Pulitzer takes a two-tiered approach in St. Louis with STLtoday.com

This column appeared March 22, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

Pulitzer Inc. threw the switch March 15 on STLtoday.com, a new portal that bills itself as the definitive online guide to living in St. Louis. It’s bright, colorful and slickly packaged.

Now only if it had a soul.

As part of Pulitzer’s new portal strategy, its flagship paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, takes a seat far to the rear of the bus. It’s an interesting approach, one that bears watching for other publications in mid-sized markets. Online staffers at the Post-Dispatch update the portal with breaking news, but they’re only peripherally involved with the new venture’s operation.

In words and deeds, STLtoday has taken pains to distance itself from the Post-Dispatch (they’re both subsidiaries of Pulitzer). And while, in my view, they’ve gone overboard in that effort, the company’s goal of broadening the site’s mission to create a gateway to St. Louis seems the right approach.

Since the earliest days of online publishing, news publications jumped onto the Web bandwagon but offered users little except digital versions of their print products. Users, meantime, flocked to portals that offered practical services or to the largest news sites to get their daily dose of news.

As one user of the site wrote in a post Monday on the STLtoday forum: “I personally don’t use the Post Dispatch site for news. If I want news I go to CNN or Yahoo.”

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This column appeared March 8, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site.

By J.D. Lasica

“Sponsored content” on the Web comes in different shapes and flavors. At some online publications, like Slate, Salon, iVillage and ESPN.com, clicking on a “sponsor” link transports the user to another site or to a co-branded page paid for by an advertiser or hosted by a strategic partner.

Other sites, like Women.com and BabyCenter, publish special features pages hosted on their own servers.

Not all sponsored content is created equal. Some of it is pure promotional puffery, while some offers useful editorial material.

More than any other revenue source, however, online sponsorships seem to come with their own special set of ethical headaches. Should a company that manufactures children’s acetaminophen be allowed to sponsor a baby site’s medical section on child fevers? Should a children’s clothing manufacturer be allowed to sponsor the articles on how to dress your child?

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Balancing business interests and journalistic credibility at BabyCenter

This column appeared March 8, 2001, in the Online Journalism Review. Here’s the version on the OJR site. See the related story, The fuzzy world of sponsored content.

By J.D. Lasica

For those of us who still believe in the promise of online content sites, the March 2 sale of BabyCenter from online toy retailer eToys to the baby goods manufacturer Johnson & Johnson was significant on a number of levels:

• If you’re pregnant or a new parent, there’s simply no other site on the Web that comes close to offering the breadth of trustworthy editorial content, expert advice and baby products that BabyCenter offers to its 2.2 million visitors each month. (Its nearest competitors draw only one-fourth the traffic.) The 4-year-old site, which faced the prospect of shutting down alongside its ailing corporate parent, can now not only grow but thrive.

• The sale sends another strong signal that even the most successful pure-play content and commerce sites may not be able to survive without the support of a deep-pockets parent or brick-and-mortar partner. The site has won three straight Webby awards, but has still not achieved profitability.

• The sale also rekindles the debate over a corporate owner’s effects on journalistic standards. Simply put: Can a content site retain its independent editorial voice when placed under the control of a corporation with a stake in the site’s core offerings?

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