A glass full of potential

As Mr. Glass-Half-Full, by both position and personality, I try to see the still-unrealized potential of Internet-delivered news even while reading about the perilous state of the traditional news business in general.

Recently, OK, for a while now, there's been an awful lot of bad news in the news biz. Other people can chronicle that better than I can. I still see a lot of promise.

Here's one example: In this post on Publicola, an online alternative news site in Washington state, on whether the likely doomed Seattle Post-Intelligencer could make a successful go at it as an online-only publication, Glenn Fleishman offered this very well-phrased statement of what a newsroom like ours can provide that Googhoosoft just can't.

Even today, Google has had a tough time selling local ads, because Google doesn’t have per se local content. It’s likely that by 2012, the company will have suffered significant reversals because of its inability to diversify revenue much beyond online advertising and providing search results. It may feed 10 times the search results its site does today, but their growth will have tapered off. All of this means that the store down the street or the national chain with local outlets will be desperately working on strategies that let them focus on customers just down the block or a few miles away. With radio unlistened to, TV unwatched, and newspapers shells of themselves, where will the money go? To whatever media is left online.

I believe that's true, indeed, inevitable.

But, the glass-is-empty crowd says, you can't make money online the way you could in print. I respond we aren't, but why can't we?

I've written here before on the potential of self-service, search-based local advertising. And I've written how studies show readers' eyes are now trained to ignore the normal display advertising one finds online. This post, from the always insightful BrassTacksDesign, opened up my eyes to how ineffective online ads are now, and how much more effective online display advertising on the net could be if done well.

I'll jump to the chase, while encouraging you to read the whole post. Instead of confining our beloved advertisers to those little rectangles and squares our readers are now conditioned to avoid, why not create a page that is advertiser friendly but still editorially pure, like these or some of these? Those presentations don't scream "Sponsored/Brought to you by ..." but they are much more effective in delivering the advertiser's message, and they separate the news and the advertising, rather than jumbling them together.

This sort of display, combined with unique local content, would be worth top dollar, not just nickels and dimes.