I created a page (Update: Page no longer exists) aggregating PressDemocrat.com’s available local news feeds. It’s clean, light, and navigable. Take a look and let me know what you think:

My goal is to facilitate a conversation around making the page better. I want everyone’s feedback on how to make the page better. I’m open to try anything. The page is limited only by the availability of PressDemocrat.com’s feeds.

Am I stealing PressDemocrat.com’s content or conversations? No, I’m using feeds they’ve made publicly available. And, I’m using them to redirect people back to PressDemocrat.com’s content and conversations.

Your ideas, comments, and emails are valuable to making the page better. Email us at andrew@buzzyeah.com.

I update Buzzyeah with new posts very infrequently, so I thought I’d point out a few places where I update on a daily basis (if not a multiple-times-a-day basis).

1) @andrwmyr at Twitter

Here you’ll find a diarrhea stream of news links I think are cool, my half-baked opinions and thoughts, what I’m up to on any particular day, and hollow flippant-ness.

2) My FriendFeed stream

It tracks most of the things I do on the Internet from favorite videos on YouTube to uploading photos to Flickr to digging articles on Digg. Here’s all the social sites I have feeding into my FriendFeed stream:

YouTube Favorites
Flickr
My blog’s feed
Amazon Wishlists
Delicious
Digg
Facebook Status Updates
Disqus comments
Google Reader Shared Items
LinkedIn
LastFM “Loved” tracks
Netflix
Seesmic
Tumblr
Twitter
FriendFeed Posts

3) Glahsez (Update: Blog no longer exists)

My blogging outlet for my unusual eyewear fixation. I try to update it daily with fresh glahsez.

When a reader leaves an insightful, thoughtful comment on Buzzyeah, it will get reblogged. Like this comment:

What you say is true. I used read the PD first thing in the morning and then check my internet news aggregator. Now I check the internet aggregator first and then the PD. I find that the PD front section is useless. It carries news stories that were on the internet news aggregators 24 and 48 hours ago. I do read the Empire section of the PD because it has more or less local news that is harder to get on my internet aggregator (probably because I haven’t bothered to tune the aggregator for local news yet). I don’t even look at the sports section much anymore because it’s all available on the net on a more timely basis. If the PD really wanted to keep my eyes on their news they would put up a portal that lenses local, national, and world news based on its impact on Sonoma county. Stories could be linked to local blogs and commentary like Memeorandum does.

Originally posted as a comment by obsequiem on BUZZYEAH using Disqus.

When I visit PressDemocrat.com, I go for one thing: Sonoma County news. Someone in Mendocino County might visit the site for Mendo County news, which is great, but not the reason I visit. Ok, with that said, how do I locate Sonoma County news on PressDemocrat.com. Ahh… herein lies the problem. Local news granularity is sorely missing on the site.

When scrolling down PressDemocrat.com’s frontpage, you won’t find sections for “Santa Rosa news” or “Windsor news”:

When you go to the “Local” page under “News”, you won’t find sections for “Santa Rosa news” or “Windsor news” either. You will find a section for Petaluma news, but that’s because its a feed for Petaluma360 one of PressDemocrat.com’s other sites:

I can’t wait until PressDemocrat.com adds clear local news granularity to the site. I’d love to visit the homepage and find sections for “Santa Rosa news” or “Windsor news”. I’d like it even more if Northern California news got the above-the-fold treatment over national news. I’d like it even even even more if Santa Rosa news, Windsor news, etc, got their own pages.

Note: I’m strictly talking about PressDemocrat.com, not the print edition. The Make PressDemocrat.com Better conversation I’m starting has nothing to do with the excellent print edition. They are completely different worlds.

Scott Karp’s Publishing 2.0 blog is an excellent conversation starter around the topic of news organizations increasing, bettering their Web presence. I’ve been reading it heavily. Here’s a couple interesting posts:

Reinventing Local News Distribution On The Web (Scott Karp on Mar 13, 2008)

Drudge Report: News Site That Sends Readers Away With Links Has Highest Engagement (Scott Karp on Sept 15, 2008)

Why Every News Site Should Put a Continuously Updated News Aggregation on the Homepage (Scott Karp on Sept 17, 2008)

Nervous About Link Journalism? Ignore Web’s ‘Cesspool’ And Tap Its ‘Natural Spring’ (Josh Korr on Oct 13, 2008)

Mainstream News Organizations Entering the Web’s Link Economy Will Shift the Balance of Power and Wealth (Scott Karp on Oct 16, 2008)

On another note, it was reported yesterday that the #3 newsmagazine US News and Report is dropping print for the Web. This is a trend that will continue to happen with news organizations. I’d love to hear more discussion and thoughts about print-to-Web transitions and strategies by news organization insiders.

Photo credit: News Int’l/AFP/Getty

My local newspaper The Press Democrat is one of the best, as far as non-national newspapers go. I read it online and since their site is my only source for local news it’s very important to me. And, like most consumers, I want my favorite products to get better. This is why I’m trying to start a Make PressDemocrat.com Better conversation.

