The beauty of local news is that one is writing for a small community. This small community will respond better to social media interaction than a non-cohesive national audience. The best way to interact with and engage this audience is to give readers their own avatars so they feel like part of a community when they are on a site, then encourage them in various ways to make their unique mark all over aspects of the site. Some sites already do this to a certain extent, but I think it is a strategy that hasn’t been explored to its fullest potential yet.

Every reader is an individual

DCist, a local news blog, has many active users. The most active 50 each week can be viewed here. The site tracks how often they post comments. I think this could be easily expanded to include how often they send in story tips, on-scene photographs, or post on message boards. For a breaking news event, these unique users will be more inclined to send in their content if they know it will be obvious who the credit goes to. Unique users who post comments regularly will begin to interact with each other. If these comment threads are monitored to make sure they don’t disintegrate into personal attacks, the users can build atop each others ideas, respond to each other, etc. With the advent of Twitter, comment threads are already moving in this direction, with many users making reference to “@Anonymous 4:35 a.m.” or however another user wishes to identify himself. Of course, some users will still choose to remain anonymous, but I think a majority will like the idea of having posts tied to a unique identity. The anonymity of the Web also won’t necessarily tie a username to a real name.

Tools

• Twitter Lists: Our site can make lists of users grouped by certian categories (the categories they choose). For example, some Twitter/avatar users of the site can be grouped into lists by neighborhood, by interest, by job type, etc. Because these lists are open, the users can interact better with each other and keep conversations going with like-minded individuals.
• Sidewiki: This Google application works like a sidebar conversation on a web page. On a news story, it could act like a different kind of comment box for regular unique users. Users can add not just insights but pictures, video and other content.
• Alerts: Today’s readers prize instant knowledge. They should be able to create through their personal avatars specialized alerts so they can filter out what they aren’t interested in and keep the alerts they really want.
• Google Wave and Google Latitude: These brand-new Google applications have different journalistic uses. With Latitude, a unique user can interact on the site with their phone from a certain location, and that could be tracked. For some, this might be too much of an invasion of privacy, but I feel many users would like the idea of being able to be located geographically and differentiated from a user in another neighborhood or city. For Wave the uses would be similar to Sidewiki, with side conversations going that can include various types of media like videos, pictures and live conversation.
• Phone Applications: BlackBerry and iPhone applications are the way of the future for mobile readers who want their news instantly. Our local news website would have one of these that would work on smartphones of all types. Their phone could be linked to their online avatar so that if they post a comment or add to the conversation in other ways, it will be tracked.

In the future of social media, I believe all users will have one unique identifying avatar that they can use across all platforms — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, etc. For now, we don’t have the technology to intergrate like that, but I feel like our site would be on the cutting edge of social media if we used this approach. Our readers would like it too.

The page has over 4,000 fans. Considering their circulation and reach, that doesn’t seem like much.

The page is pretty active, but sporadic. Some days will see five or more posts, while other days don’t get posts at all. The posts get a fair amount of comments and “likes” from fans of the page, but it’s not an overwhelming kind of thing. The comments are usually pretty intelligent and don’t stray into the crazy territory.

It seems like Politico is doing everything right: they post stories at good times, the stories they post are compelling, and yet, they don’t seem to have a huge Facebook following.

Their Info section is well done, with links to their best pages (Click, 44, the Arena). Their photo page could use some work — it only really has art by their cartoonist. On the other hand, Politico doesn’t really have a lot of unique photography, and that’s not what they’re known for.

The Notes section could use some work. They seem to have tried to start posting top stories of the day, but the last posting was a month ago. Their Discussion section is also pretty dead. There are only a handful of discussions going on and I wouldn’t even call a one post a “discussion.” Their Events and Video sections are empty.

It’s unclear why the fan page is so unpopular. It may be because their reporters don’t really interact with readers in the comments. If I were to comment on a particular story and the reporter responded directly to me, I would be really excited, and probably comment all the time. But readers only have themselves to interact with.

I would recommend more interaction with readers, a beefed-up discussion section, more videos and events posted, and a daily Note with the top stories of the day. I would also recommend they post more stories more often, and make sure they’re the top stories of the day.

I’m actually going to compare two Politico.com twitterers, because I feel like they each have different strengths and weaknesses.

