Friday hodgepodge

I'm spending the afternoon at our Uptown bureau office to work on things that of more direct benefit to Peg than blogging. Here are some things to chew on until I resurface:

• Our snazzy new design will debut sometime between now and Monday. That'll mean readjusting your bookmarks, RSS feeds, et al. The three of you who have signed up for the mailing list will be SOL. But your eyes will thank us.
• Frontburner has lots of stuff on Belo layoffs.
• A new WAN report talks about successful online newspaper strategies. Launching against a powerful hometown incumbent doesn't make the list, but here's what does:
  • For example, the report includes 11 examples of content that people will pay for (sports results, personal health, personal security etc.) and four they won’t (news that doesn’t affect them, most politics, non-local events, the arts).
    
    It also includes a range of case studies about services that people will pay for:
    • Alerts concerning vital news, items for purchase such as houses, cars, bargains, and financial information that can be sent by e-mail or mobile text.
    • Archives of historical information relating to issues of particular interest.
    • Aggregation of content from different sources that would not be easily available to the general population.
    • Transactions that offer discounts are worth paying for, but most readers or users will expect the trader or website to cover the transaction costs, or commissions.
    • Intelligent search that enables users to dig deeper faster, rather than having to trawl through secondary content.