Be the Answer: Using interactive databases to provide answers and generate revenue

8/14/2019 Be the Answer: Using interactive databases to provide answers and generate revenue

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Be the Answer


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2008 AmericAn Press institute1

Be the Answer: Using interactive databases

to provide answers and generate revenue

Databases help us grow the best o traditional journalism anddirectory advertising into the best o interactive community

connection. Traditional newspapers always included databaseso sorts where people ound answers to a host o questions.Readers searched through columns o agate type, looking ormovie times, calendar listings, stock prices, box scores, policereports, lawmakers votes, service businesses and more.Through technological innovation, interactive databases canmake your company the answer source or your community ina more ecient, useul, timely way than daily agate lists evercould. These are an essential tool in your transormation rom anewspaper company to a local inormation and connection util-ity, the vision spelled out in APIs report Newspaper Next 2.0:Making the Leap Beyond Newspaper Companies.

Databases are also one o the most resounding successes othe rst wave o Newspaper Next innovation. Databases t allour areas o the N2 Game Plan: They maximize core products,build audience by doing new jobs, and generate revenue in newways; and companies are restructuring to build the capacityto develop databases. Databases help your company amassuseul, interactive community content with lasting value.While news stories lose much o their value ater a day, manydatabases can be useul again and again. Instead o simplyeeding the beast daily, database work builds lasting valueand searchable content, much o it easily updated ater theinitial development.

This report will mention and link to notable work rom morethan 200 examples developed by more than 60 sites repre-

senting large and small newspaper groups and independent

newspapers. However, this represents only a small percentageo newspapers; most newspaper sites make scant use, i any,o interactive databases beyond a calendar or a story enhance-ment, and many are not even taking those rst steps.

This is a study o how newspapers are using and could use da-tabases to provide answers or their communities. We includerecommendations or how you can do more i youve alreadystarted with databases, or how you can get started. Perhapsmost important, we discuss how you can use databases moreeectively to generate new revenue streams.

However, i you read this report and consider all the possibilitiessuggested here, you will quickly be overwhelmed. You cant doall this at once. What you need to do is start thinking about the

needs o your community and the abilities o your organization.In the nal section, we will discuss the important task o set tingpriorities and getting to work.

CONTENTS

I. Start by understanding the job youre doing ...............................................

A. What to call it? ........................................... ...........................................

B. Where to put it? .......................................... ...........................................

C. Answerbases or mega-jobs .............................................. ....................

D. Build a business, not just content ............................................. ............

II. Doing mega-jobs for businesses and consumers.......................................

A. Moving into transactions ............................................ ...........................

B. Niches ..................................................................................................

C. Protecting the verticals ............................................... ...........................

1. Doing jobs or drivers ........................................................................

2. Doing jobs or home owners ..............................................................

III. Lots of questions, lots of opportunities .....................................................

A. Answer Center index page .......................................... ...........................

B. Politics ............................................... ............................................... ....

C. Government ............................................... ...........................................D. Crime ......................................... ............................................... ............

E. Entertainment, activities ............................................ ...........................

F. Eating out..............................................................................................

G. Education ........................................... ............................................... ....

H. Sports ........................................ ............................................... ............

I. Recreation .......................................... ............................................... ....

J. Newspaper archives ........................................... ...................................

K. Seasonal inormation ......................................... ...................................

L. Weddings ........................................... ............................................... ....

M. Travel ....................................................................................................

N. News ....................................................................................................

O. The big story .............................................. ...........................................

P. Community inormation .............................................. ...........................

Q. Answers on a variety o topics ........................................... ....................R. Relocation .......................................... ............................................... ....

IV. Operating your answer center ....................................................................

A. How to start, how ar go to ......................................... ...........................

B. Programming solutions ............................................... ...........................

C. How do you develop database skills? ........................................ ............

D. Answerbases generate trac ............................................ ....................

E. Promotion and widgets build trac ........................................... ............

Build milestone answerbases .............................................................................

Conclusion ..........................................................................................................

About the author .................................................................................................

Sources .............................................................................................................

IntrodUctIon


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As with the N2 projects in the Casebook o the NewspaperNext 2.0 report, database projects studied or this report tend

to be imperect but good enough. This is consistent with theN2 principle o keeping costs low by starting with good-enoughproducts that get the job done and o er new solutions not avail-able in the market. Then you improve as you gain experienceand receive eedback rom the marketplace.

However, one requent break rom the N2 approach is that eventhe databases that were designed eectively to do importantjobs generally didnt start with jobs-to-be-done research. Moreoten a database started with a reporter s interest in data thatwould illuminate a particular story or an editors hunch that thepublic would nd a database useul. Even one o the most-promising projects described in the Casebook, DeliveringQC,bypassed JTBD research, launching instead rom an executivesintuitive perception o a job that needed to be done. Similarly,many databases that bypassed that research stage are suc-ceeding because they were designed to do important jobs (ortrivial jobs that matter a lot to some people):

Help me gure out how much my property taxes will increase.

Help me decide whether this politician is telling the truth.

Help me nd out how good the schools and how bad thecrime are in a neighborhood where I am considering buyinga home.

Help me nd a good barbecue joint.

Help me nd a contractor I can actually trust.

Help me nd out how much that dolt who was rude to me atthe DMV today is being overpaid with my tax dollars.

Tell me every possible detail about my avorite quarterback.

So, while we can learn rom eorts that ocused intuitively onimportant jobs, we should not rely solely on intuition. Start yourdevelopment o databases by doing jobs-to-be-done researchwith potential users o your new o ering, as detailed in the ini-tial N2 report, Newspaper Next: Blueprint or Transormation,released in 2006. Even i you are intuitively on the right track,hearing rom potential users will help you design more helpul

products and prioritize the eatures or content you want to oerrst. Jobs-to-be-done research also may turn your attention innew directions. Many journalists will be inclined to ocus their

eorts on public-records databases ollowing the civic orienta-tion o newspaper beats. While you can use those databases todo important jobs, many peoples everyday needs and interestsall more in the consumer realm o lie where newsrooms areless likely to look. Identiy urgent jobs where your communityis rustrated with current solutions and oten you will nd data-bases are a helpul tool in doing those jobs.

A. Wa all i?

Databases can eel orbidding to users who dont know whatthey are. Its kind o like marketing a car by trying to orce theterm internal combustion into the brand name. Thereore, werecommend not presenting your data products to the public asdata. Users generally dont think o themselves as looking ordata but as looking or answers or inormation. Dozens o eortsto present answers online are branded with some twist on theword data: DataUniverse, DataCenter, Database Central, DataCentral, Data Connection, Database Warehouse, Data Bay, Da-

tabank, DataSphere, Data Leader, Data-Leader, DataMine, DataMississippi. At least one other name is built around the worddocuments, shortened to docs. Data and documents are wordsocused on what we use to do the job, not on the job itsel.

I. StArt by UnderStAndIng the job yoUre doIng

Consider labeling data that you present online not as a place tond data, but a place to nd answers. Build your name arounda job-ocused term: Ourtown Search, Answerbase, AnswerSource, Yourtown-opedia, InoCenter. Several sites are on theright track: Fact Finder, South Dakota Ino, FYI.


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To help underscore this need or a user-ocused outlook, thisreport will use the termanswerbase when reerring to the prod-

uct your users see. Database will be used only to discuss theinternal handling o the data to develop the answerbase. Thisisnt to suggest that the whole industry should shit suddenlyto usinganswerbase, a term that already has enough use that itgets nearly 50,000 Google hits, including some company andproduct names. Rather, its to underscore the importance othinking about your product as answers or solutions to impor-tant jobs that need to be done, not just as data, and choosingthe right answer-oriented name or your answerbase, possiblyincorporating the community or region name.

Sometimes a news sites home page will include an invitation tosearch our databases, a link that takes you to its data center.Many people who use online databases dont think o them-selves as searching databases. Some potential users may thinkthey dont know how to search a database or why they wouldwant to. They think o themselves as searching or inormationor answers: Whats going on this weekend? Is this candidatetelling the truth? Where can I nd a reliable plumber? I youre

already using a data-oriented name that is gaining some brandrecognition, perhaps you can enhance that with a home-pageinvitation or data-page subhead thats more user-ocused.

