Earlier today Howard Weaver tweeted the following, which I can’t answer in 140 characters (!) so I’ll respond here. …

“Why do people (@steveouting et al) keep saying ‘block level’ info is best premium opportunity? Seems *most* likely to be citizen generated.” –@howardweaver

I don’t recall saying it’s the “best” premium online content opportunity, though I think it’s important. Why? Because I don’t know what’s going on with my neighbors, other than the ones I know or who are friends. No business, media, or service has yet been able to inform me what’s going on in my little neighborhood (about 120 houses, in my case).

Sure, if a neighbor two streets over murders his family and sets his house on fire, the local media will tell me the details of that. But if that neighbor is not a loony but comes in first place in the Boulder Marathon, I’d like to be alerted that that person lives near me. If a county paving crew is coming to resurface a street in the neighborhood, I’d like to learn about that. If another neighbor’s car got scraped by a vandal last night, I want to know about that.

A lot of the pieces are waiting to be put together; they exist already. Everyblock.com can find data from my neighborhood (well, not actually MY neighborhood, but those in other cities it’s reached so far), by parsing it from public databases and mapping it; it can tell me when a house in the neighborhood is sold and the selling price; it can identify streets in my neighborhood where crimes occurred, and give me the details. I could find photos taken within my neighborhood on Flickr, for those photos that are geo-tagged (a growing number are). I could use Twitter search filters to find tweets posted from within my neighborhood (again, those that are geo-tagged, such as those posted from a GPS-enabled phone).

So to find out as much as I can about what’s happening in my little neighborhood, it’s now more possible than ever before; in time there will be even more news and data about my neighborhood or my block. It’s just not convenient or easy to find it all now.

So where there may be opportunity is in bringing all this together into a by-block or by-neighborhood information service that I might find worth paying for. It would know my address and alert me to new data (neighborhood home sales, crime reports, fires, divorces, marriages, deaths, etc.) automatically. It would identify Twitter posts that came from my neighbors and give me a list of them. It would know who my Facebook friends are (because I permitted the service to look into my account), and pull out status updates and other Facebook submissions from those in my neighborhood. It would identify bloggers who live nearby and show me their latest posts.

Of course, Google might get to this level of information granularity at some point and offer such a service for free. But it doesn’t yet. If a local media entity offered such a service for a modest price, I might pay for it. The value worth paying for is in the service of making all that micro-local and micro-personal news and data come to me in a simple personal digital information stream.

Is that a big business opportunity? I don’t know. I know I’d like to have that information available.

So, it appears that we’ve passed the point within the newspaper industry of utter panic and all the publishers will not be colluding (ahem… I mean cooperating) to put most of their websites’ content behind pay walls. At least that CEO/publisher-group insanity is over — I hope.

Instead, the meme within the industry is something I’ve long supported: Let’s keep most of our news content online free, so that we don’t lose advertisers and high reader numbers, and maintain our “googlejuice,” but let’s create more “premium” content and services that we can charge for … and people will find worthy of paying.

But what is this premium content that newspaper companies can produce for the web (and mobile devices) that will get online users spending?

This is a difficult question, with so much great information and news available elsewhere on the web for free. And then there’s the little matter of many newspaper staffs having been cut so much in the last couple years. Who’s going to produce this high-value content?

I’d like to use this blog item as a starting point for a discussion about what newspapers can create that they can sell. Please use the comments feature to share your ideas!

I’ll get things started with a comment of my own. It should be first in the list unless someone beats me to it…

Some folks who attended my “Why now is the best time ever to go into journalism!” keynote talk at the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas, on Friday asked how to get a copy of my presentation. A PDF version (big file!) is here.

I’m sure this will be mainstream across many professions before long, but for now it’s mostly limited to technology and media conferences. I’m talking about how speakers now get feedback from their audience as soon as they finish talking, via tweets from audience members posted immediately to Twitter. Overall, it’s a positive development that can benefit speakers — though something to get used to, and the speaker might take a few lumps.

