The long-promised revamp of the Herald-Sun's web site has arrived.
The site, which launches this morning at heraldsun.net (though the old site says that heraldsun.com "will return shortly"), uses a social-media-linked content management system called Matchbin. Initially launches as a barter/auction technologies site, Matchbin has evolved into a platform with a strong focus on community newspapers -- with a mission of helping to create an online community and engagement with readers alongside the daily news.
Fellow Paxton Media paper the High Point Enterprise has also made the jump to the new hosted provider.
In outsourcing its web presence to third-party Matchbin for a "Web 2.0" site, the Herald-Sun is also staking its clear business hopes in an online presence in which you, the reader, help contribute content and value, too.
That's clear, in fact, from the intriguing button near the masthead, which transforms "The Herald-Sun" into "your Herald-Sun" -- the latter being a place you can go to, well, be an unpaid contributor to the Herald-Sun's content base (and thus its impressions, and thus its ad revenue, etc.)
The H-S' Bob Ashley makes no bones about the importance of the new section's addition, noting in his Sunday column:
A key feature of the new site is "Your Herald-Sun." That's a place where you can post photos, stories, videos -- news about yourself, your community or something that interests you....
We are striving to delineate clearly between two sides of our site, each with an important but distinct purpose. The conventional news site will have most of the news content of the printed paper, just like the old site. If you're looking for traditional news gathered, vetted and presented by full-time journalists, that's what you'll find.
On "Your Community," you're in control.
Ashley notes that the "Your Herald-Sun" section will serve as a home for the "increasingly popular reader-supplied content" that currently occupies several pages in the Sunday print edition -- and which, Ashley says, will soon get an additional weekday page to help cover the material.
It's local-news 2.0, the same strategy that The Durham News follows: in an era when newsrooms have been cut to the bone (literally -- with even one-time columnist John McCann telling his Twitter followers recently he filed five bylines on a single day), papers are turning to the press releases they receive from non-profits and community organizations to fill stories.
Or, increasingly, just let community members post it themselves, as with the new web site.
Local newspapers have been struggling to figure out what it is that makes the online world so difficult to succeed in. There's no question they've been less dominant in the electronic world than the print one.
Of course, I'm biased in this whole thing myself, but I've seen BCR's traffic grow to the point where we're even or ahead of the N&O's TheDurhamNews.com on a daily basis, while on peak readership weeks BCR has garnered almost one-fifth the online visitors as the Herald-Sun's online property. And that's without any paid full time staff. (Yet.)
(Interesting side note: just under 10% of the Herald-Sun's web traffic comes from Australia, according to Alexa.com -- which seems surprising until you realize that Melbourne, Australia is also home to a Herald-Sun, that one part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation conglomerate.)
The Herald-Sun's new approach to the web is intriguing. For years, standalone community-driven news sites have withered on the vine, largely because there was little motivation to contribute content -- or the groups that dominated the content-submission were so insular and focused in their interests (e.g., posting every single, say, "Youth Soccer Try-Out" that they filled the screen with them) that they nudged others out.
Backfence.com was one of the more spectacular failures where that's concerned, with founder Mark Potts sharing his received wisdom on what worked, and what didn't, in this blog post back in 2007.
At the same time, WRAL has been able to do this remarkably effectively, achieving (according to a recent WUNC report) a much higher traffic level than the N&O -- though I've tended to attribute that to the sometimes-scary GoLo community over at 'RAL, which has all of the charm and character of a middle-school cafeteria lunch table, replete with spitballs and gossip.
The challenge is engaging community participation in a way that fosters effective community dialogue and participation. Will the Herald-Sun be able to create that engagement at their new web site?
And if so, will it capture the best of the community -- or the sometimes racially-tinged back-and-forth that dominated the comments at the old Herald-Sun?
We'll all be watching. And, if the H-S and Matchbin do it right, participating, too.
Well, lookie there! And I don't have to sign in with fake user info every time I want to read more than the first paragraph of a story. BugMeNot will be missing me...
Posted by: Stephen | August 24, 2009 at 11:06 AM
Well, the design is an improvement, if nothing else.
They're doing what I've said they should do, with one exception -- they really need a ranking system (like the "Recommend" buttons at DailyKos and others) to keep people from spamming the page to irrelevancy. That said, I'm cautiously optimistic about this.
(And if you're going to be getting into this more permanently Kevin, don't do things like this: "in an era when newsrooms have been cut to the bone (literally -- with even one-time columnist John McCann telling his Twitter followers recently he filed five bylines on a single day)." If the newsroom had been "literally" cut to the bone, we'd have seen H-S staffers in emergency rooms with lacerations. )
Posted by: Michael Bacon | August 24, 2009 at 03:29 PM
They plagiarized the entire front page design from the NY Times online. They may have even nabbed their style sheets. Pretty lame, even for the Herald Sun.
http://www.orangepolitics.org/2009/08/herald-sun-improves-lackluster-website-by-stealing-ny-times-online-layout#comment-8761
Posted by: Patrick | August 25, 2009 at 11:18 PM