Personally I try not to even think o most o these productsstrictly as databases, because your users wont either, saidMichael Corey, digital projects editor at the Des Moines Regis-ter and DesMoinesRegister.com. Theyre just looking or goodinormation or something un to play with, and theyre not verytolerant o roadblocks and arent amiliar with some tools that

database users are very amiliar with. The title or the databasecollection at DesMoinesRegister.com and the invitation rom thehome page both refect this user ocus: Search Your Community.

b. W pu i?

All i pla: In a recent blog entry, Matt Waite, developero the St. Petersburg TimesPolitiFact site, reerred to thesedatabase collections as the Data Ghetto, that one mishmashpage where all o that sites databases are lumped together.The observation had some merit and he made some excellentsuggestions or improving databases. But once you ocus onyour job o providing answers, it makes great sense to put anendless variety o answers about your community in one place not a ghetto, but a downtown, where people might come orwork, shopping, entertainment or sports events. Or let s movethe analogies rom the community to the digital world: a local

equivalent o Google, where all kinds o people search or quickand easy answers to all kinds o questions.

All v pla: A jobs-ocused presentation o answers

also means that you should help people nd the answers whenand where they might be asking the questions. For instance, acalendar is a database, but most sites with answerbase direc-tories understand that they need to place the calendar link on ahome page and/or an entertainment page. While presenting allthe answerbases in one directory with a job-ocused name willhelp people develop the habit o coming there or answers to

any question, you also want to guide them to answerbases romother places where they might look. During ootball season

IndyStar.com eatures prominently on its Data Central indexpage the Manning Meter, breaking down every pass PeytonManning has ever thrown in every way that any an might havea question. But Colts ans (and certainly NFL ans in othercommunities) seeking to analyze Mannings perormance maynot even know o Data Centrals existence, so during the seasonthe Manning Meter also is eatured prominently on the sportspage o IndyStar.com and its easy to nd on search engines iyou just heard about it rom another sports an. Some answer-bases need to be eatured with a news story or on the homepage when theyre timely and then just in the answer directorywhen theyre less timely. Others should reside permanently inan entertainment or business section or a real estate or autosvertical or a health-care directory as well as in the answerbase

directory. Think o the answerbase as a room with multipledoors to help users enter rom dierent directions, dependingon their interests and needs.

c. Aswass a-s

In the Newspaper Next 2.0 report, API introduced the concept

o mega-jobs that serve virtually every consumer or everybusiness in a community. Answerbases help perorm each othese mega-jobs or consumers and many o the mega-jobs orbusinesses. The business mega-jobs are addressed in the nextsection. Well elaborate on all these jobs throughout this report,but want to remind you here o the consumer mega-jobs andmention briefy how answerbases can help do those jobs:

hlp ak spi isis. Communitybusiness directories and specialized directories such as res-taurant guides provide a wealth o answers to help with thismega-job, rom menus, coupons and videos provided by thebusinesses to user reviews and ratings rom the community.

hlp , alk a sa wi s. Answer-bases can become a place where your community sharesits collective wisdom and experience, whether through userreviews o products and events or user stories, photos andvideos entered into a database such as a calendar or map.

hlp f/s is . Calendars and enter-tainment or tourism guides designed to do this mega-job arethe kinds o answerbases in widest use by community news

and sharing sites.hlp asws au ui. This is thesweet spot o the answerbase. The Newspaper Next 2.0report suggested developing a local encyclopedia o com-munity-contributed knowledge along the lines o Wikipedia.You probably will want to structure the encyclopedia as adatabase. Combine the wisdom you can gather wiki-style

rom the community with the data you can assemble rompublic records, your own archives and other sources and youcan answer an endless array o questions. You will becomethe place people turn rst, whatever the question.



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giv a -sp asw pla. The online commu-nity portal approach suggested in Newspaper Next 2.0 will

include answerbases in virtually every option: Your shoppingoption will include business directories; visitors who click onthings to do will go into your calendar; users seeking com-

munity inormation will be presented with a wide array oanswerbases; when they click on the news option, you willuse answerbases to help them personalize the story or digdeeper.

d. buil a usiss, us

Companies that want to prosper in the digital marketplace needto ocus on these opportunities immediately. As the research

rom Borrell Associates in Newspaper Next 2.0 showed, thegrowth oppor tunities in online revenue are not in the areaswhere newspaper sites get most o their online revenue now

banners and classied listings. Instead, Borrell projectsdramatic growth and opportunities in video advertising, emailadvertising and search. Databases can be key vehicles ordeveloping all three o these opportunities.

Borrell also stresses the importance o developing solutionsor business customers who dont traditionally advertise innewspapers. Again, answerbases are an ideal solution or manyo the jobs o these businesses, so you arent just shiting yourprint customers online but developing new revenue streamsrom new business customers.

Seizing these opportunities will require a signicant shit in howmost companies think, operate and communicate internally. Aswith other eorts described in theNewspaper Next 2.0 Case-book, newspaper companies have used answerbases more e-ectively to develop content and build audience than to generateinnovative revenue streams. A notable exception is the use obusiness directory databases such as Kudzu, PalmettoBizBuzzor HudsonValley, which were developed as business revenuevehicles. (More about those later in this report.)

In most cases, the time-honored segregation o news rom ad-vertising seems to rule in the world o database answers, too. A

nearly impenetrable wall seems to keep the people who developcontent providing answers to the public rom any collaborationwith the people whose job it is to connect businesses with cus-tomers. By contrast, Google has made billions by connectingthe job o searching or content with the job o reaching peoplewho express particular interests by the search terms they use. Inewspaper companies (and the local inormation and connec-tion utilities that they must transorm into) are going to surviveand thrive in a world thats increasingly search-oriented, weneed to break down silo walls and work together to master theinterconnected business o search: more data, more users,more searches, more revenue opportunities.

Journalists can protect their integrity and still collaborate withcolleagues who generate and collect revenue rom the contentjournalists develop. And they have to. The cutbacks in too manynews organizations have harmed the quality o journalism inhundreds o communities. Protecting quality journalism nowrequires collaboration on development o revenue. Journalistscan still maintain a proper distance by staying out o the who onew revenue sources but working closely with sales colleagueson questions o how to generate revenue.

The sky is the limit when it comes to ways to sell advertisingwith dynamic, data-driven content as long as it has value and isas relevant as the content, said Scott DeNoon, online opera-tions manager or The Observer-Dispatch and uticaOD.com inUtica, N.Y.

In telephone and email interviews with more than two dozenpeople developing databases, only a ew mentioned any col-laboration with commercial sta. Jacob Kaplan-Moss included

a mention o the Marketplace directory in discussing develop-ment o several products or the Lawrence Journal-World andLJWorld.com.

James Wilkerson, data editor at the Des Moines RegisterandDesMoinesRegister.com, said he always considers the adver-tising potential o Web sites we build, and he touches baseto alert the advertising department to possible custom sellingopportunities. More editors need to take this basic step. Adver-tising response has never infuenced whether the inormationcenter proceeded with a data project, Wilkerson said.

Brian Butts, director o data and technology or the CincinnatiEnquirerand Cincinnati.com, said a data integration team romthe news, advertising and circulation departments collaborateson database development. So when the developers acquireddatabases o new businesses and property sales, the advertis-ing and circulation stas began using them or lead generation.And Cincinnati.com sells display advertising targeted to thelikely audience o a particular channel o answerbases, such asreal estate or crime.

These ew cases were exceptional, though. Several developerswho could provide great detail about how their answerbaseswere developed and presented had little idea whether and howthose products were generating money. One answered that


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he got a big raise last year, so they must be doing well. To theextent that the news-side developers did know about commer-

cial success, they indicated the advertising is pretty much thetraditional banners and buttons that dominate newspaper sites.Since answerbases drive lots o trac, they bring eyeballs to thebanners and buttons and have been successul in that sense.

The main objective with these has been to build large amountso audience, said Danny Sanchez, senior producer or theOrlando Sentinel and OrlandoSentinel.com. We do sell ourentertainment-related databases such as restaurant and eventlistings.

DataUniverse atAsbury Park Press and APP.com has beena huge revenue hit. We run ads at the top o the page, PaulDAmbrosio said. At IndyStar.com, some specialized answer-bases such as Indy911Calls and Manning Meter have sponsors.

