Tag Archives: AlanJacobson

2 More Papers Join TweenTribune

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Sandy Sanders, the publisher of the Valdosta Daily Times in Valdosta, GA gave TweenTribune the green light this week. Here’s his page of local content on the site: http://tweentribune.com/valdosta.

David Leone, the publisher of the AmericanNews in Aberdeen, SD, told TweenTribune owner Alan Jacobson that he wants to move forward with TweenTribune. Here’s what Dave said:

“I like the content, the look and I have some ideas on how we can utilize it, not just for NIE purposes but to market it towards that tough age and frankly, the age where many kids have no clue about newspapers or newspaper websites. I do think there is a good opportunity to sell local advertising also.”

Local news from both papers, as well as Norfolk, Bakersfield and Wilson can be seen beneath the “your town” topic at tweentribune.com

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TweenTribune Signs Up Another Newspaper

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TweenTribune is on a tear signing up their third newspaper, in almost as many weeks, since launching the platform.  The North Carolina based Wilson Times is now using TweenTribune for their NIE program and founder Alan Jacobson reports that “ads are running at wilsontimes.com on its homepage and interior pages to promote tweentribune”.   If Alan Keeps this pace of new announcements up I’ll have to start charging him for bandwidth consumption on metaprinter.

Read my interview with Alan Jacobson to learn more about “community of interest” news sites and how TweenTribune can monetize a newspaper’s NIE campaign while bringing it into the internet paradigm.

The Bakersfield Californian to Deploy TweenTribune

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The Bakersfield Californian joins The Virginia-Pilot as early adopters of the Alan Jocobson inspired news platform, TweenTribune. Both newspapers are using the site to revitalize their moribund NIE programs.  The platform is web based, safe for kids, NIE compliant, and monetizable.  If that is not incentive enough to consider it, the Audit Bureau of Circulations will cease to count NIE newspaper copies as a form of paid circulation in the beginning of 2010.   The TweenTribune sites will fill that need.

Though TweenTribune is a niche site for kids, Alan’s concept focuses on newspapers publishing many “community of interest” news sites rather than a single geographic community newspaper website.  Currently, this is a more common strategy for magazine publishers and blog networks, but the idea is to publish many independent niche news sites to focus readership, drive engagement and command higher CPM’s from advertisers.

In an email with Alan he emphasized that newspaper publishers are interested in the TweenTribune platform as a model for lots of niche sites – “…the number we’re throwing around is 1,000 sites. They want to use TweenTribune to test the efficacy of that strategy”. Continue reading →

Interview With Alan Jacobson – TweenTribune News Site

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This interview took place between TweenTribune‘s managing editor Alan Jacobson and I at this year’s America East Newspaper Operations and Technology conference.  If Alan’s name sounds familiar it is because he is the president of BrassTacksDesign, which has provided editorial, advertising and technical support to newspapers from New England to New Zealand for almost 20 years.

RI- What is TweenTribune and how did your idea for it come about?
AJ- Lets go all the way back to 1996 when I wrote an article for Brass Tacks Design entitled Online newspapers: Where’s the revenue? In that article I emphasize the importance for websites to build on a “community of interest” rather than a geographic community such as newspapers have traditionally served.   The points being, advertisers would be eager to advertise beside niche content rather than generic news on a website AND the internet is better suited at targeting “communities of interest” than printed newspapers.  Newspapers should have 1000 niche sites, not 1 mammoth site attempting to do everything.

I am the father of two tweens and being familiar with the Newspapers In Education (NIE) program it was clear to me that something better needed to be created for all parties involved.  The current NIE setup is a disaster.  The print product they are pushing not only costs publishers millions of dollars, it is attempting to get kids interested in a product that is going away and filled with adult content.  Their online solutions are equally bad.  Those sites are not designed with the kid’s best interests in mind.  The sites are poorly designed and have wacky logos and colors…  I actually did design testing with my kids and their friends, and my friends kids… you know what they like?  A well laid out, clean site just like the rest of us! Continue reading →