http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/d.....papers-1x/

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/d.....papers-1x/

Newspaper sites are sitting on a valuable archive of reviews, stories, interviews and experiential knowledge of their staff.

News is valuable when it first breaks and is unique. This space is well-served by the news aggregators we saw on Thursday who scoop this up and quickly and efficiently distribute it through their associated social networks.

Once a news story is broadly distributed, it becomes a commodity and re-purposed to the point where secondary stories break their connection with the original story and no longer serve as a source of traffic to the original.

Starting about a month later, the news becomes valuable again for archival reasons. As the news archive business can tell you, such a story can still be “monetized” as a source of truth. The going rate is usually $2.95 behind a pay wall.

I would argue that these stories could be better monetized if they were outside the wall as reference points for historical perspective. I was recently looking for information about the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis and the top result was from Wikipedia. There is a NY Times page dedicated to the topic but it only points to NY Times stories. There’s no reason a newspaper can’t broaden their coverage to include multiple sources and perspectives as this one hosted by the Harvard Business School or the Wikipedia example above.

Taking this same example to the local level, there is no reason restaurant and movie review stories can’t pull in past perspectives from their stories. If a new restaurant features a cook from another restaurant, link to a review of that restaurant. If a movie features a particular landmark, link to a local story that ran when they closed off the street for the filming.

Newsrooms are sitting on goldmine of material that can be re-purposed to enrich stories as they develop. If the news editors pulled in related stories not only from their own archives but also from sites out on the open web, it will not only help their brand, it will help the reputation of their editorial staff.

An editor must do more than re-write headlines and arrange the top stories for the home page. Each major story is an opportunity to create a new home page around that story and provide their perspective and viewpoint.

Newspaper sites are sitting on a valuable archive of reviews, stories, interviews and experiential knowledge of their staff.

News is valuable when it first breaks and is unique. This space is well-served by the news aggregators we saw on Thursday who scoop this up and quickly and efficiently distribute it through their associated social networks.

Once a news story is broadly distributed, it becomes a commodity and re-purposed to the point where secondary stories break their connection with the original story and no longer serve as a source of traffic to the original.

Starting about a month later, the news becomes valuable again for archival reasons. As the news archive business can tell you, such a story can still be “monetized” as a source of truth. The going rate is usually $2.95 behind a pay wall.

I would argue that these stories could be better monetized if they were outside the wall as reference points for historical perspective. I was recently looking for information about the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis and the top result was from Wikipedia. There is a NY Times page dedicated to the topic but it only points to NY Times stories. There’s no reason a newspaper can’t broaden their coverage to include multiple sources and perspectives as this one hosted by the Harvard Business School or the Wikipedia example above.

Taking this same example to the local level, there is no reason restaurant and movie review stories can’t pull in past perspectives from their stories. If a new restaurant features a cook from another restaurant, link to a review of that restaurant. If a movie features a particular landmark, link to a local story that ran when they closed off the street for the filming.

Newsrooms are sitting on goldmine of material that can be re-purposed to enrich stories as they develop. If the news editors pulled in related stories not only from their own archives but also from sites out on the open web, it will not only help their brand, it will help the reputation of their editorial staff.

An editor must do more than re-write headlines and arrange the top stories for the home page. Each major story is an opportunity to create a new home page around that story and provide their perspective and viewpoint.