Jacksonville.com is seeking a sponsor or Databank.

such as OpenTable. Its possible to maintain the integrity o theeditorial content as eectively in an online restaurant guide as

in a print entertainment section that runs movie ads along withmovie reviews. A recipe answerbase could connect with a oodshopping answerbase, providing prices at a grocery store or theingredients listed in a recipe or oering an opportunity to orderthe ingredients or home delivery or or pick-up at the store onyour way home rom work, already bagged and paid or. Or ashop selling gourmet cooking equipment could advertise along-side the recipes.

David Milliron o Caspio expects a great increase in targetedrevenue linked to data searches. Think about the jobs that bringusers to an answerbase, then think about businesses who canhelp those customers do those jobs. Its a natural match.

Several o the mega-jobs or businesses described in Newspa-

per Next 2.0 can be perormed eectively using answerbases:hlp a xal p us I

a. A niche site ocusing on moms or brides can includea database o businesses hoping to reach that target audi-ence, such as child-care providers and recreation opportuni-ties or the moms site or forists and caterers or the brides.You provide the basic directory inormation business type,

name, contact inormation, map at no charge to the busi-ness, with opportunities to pay or upgraded listings with vid-eos, coupons and so orth. Answerbases on these niche sitesalso provide opportunities or email advertising. For instance,i a mom clicks on a childrens theater oering in the calendaron a moms site, you could oer her an opportunity to receiveemails rom the theater, telling her about upcoming plays andoering the chance to buy tickets.

hlp si w a us is au ak

a i. The business directories, which weve alreadymentioned and will discuss in depth later, are geared speci-cally to do this job. The landscaper who wont spend a nickelor a newspaper ad wants to provide lots o inormation to theuser who clicks on landscapers in a business directory. Weelaborate on these directories in the next section.

hlp sw ppl uali pu/svi/

us xpi. Again, the directories are a perect vehicleor photos and inomercial-style videos, demonstrating anew product or taking a prospective customer right into theshowroom or showing nished results o a service (such aslandscaping).

hlp uil a aiai us lal and hlp a -- laisips wi uss. As

directories connect businesses with consumers through yoursite, those email opportunities which you can manage orthe business customer help the business cultivate the rela-tionship through the use o coupons, updates and advice.

hlp wi us asai. Databases can bean eective tool to move beyond the traditional advertisingmodel o simply delivering the sales pitch to customers; theycan help close the sale and collect the money. A database o

I youre developing an answerbase, part o your considerationneeds to be which businesses would want to reach peoplewhen theyre looking or that inormation. An important ques-tion to ask businesses is, When do you want to get your mes-sage in ront o a potential buyer?

Answerbases provide opportunities or targeted revenue op-portunities that our industry must explore immediately andaggressively. The very jobs that bring people to these sitesseeking answers, such as searching a restaurant guide ora place to eat, make them ideal targets or certain types oadvertising. Restaurants want to reach exactly the people whoare looking or a place to dine, and can oer coupons, purchasean expanded listing, or link to an online reservation system


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One o the best oppor tunities rom databases matches upthe mega-job or consumers, Help me make good spending

decisions, with the mega-job or businesses, Help me getconsidered when a customer is about to make a choice.

Interactive business directories that go way beyond an onlineyellow pages provide a tremendous opportunity that newspa-pers are only beginning to pursue. Four o the best examplesare Cox Searchs Kudzu.com, Bakerseld.coms Inside Guide,LJWorld.coms Marketplace and Evening Post Community Pub-lications PalmettoBizBuzz.com. HudsonValley.com, launchedby the Times Herald-Record in Middletown, N.Y., is not as aralong the developmental path, but shows similar potential. Re-member the triple play o online growth opportunities search,video and email identied in the Borrell Associates researchin Newspaper Next 2.0? These directories become a key vehicleor local search, they provide excellent video advertising plat-orms and they give businesses a chance to identiy customerswilling to receive emails with special oers and sales.

Lawrence Marketplace, which debuted April 3, 2007, grossed$600,000 its rst year, said General Manager Al Bonner. Whilehe wouldnt release exact prot gures, he said, Were havingno trouble making money on it. We recouped our investmentater the rst six months.

on good listings. Most important, these initial calls collectedadditional basic inormation rom each business: hours, credit

cards accepted and Web site, i any. This job took three tempsabout two months and the inormation gathered added immedi-ate value to the directory or consumers at launch. The hourso operation make it much more usable than any other source,Bonner said. The Marketplace sta also shot photos o eachbusiness and generated automatic maps, so even or non-paying businesses, the consumer gets much more than just thename-address-phone number-category oering o a basic direc-tory. I it s just another directory, its a dime a dozen.

Marketplace also ollowed a critical tenet o Newspaper Next ocusing on non-customers. And it illustrates the wisdom oa key point o Newspaper Next 2.0 using a separate salessta instead o relying on upsells rom the print sales reps. Itstarted with one dedicated sales rep and now has our. Theirocus is business we dont have, Bonner said. He has heardo too many business-directory e orts by newspaper compa-nies that disappoint. I they just turn it over to their regularsta, they just call on their regular customers. That approachhas two critical drawbacks: You overlook lots o potential newrevenue and much o the revenue you get will be diverted romthe customers print advertising budget. We tried to create abrand new revenue stream, a brand new vertical, Bonner said.He estimates that 60 to 65 percent o Marketplaces revenue isrom new customers.

In addition, he said, you have to train dierently to sell or thedirectory. We have to deprogram them basically, especially

i theyve been in print. The Marketplace approach is entirely

dierent rom newspaper advertising, which is heavily ocusedon generating immediate business, Bonner explained. The salesrep needs to guide the customer in building a Web presencethat will gain value over time. Its not a direct-result medium.

The basic upsell package or $75 per month lets a business addour additional photos and gives the business (many customersare small enough that they dont have Web sites) a promotableURL: LawrenceMarketplace.com/businessname. The basiccustomer also can add a thumbnail prole and keywords thatwill help optimize its site or search engines.

The basic package is just a allback, though. The primary pack-age Marketplace reps sell is a multimedia package at $200per month, designed to make those customers Marketplace

pages a marketing hub or their business, Bonner said. Thispackage ollows one o the key points o Newspaper Next 2.0,anticipating the growth o revenue rom video advertising. Themultimedia customer can post unlimited photos and videos onits Marketplace page. TheJournal-World owns the local cablecompany, so commercials there can load easily to Marketplace.Reps also encourage customers to post how-to or helpul-hintsvideos rom product manuacturers. Or Marketplace can pro-duce videos or the customer or a ee.

While news and sports videos present important pre-rolland post-roll video advertising opportunities, a directory hasadvantages. Especially with pre-roll ads, video advertising with

II. doIng megA-jobS or bUSIneSSeS And conSUmerS

One thing to keep in mind in the good enough concept oNewspaper Next is that it s not a general acceptance o lowerstandards. Yes, you do need to decide where you can acceptgood-enough perormance to keep costs down, but you also

need to decide where you need to invest what it takes to dier-entiate yoursel rom other solutions available to consumers.

Lawrence Marketplace did this by not just going online im-

mediately with the basic business database that it bought romInoUSA, but by investing enough to dierentiate the productrom other online directories and provide unique value. TheLawrence sta contacted each o the 3,200 businesses in thedatabase, deleting outdated listings and conrming inormation


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a news or sports story is intrusive and annoying, so it has to beshort. However, videos are welcome when a shopper is trying to

make a choice. Depending on the nature o the business, a two-minute promotional video or a longer how-to inomercial can beo great value. While it may not get as many impressions as thead with a news story, everyone who views is interested in thisproduct or business and what it has to o er. Every viewer choseto watch and no one is annoyed. With this kind o audience, acreative business could develop a series o unny promotionalvideos that would keep users coming back and even gener-ate viral marketing. Only about 10 percent o the Marketplacebusiness customers post videos now, Bonner said. We arebeginning to shoot more video or customers and have plans touse our ad design department to provide this service.

Tabs on each Marketplace page or products and coupons letthe multimedia customer post a menu, product descriptions,brochures, coupons and the like. You can essentially postanything you want there, Bonner said. Ads romJournal-Worldprint products post automatically to the Marketplace page. Anda template lets the multimedia customers build their own ads.

