You”ll find many wild ideas here. Ideas to inject new life and energy into newspapers.
But here’s the most revolutionary, evolutionary idea of all.
In one swell foop, it capitalizes on many points presented here:
- Job 1: Be less boring.
- News is not the answer.
- It’s time to empower the renegades on staff.
- Dare to brainstorm the blank page.
- Really find out what readers what.
In a single section, it’s possible to do all of the following:
- Create a perpetual innovation machine.
- Reverse the life-draining outflow of content to the Web.
- Get readers more involved than ever.
- Add candor, creativity, humor and surprise.
- Showcase content no other local media outlet can.
Look at what’s been thriving lately on the Web: MySpace. YouTube. Blogs. Forums. Places where million of people fulfill their need to have their time in the sun, their 15 zillion nanoseconds of fame. Newspapers have been remote, distant from their readers, who get a spotlight only in letters, ads, announcements, or some limited poem/drawing/photo page.
Change that. Radically. The salvation of newspapers could lie not in feeding the Web but in stealing ideas from it.
Call this new section: The People Pages … The People’s Ex-Press … YourSpace … The Youse Paper, as we might say in Philly. Or ByPopular Demand. Fill it with anything and everything that lets readers shine. The list of possibilities is long … and it better be to save a medium.
The content? As marketing genius Abe Lincoln once said: This section would be “by the people, of the people, and for the people.”
It would be reader approved. Yes, polls and surveys, both in print and online would perpetually shape the content, forcing it to evolve.
There’s even a way it could be financially supported by readers. Smart business upsell their products. How about this “premium” subscription idea? For so much more a year, you get so many free announcements (anything from love notes for Valentine’s Day to birth announcements to death notices) or classified ads, or even just a box of reader shout-out space in our new YourSpace section.
Staff would be involved (there’s always a price), but mostly in selecting and shaping in ways that empower and gratify readers — or in creating graphics and briefs about ordinary folks.  Oh, and in making the section look good with photos and illustrations.
A sampling of the possible ideas:
- My Room … My Fridge … My Shopping Cart … My Gift Idea … (What I Bought and Why).
- Original reader one-liners, like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s “The Vent.”
- Original mini comics (graphic short stories, longer than panel cartoons).
- “Everybody’s a Critic.” A column with short opinions on anything. (See “Low-Brow Brigade” post.)
- Best of blogs, sports forums, YouTube, MySpace and FaceBook, with emphasis on local people.
- “Reality shows” that follow the lives of readers. (Do you own Bachelor, Biggest Loser or Apprentice.
- Talk of the Towns: Positive newsy notes about your neighbors. Or “My Friend. My Hero. My Neighbor” Testimonials.
- Contests / quiz shows in which readers compete.
- Provocative comments culled from stories on the Web.
- Results of all sorts of Internet polls.
- A Talk About TV forum (what’s with mostly doing reviews, which talk about shows before anyone else has seen them?).
- Poetry, fiction, plays … as long as it’s short and preferably illustrated.
- People’s pix .. best local pictures posted online … babies, pets, gardens, friends and family.
- Letters to the editor off the beaten social-studies track.
- Jokes. Yes. Including visually humor PhotoShopped art.
- Classifieds, birth/wedding/death announcements, any other ads ads from regular readers.
You’ll find more possibilities mentioned on other parts of this blog.
In short, craft a lot of your Website so it not only entertains people online, but generates content for this section. (Note: I have even better ideas for synergistic Web content I’m holding back to further develop.)
What’s the appeal? Online, visitors can be overwhelmed by all the choices.
This section will package it all in a handy, portable entertaining way.
It should look nothing like a newspaper. Screw the columns. Screw the rectangular pictures. No strings of paragraphs. An inviting chaos of small art, little bold headlines and easy to read text blocks. Staffers who work on this should be short-form thinkers.
Make it mostly local. But make it partly national. Humor can be universal.
And share content with other papers. Help each other out.
Create an Associated Ex-Press … sharing print-worthy content from the Web.
To give newspapers new energy, life and hope.