Friday morning I gave a keynote talk on the third day of the National College Media Convention in Austin, Texas. It’s been a while since I gave a presentation solo to a fairly large audience, and so the audience tweeting was focused on what I was saying for close to an hour. (Being on a panel, your part is likely to only get a small number of tweeted comments.) As long as the attendees in my session used the conference hashtag (#ncmc09) and my Twitter name (@steveouting) or real name in their tweets, I could see the reaction from lots of people in the audience once my podium time was up.

There’s also a CoverItLive feed of Twitter posts during my talk on CoPress.org.

So while this is not the first time I’ve had a speaking engagement where audience members were tweeting, this was the first one where I got a really good feel for the new world of public speaking. It’s an interesting experience of getting feedback that wasn’t possible in the past. For example, I learned:

• What points people thought were most relevant (via multiple tweets of the same thought or quote).
• What things I said were misinterpreted or misunderstood. (That’s great information for next time; I know I need to do a better job explaining a particular slide or point.)
• What I screwed up. (A dollar figure I cited that apparently was wrong.) … Etc.

One interesting insight was when I got to a part of my talk where I discussed the need for Journalism schools to expand their reach to other disciplines, so that journalism students also learn entrepreneurial and business skills, and some computer science skills (or at least enough to understand how to talk with and work with MBAs and computer scientists). Some tweeters in the audience thought I was “bashing” journalism schools, and felt offended. Without those tweets, I never would have known that some people heard something different than I thought I said (which was that for this period in journalism’s history, business and technology skills are a necessary complement for a generation of journalists charged with reinventing the news business). I’ll phrase it differently next time.

And, of course, if you don’t have the oratory skills of President Obama (I definitely do not), you might hear a bit about that, too. … Seeing one person tweet that my delivery lacked enough voice inflection, I’ll go watch a few Obama speeches and work on that.

I think that as this audience behavior becomes even more common at conferences and lectures, it will help those speakers brave enough to look on Twitter for feedback to learn how to improve their delivery and message.

And, of course, it’s pretty cool for the audience members of a speech where one person is doing all the talking to be able to watch what others are tweeting. You get a sense of what points resonated with the audience; perhaps it’s something that your mind skipped over, or you interpreted differently. After the session, you can tap the collective minds of the rest of the audience to find the best stuff that was presented, and probably find additional insights beyond the speaker’s.

For speakers, get used to lots of people not looking at you but rather at their laptops or smart-phones. Lots of heads pointing down no longer means what it used to at a speech. It can mean that you’re presenting information that people find valuable enough to share via tweeting … or that everyone has noticed the ketchup stain on your tie. You’ll know after you’ve finished talking.

A new, and very large, Barnes & Noble bookstore opened here in Boulder, Colorado, recently, replacing a smaller store half a block away. I’ve wondered since construction started how the giant bookstore chain could justify a larger store when more and more we’ll be seeing people buying and reading books on digital tablets like Amazon’s Kindle. Wouldn’t smaller bookstores be in our future, not bigger ones?

With the announcement of B&N’s Nook e-reader device to compete with the Kindle, now I understand. The Nook digital strategy supports the brick-and-mortar business — the physical stores — of B&N.

I think the Nook business model is freaking brilliant! Here’s what it looks like:

• The Nook is priced about the same as a Kindle, but advances e-reader technology a bit. It features an E-Ink screen (no color) for reading, but also has a color navigation screen below the reading area.
• It adds a lend-a-book feature; it’s limited, but a great idea — and Amazon is sure to follow with something similar.
• You can preview and buy books anywhere you have a AT&T 3G signal or a wi-fi connection.
• And the best part: B&N says it “soon” will allow Nook owners to take their devices into any B&N physical store and read any e-book for free while in the store using the free wi-fi there!