A calendar eature lets these customers post sales or specialevents, or which users can sign up to receive notications byemail or text message. About 5 percent o customers are using

the calendar and text service.

The video and email eatures are under-used right now, Bon-

ner said, but we expect both o these to grow as new capabili-ties o the Marketplace sotware are introduced.

The goal, Bonner said, is to make the Marketplace listing so

multi-unctional that it becomes the de acto home page or thebusiness, whether it has a Web site already or not. I anybodyhas that kind o capability in their own Web site, theyre a rarebird, he said. Weve run into a number o businesses thatwere planning to spend a bunch o money to do their own Website and just decided to do this instead.

In the rst year, Marketplace has drawn 225 business custom-ers, about 75 to 80 percent o them choosing the multimediapackage. The site averages 175,000 to 200,000 page views amonth, about 25 percent rom return visitors.

Marketplace is not just passively hoping or customer satisac-tion, either. A coordinator calls on business customers to showthem how to use the site, tell their customers about it, use the

right words or search-engine optimization and get the mostvalue rom the directory. Theres a ton o businesses that needto be prompted and they need to market it or it wont work,Bonner said.

Pizza Hut, an important business or a university town, is usingits Marketplace page so eectively including the ability toorder online that it s planning to stop its direct-mail advertis-ing. Pizza places are the top category Marketplace sold rst,with other entertainment and retail businesses also gettingearly attention.

Marketplace is delivering another revenue stream or the WorldCo. The company is selling Marketplace sotware and services

to newspapers in other communities. The Hutchinson News andhutchnews.com went live with HutchMarketplace April 1 andother newspapers are preparing to launch. Hutchinson PublisherJohn Montgomery said the site launched with 22 customers atera couple months spent building the database and training thesta. He expects the customer base to grow as promotion andmarketing bring consumers and businesses to the site.

We sell the exact same sotware we use to our commercialcustomers, Bonner said. The Marketplace package includessales training. We believe the sotware and the design arevery good but the key to making Marketplace a success in anymarket is the sales model. As we have talked to many news-papers, both private and part o a group, they all seem to haveallen short on the sales side with any directory product they areusing or have used. Our model turns the current selling processon its head. We recommend having a separate, dedicatedsales team that ocuses on non-advertisers, especially the keyprint yellow-page categories like heating and air conditioning,insurance, medical, attorneys, lawn and garden, etc. At mostnewspaper directories, Bonner said, Sales eorts stay withinthe 15-20% o the businesses newspapers already have. Mar-ketplace is an opportunity to open the door to the other 80% othe businesses you dont have.

As interactive as Marketplace is, it does not include one im-portant eature o Kudzu, Inside Guide and PalmettoBizBuzz

customer reviews. Bonner said the Lawrence directory steeredclear o reviews ater some negative eedback about commentselsewhere on the site. LJWorld does oer the option o reviewsto other newspaper sites using its Marketplace services. Even-tually Bonner plans to oer Lawrence businesses the option oallowing customer reviews.

Bakerselds Inside Guide has been stronger as a vehicle orreviews than or revenue in its rst year. Only recently didInside Guide hire a dedicated sales rep, said Logan Molen, vicepresident o interactive media at the Bakersfeld Caliornian.We expect to see traction soon, he said. The site had 4,562businesses listed in late April, with 496 o them purchasing


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enhanced packages. Eventually the Caliornian hopes to list15,000 businesses as it adds more categories. The site gets

60,000 to 70,000 page views per month.Reviews are allowed throughout Kudzu and provide much othe content and drive much o the trac, said Tom Bates, vicepresident o Cox Search and general manager o Kudzu. Werenot creating a lot o the content. With the reviews, they get thegood, the bad and the ugly. The reviews have cost Kudzu somecustomers, even though businesses get an option to respond.But the reviews some 200,000 and always growing are parto the reason visitors view more pages per visit on Kudzu thanon a yellow pages site. With reviews and proles, rather thanjust listings, Bates said, were being used more or researchand considered decisions than or look-ups.

And reviews are not necessarily a deterrent or businesses.

The smart guys have used the consumer reviews to theiradvantage, Bates said. A business can link to positive reviewsrom its own Web site, quote positive reviews in other advertis-ing or quote positive reviews in the store. And the opportunityto respond to negative reviews gives the vendor a chance toaddress an impression that is being spread by word o mouthanyway. Businesses also use reminders on their invoices andsigns in their stores to encourage happy customers to post re-

views (all o which promotes Kudzu). The result o all the tracand promotion is lots o inormation to help potential customersmake decisions. For instance, Action Auto Glass in Norcross,Ga., has 30 reviews and The Painting Pros in Atlanta has 48.

will receive special oers rom the business and be listed on thebusinesss page as a an. PalmettoBizBuzz and HudsonValleyask reviewers to give a rating to a business on a scale o one tove stars. Kudzu asks or an overall rating as well as ratings orservice, quality and value.

Kudzu, which started in Atlanta in 2005, expanded to SanDiego, Phoenix and Las Vegas, all markets where Cox has cableoperations that provide good rates or promotional advertis-ing as well as joint sales opportunities. This year the operationwent nationwide. Hal o its 2 million monthly unique visitors

come rom the our early markets. Kudzu is open to consideringpartnerships with local media companies, particularly in the top30 markets, Bates said.

Kudzu has varying levels o businesses:

Basic directory inormation (name, address, phone num-ber, business type) or every business in the community(500,000 total in the our early cities, 13 million nationwide).Again, the starting point is a purchased database.

Free sel-serve business prole completed by the businessonline (100,000 total, including more than 40,000 in theour early cities).

Paid proles at varying service levels ranging rom $75 to

$5,000 per month, depending on market and services cho-sen. These packages o er uploading o videos, photos, andprice lists; premium placement; marketing descriptions; andcall tracking.

While the paid proles are oered sel-service online, mostsales require interaction with the Kudzu sales sta, mostlyby phone or computer. However, the sel-serve model helpsidentiy candidates or sales calls, Bates said. A business thathas lled out the ree prole is already amiliar with Kudzu,may have heard some customer eedback already and might beopen to the pitch or a higher prole.

With Kudzu, as with PalmettoBizBuzz, reviews are oeredusing screen names, but a visitor can judge the credibility oa reviewer by clicking on the screen name and reading all thatpersons reviews. Inside Guide allows users to tell whetherreviews were helpul to them, which leads to a list o mosttrusted reviewers (people who have reviewed at least 10 busi-nesses and received a thumbs-up rom at least 10 dierent us-

ers). A user can join a businesss an club, which means you


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Kudzus business is primarily with home services, personalservices and elective health services such as dentists or chiro-

practors. These kinds o services are inherently local, Batessaid. With some exceptions like Roto-Rooter, they are notdominated by the national chains.

Other directories o ering consumer reviews, such as Yelpand CitySearch, tend to ocus on restaurants and entertain-ment. Angies List ocuses on home services and provides userreviews, but it charges a subscription ee to consumers, whereKudzu and the other examples cited here are ree.

Bates said about hal o the businesses advertising on Kudzudont have their own Web sites and their Kudzu page becomestheir online presence. For other businesses with Web sites,Bates said, Were getting more trac than your Web siteprobably is. The Kudzu page will get higher Google listings and

more hits rom search engines, he said.Part o the invest-a-little-learn-a-lot phase or Kudzu wasthat one size did not t all in business proles. For the basicprole, they needed a dierent questionnaire or each category,because a chiropractor, a landscaper and a pediatrician cant alluse the same questionnaire to ull benet.

Kudzu has tried to gure out smart, ecient ways to give cus-tomer care that people cant get rom Google or yellow pages.Kudzu is looking into perormance-based models, to make theservice even more valuable to businesses. Were going to haveto do more things than just impression-based advertising.The businesses are closely watching the results o their ads.Theyre counting the calls. Theyre counting the clicks.

