A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...
A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...
A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
Advertisers are not limiting their digital investments to their Web sites, of course.<br />
Ikea, the world’s largest furniture retailer, recently placed the inventory from its UK<br />
catalog into an iPhone app. 89 Kraft Foods has developed one of the most popular recipe<br />
sites on the Web, and has attracted more than 70,000 friends to its Facebook page. As<br />
<strong>for</strong>mer Huffington Post CEO Betsy Morgan puts it, “Brands are becoming publishers.” 90<br />
As companies aim their content more directly at users, news organizations find<br />
themselves less essential in their role as a delivery mechanism <strong>for</strong> the messages<br />
advertisers want delivered. Rather than simply bemoaning the trend, what if news<br />
organizations helped facilitate advertisers’ interests in serving as well as selling their<br />
customers? To work, such ef<strong>for</strong>ts would need to be quite different from the infomercials,<br />
advertorial and video news releases that demean advertising as well as journalism.<br />
Cory Bergman is a journalist with an MBA whose day job is director of new product<br />
development at MSNBC.com. In addition, he and his wife run a network of<br />
neighborhood news blogs in Seattle. Part of the network they’ve created with their Next<br />
Door Media Company is the wherewithal <strong>for</strong> advertisers to reach users in multiple<br />
neighborhoods. Bergman describes one of the most important next challenges facing the<br />
startup as helping advertisers become publishers—and creating new advertising<br />
experiences in the process.<br />
“One of my most avid readership groups is business owners,” Bergman says of the<br />
users of Next Door Media blogs. Equipping those owners to publish to MyBallard.com<br />
and their other sites helps secure the loyalty of users as well as the commercial viability<br />
of their enterprise. 91<br />
Scott Karp, founder of the Publish2 aggregation and sharing service <strong>for</strong> journalists,<br />
told participants at a Shorenstein Center conference in October about plans <strong>for</strong> a service<br />
aimed at enabling publishers to set up advertisers to provide in<strong>for</strong>mation to users—<br />
content deemed more useful than the traditional delivery of commercial messages. 92<br />
MinnPost, the local news site in Minneapolis, is already doing just that with ads<br />
served by a firm called Real Time Ads. The service uses Twitter and RSS to automate the<br />
delivery of messages from local merchants to space they’ve secured on MinnPost. A<br />
mid‐December ad <strong>for</strong> the Mall of America on MinnPost’s left rail linked users to a Tweet<br />
30
Change language