Here are a few questions I have for PressDemocrat.com’s Online Director. I’ve split them up into questions directly for the Online Director, questions about site usage, and questions for online readers:

PD online director:
Your content focus for homepage?
Your plans for PD.com?

Site usage stats:
Most popular content?

Online readers:
Content you go to PD.com for? For example, national news, local news, editorials, pro sports, comics, etc.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll add them to the post.

This is a very basic tip that works almost 90% of the time.

Here’s what you do:

1. When you get to an online checkout page, stop, and find the “Enter promo code” box.

2. Open Google in another page and search for something like “(Product you’re buying) + promo code”.

Note: Make sure you use the promo code keywords that the online checkout uses. For instance, if they call it “Discount code” instead of “Promo code” than use “Discount code” in your Google search.

3. Sift through the first page or two of Google results and find a promo code that gives you 10-20% or $10 off the product price.

4. Go back to online checkout page and enter the promo code. Voila!

I just discovered this Google trick recently and thought I’d pass it along. Its so simple, yet effective, I can’t believe I didn’t discover it earlier. If you’ve been doing this for a long time, I apologize if I insult your savvy consumer skills in any way.

Try this tip on any online purchase. From airline tix to barbells to sunglasses.

Reader comment:

“You make some strong points. The Press Democrat has a long ways to go. And I’m not just saying that because you advocate for me to have a bigger presence in the publication. ;)
The one thing you left out was the need to improve our forums and comments. Right now the comments are often vile attacks against victims, professionals, and way too often minority groups. Very few tools have been given to online readers to help police the forums — and they don’t appear to be effective. In my opinion, our comment section in its current iteration drops the overall value of the online publication.
I’d also be interested in hearing you expand on your definition of “real blogs.” Because while I don’t have a blog, both Beck and Maiocco do. And Maiocco’s blog drives HUGE traffic to the Web site. I don’t have the exact numbers, but I think it’s fair to say his blog contributes a double-digit percentage of traffic. That said, the blogs are fairly basic, text-oriented pages, with few options for us to expand on. What more would you like to see on the blogs?”

Originally posted as a comment by Nathan Halverson on BUZZYEAH using Disqus.

My reply:

“I was saving comments/forum suggestions for Pt 2, which can be found here: http://buzzyeah.com/2008/09/17/make-pressdemocr…

As for what I mean by “real blogs”, I don’t have a deep, philosophical Web 2.0 babble definition. The blogs just seem clunky like the main site. I guess they both have comments, blogrolls, and recent posts lists; and John Beck’s links out of his posts. So, they meet the basics there. I’m just used to the feel and look of excellent blogging platforms like Wordpress. Blogs don’t seem Internet friendly to me unless they’re using a “real” blogging platform like Wordpress, etc. What platform do you guys use?

Do the PD blogs use the same site structure as the main site? Because if they do they aren’t Google search friendly. You could probably get way better traffic flow for the blogs using the Wordpress platform.”

I will be reblogging excellent reader comments from the “Make PressDemocrat.com Better” conversation. Get your comment on!

If you read Pt 1, you’ll know that I’m a lifelong Press Democrat reader and interested in making PressDemocrat.com better. In the post, I talked about four areas where PD.com could make their site more Internet friendly.

This post is going to look at a more defined area on PressDemocrat.com: Comments. I’ve heard plenty grumblings (here, here and here) about the conversations in the comments section on PD.com. If you improve the comments section, it should improve the conversations. Here are a few suggestions:

1) Location, location, location
2) Timely conversation
3) Community moderation, including voting and flagging
4) Etiquette, moderation rules up front and center
5) Reader profiles (i.e. accountability)

Now with more explanation:

1) Location, location, location

On all online PD articles, you’ll find a comment section that shows the ten most recent comments the article has received. However, readers don’t leave comments on the article’s page, instead they have to click “Post a comment | View all comments” and transport over to a forum discussion page for the particular article. The forum discussion page let’s readers add they’re own comment or read all the comments beyond the ten most recent.

I think this is a huge no-no since it quickly sets a negative tone. When you put commenters in a dark, dirty section of town with no police patrol, road maintenance, etc, the dark, dirty section gets darker and dirtier.

                Site comments                                               Forum comments

2) Timely conversation

PressDemocrat.com pulls its articles from its print edition, The Press Democrat newspaper. Newspapers are timely. You have a whole bunch writers, reporters, editors, etc, working around deadlines to get content off to the press in an extremely timely manner.

Reader commenting should also be timely. What do I mean? Commenting on specific online article should be open for 1-2 weeks and than closed. This will help comments be on the same time wave-length as the news article, which, in turn, helps keep comments on-topic.

3) Community moderation (voting and flagging)

I don’t see Press Democrat writers rolling up their sleeves and participating or moderating reader comments. I’m pretty sure most of them sneer at reader comments polluting their peerless journalism.

