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Shall I strip to save the newspaper industry like in Vegas 2.0?
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Bikini weather anchor
Vegas TV 2.0 702.tv hired professional strip performers to animate their daily online weather forecast: "the weather is going to be a hot... 96. It's going to be so hot, so you might want to come inside and get cool and come and see us at the Flamingo" said the "weather anchor" while removing her bra.
Informing people who do not want to be informed
"It's beyond awesome," commented Rob Curley, president and executive editor of Greenspun Media Group's interactive Las Vegas Sun, in a preview of their new online TV 702.tv launching this month.
Our mission is "to try to inform people who do not want to be informed," he added, setting up a joyful atmosphere among the audience and the panel hosted last month by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab at the Stanford Graduate School of Business event "News in the 21st Century: Who Reads Print Anymore?"
What happens in Vegas works only in Vegas
However Las Vegas Sun's attempts at a new 2-year profitability plan contains (other) attractive ideas that may inspire other newspapers. Even if the current industry situation is more than fragile, I am eager to suggest my editor alternative solutions, also inherited from Rob's presentation, before hypothetically being asked to video strip for my media industry column...
Vegas Five P's
Rob's argument is that what people do on the web is always related to one of the 5 P: Passions, Practical, Playful, Personal communication, Porn. "I don't do it but I know you all do," joked Rob. Underneath the joke lays a winning strategy: the Las Vegas Sun won an award for best newspaper-affiliated web site with about 1 million unique viewers monthly.
The Las Vegas Sun has three recipes to survive and, why not, make a profit:
Real-time
- Constantly updating the web site with breaking news: if you see smoke above your town and you can't see a story about it on your news web site, you go and watch local TV. "Real time is the expectation now," Rob said.
Community
- Building a sense of community and pride by documenting the local history of the community is an honorable job, much more than, like, a lawyer, he said. Las Vegas Sun created a virtual historic map of the String, with links to historical news, and even bios of the mob leaders "and which casino they were fronting," he said.
Hyper local advertising
- Enabling local businesses advertising revenues by geocoding everything, from the local news to the lists of clubs. The viewer is encouraged to login and to enter a zipcode. It enables micro-advertising, for example sending a coupon for a pizzeria one block away from the viewer. The zip code enables local businesses to advertise special discounts on a weekly basis and at a micro geographic level. "We are in the hyper local business," Rob said.
"There is a lot of energy in the micro-local push," confirmed Ann Grimes, acting Director of the Graduate Program in Journalism at Stanford University.
This month ComScore reported that the number of people who sought local information on a mobile device grew 51 percent versus one year ago. Other research also showed that in the US, online local search grew 58 percent in 2008, outpacing overall online search, and AT&T reports about nine out of ten print local search champion Yellow Pages users make a purchase.
Where has all the writing gone?
"People like Rob make my life miserable," said Larry Magid, CBS News & CNET tech analyst and columnist. "You are turning every writer into an editor - twitter - video editor - podcaster. And it's very hard to be good at all this."
"We want to do print the way print is done, we want to do video the way video is done, we want to do web the way web is done, it's really how you can start over and do it the way if you did not have to worry about the legacy media," Rob concludes.
Watch Rob Curley full length presentation video here.
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