In his new blog, International Newsmedia Marketing Association executive director Earl Wilkinson notes the difficulty in achieving definitive online success as a newspaper.
He views the challenge as one of several steps:
1. Focus on six to eight topics in the paper and own them in such a way as to generate substantial advertising revenue to pay for other journalism activities.
2. Shed several non-essential areas of coverage. It is, he notes, a zero-sum game.
3. Devote more marketing resources to those niche areas.
Wilkinson identifies a critical need for sites to generate return traffic. Unique visitor statistics are good, but regular visitation is even better.