Community-minded: With KOZ Community, publishers can draw non-staff content as well as eyeballs to their web sites.

Community-based news given new products for going on-line

NEW ORLEANS -- As a community of practice, we're obsessed with practicing community journalism. Whatever merits you find in the concept, it is now securely enough rooted in the culture of journalism that it is as much a buzzword as a way of framing the news.

Like most buzzwords, "community journalism" tends to generate a huge quantity of variations so that the original concept is only a faint trace. Moreover, buzzwords are the hooks onto which marketers hang their new products, so if you start with "community journalism" you can expect that shortly you'll bump into something like, umm, "web community publishing."

We certainly did at NEXPO. Two key contenders for newspaper dollars in this field are Zip2 Corp. (http://www.zip2.com/), neé Pantheon (http://www.pantheoninc.com/), and KOZ (http://www.demokoz.com/).

Ed Petersen, marketing manager at Seattle-based Pantheon (whose July acquisition by Zip2 of Mountain View, Calif., means Pantheon workers will be moving south over the next few months), identified two kinds of community: "the region or area that surrounds a person," and "a class or group with common interests" which may or may not be associated with a geographical area.

In his mind, print newspapers serve the geographical community, while web publishing is better suited to communities of interest.

At Raleigh, N.C.-based KOZ, Mark Markwell, vice president for sales, said the concept of community which guides a publisher's use of KOZ/Community "is realized through a juxtaposition of related groups and information within a common, appropriate interface."

Groups with common interests -- civic groups, sports leagues, social organizations, professional clubs, schools, churches and local businesses -- can choose to link to one another to form a community. KOZ/Community is "topic-centered" and uses a relational database which includes both content and system architecture -- user data and interface, administration infrastructure, publishing functionality.

Communities, said Markwell, share four functional attributes. Groups have a community administrator responsible for content such as calendars, rosters and newsletters in their publishing area. Groups can have both public and private viewing areas.

The appearance of the pages, and the inclusion or exclusion of groups, is governed by a community/group relationship. Although each group is contained within a default community, it may also decide to link to other groups to form new communities.

Communities are recognizable by a coherent interface and appearance, achieved by using the same, configurable template, designed to reflect key facets of an actual physical community. It's the "when in Rome" phenomenon: This chameleon feature allows the pages of a group which is a member of several communities to always take on the appearance of the community the viewer is currently browsing.

At the heart of web community publishing systems is a series of tools for self-publishing -- such as dynamic calendars and interactive forums -- that groups themselves create and maintain remotely. Newspapers retain control -- and thus, accountability to their community. With the Zip2 Community Suite, information the group publishes can also be reviewed by in-house staff before going live.

Looking up from the bottom line, things get even better: The community is doing most of the work, so publishers get more content with fewer employees, although information can (and maybe should) be reviewed by in-house staff.

Another bonus for the newspaper, said Petersen, is that with a definition of community that has no geographical boundaries, there is a virtually infinite number of new advertising markets.

That's one reason Zip2's acquisition of Pantheon in late July made good sense. Pantheon had a way to manage community news and classifieds, but Zip2 products have been rather commercial -- city, real estate and auto guides, as well as mapping and door-to-door directions databases. The integrated product is the Zip2 Community Suite.

In addition to staffing, newspapers are likely to benefit from web community publishing in still another way: The more the audience is drawn into the process, the more likely it'll develop a sense of loyalty to your newspaper, your classifieds, your on-line site.

This loyalty, said Markwell, is likely to help you distinguish your site from the rest of the services -- like Microsoft and CitySearch -- competing for your local audience.

And, it provides a targeted market for your advertisers -- which puts you in a more competitive position with Yellow Pages and Advo-type approaches.

KOZ and Zip2/Pantheon have similar products, but not identical features or screen setups.

Zip2 offers push technologies that can be either effective or annoying: Once a viewer identifies specific interests, the system sends e-mail when the system is updated with information that matches his or her criteria. Likewise, it'll send a reminder about events a viewer has specified -- for example, a deadline for buying tickets to Cirque du Soleil.

Zip2 also has a reverse publishing feature that can feed the community information into the newspaper's front-end system for print publication.

By contrast, the KOZ target market is any community group or business with an Internet connection, although newspapers, said Markwell, represent a logical channel. KOZ/Community is less a production tool -- allowing publishers to collect community information from the public -- than it is a tool for increasing the level of community participation and interaction, and thus loyalty to the publisher, Markwell suggested.

It's a philosophical distinction that is reflected in the marketing of the two products as well. KOZ/Community is a centrally hosted service available to anyone who has a browser and net connection. Thus, KOZ may sell to either a local publisher who decides to offer it as a service, or directly to the communities themselves.

There is a one-time enrollment fee (which covers affiliate training), fixed monthly service and a support fee (starting at $500 per month) based on market size. The fee includes hosting, system and database administration, and end-user support. End-user training is via e-mail help desk and on-line documentation.

The system has been bought by Houston Chronicle Interactive, the Chicago Tribune, the Community Newspaper Co. of Needham, Mass., and The Record of Hackensack, N.J. KOZ is establishing an on-line user group using its own product.

Zip2 is a developer that sells both software and integration consultancy services, and negotiates costs on a case-by-case basis. The Windows-based product runs on an NT server; the site can be edited through either Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.

All contracts have a service clause.

-- L. Carol Christopher

KOZ Inc.,
(919) 832-8926;
Pantheon Inc.,
(206) 628-3411;
Zip2 Corp.,
(650) 429-4400; e-mail: info@zip2.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, August 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.