What I propose:
The page shown here is how "www.DaytonDailyNews.com" currently looks. It has a link to the recently created "todays news" page (which is a big improvement over the earlier version), but other than a few other links the main "DDN.com" page has little on it.This is not likely to change without more direct involvement from us.
CIM, after all, is focused on its own pages and it will never represent us as well as we could represent ourselves.
I advocate that the Dayton Daily News assume responsibility for this page -- as well as the task of posting daily stories.
On this main page we could have links to:
An "About Us" page telling all about the Dayton Daily News, our history and our mission. It would highlight the new printing plant and explain our expanding zoning efforts. I already have some history of DDN material and a bio of James Cox on the library intranet, but we could easily add more from last year's special section and from the annual report. A DDN Staff page, which would serve as a "who's who at DDN." The Tom Archdeacon page I showed earlier is an example. I'd also create a basic directory of all editorial staff with e-mail and phone numbers. A full list of our enterprise work with the most recent series promoted with a photo on the main page. An improved archive site, in which we would include at least some graphics and photos with the stories, along with links from one story to its sidebars. If the developers at Infonautics meet their verbal deadline of Aug-Sept, we would have a public archive which replicates the more elaborate archive we have in-house. News event backgrounders on long-running stories in the news. This would be an innovative way to provide our readers with a single place to go for more information on an important local topic. A page archive of section covers (which we already have in-house). Our most recent Dayton 100 companies list Who's Who in the Miami Valley with at least 100 profiles of local newsmakers.
Posting daily stories:
When I started drafting this memo I didn't intend to volunteer for this task, but I do believe it is rightly DDN's responsibility and I have a plan for how to do it.The provider of our in-house library system, MediaStream (formerly Vutext), has a piece of software which is scheduled to be available to us by September 1999 which could automate much of this process. Our filter runs between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. each night and is capable of spitting out instant HTML versions, complete with index pages by section. These stories would be fairly clean, but humans would still need to be involved.
One way to do this would be to split a 30-hour position and hire two people who would find it attractive to work three hours per day, early in the morning, from home. Each would cover one weekend day and would overlap in the middle of the week. A third person, taken from the existing staff, would also work early Monday to Friday and would supplement and coordinate this work.
These people would be responsible only for posting clean and correct versions of as many local stories as possible. They would not add subject terms, captions, image links or corrections and they would not look for stories not received in the automated feed.
Other existing staff, working later in the day, would complete the archiving work -- finishing anything missed by or unavailable to the early team, and adding to the stories the additional features needed for long-term archiving. And of course, the regular staff would still handle news research, photo archiving, public calls, microfilming, etc., and they would add images to stories and links between sidebars.
Costs and staffing:
People: Much of what I propose in this memo is already being done -- or at least it was being done before we lost two staff positions. I propose to do all of the above -- including posting daily stories -- with only the restoration of those positions. I'd also suggest that someone on my staff be given official deputy status with appropriate pay. At minimum we'd need 24-30 hours to use as described above.I spoke with Elvin Taylor to seek his opinion on whether we could find people willing to do the early morning postings, and he feels that we would. The downside to the job is one has to work very early in the morning and cover a weekend day. The upside is working from home with a company-provided laptop. Elvin suggested this would be particularly attractive to someone who is disabled or who cares for children or a homebound adult.
Equipment costs: $2,500 for the software, plus three laptops and perhaps phone lines for people working at home. An unknown cost would be whether CIM would want to charge us for space on it's system. We might want our own server separate from CIM.
Other needs:
Newsroom help: To improve the quality of our automated data feed we need to have clear standards for how tags are used. We already have standards which are followed most of the time, but these need to be made official in writing, and we need to enforce their use. Also, we'd want staffers to contribute their own bios and possibly assist with backgrounder files on stories they are covering.ITS help: Although the nightly file transfer works well, we continue to experience long delays with the "Move-to-Vutext" program which sends individual stories from DT to the library on demand (this is used when stories are not captured in the regular feed or need to be resent). It would also help if ITS could create a better method for our getting preprinted stories earlier than the publication date. (This would mainly be needed for Zones, which are too numerous to manually send).
Potential revenue:
People pay to use our archive so you'd think there would be revenue. Not so and not very likely under the current contracts.It turns out the contract between CIM-corporate and Infonautics calls for CIM to pay $15,000 per month to Infonautics for the five Cox archives. This debit is divided equally among the five so our "share" is $3,000 per month. DDN does not actually pay this, but it is debited against any revenue generated from the fees people pay to use the archive.
The entire amount of revenue our archive site generated last year was only $6,952. Our archive site would have to generate revenue in excess of $36,000 a year before the next dollar could come to us -- and then we'd only get 50 cents because CIM-Dayton gets 50%.
Most of that $6,952 came from a mere 52 users paying $9.95 per month for individual accounts. Institutional users like the public library pay $750/year for a five-seat license, but apparently very few such accounts have been sold.
Obviously the main problem is that neither DDN nor CIM appear to make any major effort to market the archive. If we greatly improved our site and promoted it we might make some money.
But we would need 300 people paying $9.95/month to break even. Or ten institutional accounts and 237 individual accounts. Either way we are nowhere near seeing any actual revenue.
However, apparently there is some debate within CIM-corporate about whether it is fair to divide the $15,000/month fee five ways with Atlanta's burden no larger than ours. I've spoken with Kevin Stephens about getting in on that debate to make the case for a more proportional division based on circulation or some comparison of market area.
The CIM relationship:
I don't think CIM would mind our doing this. It takes a burden from them and it adds quality content to the overall site. We could point to each other and both would benefit from increased traffic.We would still direct users to Active Dayton for their content and their real-time, interactive features, such as online polls, etc. But we could point to our own site for references to our previous work or to the backgrounders which summarize our previous work. That can be the basis for distinguishing their turf from ours.
Why we should take responsibility for our website:
I suspect CIM would be relieved to have us take charge of our own site, and frankly I'm tired of hearing that we can't.If we do what I suggest we would have:
numerous opportunities every day to readers to our website. our most valued work in the public eye as long as we want an equal partnership with CIM rather than a dependent relationship a place to explain to our readers that, no, we are not all moving to Franklin opportunities to drive traffic from factfiles into our paid archive a better way to serve our readers with more relevant website content opportunities to promote readership of the paper a website which truly represents the Dayton Daily News.