This article was written by Stephanie Gray, an independent researcher and graduate student at Columbia College in Chicago, where she is currently working toward her master's degree in public affairs journalism.

Trade publishers in every industry are feeling the pressure to keep up - or, in some cases catch up - with their tech-savvy audiences. The almost-daily barrage of new media tools and applications can overwhelm executives trying to design a profitable online strategy.

But experts say these publishers should stop focusing on the technology. The real secret to success in this new marketplace, they say, is matching online operations to readers' needs by finding the easiest, most user-friendly applications to present the content the industry most values.

At baltimoresun.com, video advertising has a bright future. And not just 10-second pre-roll videos or posting clients' existing television commercials online. They're on to something much more lucrative. Below are two examples of how the staff at baltimoresun.com has incorporated video to serve local businesses in innovative ways: one involves embedding video in a standard online display ad, and the other involves providing Web development expertise, including video, to do a specific job for a local business.

From Suburban Newspapers of America, here's an article about a personalizable online calendar developed by the newspaper in York, Ontario -- a direct outgrowth of their Newspaper Next "jobs to be done" research.

The Chicago Tribune launched a new Disruptive Innovation initiative a couple of weeks ago called Trib Local. I must have missed the announcement in the trades, but I learned about it as I was making the rounds on the show floor at NEXPO. Right from the first sentence, it struck me as a great example of N2 thinking.

I heard about it when I was scouting the small booths, looking for tools and solutions that could help newspaper companies launch new, disruptive products. The guys at Bluefin told me about it, saying they had developed a piece of the technology platform, which now is being offered as a multi-module system to other publishers by Advanced Technical Solutions, Inc. (ATS). Others involved in the development, besides ATS and Bluefin, were Creative Circle and -- surprise -- Kodak.

I got a demo in the ATS booth, and it looked to me like a textbook example of everything N2 preaches. So I called Owen Youngman, VP - Development at the Trib and a Newspaper Next Task Force member, to see if it had been an N2-based initiative.

Absolutely, he said.

He went into a fair amount of detail about how the Trib had applied N2 principles. Trib Local targets nonconsumers (both public and businesses) who are being overshot by the Trib and other dailies, uses a business model with a drastically lower cost structure, aims to be "good enough" to fulfill important, unmet local jobs, is starting in limited locations to minimize risk and discover what may need to be re-vectored ("invest a little, learn a lot.") And more.

When I congratulated him on excellent deployment of the N2 concepts, he laughed and said, "I pay attention!"

Here are some more details about it:

-- They're calling it a "micro-zone" publishing strategy.
-- The idea is 1) to give people in local communities a way to share whatever they're doing and whatever they want others to know about -- chicken dinners, club announcements, etc. (the kind of stuff dailies don't run). And 2) to give local businesses a cost-effective way to reach local residents.
-- The operation is designed to run with just a few editors, who will monitor the online content and select content for print, assisted by a publishing system created to help speed and largely automate the copy flow. They will also be watching for stories the Trib should follow up.
-- Advertising will be sold by a very small ad staff, calling on local businesses, with suitably low rates. Also launching soon will be a self-serve advertising module, so local businesses can create their own low-priced ads with almost no sales cost to the Trib.
-- It started with eight websites in two clusters under the URL www.triblocal.com. The site is the entry page for individual websites for, at the outset, eight suburban Chicago communities with a total population of 350,000. The sites are designed to be almost entirely (I gathered maybe all, eventually) user-generated content.
-- Around the beginning of May, they expected to launch two weekly print tabs -- small square tab format -- that will serve the two clusters. These will be reverse-published from the user-generated content that is the lifeblood of the websites.
-- The plan is to start with about 15,000 copies of each, with free distribution. I saw a copy of a prototype, and it looked great. At first they will be distributed inside local copies of the Trib, to help retain local subscribers. Later, who knows.
-- When the launch was announced in the Trib, the new sites had more than 60,000 visitors in the first 24 hours.

Way cool!

Another jobs-to-be-done solution from the forward-looking Roanoke (Va.) Times, which has created a Web site called BigLickU to connect college students across all the institutions of higher learning in the area.

To create BigLickU, they:

• Took an existing product, ran it through the JTBD lens and determined that it wasn't working;


• Asked students about their JTBD needs, listened, and created an entirely new product that seems to meet those needs extremely well;


• Took advantage of the fact that no one else in the market would be motivated to create such a product;


• Started small by using students in the target audience to help design and run the site. The BIgLickU office is actually near a campus, rather than in the Roanoke Times facility.

As a way of providing a "good enough" communications platform, the Huntsville (Ala.) Times has created a wiki (more here about what a wiki is) that will serve for the moment as a feedback mechanism and discussion forum for all its employees to use. On it they've included:

• A page of jobs-to-be-done interview questions


• A place for employees to post JTBD interview feedback


• A forum for feedback from a user's perspective about their Web site


• A place for people to list other Internet sites they think might be useful sources of ideas


• A place for feedback on some of their new initiatives

The paper has also branded its Newspaper Next initiative -- GetN²It -- as an invitation for everybody to get involved in what it's now calling Newspaper Next Innovative Times!

The Dispatch in Moline, Ill., wanted to develop a subscriber loyalty program and at the same time saw an opportunity to offer small local businesses an affordable way to reach those readers. The result: Delivering QC, a site that offers discount coupons from local businesses, available only to paid subscribers.

Read Seattle Times Editor-at-Large Mike Fancher's column, asking for reader feedback on information jobs they'd like the newspaper to do ...

... and read readers' responses here.

Amy Gahran's post on The Poynter Institute's E-Media Tidbits newsletter highlights this very cool ad The Roanoke Times has developed to recruit a new executive editor. In particular, check out the Who We Want section and the About Us section. A terrific use of multimedia not just for recruiting a newspaper editor, but something we can deliver for any recruitment advertiser.