I’m in awe of whoever thought up that last item. It’s a brilliant strategy to get more people into B&N bookstores. Nook owners will come in to read more than just the samples available to them outside the stores’ wi-fi range. They’ll buy coffee and perhaps other physical merchandise. They’ll read maybe a few chapters into a new book while lounging in a comfy chair in the store, then probably decide to buy the full e-book to finish at home later.

Sure, there might be a few freeloaders who spend time inside the stores reading entire books for free on their Nooks without actually buying the e-books. But so what?! I suspect that the increased coffee shop sales and the number of people who do buy the full e-books will far outweigh the freeloading. And the physical stores will be more crowded, sending the social signal the B&N stores are the place to be.

I had expected bookstores to eventually die off in larger numbers, and for chains like B&N to have fewer stores in the future. But this Nook strategy, as I see it, ensures a bright future for its brick-and-mortar stores. It gives the Nook a big advantage over the Kindle, since Amazon doesn’t have physical stores.

As for independent bookstores, if e-readers like the Nook, Kindle, et al truly take off, I’m not sure how they’ll stay healthy over the long run. But at least they probably have a longer lifespan than printed newspapers; I sense more people willing to say goodbye to the printed newspaper than the comfy printed book.

My latest Editor & Publisher Online column has been published: “Real-time, Relevant Ads Matched With Real-time News? What a Concept!.”

This is a really interesting topic, as we’re closing in on being able to match ads in real time contextually with news events as they quickly grow popular. I interview the CEO of OneRiot, a Boulder social-search company working on this model.

Right now, news happens fast, but ads that complement news can’t be efficiently added to accompany fast-breaking, going-viral news. Get the two in sync and you have the potential for effective, high-CPM ads sold in large quantities.

Example: Tornado rips through a Dallas neighborhood, resulting in a flood of traffic to local news website. Instead of showing all those Internet visitors cheap remnant ads, site utilizes technology to match the story with relevant ads, such as contractors, builders, window replacement providers, plumbers, insurance companies, home clean-up crews, disaster relief, hotels, etc.

This isn’t an easy problem to solve, because it will take advertisers a while to alter how they operate and provide feeds of ads that can be used to match news as it happens. And of course, not every breaking news event represents appropriate contextual ad opportunities. But this is coming, and I think it could be an important growth agent for online advertising for the news industry.

As a journalist trained way back in the 1970s, it’s amusing to compare how today the online the goal is to match content and editorial for financial gain. In my early days as a newspaper copy editor, part of my job was to make sure that didn’t happen — e.g., keep the United Airlines display ad off the page about the plane crash.

Reading the new report by Len Downie Jr. and Professor Michael Schudson, “The Reconstruction of American Journalism,” today, I kept wondering: Who is this report aimed at?

Commissioned by the Journalism School at Columbia University, the 96-page report offers nothing much new to media geeks. If you follow the news industry and its travails closely, the treatise is just a handy recap of how we got into this mess (newspapers crumbling, reporters laid off, et al) and of all the various small news entities springing up to take over some of the tasks that old news media is shedding (like “accountability journalism,” which saving is a central theme of the report). And then some recommendations; again, nothing particularly original.

But I don’t mean to be negative, because I think the report is great for the right audience: philanthropists and foundations.

As the authors make clear, much of the new news ecosystem — the part doing the serious watchdog and investigative journalism that advertisers don’t especially want to pay for — will be non-profit, or low-profit. For this segment of the news sector to grow (and it must), philanthropic money will be critical. Such news organizations can’t rely on sugar daddies forever, but they’ll need it initially while they work toward and invent a model for long-term sustainability.

(I am not dismissing for-profit enterprises springing up out of the ashes of old media, and neither do Downie and Schudson — though they don’t give a whole lot of time in their report to for-profit solutions to the news crisis.)

I do hope that “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” is widely distributed and read by community foundations, national foundations that have not yet made grants within the news and information sectors, and various other philanthropists. Because this report will serve to educate them on a problem that they should know about, and to persuade them to join the party to find solutions.