We started this section mentioning two specic mega-jobs thata business-directory database can do eectively: helping con-

sumers make good spending decisions and helping businessesget considered when a customer is about to make a buyingchoice. But as you can see, Lawrence Marketplace, Kudzu,Inside Guide and PalmettoBizBuzz are helping businesses withseveral more o the mega-jobs identied in Newspaper Next2.0:

hlp sw ppl uali pu/svi/

us xpi. The video advertising opportunity in thesedirectories is an excellent solution or this mega-job.

hlp uil a aiai us lal. The emailand text opportunities at Marketplace help businesses stay in

touch and give customers reasons to keep coming back.

hlp a -- laisips wi uss.

Again, the email and text opportunities help here.

mak avisi sipl a ap u a I a a-

uall i. The sel-serve options and low rates make thesedirectories attractive even to small businesses that rarely ornever will buy a newspaper ad.

hlp us I ivl w usiss.

One o the best eatures o these directories is how oten theybecome the home page or a business with a weak Web pres-ence or none at all.

The power o databases will surace in new and interestingways, not only rom a readership perspective but also in ways o

tapping niche revenue streams, Molen said. It is the power oChris Andersons Long Tail.

A. mvi i asais

The next step and a potentially lucrative one is or thesedirectories to become the online sales platorm or businesscustomers to do the mega-job: Help me with the customertransaction. An online business directory can become a placewhere a customer can place an order, buy a product directly,make a reservation or take other steps that move the customercloser to the transaction, such as scheduling an estimate ora remodeling project. I you can collect revenue or the busi-ness customer (keeping your cut, o course), you have movedto a model thats more benecial or the business, and more

lucrative or you, than mere advertising. Whether you are sellingeyeballs or clicks, a looker isnt as important to the business asa sale, so you need to seek ways to move the customer towardor even through the transaction. Helping with the transactionundamentally changes the relationship with business custom-ers. Except in creative situations such as DeliveringQC.com,advertising is an expense item in a business budget, alwayssubject to being lured away by another (usually less expensive)advertising medium or to being cut when times get tight. On theother hand, i you start delivering sales and generating revenueor a business customer, the business is going to look or ways

to do more business with you.

b. nis

While general business directories are a tremendous opportuni-ty, specialized business directories present niche opportunities.Consider whether your community might present an opportu-nity or a restaurant directory, tourism directory, health-caredirectory or worship directory. Each o these has tremendouspotential both or interactive content and or revenue. I you arealready developing the ull community directory, the special-ized directory might become just a part o it. For instance, theYourtown Marketplace directory would include a restaurantssection that is the same as the Yourtown Dining Guide that ispromoted separately on your home page, community site and/or entertainment site. Each is just a dierent entry point to thesame detailed, interactive restaurant directory.

Health care in particular has great potential or developmentas a directory that you promote on its own as a new vertical(but that also can be ound through the business directory andthe answer center). In act, our list o mega-jobs should includehelp me stay healthy. This is an area with big potential orvideo advertising, as providers show o their acilities, demon-strate procedures and show beore-and-ater results. Consum-ers with health-care needs are highly motivated and you needto use multiple tools to become the best source in your com-munity or answers about staying healthy and caring or health.And you can supplement the directory inormation with many

answerbases relating to health: medical licenses, complaints


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against doctors, nursing home violations or quality, assisted-living acility inspections, community health centers, smoking

complaints, heart care at hospitals.Consider ways that your own archives and other businessanswerbases might urther enhance a business directory. Forinstance, you could provide stories in your archive dealing witha business in either o these ways:

Let the business search your archive or stories you have runabout the business or its industry and post the ones that theowner eels would be helpul to visitors to the site, such as aeature about the business or a brie on the new manager ora news story on a new product. You need to decide the rightway to protect editorial integrity in doing this, certainly withpublication date, perhaps with display that dierentiatesrom the advertising content, probably with a disclaimer that

the news story was originally produced independently romthe advertiser at no charge, and absolutely with no option orthe advertiser to change the content.

Let the user search the database or stories on the business.

The business directory could include links to other answer-bases dealing with businesses, providing inormation on topicssuch as development, executive salaries, salary comparisons,business licenses, proessional licenses, beauty salon inspec-tions, property insurance cancellations, contractor violations,

bankruptcies. Depending on how you develop and present theanswerbase, some would denitely t with a business directoryand, in act, enhance individual listings. For instance, licensesand inspection records would link well to a directory database,

with the restaurant or beauty salon inspection an automaticpart o every restaurant or beauty salon listing. You also couldpresent a place to browse the inspection reports, with linksrom a restaurants or salons report to its directory listing.

c. Pi vials

Newspaper Next 2.0 discussed the importance o protectingthe Big Three verticals o recruitment, real estate and autoswhile also diversiying your online revenue streams. Determinei content will help draw people to the site, the report advised.Answerbases can be part o that ormula. Newspaper siteshave not done much yet with answerbases that might helpattract trac or a recruitment site. But we have seen lots oanswerbases that could generate trac or auto and real estate

verticals.

1. Doing jobs for drivers

I your autos vertical is just a place to buy and sell cars, peoplewill only visit when they are trying to buy or sell a car. And youhave to hope they will think o looking there instead o Auto-trader, Cars.com, craigslist, eBay and all the other places sellingcars. Instead try developing a broader vertical targeted atdriving rather than auto sales. I you can develop a site driverswant to check beore (or during) their daily commute and everytime they ll up their gas tank, you are more likely to be the rstplace they look when they want to buy or sell a car.

Think o the jobs or drivers that all within those mega-jobso help me get answers about my community and help memake good spending decisions. In metro areas with heavycommuter trac, an important job to be done twice a day orcommuters is help me see how bad the trac is on my way towork or home. Washingtonpost.com, Eastvalleytribune.com,MercuryNews.com, PalmBeachPost.com and Boston.com dothat job by providing real-time trac maps, showing locationso accidents and construction projects, with options to turn onstate trac cameras and see what the trac looks like rightnow. Because this inormation is most valuable when peopleare in their cars, be sure to make it easily accessible by cellphone or oer text alerts on trac, as the Pocono Record does.

Another requent driver question, especially with rising gasolineprices, is Where can I get a good deal on gasoline? Jackson-ville.com, GazetteOnline.com and appeal-democrat.com areproviding those answers or their communities using mashupswith GasBuddy.


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2008 AmericAn Press institute 12



Your business directory will have listings (and, you hope, en-hanced advertising) or auto-related businesses such as rental

agencies, repair services, tire stores, towing and so on. Placea mini-directory with those categories on your driving vertical,too. Maybe you can develop an emergency-repair-services an-swerbase, where auto service centers who can squeeze you intoday post their available slots, so a motorist who needs serviceright away can nd a quick solution rather than calling all overtown. Be sure to make this solution easily accessible by mobiledevices, since many times the motorist who needs a quickrepair is away rom the home or oce.

Other driving-related answerbases can ll out the site, estab-lishing a one-stop place or all jobs related to owning or drivinga car: gas pump inspections, bridge inspections, parking o-enders, vanitylicense plates, and parking meter citations.

O course, databases are only one o the tools or buildingaudience. Help drivers connect at your driving vertical withdiscussion orums, sharing photos o souped-up cars, contestsand advice. Invite drivers to swap stories on topics such aswinter driving, rst cars, teaching teens to drive and so on. Iyour community has bad winter weather and/or a poor road-maintenance department, you can develop a map where usersenter locations o bad potholes, both warning the public and

automatically emailing the city. Or on a big snowstorm, you askusers to enter the time when plows reached their streets (some-thing that would provide a good story or your news pages).

Driving is an area where you can call on the users to developmuch o your content. Develop a map where they vote on the

slowest or most dangerous intersections (you could start bymapping where accidents occur) or call attention to the roadsmost in need o repair and vent their complaints about them.

The point is that driving is mostly a local pursuit and its a

rustrating mega-job in many markets much more than aonce-every-ew-years pursuit, as buying cars is or most people.This is a topic a local site can own. Once you start identiyingthe jobs and questions and providing solutions and answers,you will provide the place or drivers to turn every day. You willnot only protect your revenue rom auto classieds, but youmay have a chance to attract revenue (in particular rom video,mobile and local search) rom repair shops, insurance agen-cies and companies, tire stores and other businesses that maynot advertise much in newspapers. (This site would be a greatplace or drivers to buy their insurance online ater comparingrates rom dierent companies.)

