Too many of the sites I visited looked as if they’re frozen in time or, at the very least, not working with any sense of urgency. When I tweeted my observation:

“Where’s the innovation? Where’s the experimentation? Don’t see most newspaper sites doing anything different or new. What happened?”

Steve Yelvington came back with this on-point response:

“Biggest risk of organizational (i.e., newsroom) convergence is a loss of imagination and innovative spirit.”

While I agree with his comment, I just don’t feel like any of these sites can afford to rest on their laurels or to be stuck in neutral. With marketing budgets at many newspapers shrinking or disappearing altogether, for the most part, it’s up to the individual web staffs to increase metrics such as page views, time or site and return visitors (for example).

What concerns me even more is that I’m not sure the people at any of these sites realize that they have a problem. On too many occasions I’ve heard the cliché “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”.

I once worked for a VP who said something along the lines of “if you’ve been doing it for the past 20 years, then it’s time to change what you’ve been doing.” With that in mind, I’ve got a suggestion for all the online staffers out there – consider this a low tech intervention. Take a piece of paper, or create a document and number the lines 1 through 10. Then, on each line, list something that you have done in the past three to six months at your site that you consider innovative or experimental.

For example:

1. Experimented with commenting
2. Incorporated user generated galleries
3. Staffed the site overnight, etc.

Now if you don’t want to do this brief exercise or if your list contains only one or two items, then I would suggest that you have a problem. I would even go so far as to predict that your site (barring the occasional Druge or Fark) is seeing traffic hold steady. While that might seem like a good thing, it really, really isn’t.

With print products struggling just to maintain their depleted numbers, online growth must occur and innovation and experimentation, I believe, is key to that growth.

Now before you run off and put floating eyeballs on your site, I would suggest first of all setting, at the very least, a monthly traffic goal. This will help you gauge the effectiveness of what you attempt and justify those changes or alterations to those you work with.

Once you have that done, try something. It doesn’t have to cost money even, as there is plenty of free tech that you can leverage. Want chats? Try CoveritLive. Want widgets that you can centrally update? Try SproutBuilder. The list goes on and on.

And as you go, share your successes and your stumbles. Just like we’re seeing more cooperation on the content side between news outlets, we need to see more cooperation on the tech side (more on this another time).

Now lets get down to innovating and experimenting and be sure to let me know how it goes.

Popeil claimed that it was so easy to cook whole chickens in the Showtime Rotisserie Oven that all you had to do was “set it and forget it.” This phrase popped into my head recently while I was trying to explain my approach to website management.

Too many online staffs treat their websites like the Showtime Rotisserie Oven. They, say it with me, “Set it and Forget it.” Enamored with automation, they design sites that is chock full of headline pulls, RSS feeds and automated dayparting, Flash galleries, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a technophobe, but the problem I have is that all the automation becomes an excuse to not deal with their site unless there is a problem or special project. They never stop to ask, are the right stories are being presented at the right time? Is the best photo being featured? Are our visitors being best served? They never ask because well, it’s all automated.

To me, that just spells missed opportunities.

I believe that the pages on your site should showcase not just the best, but the most appropriate and appealing content that your visitors would want at a given moment. And yes, that means change comes often.

My approach is to use metrics to help plot a roadmap and then use your journalistic sense, your common sense to make the right choices. Are there places for automation? Of course, but your site won’t grow automatically it requires your constant attention.

So if you want to cook a chicken follow Popeil’s advice. But if you want to grow your site, take my advice and do the work yourself.

On Sunday, the New York Times posted a story “Dancers in the Crowd Bring Back ‘Thriller’.” It’s an interesting and entertaining piece about how Sony BMG has used viral marketing as part of the 25th anniversary of the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller album. Central to the story is that videos of paid dancers breaking into “spontaneous” zombie dances aboard trains and on city streets have become very popular on YouTube, the video sharing site.

