On a Roll with Content Partnerships

Sometimes good stuff slips into our days and goes unnoticed until we wake up, mid-week from editing a bunch of stories and realize, wow, a sweeeet thang happened while I was buried under that pile. As a former print editor turned editor of an Internet startup, my translation of sweeeet thang would be:

1. Two days of having the same story on the msn.com home page.

2. And two days of two different stories on Woman's Day.

I guess it goes to show that some rules don't change, regardless of medium. Simply put, good content works.

D360 Partners with Woman's Day

The Holy Grail of Internet startups -- partnerships with other web sites.

How does it work? You provide content, which they pick up and use on their site. And then they give you links and credit, which drives more traffic to your site.

So far, our content has been featured on msn, AOL, so many newspapers and their web sites that I've long since lost count. And a year after eight months after we launched, we added one more partner to our list: Woman's Day.

Today, Woman's Day relaunched its site with a new design -- and some content from us. Enjoy.

http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Family-Lifestyle/Relationships/7-Ways-to-Move-On-After-a-Divorce.html

http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Family-Lifestyle/Relationships/How-Talking-Helps-Marriage.html

Gotta love MSN

Today's home page.

A Positive about Newspapers

With all the bad news about the declining newspaper industry, it's tough to find something positive to say when you're wrapped up in it. Declining profits, buyouts, newsroom cutbacks. You name it, the industry has seen it all in the last few years.

But after about a decade as a Gannett newspaper editor, I've spent almost a year on the other side of that fence -- working for an Internet startup company, developing a Web site and assessing the content's connection to the readership.

Part of the job is to search for partnerships with other news organizations interested in offering our stories on their sites. The more partners, the more they use your content. The more they use your content, the more the traffic builds. It's a pretty basic way to build online readers.

While our stories routinely get picked up by msn.com (Yesterday, our content was on the home page.) and other online sites, we've been searching for another way to increase traffic online -- through a partnership with newspapers.

Why? The CEO of our company, Cotter Cunningham, explains it by using his previous experience at bankrate.com, which built its traffic not just through its online partnerships but also through its partnerships with traditional print products. The more newspapers picked up the content, the more the online traffic increased.

This week, we signed a contract with McClatchy-Tribune to provide relationship content on its wire service to newspapers around the country. For me, it's an interesting twist. After spending years in the newspaper industry moving from print to online, I now work for an organization that's moving from online to print.

Funny how the world works. For all the bad news about the newspaper industry's decline, it's still offers something of importance to other mediums. Newspapers provide readers. It's just that simple.

Will Internet Portals Invest in Newspapers?

The most interesting thing I've seen in a long time about newspapers was a video on Yahoo! Finance. In it, Todd Harrison, CEO of Minyanville.com, who suggested that online portals buy large print companies like Gannett, my former employer. The idea of "Content as King," isn't news to a veteran newspaper editor like myself. Nice to see someone in the financial world with the same understanding.

I e-mailed the video to a number of newspaper friends, one of whom asked me what I thought would happen if such a deal emerged. As the editor of a startup company for a niche product, I think there's a real possibility in the idea. Given the media partnerships that emerge online, (msn.com, for example, using content from our site and links to it), it seems like a sound idea to maintain a steady stream of content that could be reused online from the original source -- the newspaper.

Until newspapers don't have any readers anymore, there's still income -- albeit much less of a profit margin than in the past -- that comes from the print product and the traffic from its online publications. So an online portal could maintain the newspaper's circulation until it becomes a financial liability and still get the benefit of great journalism.

These days, given the state of the struggling newspaper industry, the idea looks appealing indeed.

In Startups, It's All about the Little Things

When you're the editor at an Internet startup, days go by that follow a routine. It's all about the internal stuff. Playing with headlines to get better search engine optimization. Restructuring stories to make them easier to read online. Examining the look of the latest emoticons, avatars or landing page redesign. All worthwhile stuff, to be sure. But given my traditional news background, occasionally I miss the excitement of a good, old-fashioned breaking story.

And then one day, when you're out of the office at a daylong conference about startups, the fun happens without you. Your Blackberry gets tied up with e-mails about your content getting picked up by another news organization -- or two.

You find out a blogger from the Seattle Post Intelligencer has picked up a story about how baseball can help your relationship. Or Yahoo's women's site, Shine, quotes the same story. Or that msn.com has highlighted your news story about how the mortgage crisis may be adding to the divorce rate. And then U.S. News and World Report picks up the story the same day.

These are the days when you know, despite the daily routine, you're doing something right with the content. And you remember what a kick working on a good news story can really be.

Reimagining Newspapers

If newspapers worked the way they did in my brain:

1. Their Web sites would aggregate the news for a big, breaking story so if I went to their sites I wouldn't have to look at other sites in the region for stories on the same topic. I'd get short fat graph-introductions to stories on other news sites. I'd know it was a good read, because you told me so by showing me it was there. And the next time something big happened, I'd come back again -- and again.