Some newspaper sites are using some o these tools. Forinstance, the dallasnews.com autos vertical has auto-relatednews, a car clubs directory, reader-submitted photos anddiscussion orums. Its developing a place or car enthusiaststo gather online. A good next step would be some answerbasesdelivering useul everyday inormation or drivers o varyinglevels o enthusiasm.

2. Doing jobs for home owners

As with cars, the principle here is to broaden the homes-relatedjobs that you already do. Most real-estate verticals do just two

jobs: Help me nd a home to buy (or rent) or help me sell ahome (or nd a renter). The competition or those jobs is erceand real estate agents are nding that they can reach that audi-ence directly. Consider using answerbases to expand your real-estate vertical and do more jobs relating to peoples homes. Ithey turn to this site requently or the jobs that come with beinga home owner, this will be the rst place they look (and thus the

rst place real estate agents will want to be seen) when they areready to move to a larger or smaller home. (Admittedly, manyhome buyers are just moving to the community, but an eectivesite that people are using regularly will generate reerrals romnew co-workers. And i the same answerbases are part o acommunity answer center or newcomers, you connect withnew people beore they arrive, identiying yoursel right away as

the all-purpose answer source.)

As with driving, some o the best existing answerbases orhome owners are typically ound in the news sites data centerrather than in the real-estate vertical. Think o all the home-re-lated questions within those mega-jobs o help me get answersabout my community and help me make good spendingdecisions:

hw u will pp axs up? DesMoinesRegister.com provides a property tax calculator to help you nd theanswer.



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hw u i a us up lk sll ? Propertyrecords are the most popular answerbase at DelawareOnline,

public service editor Merritt Wallick says.hw a sls ( w a is i) i is

i? The Washington Posts Local Explorer and

The Cincinnati Enquirers CinciNavigator show how you canuse one tool to search multiple databases, answering a widerange o questions at the neighborhood or block level about

crime, schools, home sales, events, new businesses, recentnews, restaurants and other nearby businesses and attractions.These tools are appropriately located on the home page or thedata page o news sites, but need to be prominently eatured inhomes sites, too. They answer critical questions about neigh-borhoods prospective buyers are considering. Adrian HolovatysEveryBlock project provides photos, news articles, data onbuilding permits, liquor licenses and other inormation on neigh-borhoods by scraping all manner o geocoded inormation romthe Internet. EveryBlock covers just San Francisco, Chicago andNew York so ar, but will be expanding.

Issues about dwellings raise lots o other questions you can

answer using data: property sales, propertyassessments,

mortgageoreclosures, tax delinquencies, housing discrimina-tion, and contractor violations.

Again, ollow the approach suggested or the driving vertical byengaging homeowners in community orums where they can tellstories, swap advice and share pictures o rst homes, dreamhomes, remodeling projects, landscaping projects and so on.

A random search o more than a dozen newspaper real estatesites showed little use o databases or social-networking toolsto make them places home owners would come regularly,beyond standard news and eature content and occasional useo an answerbase to search property transactions.


W a I f a lasap? As with the driv-ing vertical, enhance your homes vertical by cross-reerencingappropriate categories rom the business directory. This helps

both products, providing another avenue into the businessdirectory and giving continuing value to the homes vertical.As with driving, you could develop an emergency-servicesdatabase, where contractors available on short notice that daymight register their availability. Or you could make this email-driven: Instead o calling around or a plumber in an emergency,the home-owner enters an address and you send out emails toplumbers who have asked to be notied o jobs in that part otown. Those who are available and interested respond by anemail that goes through your site. Businesses could pay eitheror the leads or the actual jobs or, in a two-tiered ee structure,they might pay a small ee or the email contact and a larger eei they land the job.


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III. LotS o qUeStIonS, LotS o oPPortUnItIeS

I youre uncomortable blazing your own trail, you have plentyo examples to ollow in using data to provide answers online.

We encourage being the rst to use answerbases in a particularway, especially when it comes to innovative ways o generatingrevenue. But you also can copy and improve upon the success-ul eorts o other organizations.

Data desks were key parts o Gannetts reorganization intoinormation centers. Rob Curleys teams have used databaseseectively in his much-noted work at CJOnline.com, LJWorld.com, naplesnews.com and WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interac-tive and well no doubt see more database work rom Curleysteam in Las Vegas. Adrian Holovaty has received acclaim orhis work on databases both with the Curley team and in hisindependently produced chicagocrime.org. Hes currently work-ing on open-source sotware or community databases in hisEveryBlock project under a grant rom the Knight Foundation.Other organizations are having success with databases, too.You can study those examples and copy them or better yet push them to the next level.

This report tries to help you envision what your answerbasecollection can become. For organizations already operating datacenters, we encourage consideration o some o these jobs-ori-ented ideas or presenting answers. For organizations that need

to start turning data into answers, we oer this as a contentroad map. Where we know o answerbases similar to those wesuggest, we provide links. In other cases, we encourage you tobe the rst with this approach and send API the links, so wecan note them in the N2 Blog and uture reports.

The list o answerbases presented here is is a large collectiono answerbases that a metro organization might develop. Butcommunity organizations should scale this to their stas andtheir communities, identiying the jobs here that they can andshould do. Whatever your size, develop answerbases that willhave lasting value, so your collection o answers grows witheach project. Then update them periodically so they hold theirvalue.

Most important, get started now, i you havent already. I youdont start providing answerbases, someone else in your com-munity will beat you to the job. Gannett TV stations and someother TV stations are developing data centers similar to the datacenters at Gannett newspaper sites. A Gannett station in onesouthern city has a Data Center that oers more answerbases

than the local newspaper. The newspapers Web site oerslinks to a ew answerbases (state and local salaries and presi-dential candidates views on the issues) but does not promotea general answer center. Community groups and Internet pure-plays, as well as TV stations, can beat the newspaper into thisspace in your community i you dont move swi tly.

A. Asw c ix pa.

The index page should always eature one timely answerbase.It may be the reshest one or a standing answerbase that istimely because o the season, an annual event or something inthe news. For instance, the standing answerbase on salarieso state or city workers might move to the eatured spot whenyou run a story on labor negotiations. Or an answerbase youdeveloped a ew months ago on housing oreclosures mightmove to the eatured position when Congress or the presidenttakes some sort o action to provide relie or homeowners ac-

ing oreclosure. Ater a ew days or weeks (however long it takesto produce a newer answerbase), the eatured one moves othe prime spot but remains listed under a topical heading suchas answers or housing questions. Oer one to three second-ary eatured answerbases, as well as an organized directory oall your answerbases. Be sure to organize by the job that theanswerbase does or the user, as we have below, not by agencyor topic (most journalists deault setting). The Cincinnati DataCenter and RocDocs oer attractive index pages that are easyto browse or the answers youre seeking.

Because the newspaper industry has not done well at develop-

ing revenue opportunities associated with databases, severalexamples in this section will include discussion o the revenue-generation possibilities. Given the heavy trac that index pagesare already driving, these should be strong advertising loca-tions, either or rotating banners and buttons or or a particularbusiness to sponsor the whole page. But keep in mind theprojections in the Newspaper Next 2.0 report rom Borrell As-sociates that search, video and email advertising are going togrow dramatically in the next ve years, while banner advertis-ing will actually decline. Answerbases are excellent vehicles

or these and other orms o revenue. So revenue developmentmust be part o any answerbase project.


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b. Pliis

j: hlp i w v. This will be an important jobthis year. Its one news stas have been handling in print ordecades and more recently online. As already discussed in thisreport, PolitiFact is an excellent, job-ocused answerbase, de-signed to help voters evaluate candidates claims and attacks.Washingtonpost.coms Fact Checker does the same job.

types o content and need to be integrated throughout a site.The Dallas Morning News and dallasnews.com Voter Guide lets

you enter your address and it gives you a printable ballot oryour exact jurisdiction, along with providing the guide inorma-tion or the races you will ace. NewarkAdvocate.com, Web siteor an Ohio newspaper o about 20,000 daily print circulation,provides a Voter Guide that shows how this can work at thecommunity level.

rvu pssiiliis: A longtime lament o newspapers hasbeen that they dont get their share o political advertising.Election-oriented answerbases should be terric venues orvideo advertising and other orms o advertising by candidatesand interest groups, especially as more and more o campaignbudgets are being directed online.

c. gv

j: hlp s wa I i ax llas. Peoplein your community are interested in seeing the salaries o publicemployees at virtually any level (ederal, state, university,county, city, school). Salaries get the highest trac at severaldata centers. Other accountability answerbases help userscheck votes by local ocials, study ederal pork projects, cityproperty, lawmakers or other ocials expense reports or voterregistration problems.

d. ci

j: tll w sa i is. Lots o answer-bases ocus on public saety issues. Holovatys chicagocrime.org showed the way and set the standard. O course, this is

an essential job in urban communities. The Homicide Map atLATimes.com shows how you can answer more specic public-saety questions.

