Memo to News-Site Executives- How can Net-based news services best serve their audience during the imminent conflict?
MEDIA NOTES By Jimmy Guterman, March 19, 2003 <a href=www.business2.com>Business 2.0 To: Managers of News Sites
On Sept. 11, 2001, few Americans got their breaking news online. Even after stripping ads, graphics, and scripts from their front pages, most major online news sources received so much traffic that visitors had to either wait minutes at a stretch for text to load or hit the "Refresh" button repeatedly until something other than an error message appeared on the screen.
That experience led you folks to reconsider how much bandwidth is adequate for times of emergency and what the role of online news is, compared with that of more entrenched electronic media like television and radio. In the 18 months since the 9/11 attacks, you have learned about features like "burst" capacity, additional bandwidth that becomes available when unexpected traffic threatens to slow a site to a crawl or take it down entirely.
I'm writing this column on Wednesday, March 19. By the time you read it, the United States and Britain may be at war with Iraq and people will be desperate for up-to-the-second information. Just keeping sites up in the early days of a war will be a challenge, but that's only the beginning. If you are to compete effectively with your more entrenched electronic brethren, you need to pay close attention to how you're using broadband and how broad your content sources are.
Deploy broadband sparingly. Even with additional capacity, your sites may be fighting to keep up with traffic, and there's nothing like a lengthy video file to slow access and send visitors elsewhere. And let's face it: No matter how you promote your broadband offerings, small, jerky streaming video feeds inside a RealPlayer or Windows Media Player are nowhere near as compelling as video seen on a 25-inch screen that was built for video. Some video files will be necessary to give your visitors a broad array of services, but if people want immediate access to breaking video, they will opt for television.
Use weblogs to jump-start discussion. The easiest way to get the greatest number of voices and the freshest opinions on a site is to point to the best of the thousands of diverse weblogs on the war being updated obsessively. To ward off potential charges of bias, give equal footing to all views; the least expensive way to do that is to provide a safe way through the minefield of independent opinion on the Net. Use tools like DayPop, the speedy weblog search engine, and its kin to keep up with war reports and opinions from unlikely places. The more voices, the better, particularly in the earliest days of the conflict, when much of the content you'll receive -- and perhaps all of the broadband content -- will be coming from or filtered through official sources. Best of all, the content's free. It's a great starting point for your visitors to join in the discussion. Those sites that foster active communities will come out of the next couple of weeks with a better reputation -- and more traffic.
Jimmy Guterman was the editor of Media Grok and its successor, Media Unspun. He has written or edited for more than 90 periodicals (some of which still exist), has written five books (half of which are still in print), and has produced CDs for every major record label (all of which have consolidated). He is the founder and president of a consultancy, the Vineyard Group.