Of course journalism has long had its support from key foundations, with the Knight Foundation at the top of the heap. But even that big pile of cash in Miami won’t support everything that needs to be done to make up for the degradation of newspapers and resulting alarming decline in accountability journalism. New players must come into the picture, including more community foundations and local philanthropists. The authors make the case that local accountability journalism is most at risk (and much of it already lost in some communities).

Knight already has been courting community foundations, with matching grants for those that take on local initiatives or programs to keep their communities informed. It’s also reached out to other national foundations, urging them to get involved. After all, if the good work by organizations that these foundations support in other need areas can’t get their messages out because of a dysfunctional and chaotic media ecosystem, then it’s in community foundations’ interest to start spending some money on news and information experiments and solutions.

Entrepreneurs looking to make a profit well may be able to create new news entities that don’t rely on philanthropy to get started and succeed long term. But I’m of the opinion that when it comes to serious journalism (accountability, investigative, watchdog, public-interest, whatever you want to call it), we’re headed into a period where that kind of journalism increasingly will be non-profit.

I didn’t learn much that I didn’t already know from this report, but there’s a lot in there that caring people with money to give away to support their communities don’t yet understand. Let’s hope “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” gets on their reading lists, post-haste.

Some of the most popular content of the New York Times is (shocker) opinionated and biased. Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Paul Krugman … As op-ed columnists they get to report AND express opinions that influence readers. The Times felt that their content was so important that a few years ago it put up a pay wall around the op-ed columns (and some other stuff in a web initiative called TimesSelect), thinking that its star columnists’ work was so important that people would pay for it online. (Didn’t really work out so well.)

Not as popular: newspaper editorials and candidate endorsements. Yet they’re been with us for decades, and no doubt influenced many people who read them looking for guidance. Alas, some newspapers are getting out of the business of expressing opinions on such controversial issues as which candidates most deserve citizens’ votes. As Alan Mutter notes on his Newsosaur blog, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has decided not to endorse political candidates from now on. Mutter terms the AJC action “wimping out,” and I agree.

And I noticed some more wimpish behavior by a solid, quality old-media institution today, thanks to the non-wimpish Huffington Post.

Check out this significant and powerful story published by the St. Petersburg Times (which is owned by the Poynter Institute; disclaimer: a former employer of mine): “Nearly blind woman’s world grows darker as the medical bills pile higher.” Published September 28, it’s the story of a family going broke from medical bills despite having health insurance, and their insurance company denying further claims because the family has cost the company too much already (due to a rare genetic disorder that’s making the mother and her daughters go blind).

Great story; important. Reading it makes you want to help this unfortunate family. Alas, the St. Pete Times website, TampaBay.com, offers no way for readers to take action and directly help out with the family’s massive pile of unpaid medical bills. I know, as a long-time journalist, that putting up a widget on the website alongside the story, allowing sympathetic readers to directly donate online to the family, would be unseemly, under traditional journalistic thinking. “Heavens! Then everyone will be bugging us to raise money for their personal catastrophe! We’ll be seen as bleeding-heart liberals pushing the case for the public option on health care reform!”

Now take a look at what the Huffington Post did with this story. It summarized the St. Pete Times piece, embedded the video piece from TampaBay.com (as is allowed, and as I’ve done at the bottom of this item), and then added to its package a widget allowing anyone to donate money to the family’s PayPal account to help pay the medical bills. (This is part of a new initiative, introduced today, called HuffPost Impact.)

Hmmm. Well-respected Florida newspaper does dynamite article about a family’s miseries under our current health-care system. But it takes an Internet up-start to “break the old rules” and with a phone call and a few lines of code allow readers to help the family.

Is it just me, or is there something wrong with this picture? Newspapers are struggling, losing readers, losing advertisers to newer forms of media, losing relevance. Yet they stick to the old ways of doing things. And in this case, the local news institution that brought this family’s story to public light will not get the credit when caring members of the public help pay off their medical debt. The Huffington Post will get that credit, because it’s not afraid to take action to support a worthy cause.