Although I’m familiar with the Jackson inspired dance (not that I can do it myself), I found the idea of a video of “zombies” dancing on board a London subway car an entertaining enough idea to check out. The article has visible links to Sony, Kanye West and Fergie (artists who both appear on the a Thriller tribute album) and Tesco. And thanks to their partnership with Answer.com, you can double-click on any term or word for a definition. But nowhere were there any links to the videos on YouTube, nor did the Times decide to embed them.

Instead, the Times forced me to open a new browser window go to YouTube and then search for the videos myself. A rather annoying endeavor that I felt was unnecessary and took up time that I really didn’t want to spend. See, as a reader of the Times, I expect them to be comprehensive in their reporting AND in their print and online presentation. To me, not providing the related links is the Times disrespecting me and frankly, being lazy after all, how big is their online staff?

My guess is, that your readers would feel the same way if you did this to them. But something else to think of, because the Times drove me to find the videos on YouTube myself, I didn’t return to their site. My visit that might have encompassed say half a dozen page views, stopped with that single one. In a time when we’re talking about how to further engage our readers and how to get them to spend more time, is this an opportunity any of us can afford to overlook?

Want to see the videos yourself? Here they are:

Feel free to provide links to others as you come across them.

I think you need to first decide whether or not you believe that enhancing your stories has value. Do you think it is important to present something more then just what you offer in your daily paper? If the answer to either question is no, then you can stop reading here and I wish you a pleasant day. If your answer is yes, then read on.

One suggestion is to essentially allow all your content to have outbound links attached to them. Not sure what I’m talking about? Try visiting the New York Times’s website and open a story. Double-click on any word and “a new window will open with a dictionary definition or encyclopedia entry.” This has nothing to do with the minions who work at the Times or the large stacks of cash that the newspaper spends on technology, rather, it’s via a third-party vendor. The Times, like CBS News, partners with Answers.com.

Answers.com was founded in 1999 by Bob Rosenschein. So what is it? Well,

Answers.com is an advertising-supported, free website. Since its launch in January 2005, it has become one of the leading information portals on the Internet. Answers.com’s collection of over four million answers is drawn from over 180 titles from brand-name publishers, original content created by Answers.com’s own editorial team, community-contributed articles from Wikipedia, and user-generated questions & answers from Answers.com’s industry-leading WikiAnswers. The site offers useful answers in categories like business, health, travel, technology, science, entertainment, arts, history and many more.

The Times, CBS News, blogs (like editor on the verge) and other sites are using Answers.com’s AnswerTips “small information bubbles that define any word when double-clicked without opening a new browser or following outbound links. AnswerTips deliver instant definitions, explanations and facts including biographies, tech terms, geography, pop culture and much more.”

Using this service on your site would allow you to offer outbound links without having to have a designated staffer research and complete them. I’m not necessarily endorsing Answers.com, if there’s another comparative service or another way to approach this issue, I’m all ears. I just believe your losing out if you simple do nothing.

When I look at many newspaper websites, I just can’t help but wonder why some stories are in a featured homepage slot and, even more so, why they remain there for so long.

I recognize that every market has it’s own issues and what is a popular story in say North Jersey, might not work in Ann Arbor, Michigan. So while I sometimes wonder if “Gardening to Extremes” deserves top billing, I will ultimately bow to the taste judgment of local editors. But what I will question is why that and many other stories keep that top billing throughout the day?

Looking at a variety of sites I see a couple of patterns at work: There are sites that keeps their top stories in place until there is breaking news. There are the sites that rotate content based on the time of day. There are the sites that don’t change anything and even breaking news is only treated as an update. And then there are those that appear to take an approach that I think all sites should emulate. The producers and editors at these news sites let their audience guide them.

It make little to no sense to me to keep a story in one of your prime spots if it’s not drawing an audience. Honestly, I don’t care if it was the top of 1A and you think it’s a hoot or the most important story “evah”, if it’s not bringing them in, then what are you achieving?

