There may be some truth to the notion that newspapers just don’t get it when it comes to understanding new media models. Three areas of neglect stand out.

The first, and perhaps the most pronounced, is failure to treat newspaper content as data, and then to manage it as a database.

We are still running in newspaper mode where every day is a new day and a new issue - offering us a chance to reinvent our product and start over. We see ourselves dispatching that product from “the front” with all the news that is fit to print. We control the message and help our readers by deciding “what they really need to know.”

In the meantime, savvy newer models build on their own past each day. They do that by maintaining easy-to-navigate archives from which you may follow the thread of an idea and how it developed. They do that by displaying every post that a subject ever received. They organize and offer tools that make it easy to compare facts. Their content is easy to search and drill down into.

 

By contrast, most newspapers make it barely possible to search the last two editions of the paper. We avoid linking to other content like the plague. We certainly don’t leverage one of our greatest assets - that is, years and volumes of painstakingly gathered data in the form of previous editions. And we most assuredly do not encourage anyone to share that data.

The Dolce phenomenon

Which brings me to the second bit of evidence that indicates, that as an industry, we haven’t quite connected.

The strongest blogs and best presentations on the Internet enable comments and interaction with readers. Sure, we try little experiments with that, but the experts cultivate an audience with everything they do - exchanges and interaction.

Take, for example, Christine Dolce, the queen of MySpace.com, whose profile is so popular she’s gathered close to 1 million “friends.”

 “That following has led marketers to solicit her recommendations for new products on MySpace - and pay her up to $5,000 for personal appearances,” according to a July 29 article by John Jurgensen in The Wall Street Journal.

Make new friends and keep the old; if you cultivate the right audience, one is silver and the other is gold with advertisers.

Which brings us to the third piece of proof. In general, we (most newspapers) really have no idea how to sell new media advertising.

Business 2.0 reported last month that one Web ad agency, Organic, said it plans to place more than $40 million of advertising on blogs, a number that’s expected to rise as Internet advertising overall blossoms.

Newspaper companies and other old guard media still struggle at even putting an advertising package together for new media products. Instead, we give away space or have no effort at all going - while simultaneously posting almost all our content. Truthfully, how many of you ink-stained wretches are operating successful new media ad sales efforts?

But sites like Boing Boing, with a 4-person staff and 325,000 daily visitors, will gross more than $1 million this year, according to Business 2.0. Small potatoes, you might say, but imagine the cash flow on an operation with only four employees, no expensive press and no newsprint costs.

Isn’t it about time we started figuring out why YouTube can offer 6.1 million videos on its site but we can’t even sell ads on our news site? If we don’t find an answer, someone else will, and we won’t ever get it.