Another important public-saety job, especially or parents oteen-age drivers, is Tell me what that siren is about. Indy-911Calls, already discussed in this report, provides answers ina real-time map, where users click on police, re or ambulanceicons to get basic inormation address and nature o the call.

Springeld 911 provides a similar map or a smaller metro areain Missouri, with more details on the calls.

Public-saety answers are not just a job or metro papers, as the

Northwest Florida Daily News demonstrates with its Blood-Hound map. Online Editor Isaac Sabetai and content developer

Nathan Land developed the database and mapping system in2007, using electronic reports rom the sheri s oce, whichthe News was already receiving. A police reporter coordinatedgathering o paper reports rom other agencies, which theNewssta keys into the database. It takes a ew hours, but Ithink its worth it, Editor Pat Rice wrote. BloodHound was animmediate hit and page views have been steady, about 15,000page views a month. Rice told the story o when a News stamembers home was broken into. When the police arrived,[the sta members] boyriend asked i similar incidents had oc-curred in the area recently. The ocer said he didnt know, theninstructed them to go to our Web site, nwdailynews.com, and

Educating voters or local elections has always been an impor-tant job or newspapers. LoudounExtra, a hyperlocal project othe Washington Post, has developed an election guide thatsloaded with helpul inormation. WashingtonPost.NewsweekInteractive Managing Editor Tim Richardson said: One othe reasons we created it was to get content to readers morequickly than what the newspaper had planned to do in its votersguide. And we wanted to provide lots o content that wouldnever make it into the printed voters guide. Newspapers havebeen doing Q&As with candidates orever. In addition to beingable to run them at ull length in the digital version, rather thanimposing word limits, Loudoun Extra turned the responses intoan answerbase it calls the Candidate Selector. Choose your po-sitions on various issues and the tool tells you which candidatesmost closely agree with you. USAToday.com did the same thing

with the presidentialCandidate Match Game. It adjusts resultsbased on which issues matter most to the voter.

Many news sites, including NYTimes.com and azcentral.com,

are oering campaign contributions answerbases to answervoters questions about which special interests support whichcandidates.

The Des Moines Registerand dmregister.com mapped can-didates visits across Iowa beore the caucuses there and TheNew York Times and NYTimes.com and washingtonpost.comare tracking candidate visits across the country. The Atlanta

Journal-Constitution and ajc.com combine data, stories,cartoons, photos and interactive opportunities in Election Guide2008, demonstrating how well data projects work with other


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use BloodHound because, he said, its the best way to trackcrime in a neighborhood. Thats an example o becoming theanswer source or your community.

I you think youre too small a community to try a crime map,check out the maps at newsleader.com in Staunton, Va., orat ShelbyStar.com in Shelby, N.C. Both towns are smallerthan 25,000 population. In addition to a general crime map,ShelbyStar.com presents a stolen-cars map and an unsolved-murders map with a map on car break-ins coming soon.

Lots o other answerbases address public-saety questions,especially using maps: sex oenders, meth busts, sexual as-saults, drunk driving, FBI crime stats, gun dealers, gun owners,concealed weapon permits, motorcycle accidents, teen drink-ing, elony convictions, bicycle accidents, speed trap locations,tsunami evacuation zones. Danny Sanchez, web producer at

the Orlando Sentinel and OrlandoSentinel.com, posted a direc-tory o online crime maps on his Journalistopia blog that youcan check to see the range o possibilities. Note in his directorythat in several communities, these maps have been developedby someone other than a news organization. We need to remainthe place people turn or this core job that newspapers have

perormed or years.

rvu pssiiliis: Home-security or insurance companiesmight be interested in target advertising possibilities or public-saety answerbases. Maybe i you develop an answerbase o911 calls, you could o er users the chance to register or emailor text-message alerts giving inormation about calls in theirneighborhoods. The alerts would probably need to be ree, butyou might be able to sell sponsorships. Your crime-related an-swerbases should also be accompanied by links to the sectionso your business directory with inormation and advertising romcompanies that sell home security, insurance or other relatedservices.

e. eai, aiviis

ma-: hlp f/s is . As discussedin Newspaper Next 2.0, planning activities is an importantmega-job. Community calendars are one o the most universaltypes o newspaper content, and they grow bigger and moreuseul online. Huge papers such as the Washington Post, andcommunity papers such at The News Leader in Staunton, Va.,the Sedalia Democrat in Missouri or The Telegraph in Alton, Ill.,oer searchable calendars that let users rate and review events,submit photos, add reminders to their Outlook calendars and

map the route to the venue. Some calendars, such as YorkRegion POP (Personal Online Planner), allow users to maintaintheir own calendars online.

rvu pssiiliis: The targeted revenue possibilities witha calendar are plentiul, with ads keyed to the types o eventsa user is seeking. Some calendars show directory listings orestaurants and bars in the area o a venue. Advertisers could

buy premium positioning or turn the listings into links provid-ing menus, videos, coupons, git certicates and so orth. (Anoption in the business directory could be to provide a link toyour listing when it shows up near a venue in the calendar.) Youalso should try to develop direct-transaction possibilities romcalendars, selling tickets to events or registration or classes.Events that might attract out-o-town audiences should oeropportunities to book hotel reservations near the venue. Acalendar also presents email and text advertising opportunities.People inquiring about a particular type o entertainment, orinstance, could get a prompt asking i they want notications o

uture events with that genre o music, band or venue.


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. eai u

j: hlp f a pla a i. Dining, entertainmentand night lie raise questions you can answer with restaurantguides such as those being oered by naplesnews.com, Loud-ounExtra, Maine Today, gazette.com and elpasotimes.com orwith restaurantinspectionreports, bar guides, movie listingsor guides to local music, wineries or other attractions. Thesedirectories are searchable and many o them are interactive,giving users chances to read reviews rom previous diners orwrite their own reviews. Be sure to provide a directory with easy

location search or mobile use.

rvu pssiiliis: As obvious as the targeted revenuepossibilities here are, the companies oering directories have

not ully developed them. Each restaurants answerbase entrycould include a link to an advertisement, oering menus,

videos, coupons, git certicates and opportunities to make res-ervations. Restaurant answerbases can also generate revenueby oering location-based search capabilities, allowing mobileusers to enter a location and nd eating establishments nearby.

g. euai

j: hlp su il will a uai.

Answerbases can answer lots o questions about educationor parents, teachers and taxpayers: school dropout rates,state school report cards, state test scores, teacher salaries,abuse by teachers, cheating on tests, SAT test scores, ACT testscores, school crime, campus violence, school bus incidents,school discipline, college und-raising, scholarships, graduationrates, average class sizes or whether college dormitories havere sprinklers.

rvu pssiiliis: Parents might be willing to pay oremail or text alerts when you have new data on their childrensschools, when the location o the varsity soccer game changesat the last minute, or when schools are closed or dismissedearly because o weather. Or you might oer those alerts reeand sell sponsorships. You could develop databases o school-supply lists or each school and grade level that parents canprint out and take to the store or, better yet, order online romlocal retailers via your site and have shipped to their homes.The revenue possibilities are not limited to school-relatedbusinesses. Any product that creates an audience o parentswill be valuable to a wide range o businesses, appealing to

the parents interest on a variety o issues, such as health andentertainment, that arent directly connected to school.