How do you deal with this at your newspaper? Do you pay attention to your analytics and let the numbers be your guide? I know that previous posts both here and elsewhere have caused readers to bristle over the use of analytics. But come on, can you argue that knowing what is or isn’t working or your site is really a bad thing? Newspapers spend a lot of money for analytics. Omniture, one of those more popular services starts at $20,000 and easily climbs from there. If all you are using it to find out what was popular before the morning meeting or on the previous day, then I would argue that you’re wasting good money.

So back to that nautical talk. I think you should be able to change the direction your site is going as frequently and as often as you find necessary, that you’re always offering your best content (whatever that may be). My suggestion is that you come to an agreement on a threshold for keeping or moving content based whichever metric you want use, and then, by golly, tack to the starboard or tack to the port, but turn your ship.

But as a visitor to these sites, the lists leave me wondering. I want to know how they’re calculated, how frequently they’re updated and what span of time they supposedly cover. But I find that few, if any, sites that I was able to find, provide even a piece of that transparency.

For a lot of visitors, the technology behind a website could just as well be witchcraft. They don’t know the Java on their computer screen from the java in their cup. By the time they come to your site, many of them have already had mixed experiences with recommendation engines on sites like Amazon or Digg. I include myself in that category and I’m sure you could as well. I mean how many times have you visited Amazon only to be recommended a product that left you shaking your head and wondering what it had to do with you?

So what can you do?

First of all, if your site doesn’t already have a most popular list, get one going; it really can make a difference.

Secondly, make it clear what the list is — is it “Most Popular” of the day, week or month? For example, if you dig deeper into the New York Times’s list, you’ll find that they offer a 3, 7 or 30 day list as well as what I guess is a daily list. Now I’m not saying you have to go as far as multiple lists, but you can state the period it covers. Find a place on your site to explain how the list works and include how often it is updated.

Finally, cross promote it. There is no reason why you can’t include in print what the previous day’s most popular story was and where readers can normally find this information on your site. Doing all of this will help drive more traffic to your site, keep people on it longer, spread your page rank, oh and make me happy.

On Sunday, Jack wrote a post about the firing of career columnist Penelope Trunk allegedly because “her columns commanded low advertising rates.” He explained that:

“Print media writers look askance at how ratings affect TV news, but in the digital economy, they face the prospect of eventually being tied to their advertising generating power, the almighty CPM, or advertising cost per thousand impressions.”

That got Patrick writing a post that proposed the question:

“What if instead of salaries, newspaper reporters and columnists were paid according to the advertising CPM (cost per thousand) their work generated online?”

Fortunately for many reporters, Patrick concludes that now is not the right moment for this approach:

“Though it would be interesting to use it as a metric for bonuses or raises.”

He closes by encouraging reporters and columnists to inquire about their own CPM.

Now I don’t know if Patrick was being serious or not, but it’s a great idea, especially since most newspapers have access to vast amounts of data about their websites.

See news organizations need to have some way of justifying the rates they charge online advertisers. They require statistics like the number of unique visitors, number of pages views and the times that people visit their sites. In order to collect and analyze this data, many newspapers contract with companies like Omniture or SiteMeter or set-up their own server-side data collection systems.

Since the primary purpose of this data is advertising and marketing, reports (daily, weekly, monthly or whatever) are shared with executives in those departments. Senior editors may see data for the most viewed stories, if that. And maybe, reports are shared with editors and some reporters. But overall, that’s typically as far as it goes and therein, I believe, lies the problem.

This data should be shared, widely, throughout the newsroom. I think it’s important for desk editors and reporters to understand the habits of their online readers. Desk editors should know what stories play best online; this is not to say that you don’t report some stories, but editors should understand of what plays best and where.

Newsroom staffs should understand how content is playing on social news and bookmarking sites. Are photo galleries receiving lots of views and what about audio slide shows? How are our video’s doing? While I don’t think the data should be used to weigh and justify every coverage decision, it should be taken into consideration, just like an editor considers what else a reporter is working on before assigning them another story.

We all talk about how powerful data is — we use it to prove points, justify decisions and attract people to our sites. Well data about your website is powerful too, so what are you doing with it?