So, how do you moderate comments so that you get smarter, more on-topic comments? Easy. Let the community moderate. All you have to do is provide readers with an up arrow and down arrow (a la Disqus commenting system) and readers can click the down arrow for off-topic/inappropriate comments and the up arrow for conversation improving comments.

Ok, but how does clicking an arrow moderate comments? Let me explain. You can set a commenting system, like Disqus, to filter out all comments with -5 points or whatever negative number you choose. This means when five people click the down arrow the comment would be filtered out. Or, you can setup Disqus to show the highest rated comments at the top of the comment thread and the lowest rated comments at the bottow of the comment thread.

Also, some commenting systems allow you to simply “flag” a comment for an official moderator to review instead of letting the community readers vote comments up or down.

4) Etiquette, moderation rules up front and center

All the big sites have to deal with comment trolls leaving hateful, spammy, and/or inappropriate comments. This is why you need to put your site’s commenting etiquette and moderation rules up front and center. It lets your community know the rules. This does two things: 1) Makes your future moderating clear and understood and 2) Empowers your reader community to self-moderate like Wikipedia (that is, if they have voting and flagging tools).

It makes it a whole lot easier to deal with angry trolls after their comment has been removed if all you have to do is point to up-front-and-center moderation rules. It’s even easier if you let community readers moderate off the same up-front-and-center moderation rules. Think about it.

5) Reader profiles (i.e. accountability)

Reader profiles tie everything together. They provide accountability by showing all comments the reader has left on articles. They allow the user to build positive commenting reputation (especially if you’re using Disqus‘ points-based user profiles).

Reader profiles can also tie other things the reader does on the Internet like their blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc, to their profile. I think this is extremely important as it adds an extra layer of accountability to a profile. So, instead of requiring info for advertising optimizing, PressDemocrat.com should ask new commenters if they want to add their Facebook or blog to their profile. Optional, of course.

This is the current required info when new commenters create a PD.com profile in all its advertising-optimizing glory:

I’m really trying to start a strong conversation here to “Make PressDemocrat.com Better” so feel free to use the Save/Share button below to share with friends, etc.

If you’d like to contact me, shoot me an email at andrew@buzzyeah.com. Or, feel free to leave a comment below (I’ll be reblogging awesome comments).

I’ve been a lifelong reader of Sonoma County’s Press Democrat newspaper. Still remember waking up before school and following PD coverage of the Polly Klaas case when I was 9 years old.

Nowadays I read my newspaper online. NYT, WaPost, WSJ, etc. I don’t have a subscription to a single print newspaper. This means that I also read the Press Democrat online, too.

The trouble is that the PressDemocrat.com seems to be an afterthought. It doesn’t feel to be born of the web. It’s stiff and clunky. It feels as if the print articles were copy-and-pasted to PD.com since it’s 2008 and “you got to be online”.

For instance, my mom will email me that I need to read a specific PD article in “today’s paper”. So, I’ll jump online and browse the PD.com headlines and use the site’s search feature to find the article. But, I usually come up empty-handed. That is until I jump over to Google and do an extreme search function like:

site:http://www.pressdemocrat.com “car crash in Windsor”

Anyways, my point is that PressDemocrat.com needs to become more Internet friendly. How do they do this? Here are a couple of suggestions:

1) Clean, granular RSS feeds
2) Better navigation
3) Blogs
4) Beta.pressdemocrat.com

Now with more explanation:

1) Clean, granular RSS feeds

RSS feeds are very important, especially ones with full articles and unbroken links (my Google homepage PD widget feed is always stale). Allow me to track the specific news section on PD.com that I really like. Yes, I know that PressDemocrat.com currently has RSS feeds, but they aren’t clean and they aren’t granular enough. Right now, PD.com has five RSS options. There should be way more (i.e. RSS feeds for public notices, CA news, SR-only news).

2) Better navigation

The homepage is a mess. PD.com mixes national and local news. It has too much white space, too many font changes, and too many photos with different shapes and sizes. It’s highly un-scannable and seems like a jumbled mess that doesn’t have rhyme or reason. Take a cue from a massive yet simple news site like CNN.com. Seriously, I can scan CNN.com fast and understand its navigation on first visit.

  PressDemocrat.com homepage             CNN.com homepage

3) Blogs

Blogs are truly born of the web. They’re form, style, and immediacy are all things that PD.com could use more of. They should give Matt Maiocco (49ers), John Beck (Pop Culture), and Nathan Halverson (Technology, Biz) real blogs. Real blogs create better conversations, traffic, community, etc, which all lead to a successful web property.

4) Beta.pressdemocrat.com

Messing around with your site is always a scary thought. So, why not create an experimental playground at a subdomain like beta.pressdemocrat.com? Think about it.

I will continue to spit posts like these as I’ve been thinking about how to make PressDemocrat.com better a lot lately. Feel free to email me at andrew@buzzyeah.com with ideas, etc.