What a sad story for the newspaper. It’s sad for the family involved, too, of course, but at least a new-media news entity decided that it didn’t need to live by the old rules, and asked its readers to take action.

“Tradition” lives on in the newspaper industry. Sigh.

Take a look at the left column of this blog, at the top just under the masthead, and you’ll see something new. It’s an experimental counter that tracks your personal usage on just this site. [Clarification: you may not see the counter widget until you've clicked around to a story or two on this site.] Called SurfShare and developed by NewsCloud’s Jeff Reifman, in time you’ll see more sites carry this widget.

Thus, for those participating sites that you visit, you’ll get a quick visual cue of how often you view those sites. It’s valuable feedback (I think), because with all the websites and blogs that most people visit in a typical day, you may not be fully aware of which ones you frequent often. (Be sure to enable your Facebook Connect connection on SurfShare, then it will soon track you across different computers, not just a single one.)

For publishers, the SurfShare personalized, site-specific stats for each user represent opportunity to make money by identifying your most faithful and frequent visitors. I’ll explain that in a bit.

For a more complete explanation of SurfShare, read Reifman’s blog post yesterday announcing the alpha launch.

SurfShare already has some nifty features such as, for the site visitor, a searchable, auto-tagged listing of all stories viewed on participating sites, and a widget that shows which of your Facebook friends have read a story; and for the publisher, a widget that shows a specific site’s most popular pages. More useful widgets are coming, Reifman says, such as a feature of SurfShare.org that will recommend stories your friends have read.

Now, back to that money thing. I think SurfShare is a smart idea, for one reason, because it helps a site publisher or blogger identify their “best customers” and most-frequent visitors. For example, with SurfShare, Reifman soon will add the ability for a participating site publisher to take actions after an individual user has visited the site, say, 10 times, or read 10 articles.

Examples of what action a publisher might take are many:

• A blog owner might after a visitor has read 10 articles redirect to a page that says some thing like, “Hey, I noticed that you seem to like my blog! Thanks for being a regular reader. I write this blog in my spare time, and if you’d like me to continue, I’d love it if you click the donate button below and send me whatever amount you’d like to support my writing. Thanks!”
• On the opposite extreme, a news publisher might decide that once a site visitor has read, say, 10 stories that he/she should start paying, and demand signing up for a micropayment account where each article read costs 1 cent. (This might hook into payments systems like those coming from Journalism Online, BitCents, or Google Checkout, or be part of SurfShare’s future options.)
• A site owner could use the user tracking to identify the best prospects for premium memberships. For example, The Times (of London) website could offer visitors a discount on its £50-a-year News+ premium online membership after they’ve read 10 articles on the site — and if no response, perhaps an even steeper discount after 20 articles. (See my most recent blog item about Times+.)
• A news site might notice that a visitor has viewed 10 sports pages, then offer a sports premium membership or suggest an e-commerce purchase (e.g., souvenir Super Bowl book) at a discount.

There are so many possibilities for what a blog or site publisher could experiment with using this approach. While some smart media companies with sophisticated publishing and marketing systems may already have tried such tactics, SurfShare appears as an opportunity for small sites and blogs to take advantage of new revenue-generating strategies based on tracking individual users’ behavior and identifying their best and most loyal online visitors.

Installation involves add a few lines of Javascript to your site, and a Wordpress plug-in is planned. You can add your site to SurfShare and pick up the code from this webpage.

I have a bias toward rewarding frequent visitors to a specific website or blog. I’d much rather offer the person who’s read 20 stories on my food-related site in the last week a discount or 2-for-1 meal coupon from an advertising restaurant, or offer a 25% discount on a recipe book that I’ll sell them, than force them to subscribe or start paying per article. Reifman has a differing view and likes the micropayment model. But the great thing about technology like SurfShare is that we can experiment and figure out what works best.