Mike Allen tweets infrequently, but his tweets are often important, breaking news. He throws in, inexplicably, lots of links to the print edition too. Not sure who that is aimed at. Here’s a sample:

1. AP: Obama wins 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”5:11 AM Oct 9th from web
2. For a donation, the House GOP campaign comm. offers membership on the NRCC “Physicians’ Council for Responsible Reform.” http://bit.ly/xW8R24:45 AM Oct 9th from web
3. POLITICO/House ethics unanimously votes to expand investigation into Rangel’s finances to include his revised personal financial disclosures3:56 PM Oct 8th from web
4. BREAKING — Senate Finance Committee vote on health care TUESDAY10:30 AM Oct 8th from web

All of Mike Allen’s tweets that I saw seemed to be published from the web. I can’t believe he doesn’t have a BlackBerry or some kind of mobile web device, so I suppose this means he just chooses not to use it.

It’s nice not to be overloaded by stupid tweets I don’t care about, but Allen really doesn’t seem to be tweeting as often as he could. Maybe getting TwitterBerry or something would help. He also rarely interacts with readers.

Allen’s collegue Jonathan Martin is his polar opposite on Twitter. A few newsy tweets are mixed in with tons of @replies and random comments. Here’s a sample:

1. 4 ticks left, Tenn lining up 4 44-yrd fg 4 THE WINabout 18 hours ago from web
2. If anybody not watching, put on tenn-al. tenn has ball back, down by 2 w/ just over a minute leftabout 18 hours ago from web
3. @treyditto – half-smke, loaded, and strwbry shake. my go-to.about 19 hours ago from mobile web
4. @jaketapper — hardly, but tis not first time i’ve heard go-go!about 21 hours ago from mobile web
5. Some of the tourists at ben’s chili bowl not quite, um, ready when the go-go starts blaring.about 21 hours ago from mobile web

A few tweets ago, there was something about Bill Clinton, but the majority of tweets were about go-go music, food and a football game. He also tweets constantly, at a rate of about 2-6 an hour.

Martin has way more interaction with readers than Allen, and I think his more personal tweets would attract a different twitter audience than Allen’s. Martin is considerably less popular though, with about 4,000 followers vs. Allen’s 12,000. Since Mike Allen is more well-known, it’s hard to say if the numbers of followers each has is attributable to their different styles or simply name recognition.

The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.

The shift in news production will impact media in a major way:

Big Media will continue to be influenced by what former audience members want. If they see them posting funny videos, they will try to make their own. If they see them writing political blogs, they will make their own. Many new ideas for news distribution will be formed this way. In fact, it seems like most of the new ideas for news distribution online came from former audience members. Competition in the workplace is healthy.

Politico.com seems to have been created off this entire premise. Everything about the site (for the most part) is based on the needs of a new generation of online news consumers. Some things are less well executed than others (bad video vs. early and constant deadlines), but they seem to be trying. Apparently, the only reason they have a paper edition is because they wanted the older generation of politicians to see them as a “real” news source. They have adapted to various needs of the people formerly known as the audience, as well as those who are still audience members.

Here’s what editors said when Politico launched in early 2007:

Harris is also seeking a new style of writing. “The austere, voice-of-God detachment which is the classic newspaper style can be an impediment to engagement with the reader and a genuine understanding of what’s going on with a story,” he says. VandeHei says he wants “provocative content” and “reporters to be comfortable with letting readers know more about them.”

I’ve been trying for years now to perfect a method of reading news that allows me to absorb the largest amount of information in the smallest amount of time. For awhile, I only read the Washington Post’s print edition. That lasted until I couldn’t afford the subscription anymore.

My next stage was to make bookmarks of my favorite news sites and try to check them as often as I could. But the problem with that method is that essential and interesting stories would often move out of the rotation of the front-page, and it became difficult to keep track of which stories had been published that day.

So to make sure I could keep track of every single story, I signed up for hundreds of RSS feeds from newspaper sites and blogs. This started a period in my life where I spent about three hours a day trying to keep up with the 600 items that would come in. This didn’t last long, not so much because of the time investment but because I had no idea which stories were more important. On the other hand, I NEVER missed a story.

Eventually, I moved to my current method of news consumption — the email newsletter. It’s not perfect, but it’s easy to skim, is organized by interest, and there’s a clear hierarchy of importance.

After signing up for about six of these newsletters initially, I’ve narrowed it down to four: Politico, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Daily Beast’s Cheat Sheet.

I’ll ignore the Cheat Sheet because it’s different from the others.

Politico falls in the middle of the spectrum, in my opinion. They publish far fewer stories every day than the other two papers, but the layout is clean and they will have their centerpiece story with art way at the top of the email.

