More Context = More Readers and Advertisers
Reynolds Fellow Partners with Missourian to Create Layered News Site
Matt Thompson in front of the Web site Columbia Tomorrow.
Matt Thompson watched, along with the rest of the nation, as Wall Street CEOs begged Congress for big bailouts. Droves of newspaper reporters and TV crews covered the hearings, but Thompson found that much of the coverage lacked deeper context on what brought once-mighty titans to their knees.
So the 28-year-old Thompson, one of the inaugural Donald W. Reynolds Fellows at the Reynolds Journalism Institute, spent a couple days cobbling together a one-page Web site on the money meltdown, which offered readers links to scores of other stories on the biggest financial mess since the Great Depression.
He wasn’t alone in his appetite for more in-depth and contextual coverage: more than 50,000 people visited the page in just one month. Thompson knew he was onto something big. “We typically think the role of the news organization is to lay it out in the story,” Thompson says. “But the story is an inadequate form to contain this.” Instead, this approach provided “a synthesized overview. The real value is context.”
Take any issue before Congress, such as proposals on health care or carbon emissions, and Thompson argues that it’s impossible to find a single news source that gives you all you want to know to be a smarter voter and consumer. “We see incessant stories quoting anonymous officials in Congress, but the larger picture is hard to grasp. I think that happens on a local scale as well.”
Thompson, previously the deputy web editor at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, decided to test his theory with an ultra-local topic – growth and development in Columbia. For his Reynolds Fellowship, Thompson partnered with the Reynolds Journalism Institute, the Columbia Missourian and KOMU, to create “Columbia Tomorrow,” a Web site to help citizens understand the often tedious, but important subject of growth and development of their town.
The site is very user-friendly with a rail of buttons to go deeper on subjects, such as zoning and development. It invites readers to get involved by asking questions such as: “How do we make Columbia the best city on Earth?” Longer features and news stories top off the site with updates on the new wing at Boone Hospital or a discussion on what urban planners see for future commercial and residential projects.
The benefits of the new site are many. For citizens, the Missourian now has a Web site that educates readers on how to understand complex subjects, such as transportation development districts, or how to get involved and be heard before city council. “This provides context when people want it,” says Scott Swafford, Missourian city editor who leads the government coverage. At any given time, many residents “don’t give a hoot” about development, until it “comes home to roost in their neighborhood,” Swafford says.
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Swafford, who has been in Columbia for over 20 years, sees it as a great tool for readers, such as neighborhood associations, which have become increasingly vocal before a new shopping center or highways crop up.
Creating specific and deep content creates new opportunities for revenue, too. For instance, the Missourian might not capture as many ads from architectural or engineering firms, which tend to advertise in trade publications or business journals. This is also an upscale demographic of readers, with higher discretionary income, making them appealing to advertisers.
“You’re creating a niche publication,” Thompson says. “You’re setting yourself up to have an audience.” Other possibilities: developers who want to know what the council is likely to approve, builders who want to get in the first bids and realtors who want to make the first sale.
Thompson often likens his project to Wikipedia as it allows users to keep clicking away to dig as deep as they like, instead of just stopping at one article. “Wiki was once a small set of pages. As information was added, it grew into a super comprehensive site,” he says.
The idea of customizing a publication was one of the things predicted by Nelson Poynter, the legendary editor of the St. Petersburg Times, who bequeathed his newspaper to establish a non-profit journalism think tank, now known as the Poynter Institute. Back in the early 1970s, Poynter predicted that the St. Petersburg Times would someday be customized to give him plenty of Hoosier basketball coverage, and less of what he didn’t care to read. Indeed, that may be one reason he founded Congressional Quarterly as no one was providing in-depth coverage of Congress, says James M. Naughton, president emeritus of the Poynter Institute.
Whether in print or online, Naughton says editors have to “package the material in a way that invites people to immerse themselves in it.” Such niche coverage has to be “appealing and inviting and broken up into sub categories so they can get their fill of the subject in a way that provides currency and context,” Naughton says. “That’s not easy to do.”
Major U.S. newspapers are starting to experiment with niche publications on their Web sites. The New York Times, for instance, has “Times Topics,” where readers can find stories and videos on “topics ranging from Madonna to Myanmar.” The archive dates back to 1981, and has rotating feature stories on the first page, people in the news, ongoing series and topics for discussion.
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, has a rail of links to its most popular topics, such as a multi-media report on Bernie Madoff, the New York financier who defrauded investors out of millions of dollars. Each page has a rail of ads for online currency trading or discount stock sales.
Naturally, editors always fear how much time and money such a project will take, especially when they have fewer reporters and editors due to staff cuts. But beyond the initial reporting to write topic pages and produce videos, the site actually saves time as the usual background paragraphs that each reporter repeats in each story are already there, allowing them to simply top off the site with what’s new. “We’re not spending an inordinate amount of effort creating a new thing,” Thompson said.
To be sure, Swafford and others at the Missourian now face the daily task of maintaining and updating the site, which requires training reporters and editors to constantly think about keeping the site fresh. That’s especially challenging as the reporting staff changes as new journalism students join the newspaper. “We have to make it an integral part of the work flow, not an afterthought,” Swafford says.
But it serves as a teaching tool for those who know little about Columbia. “This will save me a lot of speechifying,” Swafford says. “This will give students one more resource where they can get up to speed.”
Like all news organizations, the Missourian editors realize that readers have plenty of choices for information. “We’ve got to provide news that they simply will not get anywhere else,” Swafford says. “Columbia Tomorrow is an example of that. I don’t know where else you can get all that information in one place and talk to your neighbors about it.”
As for Thompson, he’s contemplating what’s next. For starters, he’s drafting a manuscript from his blog, newsless.org. “I want to see how I can best take the ideas from the fellowship and apply them to real-world scenarios.”
He’s likely to find plenty of news executives to listen to his research, given the pressures on news organizations to keep readers and advertisers engaged. “We have to build news sites that grow, rather than throw out an endless churn of headlines.”
Hear what Matt Thompson and other leaders from journalism, ethics and new media say about the ethics of journalism in the 21st Century.
Read more at Matt Thompson's blog, Newsless.org.
Story by: Alecia Swasy