need to brand our own content separately from the user-generated content, and to provide ways for the community to rate the credibility of the content.
Services
Between the iGuide and annual publications such as Explore and Discover, we already compile a great amount of information to help people with the needs and chores of daily life. We want to compile and provide information and services that will be valuable to newcomers to our region as well as to longtime residents. We need to tell how to get your driver’s license, start utilities, start the newspaper, find schools and places of worship and so on. Where you can do this online, we must help you do that right from our site or connect you to the agency’s site. We have to become the place to connect with services in the community. Of course, a print version of this will have value as well, but the digital version will always be current.
As we develop products from this content, we need to offer abundant opportunities here for search, direct sales, self-serve advertising and targeted advertising. If we develop the place people connect when they are coming into the community or changing their level of involvement in the community (for instance, when you develop a new interest or your children reach school age), we have tremendous lead-generation opportunities. We can provide one place to start your paper, hook up your power, register children for schools, etc., collecting fees from the businesses and schools. And it’s such a useful tool that you keep coming back as long as you live in the community.
History
We have long called newspapers the “first rough draft of history.” We need to dig up the historical work we’ve already done on important events and anniversaries for Cedar Rapids and other communities, presenting .
For instance, the full content of the “Epic Surge” book and DVD and the Iowa City tornado book should be part of the history section, along with the Gazette’s 125th anniversary issue. We can present the archive on topics or issues in town. We can make this a wiki, too, inviting each faith community, school or civic group and neighborhood association to post its own history or asking for people’s remembrances of big events in the community or of the community’s experience in big national or world events. Whether we write them ourselves or invite community members to write them, we need histories of the communities and neighborhoods most impacted by the flooding — Czech Village, Time Check, Palo, etc.
Much of this content can draw on our archives. For instance, we might not immediately write histories of important local companies such as Rockwell Collins, AEGON or Quaker Oats, or they might not provide their own histories. But at the least, we can compile links to important stories we have written through the years about those companies. Even where we do have current histories, the archives will let people get more information and spend more time digging through our content.
Maybe we don’t have huge revenue opportunities in compiling the community history, but we might have some targeted advertising opportunities. And we can do direct sales of books relating to community history, tickets to museums, etc. Even if we don’t develop strong revenue from this, the audience we build here, by adding to our image as the source for all answers and information about Iowa and its communities, builds audience for the more lucrative parts of the site.
Attractions, events and institutions
The Tacoma News Tribune’s Mount Rainier guide, Cape Cod Times tourism guide and Orange County Register beach guide provide several strong models for us to follow in becoming the authority on our local attractions, institutions and events. We can do this in partnership with or in competition with the attractions and institutions themselves and the organizations sponsoring the events.
We already produce lots of content about these attractions, events and institutions. Instead of getting one day’s value out of that content, we need to aggregate it, add to it and organize everything into a community resource that provides easily searchable answers to everything you want to know about this attraction, event or institution. Our database on Hawkeye football history and dining guide are examples of the kind of content we want to develop here. Topics or institutions on which we would want to develop deep, detailed resources might include the University of Iowa (and parts of the university, such as the Writers Workshop and Hawkeye sports teams), Amana Colonies, Hoover birth site, Iowa caucuses, Rockwell Collins, Quaker Oats, the Czech and Slovak Museum and African American Museum.
Of course, with all of this, we should start with our core communities and the region where our brand is the strongest, but Iowa.com gives us a brand with statewide potential and this is certainly an example of an area where we could expand into statewide content.
The revenue possibilities here are extensive: selling tickets to events and attractions as well as reservations for nearby lodging; selling books, DVDs and other informational items, whether we produce them or retail them for the attractions themselves; selling memorabilia, logo clothing and so on.
User-generated Encyclopedia
Wikipedia has had some credibility issues, but it presents a lot of accurate information that is useful to a lot of people and we can apply the same model on the local/state level. We will need to address some labeling and credibility issues so that we present the “collective wisdom” (which sometimes is the collective ignorance) separately from the authoritative, verified information we compile. We would require only users whose identification has been verified to contribute to this wiki. We need to design it so that contributions are attributed to people, linking to their profiles citing their claimed credentials (and the model would allow participants to challenge or support the credentials of people who were being unduly boastful or modest).
We should prime the pump here, inviting known experts on topics or officials of organizations to start entries in their areas of expertise.
Continue reading the Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection with Personal content and connection.
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[…] information is one of the areas they’re exploring. (See, for example, Steve Buttry’s laundry list of data the Cedar Rapids Gazette is looking to incorporate on its sites.) As the data imported to the […]
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[…] online) information is one of the areas they’re exploring. (See, for example, Steve Buttry’s laundry list of data the Cedar Rapids Gazette is looking to incorporate on its sites.) As the data imported to the site […]
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Steve:
I generally agree with what you wrote about local history, but I disagree with this: “Maybe we don’t have huge revenue opportunities in compiling the community history.” I think there is huge revenue potential for archive content.
An example: Gannett has digitized some of its papers’ archives and used them to build two thematic history sites about the moon landing (moonlanding.historybeat.com) and Woodstock (woodstock.historybeat.com). Because the content is so targeted, advertisers can reach an audience with a specific interest. As you can see, Northrup Grumman has signed on to sponsor the moon landing site.
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You’re absolutely right, Mark. I should have said that just because I didn’t see as strong revenue opportunities here didn’t mean they weren’t as strong as other areas. Thanks for enlightening. Anyone else have ideas on how to generate revenue from historical content?
I do agree with Mark that archives have great revenue potential, not all from this sort of focused historical site. But great work on http://www.historybeat.com/, Mark. Can’t wait to see what you do next.
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[…] Community content (driving, home, conversation, calendar, knowledge) […]
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[…] mentioned earlier, the local search and local knowledge sections of my 2009 Blueprint for the Complete Community Connection discussed the value of […]
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Reblogged this on OC TALK RADIO and commented:
Some stimulating ideas from a few years ago on how newspapers can profit from a return to “local content” and the new type of local content that can attract an audience and generate profits including ‘hyperlocal talk’…exactly what we’re doing at http://www.OCTalkRadio.ent
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