Newspapers' Online Flops and Failures

Here's an interesting article from Editor and Publisher, for all you Vermont media types who tell me you read my blog.

Joe Strupp does an informative survey of pitfalls for newspapers to avoid online.

Lesson One? Blogs can backfire.

At The Roanoke (Va.) Times, editors noted that readers are not always that interested in what their fellow readers are saying, at least not on a regular basis. Online Editor John Jackson set up 10 online columns by local residents in 2003, finding maybe three got any real reaction. "They weren't writing about things that a whole lot of people were interested in," he says, citing a graphic artist who described life in that job. "One guy wrote about stuff he saw on the side of the road, and he would hand-write it and we would scan it in."

This reminds me of the RH/TA Reader Roundtable experiment. And of our own Jazz Mafia blog. It's more difficult than you might think to train people to blog. And to figure out what's interesting. Hard to know what will work until you try it!

UPDATE: Here's a few thoughts on how CNN is getting online news right.