This morning we transformed The Recorder -- our 134 year old daily newspaper in San Francisco -- into a "daily" website (www.therecorder.com) and a weekly printed newspaper.  It is a radical change -- perhaps the most radical change we have ever made to one of our existing publications -- and represents our latest step towards transforming ALM from a predominantly print-based publisher into one which has a greater emphasis on digital media.  Please check out the new website and share your thoughts/comments with publisher Brian Hunt (bhunt@alm.com) and editor-in-chief Scott Graham (sgraham@alm.com). 

The process of watching The Recorder's transformation, reviewing new website designs for a number of our other print and digital properties, and keeping up with trends in the digital media world, make it clearer to me what role our websites need to play in the future.  I think this is a subject we should all be discussing.

It's becoming clearer to me that the internet and media websites in particular are increasingly about Search and Social Media, and not primarily where one will go to read the news.  The days when a newspaper or magazine could simply repurpose its content on a website, with home pages dominated by news headlines, in the expectation that users would come and read the news online as they would in print, are over.  Instead, we can expect that readers will be referred to our stories via RSS readers, email alerts, blogs and their friends on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.  Those readers will come straight to an article page, will read some or all of our article, and then will move on. 

Those who want the "publication reading experience" will do so via other devices and other kinds of platforms -- increasingly mobile with displays often smaller than the size and shape of a desktop computer screen.  Smartphones, iPads and similar devices will come to predominate for those who are looking to consume information -- and not always through a traditional internet browser.  That's the world we need to get ready to serve.

Meanwhile, I see much of our digital news going out to subscribers and non-subscribers via our email alerts, blogs and other digital distribution means.  In the future, I think relevant news will need to be pushed to those who are interested; publishers will not want to wait for those readers to come find us.  Those emails and blogs, in particular, will serve to not only deliver our news reporting but also provide reasons for readers to click and read more.  And much of the advertising we sell to support our digital efforts will run in those emails and next to our blogs.

But we're not going to abandon our websites.  Instead, we're going to need to rethink them.  If much of our traffic is coming to us via search and social media straight to an article page, than our focus will need to be on providing more reasons for those visitors to stick around.  Links to related stories, tag clouds of the most commonly accessed information, and other devices will need to be deployed and managed more directly in order to boost the time spent on our sites by each of our visitors, and the number of pages they visit.  Hence our investment in content tagging tools to make it easier to find those related stories and automatically generate links, tag clouds and the like.

And while delivering news is important, the real value in our websites will increasingly be to provide readers with the tools and information they need to succeed.  On some sites, that may be substantive legal information and analysis.  On others it will be access to databases and surveys that help answer users' questions.  And in many cases it will need to be a greater focus on tools that can be downloaded or otherwise accessed to deliver the data our users require to practice law, run their firm, hire and pay an attorney, or whatever else our audience will value.

As we review future website designs I would encourage all involved to be asking more questions about the entire approach to delivering news, information and tools to our audience.  I think we'll want to look at website designs in the context of all of the other ways in which our content can and should be distributed, including push vehicles (e.g. email) and mobile. Each of these plays a different role for both readers and advertisers, and we'll want to make sure we fully comprehend what each will provide and how they will complement one another.

As noted above, I think this is an important discussion.  The Recorder today is charting a path that virtually all of our publications will be following in the future.  But it also raises many questions.  What information is best presented in print and how often?  What role should our email alerts and blogs play?  What should be our expectations for our websites?  And how will mobile applications be relevant for our audience in the future?

If you don't know the answers to the questions above -- well, join the club.  Let's all figure it out together.  I look forward to your comments below.