Geography and Revenue

One of the great aspects of communities on the Internet is that they are thought communities. They are not limited by the geographical restrictions of the real world. I can be an active part of a worldwide community as easily as I can contribute to my online neighborhood yard sale.

But geographical confinement is what has kept news organizations in business since ink first hit paper, and it is still how they define themselves today. From the names of the businesses down. The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Miami Herald.

But the Web favors centralization. So to work on the Web you've either got to be very big, or have something so original that visitors can't find it anywhere else.

What the old media organizations did, and do, is bring centralized information to a local audience. They did this because that was the only way that the audience could access that information. But now that the reader, or audience, can get its international news anywhere and everywhere, there is no value in a local news organization delivering it. So a local newspaper has to do something that only a local newspaper can do. Like; local news.

This may seem amazingly obvious, but it seems to have eluded many news organizations. International news may still be a useful impulse buy, to leave by the checkout (or off on the right rail), but front and center has to be the original information that a user can't get anywhere else. That's your raison d'etre. That's were your value is to users. That's the future of your revenue.