Here are 101 ways to improve your news site. How many does your site do?
This list is from Cyber Journalist. Take a look and then add your own great ideas to the original list. I’m using this as a way to stay accountable to the 101 points.
- Post a form at the end of a breaking news story asking witnesses to send in details of what they saw — and then add the information you can verify to the story.
- Use trackbacks
- Geographic location known
- Invite anyone in your community to write Weblogs for your news site
- Take the best content from Weblogs on your news site (now that you’ve got so many) and publish them in your newspaper.
- Integrate headlines from your competition into your Web site
- Create deals with other newspapers in your state to share content at no cost. Then stop paying for The Associated Press and hire new newsroom staffers with the savings.
- Create games around the news for wireless devices
- Get the people behind the glass doors to require that at least 10% of all deals print/TV-side ad sales folks make include online components — or else they don’t get their bonuses.
- Give everyone in your company one day off a month to work on whatever project they want or simply just brainstorm new ideas
- Build a real estate database and section so detailed and useful it becomes the MLS for your community. (realestate.nytimes.com)
- Create a staff development plan so that everyone in your company gets pertinent online news training within the next 12 months.
- Design your registration system so that you have an easy way to get updated information when people move, so your data stays more valuable to advertisers
- Give people who register for your site incentive to keep giving you updated information.
- Ask readers their interests when they register and only serve them ads related to them when they visit your site.
- Offer a subscription where people can view the entire site ad-free for an extra charge.
- Double the size of all photos on your site for a week. See how readers react. Wanna bet you decide to keep at least some of them larger permanently?
- Don’t just add “Discuss story” links to stories — include the comments at the bottom or on the right rail of the page and make them part of the visible story
- Create two different home pages — one with dayparting and one without — and deliver each to half your users randomly, and compare
- Put only local news and content on your home page
- Let every reader create their own “reader home pages” where they can pick what stories to lead with — and let them be public and make it easy for other reader to bookmark them.
- Promote something online that will be in the next day’s paper or on the next newscast — and then don’t post that story online
- Set up a service so that readers can get alerts any time a story they’ve already read gets updated — or corrected
- Create RSS feeds focused on niche topics your site covers.
- Design an algorithm to automatically hotlink the names of any major newsmakers in your community to bio pages and recent stories about them
- Build dedicated pages for every neighborhood in your circulation area with useful local information, links and related headlines from your site automatically pulled in
- Create online memorial pages for every obituary — not just those of celebrities — so friends and relatives can post their memories.
- Create an army of citizen reporters to help cover hyper-local news your organization has abandoned, like community meetings or Little League games.
- Have every reporter on staff spend a day only writing and producing for the Web.
- Offer readers inning-by-inning or quarter-by-quarter SMS game updates for major local teams.
- Create a local crime database searchable by zip code and street address — and integrate it into your online real estate section.
- Create a local school quality database searchable by zip code and street address — and integrate it into your online real estate section.
- Put your city or state’s restaurant inspection database online — and integrate it into your restaurant review section.
- Ban all forms of intrusive advertising from your site for good
- Let your readers post certain classifieds for free.
- Critique your Web site — along with your newspaper or newscast — at the beginning of every budget meeting
- Use your Web site to avoid censoring content — i.e. put any gruesome war photos online behind a disclaimer, rather than not publishing at all
- Package all your best travel material into a special site aimed just at tourists for your community
- Spend an entire week only getting news from your web site (no newspaper, no TV, no other sites). Write a list of things you felt you missed out on, and then figure out a way to get that on your site.
- Buy a TiVo for your newsroom so reporters can pause and rewind anytime there’s breaking news on TV — or a live press briefing — and get exact quotes.
- Create a daily morning e-mail aimed at teens and 20-year-olds that summarizes the news in a hip and lively way
- Build a feature into your site enabling readers to add notes to any stories on your site, like Amazon’s new A9.com site does.
- Offer free access to all your archives to newspaper subscribers — but only to subscribers.
