NEW YORK: After more than 10 years of newspapers slowly migrating to the Web, most have embraced the medium as their future, showing they can break news, provide audio and video extras, and give readers more space to react and rebut than ever before. Successes are many, ranging from exclusive online interviews to sourcing details that give readers more complete information than any daily could have provided just a few years ago. Even the Pulitzer Prizes are giving props to Web-based offerings.
But with those accomplishments and expansions have come no shortage of starts and stops, bumps, flops, and sometimes outright debacles. We all remember the Los Angeles Times' "Wikipedia" experiment with its reader-altered editorials and the uproar over The Washington Post hiring a conservative blogger -- with plagiarism offenses in his past -- in the name of balance. In a decade-plus of Web exploration, nearly every daily has felt the growing pains that any new news tool requires.
At USA Today, for example, the paper's attempt at personalizing Web use misfired in 2006 when "My USA Today" launched, promising readers they could see only the offerings or issues they requested. "We found that the audience's willingness to set parameters is fairly low," says Online Editor Kinsey Wilson, who is also president of the Online News Association. "They are not that inclined to do it. The percentage of users was probably in the single digits."
Still, veteran Web spinners such as Jim Brady, washingtonpost.com's executive editor, understand the need for online operators to hit some snags and stumbles if they truly want to succeed. "Failure isn't to be feared on the Web, it is to be embraced," he says. "If you are not failing, you are not stretching as much." With that in mind, E&P talked to Wilson, Brady, and about two dozen other online minds from newspapers large and small to present some hard-earned lessons.
Lesson One: Blogs Can Backfire
Sure, the Chicago Tribune's Washington bureau blog, "The Swamp," is among the Web's most popular, and hundreds of others have drawn good-sized audiences. But some, like the San Jose Mercury News' "Reality TV" blog, have bombed.
"To some extent, it duplicated reality TV coverage on other blogs," says Online Editorial Director Randall Keith. "It showed us that if you enter a really cluttered topic, you need to have something distinctive. That was not distinctive."
The New York Times, which covers one of the hottest real estate markets in the world in Manhattan, found that did not translate into blog interest when its highly-touted "The Walk Through" real estate blog didn't fare well in 2006 -- and dumped it. "It just didn't take off," says Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager for NYTimes.com.
At The Roanoke (Va.) Times, editors noted that readers are not always that interested in what their fellow readers are saying, at least not on a regular basis. Online Editor John Jackson set up 10 online columns by local residents in 2003, finding maybe three got any real reaction. "They weren't writing about things that a whole lot of people were interested in," he says, citing a graphic artist who described life in that job. "One guy wrote about stuff he saw on the side of the road, and he would hand-write it and we would scan it in."
The Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram's reporter and columnist blogs have drawn less-than-huge interest both from readers and some of the staff bloggers themselves, says Kathy Vetter, managing editor/digital. She says the paper started them about two years ago, but most fizzled. "In the end, they don't really need the blogs because they can write every day in the newspaper," she says of the staffers. "Our guys either quit posting them because it is a lot of work, or they do not get a lot of interest."
Vetter says the paper is on its third group of staff bloggers, but will likely go to non-staffers soon: "Generally, our best one got like 2,000 page views per week, which is pretty crappy."
Lesson Two: Techno Can Pop
When The Denver Post's Web editors upgraded technology to allow an automatic refresher of the pages every 10 minutes, believing readers wanted the freshest news, they forgot about the die-hard crossword puzzlers. Many fans of the word game called and e-mailed complaints that every time the page refreshed, their work was wiped out. "They would lose the puzzle in mid-use," says Mark Cardwell, Post managing editor for digital media.
The Roanoke Times received similar complaints when it launched a contest as part of its daily TimesCast online video news report, which required users to install the Flash program to play. "People didn't want to download it, and they were pretty adamant about it," says John Jackson.
Washingtonpost.com is one of many Web sites that have seen the wrong story or headline appear before it was supposed to. Take the Post's story earlier this year that said John Edwards was dropping out of the presidential race, a story prepared as rumors of a major announcement were brewing. "It was only up for about 52 seconds," Jim Brady says. "But it still got written about." Then there was the headline that "killed [Chief Justice] William Rehnquist about six months before he died," he says. "Those things happen."
When the Roanoke Times contracted with Buzznet.com in 2005 to allow readers a place for their photos, the broad use of the Web site drew some reader complaints, especially parents who saw their children's birthday party pictures online with "racy material," says online editor Jackson. "That site had people posting people in wet T-shirt contests and spring break shots," he recalls. "They didn't leave much to the imagination." Eventually, the paper allowed readers to post photos on its own Web site instead.
