BayArea.Com’s Time May Have Come
Important Details: You have to use the Internet Archive to find the first BayArea.com. Now that idea – incorporating the soon-to-be-bought-by-MediaNews San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times, and maybe the San Francisco Chronicle as well – has been reborn.
"We’ve talked conceptually about a joint venture to start up a new Web site, which would probably use the BayArea.com name," Joseph Lodovic, MediaNews president, told the CC Times. "It’s very preliminary. These are just exploratory discussions of things we could do together."
The "we" Lodovic is talking about makes this story even more interesting. He’s talking about pooling the efforts of MediaNews’ new Bay Area properties with those of a little struggling paper to the north, the San Francisco Chronicle. The Chronicle is owned by Hearst, a new partner of MediaNews, brought together by the Knight Ridder auction.
Preliminary is a good word for it, with a predictable "never-heard-of-it, no-comment" from the Chronicle’s SFGate, one of the granddaddies of Internet news.
Still, it is a compelling idea and one that could be a model for regional news portal cooperation in other metro areas. Think of it, news from more than one paper. Restaurant reviews and film reviews from the region’s best critics. Pooled sports coverage by the best columnists of both. And lots more. This may be a product that could provide some new competition to the want-to-seem-local GYM wannabes.
In Outsell’s Opinion: It’s about time newspapers got out of the box of thinking about their Web sites as what they publish in the a.m., somewhat updated. That’s about name and about content. Name is important. Self-referential names – like mercurynews.com – offer up thoughts of, guess what?, a newspaper. They don’t tell you this is something new, something up-to-date. Subsuming the newspaper brand, in this case to a BayArea.com, is something readers would get. It’s related to the paper – but it’s not the paper. After publishers cross that bridge, they get to the more challenging one: content. A BayArea.com – or any regional portal – needs to be about the region. Lots of the "things to do" front and center. Lots of community conversation. Lots of viewpoints, and not just from those fully employed by the papers. Modern search and database access.
So MediaNews, in broaching the reborn notion, deserves praise. Now on to the execution.