The New York Times has the best newsletter. They put 3-4 of their best stories in each category in it, which makes it easy for me to get caught up. Their centerpiece thumbnails work well to pull me in, and I’m always interested in the quotation of the day.

The Washington Post does the worst job. They often don’t include art, have too many stories in each category (5-6), and there’s no way for me to include Tom Toles’ daily cartoons in the email, which is one of my favorite things about the Post. I actually can’t show what the newsletter looks like because unlike Politico’s or the NYT’s emails, it doesn’t include a link to a web page version.

This picture of a museum in Seattle has elements of repetition in the bricks, quality of light as it falls on the building and how it lights up the sky, and rule of thirds going from top to bottom.

This picture of a guy in a tunnel has elements of perspective because you don’t see many pictures of people in tunnels, graphic because it almost looks like a cartoon and point of entry because of the way the tunnel draws the eye automatically.

This picture of an old lady has elements of quality of light because of the way it highlights her wrinkles, surprise  because she has some crazy face piercings, and impact because it’s just an awesome picture.

This picture of a beach at sunset uses quality of light because of the sunset and the way it makes the footprints and rocks look, rule of thirds going from sky to water to beach, and sense of place because of the uniqueness of the beach. Note the one plastic bottle down under the rocks.

This picture of a cat drinking water has elements of moment because one more drop and the picture wouldn’t look as cool, perspective because it gets up close in the cat’s face and impact because of the expression in the cat’s face.

The Good:

• We liked the way Politico had little drawings of the reporters as part of the title bar for their blogs.
• The page is only one or two scrolls long.
• The blue and red theme went well with the political nature of the site.
• The audio slideshows were pretty good.
• The search by reporter or date feature was helpful.
• There aren’t many ads, and the ones they have a nicely placed. How do they make money though?
• The grid worked well: the pics were staggered, the left alignment was good, had continuity, three columns were good for widgets, twitter feeds, etc.

The Bad:

• Most of the story links were the same size from top to bottom, hard to tell which ones were supposed to be the most important.
• The cohesiveness of the site could use work: some of the individual pages like Click were really well done, but didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the site. Others like Campus hadn’t been updated in a long time and seemed useless.
• The audio-video quality wasn’t very good on a lot of videos, and some like “Gibbs and Takes” were boring.
• The bios on the reporters were cool, but a lot of them weren’t filled out.
• The “Most Popular” feature was too small and looked crunched.
• They had a map of the 2008 election results as the main feature on one page. No one cares about that anymore.
• A lot of links to the videos were broken, and would bounce you back to the main video page, or take you to the wrong video.

This picture shows sense of place, perspective, rule of thirds and has a graphic quality because of the color of the wall.

This picture shows quality of light, perspective and layering.

This picture has surprise, personality and a graphic element.

This picture uses the rule of thirds where the fish are split in the middle and impact.

This picture uses quality of light, juxtapostion, mood and sense of place.

But other parts of online journalism freak me out, to be honest. The demanding workload of a 24-7 newsroom intimidates me, because I already work 24-7 and wouldn’t like to do that forever.

Politico.com is actually a good example of this, because they are one of the few really online newsrooms, and their physical newspaper is just to make sure old fogeys think they’re legit. I met one of their reporters over the summer and she told me they work incredibly long hours. (She said 18 hours a day, 6.5 days a week, which I assume is an exaggeration, but still.) They are also expected to be on top of their games very early in the morning, something most journalists aren’t used to. When I worked at McClatchy Newspapers over the summer, if I came in before 10 a.m. hardly anyone would be there, either at the office or in the Senate Press Gallery.

I’m young, and not afraid of working hard, but the idea of working those kind of grueling hours for the rest of my life doesn’t sound like fun.

Then again, John and Roger are older than me, and seemed to have adjusted just fine to the different kind of work schedule. So maybe it just depends a lot on the news outlet a person ends up at.

Politico.com trails washingtonpost.com, cnn.com and nytimes.com in almost every category. However, since the site is new and has such a narrow focus I think the fact that they are even competitive with those big names says something about their popularity.

For example, for many recent days, they were about equal with cnn.com on referrals from search engines, close to washingtonpost.com on time on site, and close to nytimes.com on their bounce rate.

Check it out:

via alexa.com

So while it seems on its face like politico.com is really behind, they are still sometimes beating the big dogs who have been around for a much longer time.

This trend seems like it might continue, too. Except for their bounce rate, which was down a little, all their stats had increased. In particular, pageviews and reach both increased by more than 70 percent.