Then there are the Google ads that link based on the subject of an article -- and are not always in the best taste. Take for example the story The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., posted about a high school student who baked sperm-coated brownies and gave them out to classmates. A Google ad adjacent to the story, inevitably, hawked "yummy, tasty brownies." And almost any story anywhere that mentions Hitler or Germany in World War II will draw a slew of Google ads for Nazi paraphernalia.
Editors at The Miami Herald briefly thought someone had broken into its mainframe when an embargoed story about a charity group's plans ended up on a string of local blogs. It turned out the RSS feed of the story was launched two hours early, says Suzanne Levinson, director of site operations. "We feared someone had hacked into our system," she says. "It was not a major story, but it seemed like a big crisis because we didn't know what had happened."
But even when the technology works well, it may require rethinking. Take the San Antonio (Texas) Express-News, which had separated multimedia options like photos and videos from the stories to which they were connected. Julie Weber, the Web site's general manager, says bringing them together boosted Web traffic tremendously: "When we combined them, the traffic would increase 10 times."
Lesson Three: Reader Reactions Often Can Turn Ugly
Sure, more space is devoted to finding out what readers think about both stories and issues than in the past, but that also means more chances for offensive comments, racy photos, and even libelous words.
"We have a lot of problems with our commenting," admits Mark Cardwell at the Denver Post. "We have had to put in more sophisticated technology to catch words and slurs that are offensive." Such protections have been put in place at several papers to guard against those types of postings.
"People say things in front of a computer screen they would never say to someone's face," he adds. One such incident happened on New Year's Day when a member of the Denver Broncos, Darrent Williams, was killed in a drive-by shooting. The Post included a space for reader comment with the Web story. "It got very ugly, very quickly," Cardwell recalls. "It attracted people from all over the country because it got national attention and it got racist and really stereotypical." Cardwell was called at home at 5 a.m. on the holiday and had to remove the offensive postings from the reader response space. "I was told the comments were blowing up," he notes.
On another football front, Vlae Kershner, news director for SFGate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle's Web site, says 49er fans and those rooting for the rival Oakland Raiders have used reader comment spaces to attack each other. A 2001 incident involved the two sides deciding to meet for a fight at San Francisco's famed Telegraph Hill. "We had to shut [the pages] down for a while," says Kershner, who says he never found out if the fight took place. "The Raider fans started posting all sorts of obscene comments."
Then there was the online death threat in 1999 against gay mayoral candidate Tom Ammiano, who garnered national attention when he almost beat incumbent Willie Brown in a write-in campaign. "Police came over to try to figure out who made the posting," Kershner recalls. "We took it down, but before we could, it was distributed by e-mail all over."
Ken Sands, online editor at the Spokesman-Review, says he received death threats after he tried to intervene. "I had the gall to moderate people who were insulting each other," says Sands, who moved to Congressional Quarterly this summer. "I finally pulled the plug on open forums. Even the most innocuous things, like those dealing with high school basketball, you would have people post charges without proof." The site now runs only monitored blogs with space for comments.
The Washington Post learned fast that profanity filters are needed, after a slew of angry reader comments popped up on a blog in 2005 after Ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote some controversial comments about indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. "We had to close that blog down for about three weeks," Brady recalls.
At The Orlando Sentinel, even the most tragic story about a teenager who received a sports car for a gift, then died in an accident, drew unfeeling and racist comments on a related posting. "It veered into this anti-Puerto Rican rant," says Anthony Moor, the Sentinel's former assistant managing editor for online, who recently joined Web operations at The Dallas Morning News.
A similar incident occurred in late June at The Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y., when five local teen girls were killed in a post-graduation car accident. The paper splashed coverage heavily across its Web site, and included a space for reader comments. Editors chose to remove a thread of some 87 posts and placed a notice limiting the space to memories of the girls and condolences after some readers used it to find fault with the youngsters. "There were a few people who e-mailed us and thought the comments were insensitive," said Editor Karen Magnuson. "This was the first time I could recall taking down an entire string of comments for insensitivity."
Another recent story, about Jessie Davis, the pregnant Ohio woman whose boyfriend is accused of killing her, drew offensive postings at the Akron Beacon Journal the day her body was found. Because it was a Saturday, the effort to monitor was diminished, sparking a shutdown of the posting area. "The editor had to call the site manager and request that it be closed down because it was getting racist comments," says Web Operations VP Linda Lyell. "The timing was not good."
