Doc Searls: How to Improve Public Radio, Newspapers
Doc Searls has been busy writing lists of how to improve public radio and how to improve newspaper websites.
A key paragraph about public radio:
First, radio isn’t about “content delivery”. At its best (and the best of public radio is its best), it’s about informing people and relating to people. “Content delivery” is less than either. When you truly inform people you form them. They are changed by what they now know and didn’t know before. This is equally mundane and profound. That we are all authors of each other is to the great advantage of public broadcasting.
His advice for newspaper website improvement is all about opening up more free avenues from archives to no registration to making the website more active with the idea of bringing in more eyeballs and eventually more revenue. For example:
… start featuring archived stuff on the paper’s website. Link back to as many of your archives as you can. Get writers in the habit of sourcing and linking to archival editorial. This will give search engine spiders paths to wander back in those archives as well. Result: more readers, more authority, more respect, higher PageRank and higher-level results in searches. In fact, it would be a good idea to have one page on the paper’s website that has links (or links to links, in an outline) back to every archived item.