One other thing I like about the SurfShare model is that I think the user feedback of the tracker will motivate heavy users of a site to change their behavior, which might be to financially support the site in some new way. This reminds me very much of the miles-per-gallon (MPG) indicator in my wife’s car, which is a gas-electric hybrid.

Huh? Well, I’ve noticed the impact of that MPG meter on the dash on my driving habits. My car does not have an MPG indicator. Guess what: I find that I drive more smoothly and conservatively in my wife’s car, because that MPG indicator lets me know when I’m being a “bad” driver and wasting gas. In my own car with no such indicator, I tend to drive in my more normal manner: faster, with quicker starts and stops. The indicator in her car alters my behavior.

I think that for heavy users of a particular site, seeing their personal stats could likewise change their behavior. They may be more willing to support a site knowing how much they use it. It will be up to publishers and academic researchers to figure out how best to persuade such people to part with some of their money — whether by voluntary donation, making a prompted online purchase, buying a premium memberships, etc.

Frankly, I’m surprised that it’s The Times and the Sunday Times that have initiated the closest to what I’ve advocated in the past in terms of a smart, voluntary news premium membership model online. If you haven’t seen it, check out Times+.

Why my surprise? Well, if you’ve followed recent coverage of Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns the Times, you’d think that Sir Rupert is dead set on charging for all sorts of content online from his newspapers and new properties, and is “going to war with the Internet.” … That link is to Michael Wolff’s Vanity Fair profile on Murdoch for the November 2009 issue.

But read Wolff’s piece and then look at the Times+ strategy and you have to wonder what Murdoch is really thinking. (Or if his underlings are simply ignoring his Luddite tendencies; or if it’s all some grand plan meant to mislead competitors, analysts, and pundits.)

Times+ works like this:

• Subscribers to the print edition get a Times+ online membership as part of their subscription.
• Non-print-subscribers can pay £50 a year for a Times+ membership.

The tagline or slogan from the folks marketing Times+ is “events + offers + extras.” What you get:

“If you’re a member of Times+, you’re a member of The Times and The Sunday Times, and can look forward to invitations to exclusive events — free film screenings, private views and expert talks — plus upgrades, money-saving offers, gifts and much more.”

At least at this time, the news content of The Times/Sunday Times’ main website is free. Times+ is meant to entice online readers to cough up the £50 a year fee, and give a digital goodie to those willing to still read The Times on newsprint. Not interested in Times+ marvelous offers? You can still read the Times’ content free on the web. (I hope Murdoch doesn’t change that; Times+ as currently implemented is smart.)

With a nod to the news-industry discussion about how premium content online can get people to pay, Times+ members get access to either Culture+ or Travel+ (but not both), which otherwise each cost £25 a year. (My guess: The Times won’t sell many £25 online subscriptions to either site, as most interested readers will simply look elsewhere on the web for similar free coverage.)

What makes this smart, in my view, is that a big part of the appeal of Times+ is the offers of discounts and offers from sponsors and advertisers, plus the free member events. In fact, when you view the homepage of Times+, note that the special offers are highlighted above the editorial content, and presented in the same style. The message is clear: Subscribe to Times+ and you’ll be getting your money’s worth.

When I’ve heard others in the newspaper industry talk about the membership model, the tendency is to focus on news extras. Which is fine, but I don’t think news extras alone will grow a newspaper online membership to anything resembling success. Offering some really good commercial offers has real potential, though.

I’d like to see Times+ step up the marketing a bit, though, to make becoming a paying Times+ member a “no-brainer.” It’s not that yet. But a simple tweak of the marketing should do it. “For your £50 a year membership, you get £500 in discounts and offers, including 2-for-1 meals at some of London’s finest restaurants.” Or something like that.

So, bravo, The Times/Sunday Times! Please don’t let your Australian boss screw this up.