The Sacramento Bee has instituted a policy requiring all online comments to include the identity of the writer. "Too often, the comments descended into the depths of vitriol, characterized by racism, sexism and the like," Bee Public Editor Armando Acuna explained in a July column. "By eliminating anonymity, the thinking goes, the amount of online bile will diminish, perhaps at the cost of fewer overall comments."
Then there is the polygamy page at the Salt Lake Tribune Web site, which no longer accepts reader comments, says Online Editor Manny Mellor. "People were coming out and saying we were promoting polygamy and the polygamists would log on," he says. "It wouldn't stay on topic -- people would write 'You're the devil', and they would answer, 'No, you're the devil.'"
Lesson Four: Not Everyone Wants to Chat
When the Salt Lake Tribune launched chats a la washingtonpost.com in 2001, few people seemed to notice -- or care, says Mellor. "That was a dismal failure," he recalls. "We had chats where four people would show up, and three were in our building." He says some political chats drew interest, but most, including those linked to the 2002 Winter Olympics in town, were limited.
The Miami Herald found similar lackluster responses to its online chats in 1999, even though some of them included the likes of singer Gloria Estefan and NASCAR champion Jeff Gordon.
Lesson Five: There's a Limit to 'Local, Local, Local'
The Orlando Sentinel thought the nationwide search engine craze could work locally, with one targeting circulation-area businesses and the like. That resulted in "Find Local."
"It was supposed to be our answer to Google, aggregate the best of the Web locally," says Anthony Moor. "It was slow and it didn't work well, for starters. And it got maybe 1,000 hits a month. Maybe we didn't put enough into it."
And when the San Diego Union-Tribune tried one of the first online video programs, "The Gourmet Club," few users wanted to log on and watch the interviews with local chefs. "People didn't use the Internet then like they do now," says Ron James, the paper's content manager for seven years. "The format was too long."
Lesson Six: Pay To Play? Not Everywhere
Sure, The Wall Street Journal takes in cash for online subscriptions -- one of a handful of dailies getting readers to cough up fees for Web-only viewing -- and The New York Times' TimesSelect program rakes in monthly payments from some 225,000 Webbies for access to columns and archives. But that doesn't mean other readers will do the same. When the Times first launched its Web site back in 1996, it initially charged international users -- a move that backfired, according to spokeswoman Diane McNulty. "It just didn't work," she says.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution learned a similar lesson in 2004 when it decided to put certain sportswriters behind the pay wall, particularly those covering the Atlanta Braves and University of Georgia and Georgia Tech football, for a few dollars a month. "We decided to take what we considered unique content," says Hide Post, AJC.com's vice president of interactive. "We saw the rush of enthusiasm in other places, like the Green Bay Packers. We were trying to build a community of folks inside that universe. But it was a small community." In about six months, the offer drew only 3,000 takers.
Post blamed part of the problem on not including print subscribers because of some technical limits on determining which subscribers were online.
Lesson Seven: Print Lost in (Web) Translation
The Times Union in Albany, N.Y., found that not every big print series or package deserves expanded online attention or extras. Its Central Avenue feature, an in-depth look at one of the city's major retail areas undergoing tough times, included a multimedia package of video, audio, and a range of opinions about the three-mile stretch of roadway. "It was a great feature, but it didn't have a lot of user content," says Paul Block, the paper's senior online producer. "You have to have something that is very interactive, or updatable."
At the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Online News Director Kurt Greenbaum got a lesson in what can happen when certain Web content runs in the print edition. Last year the paper was covering the shutdown of a Ford auto plant in nearby Hazelwood, prompting numerous postings to the Web site's comments page. Among them was one from a reader who stated that a monkey could do some of the work the auto plant employees were doing, and argued for more automation.
When Greenbaum contacted the poster and asked if he could reprint the comment in the paper, with his name and hometown, the writer agreed. Little did he realize what an angry reaction it would incite. "He basically got terrorized by thugs," Greenbaum recalls. "They e-mailed him, called him, sent letters. It showed me that that kind of comment sort of goes by online. But when people see something in print, it seems to have more of an impact."
Lesson Eight: Choose Podcasts and Webcams Wisely
The first podcast Newsday produced during the 1990s, related to a Saturday retirement section piece on Medicare and Medicaid funding, was a hit, says Interactive Editor Jonathan McCarthy. That sparked an idea: do one every week. But others did not fare nearly as well. One unpopular podcast was tied to a story about activities in assisted living homes. "It was not fantastic," he says.
