The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette website launched a redesign today. It’s really more of a clean-up than a redesign because most of the elements are in the same place just presented in a cleaner way.

I wish I could show you a screen shot of it and give a more in-depth critique, but they are still working the kinks out of it and apparently they are having some issues serving the new design.

I’ve beat my head against templates and crashed servers using Ellington (their CMS open sourced as django) before.  The one thing I would recommend to them is more cache tags– they’re your friend to decrease server load (except in comments).

I spend a lot of time picking on newspapers and websites, but let’s spend some time poking at the TV guys. The BBC gives a nice look at how to report the news on TV. If only our local stations could reach somewhere near this level.

From a JOA where your paper is inserted in the “winning” newspaper’s edition to a multi-award winning newspaper website and a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service back to laying off most of your staff. The Las Vegas CityLife has interesting look at the roller coaster ride of Greenspun Media’s Las Vegas Sun. They examine how the newspaper reinvented the print newsroom to focus on long-form journalism, the free reign they gave new media wonder boy Rob Curley, the tension between the interactive newsroom and the print newsroom and how the collapse of the Las Vegas real estate market cause the newspaper to lose most of interactive staff and half of it’s newsroom.



After revealing they only have 35 online only subscribers and their traffic has dropped by half, a Newsday exec sent out a memo explaining their paywall strategy in two basic points.

“Therefore, Newsday’s web strategy has two parts: 1) to provide Newsday’s print subscribers with a rich web experience that goes far beyond what they can get in the newspaper alone, thereby motivating them to remain, return, or choose to subscribe to Newsday; and 2) to provide Cablevision’s high-speed Internet customers with reasons to remain with Cablevision, reasons to return to Cablevision, or reasons to choose Cablevision.”

Unfortunately, the memo doesn’t mention their mobile web strategy which happens to be wide open for anyone to visit completing discouraging anyone from ponying up the $5 a week subscription to their full fledged web site.

Google and Apple are both racing to own the mobile advertising platform by adding the new “holy grail” of mobile advertising – geolocation.  The Wall Street Journal reports that both Google and Apple have bought mobile advertising companies and are attempting to leverage their mobile phones to let your local pizza parlor put an ad on your mobile when you start feeling hungry in the late afternoon.  They are reaching out to you and to your local business just like FourSquare to reach you where you are right at this moment.

If you want to be really wonky about newspaper paywall’s audience and revenue numbers, Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab has released a paywall simulation that let’s you play with revenue,  audience and subscription numbers. It’s a lot of fun if you know what the numbers mean.

Along the same line of thought, Newsday is three months into it’s paywall experiment charging $5 a week for access to their website (print subscribers and Cablevision Cable subscribers have free access) and they have 35 paid subscribers. In the three months since starting the experiment Newsday has lost over 50 percent of their web traffic peaking at 1.5 million visits per month in July 2009 down to 460,000 visits in December 2009.

I’ve written about my rules of facebook before, but I just want to reiterate that research has shown that you really don’t have 5,000, 1,000 or even 500 friends on Facebook.  Back in the ‘ 90sRobin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, came up with the theory that the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language — limits us to managing social circles of around 150 friends, no matter how sociable we are. Basically these are the people that you come in contact with every year and 150 was known as Dunbar’s number.

Now, Dunbar is researching whether larger social networks (like facebook) have allowed people to stretch their Dunbar number. Dunbar told the Times Online, “The interesting thing is that you can have 1,500 friends but when you actually look at traffic on sites, you see people maintain the same inner circle of around 150 people that we observe in the real world.”

An interesting aside on newspapers and Dunbar’s number: One of the concepts behind hyperlocal newspapers and web sites is that you must reach into all of your reader’s social circles– reach into group of 150 friends– and photograph, report on someone to keep your readers. That’s why you see all the photographs of your neighbors pet or cousin’s softball trophy in your small-town newspaper.

Steve Yelvington with Morris Newspapers has done the math on a soft paywall as proposed by the New York Times (we discussed this last week).  Steves figures that a newspaper should be prepared to give 35 to 55 percent of their advertising inventory by implementing a soft paywall because power users account for 3.5 percent of an online newspapers audience creating 35 percent of their pageviews. Last week Yelvington addressed how a soft paywall isn’t really a paywall at all for users who have a little tech knowhow to clear their cookies and look like a new user to the paywall.

A free Canadian newspaper, Metro,  has struck a deal with foursquare. As you travel around Canada checking  foursquare on your phone you’ll find Metro’s restaurant reviews, city tips, to-dos and stories. It’s a great use of foursquare’s geolocation technology giving the experts at local, your newspaper, a way to give you information about your immediate surroundings.

Foursquares deal with Metro comes after they created custom games for Harvard and UNC Charlotte.

I don’t know if mobile is the next big thing or already here, but adoption of geolocation in online tools is a must for mobile to achieve it’s full relevance. Since Foursquare just opened up in Little Rock, I’ve been playing with it via my iPhone this past week and although the number of users and  number of places is limited with next to none participating businesses,  I’m hooked.

A recent article in Time Magazine calls Foursquare’s gaming component it’s “secret sauce” letting you earn points, badges and become a “mayor” when checking-in at new places.  The article says the key to user adoption is for businesses to start give aways to foursquare users who check-in often at their business–  It’s like a frequent eater card, but works virtually. The only location in Little Rock that currently offers a foursquare special is the Capital Bar & Grill with every 10th check-in getting you a free dessert and the mayor receiving a free t-shirt.

I can’t wait until US Pizza starts giving away free pizza to users who have checked in ten times, but until then it’s fun to compare how many points (and check-ins) I can get to my friends.  If you haven’t tried it, go ahead and sign-up and download your app to your phone (they make apps for iPhone, Palm, Blackberry and Android) or use the mobile interface and friend me.