April 8, 2006

By CURT CHANDLER, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
and BILL OSTENDORF, Creative Circle Media

We still have relatively little local, web-based competition. But that will change soon. Here are five of the new competitive forces that are all headed your way:

• On the web, all media outlets are created equal. Your first problem will be the local TV stations, which are just discovering the web. Note that networks now rebroadcast their news on the web. TV stations are drawing record hits now. But that's just the beginning. Moving forward, media outlets will be much more alike. Soon TV stations will have classifieds and archives, like newspapers do. Newspapers will do video feeds and even have their own web-based broadcasts, like broadcasters. And everyone will be into web casting, like radio stations. Uh, oh.

• Google, Yahoo, AOL and others are trying to get into the local news market. Right now, these are national portals. But they have the cash and the desire to become local sources of information, too. They are building sites for local restaurant reviews and meeting bulletin boards. Cable TV outlets and phone directory companies are jumping in, too. These companies are hiring more content providers than the newspaper industry is laying off. Think about that trend line.

• Several small startup companies are setting up national networks of blogs and user-contributed content. They are getting big venture money and we are their prime targets. Most of these, like Backfence, are skimming off the most wealthy suburbs, but variations of your local town names in your circulation area may already owned by one or more of these future competitors. Imagine what will happen when they partner up with cable networks or local weeklies or phone directories or someone else ...

• Community and business organizations, like your local chamber of commerce or the Realtors or car dealer associations, could easily set up user-contributed content sites supported by their own membership with advertising. And then they would spend less with you.

• Any good entrepreneur with some good content could set up a web site in one or more of your communities and become a lightning rod for news and commentary, cutting you off from one of your markets in a heartbeat. And their overhead is almost nothing.

Curt Chandler is the editor for online innovation at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and www.post-gazette.com. He collaborates with Creative Circle Media Consulting (www.creativecirclemedia.com), which advises papers on print and web design, content and management. He can be contacted at cchandler@post-gazette.com.

Bill Ostendorf is president of Creative Circle and has led more than 200 print and web redesigns and more than 400 industry seminars on a wide range of topics. He has also developed software to provide newspapers with effective web-based classifieds and user-contributed content (see www.adqic.com). He can be reached at bill@creativecirclemedia.com.