2. Newspapers would look at their Web sites as a way to start as many regional or national online niche products as they could handle, given they keep downsizing their newsrooms. A place like Delaware, for example, would have a sister Web site for beaches or tax-free shopping or incorporation information for businesses. Fort Myers would offer a Web site for midwesterns who wanted to retire to the area, including a database of such information as movers in my area, property tax information and home insurers and rates -- so I didn't have to look around for this stuff on a bunch of other sites. (I worked in both places, just for the record.)

3. Local stories would be on incorporated into a map as well as just listed on the Web site by what time it happened. Then I could decide if I wanted to read the content by its closeness to my home or my work as well as just by a good headline. It would be really interesting if, as part of this effort, citizen videos of breaking news could be downloaded onto these maps as part of the interactivity for my geographic area of interest.

4. Sports departments would link previous stories on particular teams, so that I could read the stories that ran before about this particular story. They would use their archived profiles and statistics on a particular sport, encyclopedic information in a Wikipedia-like format if you will, as links in every story so if I would have every piece of information at my fingertips. And they'd add some kind of social networking, so I can hang out online with folks like me -- who liked the same teams.

5. Newsrooms would use their historical knowledge of the community and put that into some kind of Wikipedia-like database of information that allowed readers to learn about the area through their links to local stories as well as through just browsing on topics of interest. (Ok, I've mentioned this one before, but it has a long tail so I will mention it again.)

6. Directed the conversation on particular topics -- think msn's moneycentral -- by asking a few pointed questions about stories you've written that would engage in serious discussion, offer suggestions or tips and be another place to develop content that could be linked to the original story or new stories on the topic as they were written.

7. Think of each story not as a one-dimensional, one-time only piece that would be finished once the editor moved it to the desk. Instead, it would be interesting if newsrooms thought of every story as a container of endless possibilities for content that -- over time with links, videos, photos, maps -- offers the kind of depth that the print product has slowly whittled away at over the last few years.

Imagine.

Woohoo Part II

An hour of Yoga, some work and two dog-walks into my yesterday, I'm sitting by the pool reading Columbia Journalism Review's piece on the HBO series, The Wire, when I get another message on my Blackberry (Yes, technologically challenged woman has one. And it scares the hell out of her that she reads it, like a former boss she used to make fun of, everywhere.)

Anyway, there's an e-mail from my MSN go-between, Tracy, who tells me the news site picked up yet another story from our Web site. And she gives me this link to MSN Money, which I happily click on, so I can figure out which story was picked up today. Then I send out the link to a handful of folks who can appreciate.

Woohoo, Part II, I write.

When my cousin calls to respond, I say: "I guess it wasn't a fluke." I hadn't been in a newsroom for so long, I'd started to wonder. (In point of fact, this often comes up in my discussions with former newspaper folk who have taken a job doing something completely different. And like any junkie recovering from a bad relationship or some other addiction, we often overlook the bad moments and are nostalgic about the rest.)

My cousin reminds me (though she's a teacher, not a journalist) that I used to run newsrooms for a living, so it's not a big stretch to think I know a little something about content. As I am walking back home, I think about what she said. And I realize it doesn't matter how long I've been away from a newsroom, she's right. I guess I do know a little something about content.

That just makes the day.

MSN, Christmas, Bylines and Sally Field

Today I feel the way my stepdaughter looked on some years ago when she woke up Christmas morning and found a life-sized Barbie (as big as she was at the time) under the tree. With the Florida sun streaming through the front windows, she danced around the living room with it, giggling about how Santa has been able to find her in a house without a chimney in a place where it didn't snow.

That's how it felt this morning when I woke up and discovered MSN featured one of our stories for the first time -- a link right off of the main Money page. And if that wasn't enough to make my day, I discover more links to other stories inside. Ok, so I kind of knew something was going to happen. We've been pitching stories since shortly after we launched the Web site, a little more than a month ago. But ohmygawd, who knew it would be so cool? Yeah, yeah, 20 years as a veteran newspaper reporter and editor, and you'd think the excitement would be gone by now. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, if you will.

Nada, Nope, No way. Besides, I've only been doing this Internet startup gig for a few months. As someone who spent most of my career in traditional print media, I remember feeling this way the first time I saw my byline at The Lake Worth, Fla., Herald, where I began my career working for a crotchety old-fashioned newspaper editor named Deacon Rhodes. I spent my afternoons writing obituaries and community news that he changed without notice. And I didn't care because I was writing stories that people wanted to read.

What can I say? It feels like Christmas and my first byline and Sally Field at the 1985 Oscars. THEY LIKE US! THEY LIKE US! I e-mail the writers to share the good news. I call several friends and family members who can appreciate my excitement. Woohooo! A month and a half after we started, we did it! We're on a major news site. Then, after a half and hour or so, I come back down to earth and remember what Deacon Rhodes said to me on the last day of my internship -- the day he gave a straight-A student a 'B.' "Well, if I gave you an 'A,' you'd have nothing to work for.'

Oh yeah, we gotta do this again. UGH! Back to work.