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!
As a way of providing a "good enough" communications platform, the Huntsville (Ala.) Times has created a wiki (more