Starting with photos is a fun place to start because photo galleries are easy-to-digest information, and if you’ve got an adequate database-driven photo gallery tool (I’m not talking SlideShow Pro) then that’s something that can start driving traffic right away.

Newspapers aren’t used to looking back. Newsroom resources are all pointed at what’s happening now. A handful of small online victories with archival content would help get more resources pointed at this ‘database everything’ strategy.

One thing I’ve noticed people comment on when they look at papers from the 1970s is that the advertisements get as much attention as the articles and photos do. If you don’t have the database tools necessary to start doing serious work with old content, why not start an old-ad blog? It doesn’t take much time to scan, crop and then post something, and one of those every day or two might be a good ‘getting the feet wet’ way to approach it…

This type of work would be something that falls in the lap of the library, news and online staffs. Library for the old stuff, news desk for the new stuff, and online for the tools and know-how.

The next question, then, is who packages that?

Do you do the database work once and add stories to it with tags, or does someone manually enter every one?

For smaller papers, the more automagic, the better.

Adding context is what “related stories” links and more taxonomy are supposed to do — on the news side.

On the other hand, they’ll drive time-spent and page views up as well. That’s good.

I think it goes deeper than taxonomy — there’s plenty of context that can be dynamically built around local news.

When I click on an article about a DUI fatality in Denver, the article also displays number of DUI fatalities over the past 10 years in Denver, in the surrounding suburbs, and in Colorado. It lists the most severe ones, and it gives the number of non-fatality DUI arrests in Denver, the surrounding suburbs and Colorado.

That’s a start — what I’m talking about is placing the story in the big picture so it’s more than just a spot news blip on the canvas of the place, it’s information woven into the whole tale of the place.

So instead of clicking on “Local News” or even the name of a neighborhood, a story ends up with a list of tags like “DUI, alcohol, car wrecks, deaths, Boulder, news.”

I know that’s on a tangent to your question, which is about how a stagnant information product invigorates itself. I think if you combine the ideas in Gangrey’s The New Beats ( http://gangrey.com/656 ) with Holovaty’s approach to information, you’ll get a dynamic and alive product that naturally engages readers regardless of age.