New – cheaper – means of distribution

A former colleague called me today to kindly let me know that the student center at a major local university had a news ticker that was displaying headlines from the public radio station and Reuters, but none from SignOnSanDiego/the Union-Tribune. (Thanks, Ellen.)

Then I read that the New York Times has released an API that enables you to put a gizmo on your site that will search the entire Times' archive back to 1981, 2.8 million (pinky in mouth) articles. (Here's a post from the Times' developers' blog explaining it. And here's a post from VentureBeat offering some analysis.)

Then I recalled something I blogged from the Online News Association confab a while back, a suggestion that news organizations partner with elevator operators to offer news headline tickers to the poor souls held captive as they go up or down in those little boxes.

What connects these three items? All of them are alternate means of distributing the news that were not available a few years ago. All of them will bring readers to our sites. All of them are a lot cheaper than printing newspapers and driving those papers to people's homes. And all of them are examples of how we need to start thinking about circulation and increasing our readership – and continuing our businesses.

The question is no longer just how can we get people to buy more papers, though that will remain part of the equation for some time. Now we have to ask ourselves: What are other ways we can distribute our news products and information? (Mobile phones being the obvious primo target.) How can we reach people we are not reaching now? How can we make our brands and our products more ubiquitous? How do we spread the message: Get your news right here, hurry hurry hurry, step right up?

The news is no longer an appointment deal, as I've discussed here before, but a utility that is always available, you just turn the news faucet and out it comes, flip the switch and the news shines. We need to make that utility available almost everywhere.

And I need to call the student center folks at that local university and ask them to add our local news RSS feed to the text crawling across their news ticker. After all, it would be a shame to miss all those potential customers.