FLOW OF TRAFFIC

There are a few things that newspaper websites can do to both boost the traffic flow to their websites and improve news coverage through reader-contributed content.

The first possibility is simply providing links to popular blogs on newspaper websites. It has been found that over the past few years blogs such as the Drudge Report have boosted traffic to the sites of papers like the LA Times and the Washington Post. If a newspaper site links back to the blog that references it there's a good chance that user traffic will significantly increase for both websites.

Although this might still be in the early stages of development, another thing that could be done to increase traffic flow on newspaper sites is to allow users to socially bookmark or "tag" URLs from their websites. What this means is users would be able to store the URL in an online account for quick access and then would be able to share their bookmarks with other online users. They could also ask other users to submit links to stories they might be interested in. As I said before, this form of networking is not very widespread, only available on a handful of websites such as digg.com and Newsvine. However, if a major newspaper was to take advantage of this method we could see a new trend in online journalism.

Finally, websites could significantly improve their news coverage by creating open, yet moderated, forum-type pages in which users could both report and comment on stories they are interested in. This could prove to be significantly useful for local news reporting, as users would probably be able to report on local things from a first person perspective that the newspaper might not even know about. Forums could also work well for the opinion pages so that people might be able to easily share their thoughts on a variety of issues: local, national, and international. As I said earlier, these forums would have to be constantly monitored and moderated to make sure they stay on-topic and no objectionable material is posted. However, this might not be too much of a concern if the website can quickly establish the forums as a place for repectable, newsworthy, and intelligent conversation that is open to anyone.