We’re at t-minus 3 days before SavannahNow, the web arm of the Savannah Morning News goes full-on beta. Sinice today is a Sunday, I have some time to reflect and review. This first review will be concept. The next technical.

Breaking the Newspaper Habit

The single biggest thing on this project, for me, is breaking out of the hey-lets-shovel-today’s-newspaper-content-to-the-web publishing model. Why? Because that dicision cascades down into all areas of the site. Without that anchor, the certainty of content and mission that comes from knowing that the task is to reproduce print online, the whole project of an “online newspaper” becomes an open question.

[Sidebar: Yes, for various reasons, an automated version of Bluffton, if you enter into this enterprise honestly, you can engage the audience in a collaborative process, building loyalty, trust, and readership at the same time.

The question for us right now is if that trust will scale. Bluffton is a small community of <20,000. Savannah is 500,000+.

One way to mitigate the risk of scale is to divide the audience into geographic segments. An ambitious project that involves newsroom, ad sales, and user tagging of content, we hope to let people who live in, say, the Islands area can find information and personalities near them.

Personalities

That word is another good jumping-off point. The problem with almost all newspaper web sites is that they have no personality. (I would say that this is a problem with most newspapers in print as well, where the only sense of personality is perhaps that on the editorial page, if you’re lucky.) Part of this is the journalist’s ‘objective’ nature. A bigger part of it is an attempt to cast the biggest net for the widest audience and therefore an unwillingness to risk offending.

Not that we’re going to try to offend anyone, but when you move away from the broadcast model of publishing, you open the door to a multitude of voices — some of whom won’t say what you want to hear, or how you want to hear it.

The burden for controlling that (if control is possible) will lie with the people who use the site.

But back to personality. The best part of the site is the ability to skate from person to topic to person. I love this part. here are some of the things you might do (a user-case that came out of development):

1. Go to the site to read an article you heard about (typical behavior)
2. Click on the author’s name to find out more about her
3. See other stories and blog posts by that author
4. Read a blog post about a topic you didn’t know the author covered
5. Click from there to a category page that interests you (cause the blogs have free-tagging)
6. Find a group has formed around that topic
7. Click through to the group and read what they’re up to
8. Join the group
9. Post an event for the group to get together
10. Blog about the event after the fact (or even during)

These kinds of interactive chains are made possible by the open publishing model we’ve adopted. And there are an infinite variety of such chains available. (I’ll talk some more about one of these under the tech notes.)

In many ways, personalities (yours especially) drive the site. I find myself spedning time each day moving from profile to profile, reading about people and their lives.

Risks

Certainly there are risks involved in such an approach. And I’m sure we’ll run into most of them. But now is the time to say that I’m proud to be part of a team that will at least take those risks.

Big thanks to Darryl, Julian, Michael, Heather and Felicia for making sure this thing sees the light of day.

The potential, in the end, outweighs the risks, if you ask me.