Adding my two rules to Jon Friedman’s eight

Perhaps because of some collective media groupthink, the internet is often seen as the deathknell for magazines and newspapers and news media of all kinds.

That’s bull. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Jon Friedman at MarketWatch wrote a column about it as a follow up to a presentation he made at the annual meeting of City and Regional Magazines in Mississippi:

There is no excuse for magazine editors and publishers to be uneasy about the Internet. They talk as if it’s some strange, exotic instrument that nobody quite understands.

And then he goes on to present eight excellent guidelines for finding success with your web site. I’ll let him share the details of each point in his own post, but here’s the fly-by:

1. Have an attitude
2. Make it easy to read
3. Stress interactivity
4. Entertain
5. Maintain an identity
6. Live in real time
7. Be true
8. Experiment

Of course a lot of this advice makes a lot more sense for magazines than it does for a large portion of newspaper reporting (some news, for example, should definitely be presented sans attitude). But as far as understanding what works on the web? It’s a damn good list.

I would add two of my own:

1. Make it portable
The old rules about moving content around (you know, things like Newtonian physics) don’t really apply to bits and bytes. Your articles, posts, videos, and podcasts will get re-blogged, stolen, linked to, and hijacked by everyone and their Aunt Myrtle.

The easier you make it for people to read, mix, and share your content, the more places it will go. And it’s far better to make your own, branded tools for doing so than it is to wait for someone else to just capture your video and upload it to YouTube. If you own the platform through which people are sharing your content, you will eventually be able to monetize it.

2. Ask
This is sort of like cheating, because Friedman almost covers this in his third rule (Stress interactivity), but he doesn’t get at it explicitly. The web is a place for interactive journalism, to be sure, but where it really gets interesting is when you start collecting input from anyone and everyone who can get at your page.

The best way to get people to start participating the conversation is to ask for their input. But be warned: if you ask, you’ll be forced to listen and possibly respond to the answers you get.

What do you think? Is there anything obvious that Friedman and I have missed?