Rji-interview-rust-wurzer

John Rust and Buzz Wurzer

Buzz put together a "network solution" for newspapers in advance of Pivot Point. LINK TO WURZER WORK. It makes a point for networking content to drive revenue.

• Jon believes newspapers must network if they are going to extract reasonable value from the market. As standalone content providers,newspapers lose out to technology companies who aggregate, create new products and exploit consumer data.

• Jon asks: Why does the newspaper industry not create its own "Google Surveys," thereby building a database of user demographic and psychographic information -- while providing users who don't want to pay to access content a way to see content that is monetizable to content providers? NewsRight, which grew out of AP, is particularly well suited to enable such a networked project.

• In conjunction: small media companies are not particularly strong at determining the non-traditional value in their audience. Who is worth more

as an audience? How do you build it (what content/what experience)? Can a system be built that helps small newspapers understand where and how to exploit user data? Related: Borrell's compass reports identify business segments to target with specific services. Can a compass report be developed, Jon asks, to determine which content drives more value -- and then the network via individual markets supplies such content?

• Talking about content, Buzz shared a story about his work with non-profits in Vero Beach, Florida. What was identified is that traditional news media

don't get to the true stories driving problem issues. He^Rs establishing a foundation to get meaningful dialogs started, bypassing the newsmedia and empowering community agents. He pointed out that this can be done in various community issue buckets ^V developing thematic coverage areas -- from Homelessness to Health Care to Culture & Arts, etc. This led to discussion of Deseret News' community "voices" and JRC's Torrington, Conn. daily's open news project.

• Jon shared various ways that his flagship seeks to create community dialog by giving the power to community to drive news coverage. A new project

currently in development is launching a tool where users/readers submit story ideas and have the community rate the merit of doing such stories in a "meaningful way." (Already, community members can submit their own stories, which go directly online, and which are cherrypicked for print.) In conjunction: the newspaper is developing process for public to plan investigative and/or resource-intensive stories.
Goal: empower the public to help editors drive the report. System^Eis meant to identify what will drive readership interest, monetization, while enhancing the relationship between community (including high-value portions of the community) and the newspaper/website.