In my interview with Alan Jacobson recently he emphasized the importance of newspapers shifting their online focus to “community of interest” news sites instead of geographic community sites; which are essentially general interest newspapers recreated on a website.  I agree and have been pushing the idea here on metaprinter for quite some time as well.

Because of their inherent targeting, community-of-interest news sites have high reader engagement, more vibrant communities, and are better venues for targeted advertising.  Just look at techcrunch or Kotaku.

USA Today launched  MMA Fighting Stances, a mixed martial arts community site today.  This is the newest in a string of community sites that Gannett is launching (Open Road, Hotel Check-In, Game Hunters, The Oval, and Faith & Reason).  

What do I like?

• The URL -  mma.usatoday.com is easy to remember.
• The Look-  The sites don’t look like a newspaper website and act more like blogs and forums.
• The Niche- Targeting is good MMA is what you want?  MMA is what you get.

What don’t I like?

• Advertisements above the header -  they stink and look like afterthoughts.  Use One 300X250 ad box above the fold and sell the heck out of it.
• The Look -  Get rid of the USA Today navigation and logos above the header.  Who Cares?!!  Get it out of there completely.
• The URL -  It redirects to http://content.usatoday.com/communities/mma  blahhhh…
• The Niche -  MMA’s content is pretty focused but the other sites like Open Road is just a blog about cars and trucks.  NOT focused enough.

Have you ever seen a person walking around wearing a T-shirt that says “cars”?  No they wear T-shirts that say “corvette” or “2002″ The Open Road site will flounder around, getting marginal traffic from usatoday, it will never overtake a site like Jalopnik if it does not get focused.

This is a start, but not enough of a shift away from old our-newspaper-does-everything thinking.  Newspapers must break out from their single mammoth sites and build communities of interest sites to drive engagement and revenues.  Jalopnik and Kotaku don’t have Gawker Media links and logos splashed all over their headers do they?  Nope.