Printed Matters

My tiny little brain has been working overtime since reading @yelvington’s post last night about the three primary functions of a local news website – town crier, town expert, and town square. I’ll let you read his post to find out more about the functions.

That he articulated these three functions is fine work indeed, but what’s really exciting is that once you have this conceptual framework – and his diagram – you begin to see new possibilities in the areas where these functions overlap.

To back up a little, I unconciously recognized these functions a few years ago when I did parrysound.com. If you look at the front page over there, you see four main sections to the site, three of which correspond precisely to Steve’s three functions: News = town crier; Voice = town square; Explore = town expert. I added a fourth dimension, Market, which I suppose corresponds to fourth function: town broker. In there went all the transaction related stuff: classifieds, job ads, real estate listings, and buy-and-sell, that sort of thing. And the business directory.

But what I didn’t have was the explicit recognition of those four things as functions that could overlap. Because if I did, I might have seen that interesting things pop out at you in the areas where the zones overlap. I didn’t have that organizational principle.

Principle: always have an organizational principle.

I redid Steve’s diagram to reflect my four site sections:

Steve has already pointed out something that comes out of the A-B overlap zone, the blending of the town crier function with the town expert function: topic pages.

We even fail at being the town expert in the territory where we might claim to excel, the town crier function. (Note that I have drawn overlapping circles.) Show me one single local newspaper site, just one, that has done a great job of building topics pages. Yahoo has topics pages. Cnet has topics pages. Newspaper sites? They have stories. Incremental stories that beg to be placed in context.

What comes out of some of the other overlap zones?

A-C (town crier and town square): this is where you would facilitate and cultivate reporters’ and editors’ participation on the forums. They would help lead conversations, add information about stories that didn’t make it into the original. They might also gather leads and contacts via the forums.

The site itself might cry out (shout out?) the best forum posts, comments or pictures as well. Kind of a retweet of the best user contributions. We did a bit of that at parrysound.com, promoting the best reader-submitted pictures into a scenic photo gallery.

[Ack - as I look around at the site now, they've really messed it up since I left. Almost embarrassing. Too bad.]

B-C (town expert and town square): this might be where you cultivate and promote the best forum contributors. Or it might be blogs by citizens on topics that they know something about.

C-D (town square and town broker): obvious one – recommendation engine.

B-D (town expert and town broker): maybe a deal finder: the system finds the best shopping deals for you.

A-D (town crier and town broker): tough one. Newspeople accustomed to the sacrosanct separation of editorial and sales might find this idea repugnant. Could this be contextual ads from upsells in the business directory?

And then, of course, there is that black square in the middle, where three or even four of these things overlap. Does anyone have any good ideas for tools that could come out of that?

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