The key word is LOCAL. I will focus on subjects of interest to the 150,000 people who live in the Santa Cruz area: roughly from Ben Lomond/Bonny Dune to the Watsonville border.
What are these subjects?
local politics
local sports
local arts & entertainment
business
crime
gossip
photos
This is pretty much what all papers write about though the old Sentinel didn't seem to traffic much in gossip. But if we've learned anything from the Internet, it is that there is no limit to the public's interest in and consumption of gossip. So I'm going to have it and have lots of it.
I'll expand on each of these categories later.
What Not to Print
Even though we are a WEB page our visual real estate is still very valuable. What you leave out defines you as much as what you put in.
No Stock Prices or Charts
Hey, my readers track their stocks and the market on Yahoo, Google and WSJ. I don't bring anything to the party. I will do articles on local businesses.
No AP or NYT Reprints
Again, my readers get that from Google and the NYT.
No Classifieds, Job Listings etc ...
Craigslist owns that. Only a fool would spend time competing there. (In fact, I've got a nice idea for a weekly article based on Santa Cruz related Craiglist postings ...)
No National or World News
Again, NYT, Google and Yahoo are all over this. Leave it.
No Ugly Ads
This is one area where existing newspapers have really messed up. I'm assuming we'll have our share of display ads and ad links on our pages. However I'm going to make sure that the design and look of the ads does not detract from the site's clean appearance. Even if I have to turn down an ad.
In the next post we'll talk about how many articles per day, and how we'll organize things.
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