- Offer readers access to real estate ads a day or two earlier online (or send via e-mail) and charge extra for this access or limit to print subscribers
- Develop a database of e-mail addresses and phone numbers of readers who you can tap for quotes when writing stories on deadline
- Offer an online coupon section
- Click-and-buy prints option on all online photos
- Have readers send in photos and make slide shows from them
- Pick the best posts on your message boards and highlight them in separate features — or on your home page — so readers don’t have to dig through
- Create timely special packages from archived content and sell them to sponsors
- Set up online town hall meetings (i.e. chats) with local political candidates
- Create Web-based publishing tool so classified advertisers can enter their information themselves, saving you work (should still be proof-read)
- Find another media company in town to partner with… Find a media company from out of town to partner with
- Create a downloadable MP3 section and let local bands upload their tunes for readers to download
- Create multimedia obituaries online and charge extra for them. Then
- Create multimedia wedding announcements online and charge extra for them
- Use the Weblog format to cover a breaking news event
- Figure out which writers or TV reporters always write too long for air or the paper and offer them an online column
- Have popular columnists supplement their regular column with an e-mail extra… Only let newspaper subscribers get it
- Let readers vote on their favorite local school sports player and give winners a symbolic award
- Have newspaper or station top editor send e-mails to all e-mail subscribers occasionally to let them know how the newspaper or TV station is improving
- Hold short story contests and print winners online
- Tell stories through online games created in Flash or other tools (i.e. let readers try balancing the budget)
- Tell an entire story that would normally be written in plain text entirely through a slide show
- Instead of linking bylines to e-mail addresses, link them to staff bios with photos and e-mail info so readers get to know you
- Sell prints of your front pages online, plus current and back issues
- Make online display ads interactive — games, quizzes, etc — to grab readers attention (and of course charge extra for these!)
- Offer special fan e-mail newsletters for local sports teams
- Give all reporters digital audio recorders and digital cameras to take out on stories to get material for posting on Web
- Wire all newsroom telephones to a recording system so reporters can easily record phone interviews (after asking sources’ permission) and put online
- Send readers news alerts through instant messenger tools
- Allow advertisers to put photos online with classified ads and signal to newspaper readers to go online to see them
- Create special news alerts for whatever topics are hot among local readers
- Create topic-specific photo galleries on random, fun topics (dog slide show; smiling people slide show; etc.)
- Use the Web to ask readers for fresh ideas. Actually read them. Choose at least one and actually do it.
- Rotate content on your home page based on dayparting usage.
- Get someone to audiotape big local high school sports games and post the sound online
- Have sports writers blog live from local school sports games they’re covering
- Have everyone in your organization trade jobs with someone else in a different department at some point
- If you’re the boss, work the worst shift/job on your team for a whole week. Watch your employees respect leap, and your knowledge of your newsroom grow.
- Develop an online corrections policy (or reassess and improve one if you actually have one).
- Add online elements to your company-wide ethics policy (or create a company-wide ethics policy that covers the web if no policy exists)
- Make sure all ads are clearly labeled. For real.
- Create a reader-appreciation week and have no pop-ups or animated ads all week.
- Offer readers an ad-free version of your site for an extra cost
- Give local politicians or newsmakers or experts Weblogs on your site.
- Link datelines on all stories to pages with maps and information about the location (perhaps on a partner encyclopedia site)
- Create a whole special section online for younger readers. Find local student journalists to help write for it
- Create a special section on your Web site for readers who speak a different language (that has a large population in your area); translate some stories and write special features for them
- Create a site-wide disaster coverage plan
- Make training a priority and figure out a way to give everyone on the staff some sort of training within the next year
- When local big shots die, set up online memorials on your site or via legacy.com
- When print or TV journalists contribute something impressive to the Web site, applaud them in front of the whole company — maybe post their work for all to see — to encourage others to do so
- Create internal companywide awards for good online work
- Launch a public service project online, tied to some ongoing issue or project in the community; invite readers to submit their ideas online and pass them on to the local government
- Create a template in Flash or another tool for a breaking news multimedia package so that when big news happens, you can slap it in and publish before the traffic spike has passed
- Cut the number of links on your home page in half. See if your traffic and page views change at all.
- Offer readers a way to save articles they like on your site for later reading and create a personal page for them with all of those stories
- Interview your reporters on major stories and post the audio or video online
- Have reporters answer reader questions online (live or not) about a big story and then post the answers
- Let readers vote on their favorite stories and photos and post those lists online
- Each afternoon post something on your home page telling readers something special that will be in the next day’s newspaper or on that evening’s newscast. Don’t post that online.
- Do at least one thing on this list.