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pla/a. Some o the best work in using data to provideanswers is being done to eed the seemingly endless inorma-tion appetites o sports ans: Green Bay Packers, IndianapolisColts, Phoenix Suns, Kansas Jayhawks, highschool sports,youth sports. Assistant sports editor Ted Green reported in Gan-netts News Watch that the Manning Meter took 100 hours odata entry plus about a month o design and testing. It was animmediate hit, topping 70,000 page views the rst week when

it debuted, the opening week o the 2007 season, ollowing theColts Super Bowl victory. Several developers mentioned Man-ning Meter when asked about their avorite answerbases. Thatspretty much nothing but automatic trac, said Derek Willis oThe New York Times and nytimes.com. Youve got all this inor-mation but you could never do anything like that in the paper.

For some projects data entry can be a major expense. But yoursports sta is entering and processing loads o data already orall those columns o agate you run in print. Databases can letyou re-use that material eciently on multiple platorms, asVarsity845 does or high school sports in the Middletown, N.Y.,area (proled in detail on Page 76 o Newspaper Next 2.0.)

rvu pssiiliis: Sports ans spend a ton o money andthe revenue possibilities and even direct transaction possibili-ties are plentiul: tickets, team gear, booster clubs, equipmentor players on youth or high school teams, travel arrangementsor bowl, playo and tournament games, hotel reservations orans o visiting teams.


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I. rai

j: hlp f a a iki ail. Recreationraises lots o oppor tunities or answerbases on specializedtopics such as golcourses, swimming pools, biking, beaches,hikingtrails, hunting accidents, summer camps, eagle nests ora multi-aceted guide to a national park or other popular recre-ation destination. Or you could answer questions rom boaters,shers and swimmers about shark attacks, beach pollution,boating saety, boat thets or lake water quality.

rvu ppuiis: Sporting-goods stores, bike shops,outtters, marinas and other businesses serving recreationprovide opportunities or enhanced database listings, targetadvertising, video advertising, email and direct sales.

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cisas li isplas. The changing seasons provide oppor-tunities to answer questions about berry patches, holiday lights,haunted houses, all oliage, tornadoes, storms or the likelihoodo a white Christmas. Many o these are answerbases where theusers will provide much o the inormation. You might prime thepump or a holiday-lights answerbase by asking sta membersto ll in lighting displays in their neighborhoods, but users willdo most o the work here, posting their own photos and address

inormation.

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a ailis a is w wa u is. Engage-ment announcements are another bit o standard newspaper

content that should become a searchable answerbase, withgit-registry links rom the announcements. Make them part oa local weddings site that includes an answerbase o business-es that serve weddings, such as caterers, bakers, forists andjewelers. Give each couple their own site, with opportunities orriends and amily to enter comments and out-o-town guests tomake hotel reservations.

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j: hlp uik asws w I avl. Newspapersites arent using databases very extensively or eectively to helptravelers. These solutions need to be readily accessible by mobile

devices. A quickly searchable airport directory, with user reviewsand advertising opportunities, would be really helpul or travel-ers. Travelers would nd answerbases on fight delays, airportsecurity wait times and items stolen rom luggage quite helpul.


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j: hlp f asws i u ak issus. Your archivesare a valuable resource that will answer lots o questions andprovide target advertising, either with general archive accessor specialized databases such as recipes, obituaries, weddingsor sports stories on the local team. Online editor Jean Dubailreported on Derek Willis blog that the rst our days that Cleve-land.com oered Plain Dealer stories about the Browns, usersmade 20,000 searches.

rvu ppuiis: You could oer grocery or specialtystores the opportunity to advertise their prices on the ingredi-ents in a recipe delivered rom your archives. This could includean option or ordering the ingredients online, to be either deliv-ered or waiting bagged in a cooler or pickup on your way homerom work. You can oer a general search o your archives oryou can oer specialized searches in some o the areas thatare already your most popular archive searches. For instance,i a local attraction generates lots o searches, you can set up apage just or searching or inormation and stories about that at-

traction (an ideal advertising site or the attraction itsel as wellas nearby hotels and resorts).


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n. nws

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. When Newspaper Next urges using databases and othertools to build audiences beyond news, that doesnt mean wewant to abandon that traditional job, just to expand our viewo jobs. Answerbases are excellent tools or covering the news,too. They can help your audience keep up with and under-stand continuing stories ranging rom roaming black bears towarcasualties in Iraq and Aghanistan. Data can help answerquestions about the personal or neighborhood impact when you

publish major projects on important issues such as saety ochild-care providers, commuter train station saety or innocentprisoners reed using DNA evidence.

You can use answerbases to ampliy a daily story. For example,ater a recent state audit o our citys nances, we requested

documents and data that were addressed in the report, saidMatt Wynn o the Springfeld News-Leaderand News-Leader.com in Springeld, Mo. Our audience then had a chance toread the audit itsel, look at some o the actual data that wererefected in the repor t, and take in our distillation o all o it inthe orm o traditional news stories. The databases rom theaudit saw massive trac when they accompanied the news othe day.

You dont have to analyze the data all yoursel. The News-Pressand news-press.com in Fort Myers, Fla., crowd-sourcedby asking its audience to help it nd the inconsistencies andraud in data released by the Federal Emergency ManagementAgency on disaster payments or hurricane damage in Florida.

rvu ppui: Databases help generate more pageviews or a news story, giving you more opportunities romstandard online advertising such as banners. Some particularanswerbases relating to news stories might present targetadvertising opportunities.

o. t i s

When disaster struck this spring, two Iowa newspapersdemonstrated ways to use databases to tell important storiesand connect the community. Ater a May 25 tornado killed sixpeople and destroyed hundreds o homes and businesses inParkersburg, Iowa, the Des Moines Registerand DesMoines-Register.com showed the damage in a detailed interactive map.

Click on a property and you can see the beore photo romthe county assessor s oce and a Register photo o the leveledhome. Some properties have text and videos telling the storieso the people who lived there. Michele McLellan reported in herNewsroom Leadership 3.0 blog that the map received 42,000hits by the end o June.

As rivers rose the next month in Eastern Iowa, The Gazette andGazetteOnline in Cedar Rapids used three dierent interac-tive maps to show the developments on a regional basis andin the threatened communities o Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.GazetteOnline also created Google maps o the food plains inboth Cedar Rapids and the Iowa City/Coralville area. The CedarRapids map had about 50,000 views.

Another Google map showed where the foodwater reached.

Because this inormation was not readily available rom the

ocials in the immediate hours approaching the crest, mobilejournalist Je Raasch traveled the boundary o the food watersin Cedar Rapids. GazetteOnline Inormation Center ManagerZach Kucharski traveled along the edge o the foodwater inIowa City and then drew the detailed polygons on a Googlemap. Each o these maps had about 15,000 page views in therst couple days online.

While there are higher-tech ways to do these types o proj-ects, we had to improvise because o the need to get accurateinormation out there as quickly as we could while dealing withlimited power and other circumstances, explained Kucharski.The Gazettes building was on the edge o the downtown CedarRapids food zone and operated or nearly a month on generatorpower ater the electrical grid ailed.

Kucharski also developed a searchable list o contractors certi-ed by the city o Cedar Rapids to work on food repair andrecovery projects. With fy-by-night operations advertising theirservices on small roadside signs, this gives the community aneasy way to check which contractors have been vetted by thecity.

GazetteOnline also built a public-service answerbase calledFloodlist that let people list or search or lost and ound itemsand missing pets as well as an area where people could requesthelp or oer services. Those answerbases collected only about100 submissions. However, Floodlist also included a moresuccessul answerbase in which relocated businesses cansubmit inormation about where they are operating, the extento damage the company suered and how customers can nd

them. The database collected inormation about more than 150businesses and continues to grow. Were working with the lo-cal chamber o commerce to populate the database, rather thanwaiting or businesses to populate it themselves, Kucharskisaid. Working with the chamber allowed us to benet romresources we wouldnt otherwise have. The chamber has staworking to go door-to-door, and is also collecting surveys everytime someone calls or stops in at the oce with a question.In addition to providing a ree service to the businesses, werealso able to develop a uller source list, contact inormation andstory idea list which can be used in reporting.

Another GazetteOnline answerbase is collecting user-submitted

memories and photos o the destroyed homes, which will becombined with photos shot by sta photographers o evacuatedamilies outside their condemned homes.

(dislsu: The author o this report started a new job as edi-tor o The Gazette and GazetteOnline the week o the food.)



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Be the An

Documents

Be the Answer: Using interactive databases to provide answers and generate revenue