Some good ideas we should steal

I spent the afternoon in a workshop on best newspaper practices and, while having a wide-ranging group conversation with counterparts from across the world (OK, the US, Canada, Brazil and the Netherlands), I picked up some very good ideas we could emulate and some insights.

The session was introduced by my friend Anthony Moore from the Dallas Morning News, who had a well-conceived PowerPoint overview of the landscape that I'll add here as soon as it goes online. His bottom line: News is a feed, like electricity; and the story is just one point in the continuum. News sites are no longer final destinations, just another stop on the search.

The discussion was moderated by Jennifer Carroll, Gannett's VP of digital, and she and another Gannett exec offered a good list of innovations being done through the chain and elsewhere around the business.

Among the ideas and insights:

- Give readers desktop access to your Sports team blogs through a widget. Get on Facebook with your own applications.

- Cincy Moms - a very successful social networking site that has heavy traffic even, say, on a Sunday night. It draws a demographic very desirable to advertisers and users spend an average of 5-10 minutes on the site. Gannett is setting up similar sites in other cities.

- The value of beat blogging, creates a running conversation with readers that enhances the reporting, rather than detracting from it.

- Display advertising has plateaued - face it, it has. Video and search is where the growth is.

- Small spenders is where the big local dollars are. But it doesn't make sense to have ad salesmen contact every dry cleaner in town, so we have got to get self-service advertising (see Bakosphere's approach).

- Business directories have huge potential. Small dollars adding up to lots.

- Rearranging the furniture, who sits where, is crucial to restructuring.

The best lesson: Let readers do your work.

Example 1: Florida Today's watchdog page that urges readers: Blow the whistle!
Report waste, fraud, abuse to: Matt Reed, Investigations Editor.
E-mail here. (We have to do this.) Readers love it, generate a huge amount of tips and really appreciate the service. (that word again)

Example 2: The Rochester Press-Democrat got a huge database of police overtime. They put it online on a Thursday, allowing readers to see which officers in their precincts were claiming the most overtime and telling that the related story would be coming Sunday. Readers lapped it up. Even the cops, who crashed the department's servers looking up themselves and their colleagues. The Sunday paper had the highest single copy sales of the year. (More on that project here.)