Idea Lab

How Blocking Search Engines Can Increase Ad Click-Throughs

by Joe Boydston
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Search engines, RSS feeds and content aggregators make a reader's life easier by providing new ways to scan for articles and to discover news. One result of this is that readers may no longer feel the need to regularly visit their local paper's website in order to stay informed about the goings-on around town. Following this logic, publishers work hard to make their content as searchable as possible, to make it accessible outside of a newspaper website. Conventional wisdom dictates that websites should be optimized for search engines. But what if your content is very specific in nature? Suppose that...

• April 16, 2010
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Resurrecting Unstructured Data to Help Small Newspapers

by Joe Boydston
2009 Knight News Challenge Winner

Unstructured data is typically said to account for up to 80 percent of information stored on business computer systems. While this is a widely accepted notion, I'm inclined to agree with Seth Grimes that this 80 percent rule is inflated, depending on the type of business. Still, If we could structure even a fraction of that data, it would create significant value for small newspapers. The type of data that has my attention is free-form text. Small newspapers in particular have computers full of text files containing information about their communities. Often, these files lie dormant, left on the hard...

• March 19, 2010
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