News Content Service will be a success

KPA will be launching a member service October 1 that’s going to be the first of its kind for state press associations. And I’m forecasting it will be a tremendous success, a great service to newsrooms across the Commonwealth.

First, let me acknowledge the work of the other two staff Davids — Greer and Spencer — who have toiled over making this work. It began with one of those “what if” ideas and thinking an ftp site would be the way to go. Just in mentioning that idea to them, you could see the wheels turning. I purposefully have stayed out of their way as the KPA News Content Service took shape. If they wanted advice, fine. But I trusted their experience — David G. as an editor, David S. as the techie mind behind it — and let them go from scratch.

It’s taken several months to put this together and I appreciate them not rushing into it. I think the discussion actually started about a year ago, grew gradually into “maybe we can do it,” discussions with the News Editorial Division and the Board.

Initially, we thought it would be a website for newspapers to upload some of their best stories each week, stories that would be shared with colleagues across the state. We learned from the public notice website that newspapers are not going to upload material with regularity so we took the fork in the road that led to KPA doing the researching and uploading. And David Greer volunteered to serve as the NCS Director. His long editorial background made that an easy decision.

While we’ll still welcome newspapers to upload stories, the bulk of the work will be done here. David G. will browse newspaper websites, selecting stories of interest and significance and uploading those to the website (www.kynewscontent.com). And it won’t be haphazard either. That will be his primary job now.

David and David established a beta test with a few newspapers just so we could test the system and make sure it’s what newspapers would want, and what we want newspapers to use.

I’ve just seen part of the pilot project and I’m excited. It could be one of the most beneficial member services KPA has offered.

And from your standpoint, there’s even better news. It’s free! Yes, to participate you have to sign an agreement (that you’ll run stories with bylines and newspaper credits, for instance). Now let me quality the “it’s free.” It is. It comes with paying dues but as I’ve hinted to David G. as he’s talked about this to members and the Board, “It’s free…for the foreseeable future.” I don’t want us backed into a corner two years from now, needing to recoup some costs but the statement “you said it’s free” being held over our heads.”

So I’ll tell you, it is free…for the foreseeable future.

If you haven’t signed the agreement yet, you need to. We know the news holes have been trimmed because of the economy but this is going to give every newspaper in the state the opportunity to publish state roundups, stories from other newspapers, additional content for newspaper websites.

Not only that but it will spread the story of Kentucky newspapers from Pikeville to Paducah, from Covington to Cumberland. Readers in one part of the state will be able to read stories from a newspaper 400 miles away. It’s going to be a promotional vehicle for newspapers, their names being published in print or on websites in other parts of the Commonwealth.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 7:17 am and is filed under Potpourri. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.