Miami Herald editors figured that with a large population that attends church weekly -- up to 90% in some estimates -- a podcast of church sermons would be a big hit. But when the Web editors launched them in 2005 and ran them weekly for two months, there were only only two downloads of each sermon. "We figured it was the minister and maybe a reporter," says Suzanne Levinson. "There are certain things that seem like great ideas, but don't catch on."
When one of the legendary Boblo boats of Detroit was making a return appearance last year, the Detroit Free Press thought placing a Webcam aboard the St. Claire for its 60-mile trip from Toledo, Ohio, would be a great way for online users to follow the journey. But during most of the trip, the visual was less than enthralling. "We heralded it and promoted it, and then it sat there for hours," recalls Nancy Andrews, the Free Press' assistant managing editor for the Web. "People used the comments page to let us have it."
To make things worse, once the video images became somewhat more exciting and drew traffic, the server became overloaded. "We had a problem being able to handle it," she says. "Two of our servers needed to be kick-started again to make it work."
Lesson Nine: Dude, Where's My Obit?
When the Miami Herald redesigned its Web site in 2004, editors decided to take the obituary links off the homepage and stick them inside another news link, requiring readers to go through two steps to find them. Suzanne Levinson says the move followed research that found most users do not scroll down more than one-and-a-half screens, and their lengthy link list was too long. Most people welcomed the easier navigation -- except the obituary readers. "They were not happy," she says. "We had a lot of people complaining, about 10 e-mails a day for a week. We moved it back."
Lesson 10: Be Delicate About Databases
Gannett papers, as part of their Information Center transformation, are making databases all the rage. From local crime statistics to housing-sales prices, these seemingly endless files of facts are drawing readers to newspaper sites for more than news. And while most Web efforts are applauded, some postings of public information have caused a backlash. The Lansing (Mich.) State Journal, a Gannett daily, mirrored many of its chain brethren with a database of state employee salaries, a move that has drawn little negative comment elsewhere. But when the daily from Michigan's state capital did so in June, some state employees voiced their anger, prompting an apology in the paper from Publisher Richard Ramhoff. He wrote, "Our goal was not to hurt feelings, and we didn't do a good job of explaining our intent."
But the complaints were not enough to eliminate the database, which remains. "It is public record and it is available," Journal Executive Editor Mickey Hirten says. "There has been a heightened interest in state workers here so we got caught up in it. But it is still up and people are looking at it."
What is not still up is the list of gun owners the Roanoke Times posted in March 2007, which drew complaints from Virginians who were licensed to carry concealed weapons. Newspaper officials removed the list after concerns arose that some of the names might be wrongly listed. "If the information should have been protected, and it wasn't, then we don't want to run it," President/Publisher Debbie Meade said at the time.
Lesson 11: Split Sales Staffs Don't Succeed
Newspapers have realized in the past year that having separate sales staffs for print and online isn't an effective strategy. The New York Times, for example, spent most of its first 10 years online trying to sell Web ads separate from its print offerings. That changed last year when the 30 Web-only sales associates joined the 350 who had worked on print. "Our percentage of online sales has increased year over year," says Vivian Schiller, who called the separate staffs "a mistake."
Lesson 12: Want Traffic? Be Careful What You Wish For
When The Drudge Report links to you, beware, say editors. For most, the traffic the site brings is welcomed. But often it can come fast and hard, and your server had better be prepared for it. "It would cause our site to crash at least twice a year in the past," says Paul Block at the Albany, N.Y., Times Union. "We had to increase bandwidth."
In 2004, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was unable to report on the resignation of Attorney General John Ashcroft for two hours because of a server crash. As a former governor and senator of Missouri, Ashcroft's departure from the Bush Administration was a definite lead story for the paper's site, says Kurt Greenbaum. "It was minutes before his resignation was announced," he says of the site crash. "We were paralyzed. We were unable to update for two hours. It was painful."
At the Salt Lake Tribune, coverage of the 2002 hometown Winter Olympics was a major project. But unfortunately, its in-house server was not prepared. "We ended up with more traffic than we had planned," says Manny Mellor. "During the first couple of days, it soaked up all of our bandwidth and our photographers could not send anything in." Editors had to take the server out of the building, run it down to the service provider across town, and have it expanded. "We were at a real standstill for a couple of hours," he recalls.
At Newsday, early technical stumbles were aplenty. Jonathan McCarthy recalls the online-directory vendor that linked from the site and then went out of business and replaced its URL with a string of sites, including a pornography page. "We obviously took it down quickly," he says. "But that was back in our infancy."
Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.
