We can do this

RevenueTwoPointZero, a research project put together by Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design and Matt Mansfield of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, has proposed some really solid ideas for how newspaper.com can find its lucrative future online.

Their work provides, I think, a checklist for what we should be doing.

The project offer solutions for how a home page can be redesigned to push people toward story pages, where the real money lies; how we need to beat CraigsList at its own game while providing the reliability of traditional Classified ads; and how a local news website can better serve small businesses without big advertising budgets.

This is exactly the kind of thinking we need, much more productive than the gloom.doom.com hand-wringing that really isn't getting us anywhere.

Regaining our premium

In a post outlining its "Simple model for online journalism," one of its founders, Jonathan Weber, bore out one of the themes I've been writing about in this blog. Specifically (emphasis mine):

"On the business side, we’ve found that the conventional wisdom about plunging display ad rates is simply wrong. If you have a quality site, with good editorial that drives meaningful traffic, and you work closely with advertisers and offer them flash ads, video ads, good stats reporting, and the opportunity to help understand a new medium, they will pay a premium. A critical thing we have learned is that selling online advertising is more different from selling print or broadcast than mostly people think. I’d suggest that the difficulties traditional media outlets have in getting good prices for online advertising have to do not with the medium itself, but with the learning curve involved in figuring out how to sell it properly. It took us a couple of years, and we didn’t have any legacy issues to deal with."

It's going to take a while. But I still think it's inevitable.