The essence of sites doing well with online news comes from embracing two concepts: participation, and community relevance.
Is Online News Living Your Experience?
Shifts in approaching the Internet by news sites need to take into account what their audiences want. Sounds fundamental, almost simplistic, but not real easy to pull off.
Kevin Anderson noted one incident in his discussion of ‘lived experience’ with news sites that really emphasized the need for such community focus. A December 2006 talk that mentioned a journalism project called MyMissourian.com showed how readers judge what is news far differently from professional editors:
I still remember last December when Clyde Bentley spoke about his MyMissourian.com project at a Journalism.co.uk event where I also spoke. Clyde said that his team had expected more discussion and stories about politics, especially during the US Midterms elections last year. As a matter of fact, he said:
You know what’s not popular? Politics. … Religion is far more popular than we predicted. And pictures of dogs, cats, even rats trump most copy.
That’s evocative of Hannibal Lecter’s line from The Silence of the Lambs: “We begin by coveting what we see every day.” People want the familiar in their news.
Another quote comes to mind, this time from Terry Pratchett’s Patrician in The Truth: “In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.”
(We managed to quote a serial killer and a dictator – both fictional of course – in relating the views of the typical Internet user to the news they seek. Let’s see the New York Times match that.)
Anderson made a good point about community in that thinking of it as hyper-local only works to a certain degree. It’s not just geography, but a locale of interests.
Locality in functions and in stories are ideas we’re trying to meld at Murdok. If you’re a repeat visitor, it’s likely you have a persistent interest in search-related topics. That’s the locality of stories in play.
Functionally, you have seen a number of changes on Murdok. The look and feel has changed a little, the addition of features has been greater. We’ve made video part of the weekday experience, and as conference season gets under way there will be coverage of events like Pubcon, SES, and Danny Sullivan’s events like SMX Advanced 2007:Search Marketing Expo.
It’s our way of focusing on the important issues ‘localized’ to your interests. We will continue to tweak things like the recently added comments feature below this story. Let us know what you think, and what you might want to see here.
