What's Really At Risk for Online News

Thoughts about winning an ONA conference competition and the future role of editors (or lack thereof)

By Matthew Stanton, Metromemetics LLC
(first posted 11/15/2004)

I lead the team of Online News Association conventioneers who won the "Masters of the Web Universe" competition this weekend, and since then I've been challenged by some peers on the merits of our quickly crafted proposal. Don't forget this wasn't some NIE initiative; the contest's stated goal aimed at "out of the box" solutions to capture a missing 20-something audience (presumably for advertiser revenue).

In the past six years, when I've informally surveyed classrooms of college students on their top five favorite Web sites, I always get the same aggregate results in this order:

1.) Hotmail.

2.) Google.

3.) Yahoo! News (or sometimes MSNBC or CNN).

4.) The local market's biggest news Web site (usually the metro daily's online version).

The fifth slot always fractures into a list of various niche sites reflecting the students' range of interests (ESPN, MTV, Sephora, whatever).

Those first three slots show the power of utility, but here the medium is only half the message: The voice needs to fit as well. At ONA, we pitched "John Stewart's CraigsList" as our concept, and we won, even though that's what everyone proposed. (Every team jumped on lots of blogs, free downloads, multimedia, job classifieds, entertainment listings, the whole Lawrence.com wannabe package.) Our difference focused on the role our new site should play with its audience: To be an active forum which collects, reacts and expands on the already existing newspaper Web site by being quick, funny, broad, and above all, useful. We were not willing to concede the "old" newspaper brand no longer worked for enterprise journalism, breaking local headlines or delivering classifieds; if strong, it should continue to work just fine.

What was different was our chosen voice in delivery, hence our proposed mantra of "don't be safe, be real." In this other forum, flip off the safety locks and let the users directly guide the product. So what if it veers off and crashes? Fail fast, fail cheap, retool what doesn't work and start moving again. We can afford to do it, we're the Web.

I still don't get the critics before and after ONA who thought our gimmick was to shoot for prurient shock value. Sites like Gawker, Defamer, FARK and Metafilter might slip by an F-word here or a nipple there, but look at them in their complete contexts. These sites look and feel like how their audiences look and feel - often because their links and summaries come collectively from this same audience. Complaints of "dumbing down" follow like "the kids' music today stinks" and distracts from the real, fundamental industry issue. Like Web search engines, user-driven aggregators and blogging are natural and unstoppable Internet evolutions. There will always be a critical need for the professional journalist to find and form the news; what's in danger today of becoming obsolete is the professional editor.

Are newspapers and their Web sites going to stand by and simply watch that change happen without them? Is clinging to the traditional role of maintaining authority more important than meeting the demands of an empowered and changing audience market? Remember business before eBay and Monster.com? That's the sort of crossroads in thinking we are standing at again.