Scott Karp says part of the problem with the newspaper business has been its lack of imagination:
“Nobody imagined that somebody would be so recklessly uncapitalistic as to create a website where people could post classified ads for free. Nobody imagined that an online software company specializing in information retrieval, but which produced no information of its own, could create the largest market for small business advertising that the world has ever seen.”
If your newspaper heart needs a little warming after a weekend of gloom and doom, here are a few places to look for an incredible amount of imagination — on the editorial side of the newspaper, if not always the business side:
- onBeing (regular folks tell their stories to the camera)
- Bakersfield Californian video (reporters shooting in volume)
- Mercury News Photo (the bleeding edge)
- Inside Bay Area multimedia (always journalism-first)
- lawrence.com (the prototypical local entertainment site to emulate)
- The Houston Chronicle (a newspaper home page that someone bothered to design)
What are the news sites that inspire you? And where are the papers pushing the envelope when it comes to verticals and local search? Is hyperlocal the way to compete with Craig/eBay/Google?
Comments
7 responses to “Imagination is everywhere”
roanoke!
Don’t forget roanoke.com. oops. Megan beat me to it.
I would also ask: What non-newspaper sites publish information in imaginative ways?
I’ve got one answer for that here: http://www.uxmag.com
I’d add the Shelby Star … reporter shot video and lots of blogs and the beginning of a new spirit to experiment.
Bakersfield.com for user participation, conversation and blogs, too.
Bakersfield.com for maps/mashups, too.
WashingtonPost.com for a whole host of reasons.
Hardford Courant for it’s Pets vertical.
Any number of Gannett papers for the Info Center.
SignOnSanDiego for its local music radio station.
[…] Ryan Sholin takes on the idea that newspaper’s lack imagination in dealing with the digital era. […]
Here’s another: Morris with Spotted. Big success at growing audience.
[…] reading, where I ran across some more good sources of multimedia inspiration on Ryan Sholin’s Invisible Inkling […]