1. Headlines make the world go ’round

Your headlines have to sell the story, not tell the story. It’s as simple as that. After reading the headline I should be interested in reading more. This involves a change of thinking for most journalists. Headlines in newspapers often summarize the main part of the story. Add another deck below the headline and most people won’t bother reading the rest of the story.

But this is a different distribution model. If you have a reader with a newspaper in hand you want to make it easy for them to get through the whole paper. It’s called reader consideration. You’re supposed to make it easy for them to pick out the most important stories, read the ones that seems interesting and scan the headlines of the rest of them. But online, your headline is competing with a million other links that are begging to be clicked. Give the reader a reason to click the link.

2. Write Less

Brevity is king. Get to the point quickly. Readers will appreciate it. The intro paragraph to this post is three sentences, a mere 48 words. The headline promised you 5 ways to increase blog readership, not a display of my remarkable prose. Getting people to your blog or website is hard enough. Try  not to piss them off once they are there.

3. Don’t Use Links For Background Info

I see this mistake on most blogs and I am guilty of it myself. Somehow bloggers have been convinced that, instead of giving the reader a complete story including the background information, they can just casually mention it and provide a link. The theory is that those who know will keep reading, and those who don’t will click the link, read the other story and then come back to finish what you wrote.

Imagine reading a story in Newsweek that tells you to go find last month’s issue of National Geographic if you want to understand the rest of their story. Yes, on the internet it’s a lot more convenient and quicker to link to sources. But do the reader, and yourself,  a favor and summarize it anyways. You can still provide a link, but maybe they won’t feel the need to click on it. Because trust me, they’re not coming back. (p.s.: if you’re putting in links for background info leading to other sites, make sure the HTML code specifies to open them in a new window.)

4. Publish At Different Times

A good way to increase your traffic is to publish when people are actually reading (it seems so simple, doesn’t it?). If you are writing a news blog you need to publish your articles in the morning. You are targeting people who are checking the web briefly before they go to work and then several times during their work day. Publish between 6 a.m. and noon. I am writing this close to midnight, but will schedule it to run at 11:00 a.m the next morning.

5. Be Better At What You Do

Let’s face it, there are tons of blogs that look and read like no effort was put into them. If you are serious about increasing your readership you have to produce quality content. That doesn’t mean you need to break national news, but it does mean that you should take the time to read over what you wrote, check spelling and grammar, use the best possible artwork and all the other things that can make a difference. Make a commitment to read every post out loud before you publish it. Or print it out and read it over. If you don’t take the time to read your own stuff, why would you expect others to?

A New Idea For Journalism - If the readers don't want to PAY for the news, have them INVEST in the news company. Photo by aloshbennett on Flickr.com

I was going to start this article by telling you how I came up with this idea. But then I remembered some fundamentals I learned from my J-school professors: “Cut the crap,” and “Nobody cares about what you think, just tell them what they need to know,” and probably my favorite (I’m paraphrasing here) “This piece of shit you call an article was so long that I only read the first couple of pages and gave you an F.”

So with those lessons in mind, here’s a new model of funding online journalism I think might actually have a slight chance of making it.

Get the readers directly involved in the ownership and management of their news sources. Instead of relying on advertisers and subscriptions, we can depend on the peoples’ genuine desire to be informed.

Imagine a news website that is staffed by journalist and controlled by the people who invest in it. By investors I don’t mean venture capitalists, millionaires, or your 401k account. I mean the people who are interested in the specific subject or geographical location you are focused on and pay to be involved in the process as well as get the information. Think of it like a subscription model that also gives you a say. People could invest (not subscribe) on a monthly basis for low amounts like $10, with the option of investing more to get greater influence. But there would have to be a cap on how many votes a single investor is allowed.

How would this work? Let’s say your news organization is dedicated to covering Corruption City, Ill. The staff gets together and discusses possible stories and investigations. They create a list of story ideas and put it online for all investors to see. People vote for what they want to see covered or suggest their own ideas. Then the stories that are approved by both sides, the staff and the investors, are assigned and the reporters get to work. It’s the same process that goes on in newsrooms across the country every day, except that people only get to see the finished product, not the decisions that went into it.

Now, I know there’s a million different problems with what I just wrote. Details, details, details. The most important idea here is that people could be involved in the news making process on a deeper level than letters to the editor or angry phone calls. Consider this a mix of Web 2.0 “social networking” and the coffee shop society of 17th century London. A community of people coming together, not for trivial conversation, but to discuss serious issues of great importance to them.

Journalists could finally make money based on the actual reporting they do, not the white space in between the stories that gets filled with advertising. People could finally have a say in what their news source writes about while at the same time being part of a larger community of people. People actually care about the world they live in enough to invest a little bit of time and money into the democratic process.

I realize this may be a bit of an idealistic pipe-dream, but I do also think that the time is right to attempt something a little different. If random bloggers can get tens of thousands of followers on Twitter, is it not also possible that those same thousands of people might be willing to pay a little bit of money to try to preserve reliable and objective news sources?

Consider that according to an American Journalism Review survey, there are only 355 full-time newspaper journalists covering the 50 state capitols in a country of over 300 million people…during a time of a several financial crisis and record state budget deficits. How can people hold their elected officials accountable if nobody is there to document their deeds? But if a couple of thousand people from Missouri get together they could easily fund enough journalists specifically dedicated to following the money and documenting government waste. Those few bucks invested could save citizens billions of dollars in tax money.

Ok, I think I’m done for right now. It’s late and I have papers to write and finals to study for. Plus, all of this rhetoric is giving me a buzz that will make it hard to go to sleep.