GuadalajaraReporter.com – 1 year later

A year ago today the Guadalajara Reporter launched a completely new site that was developed by me.  So I thought that it might be a good time to talk about what this last year has brought to the site, what I think about working on a newspaper website, and what I think about the future newspapers in general.

In the last 12 months GuadalajaraReporter.com has received over 160,000 unique visitors and over 700,000 page-views making it by far the most visited site that I have developed solo.  In that time the number of daily visitors has increased more than twofold.

The new site drove more traffic, but without new features to keep the readers around and advertisers to bring in revenue, there wouldn’t be a lot of value for the business.  So in the last year I’ve also launched the following features:

• Google Adsense: In order to guarantee a constant stream of revenue from advertising I added Google Adsense advertisements as a backstop for advertisements sold by the newspaper.  The staff of the newspaper hasn’t always had time to meet with advertisers, but with Google Adsense there is always an advertisement available and revenue coming in the door.
• Improved Popular Story Feature: The built in Joomla module for Popular stories shows the most popular stories from all time.  With over 20,000 articles on the site, this isn’t going to show the best stories.  I found a solution to show the most popular stories from the last month and this shows a much more relevant group of 5 popular stories.
• Demographic Survey: Using the wonderful CrowdScience Demographics tool, I created a demographic survey of the GuadalajaraReporter.com readership that allowed the publishers to better understand their readers and better market the site to their advertisers.
• Help Documentation: I created a complete set of help documentation to assist the staff of the newspaper in working on the new website.
• Private Database Server: In response to some issues with the site slowing down I moved the databases of the site into a Virtual Private Server from Dreamhost.

So, all in all, I think this was a successful venture for the Guadalajara Reporter and I think I accomplished what I had hoped with the site. So how do I feel about working on a newspaper website?

I think that a small newspaper might be the most difficult client that a web developer can have.  That isn’t because they are bad people, but because they are both demanding and do not fully grasp the importance of the Internet.

They understand the importance of a good design and want their audience to be able to use the website easily. They also would like many of the features that very large newspapers with very large development budgets have.  The good news is that I’ve been able to deliver some of these features.

The publishers of the Reporter understand that the future of their paper is online, but they think it is 10 years off. The bulk of their revenue comes from print advertisers and subscribers and they continue to chase that source with all their energy.  I can count the total number of paying online advertisers on the site in the last year on one hand.  They also don’t understand the pace of change on the web and aren’t moving fast enough to launch the kind of features that will bring new readers to their site.  Finally, I believe charging a subscription for access to online content is fundamentally limiting the possibilities for the site and is not the best business model for the paper.

Working on the site has given me a chance to really think about the future of the newspaper and recent events (with the shuttering of the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer) have given a lot of people a chance to write about the same.  I’ve come to the conclusion that while newspapers have a troubled future, journalism will live on in various forms.  The situation facing newspapers is not surprising (as some have said), but it is game changer and necessitates that newspapers change the way they look at their entire model.

Local papers and papers that serve a dedicated community, like the Guadalajara Reporter, are particularly well suited to finding new ways to sell advertisements, reach readers, and make money.  Specialized advertising products for local businesses, localized social networks, local reader generated content and hyper-local content are just a few of the ways that a local, community newspaper can change their model to stay viable.

A year after launching the site and a year and half after starting to work on the site, I’m handing the project off to a new developer.  I don’t have the time to dedicate to the site and I believe that a developer with more devoted time may provide the motivation necessary for the paper to move faster and get some interesting projects completed.