Mainstream media misfires with Web 2.0

In Editor & Publisher Joe Strupp has an excellent special report on online flops and failures experienced by the mainstream media:

After more than 10 years of newspapers slowly migrating to the Web, most have embraced the medium as their future, showing they can break news, provide audio and video extras, and give readers more space to react and rebut than ever before. Successes are many, ranging from exclusive online interviews to sourcing details that give readers more complete information than any daily could have provided just a few years ago. Even the Pulitzer Prizes are giving props to Web-based offerings.

But with those accomplishments and expansions have come no shortage of starts and stops, bumps, flops, and sometimes outright debacles. We all remember the Los Angeles Times' "Wikipedia" experiment with its reader-altered editorials and the uproar over The Washington Post hiring a conservative blogger -- with plagiarism offenses in his past -- in the name of balance. In a decade-plus of Web exploration, nearly every daily has felt the growing pains that any new news tool requires.

At USA Today, for example, the paper's attempt at personalizing Web use misfired in 2006 when "My USA Today" launched, promising readers they could see only the offerings or issues they requested. "We found that the audience's willingness to set parameters is fairly low," says Online Editor Kinsey Wilson, who is also president of the Online News Association. "They are not that inclined to do it. The percentage of users was probably in the single digits."

Still, veteran Web spinners such as Jim Brady, washingtonpost.com's executive editor, understand the need for online operators to hit some snags and stumbles if they truly want to succeed. "Failure isn't to be feared on the Web, it is to be embraced," he says. "If you are not failing, you are not stretching as much." With that in mind, E&P talked to Wilson, Brady, and about two dozen other online minds from newspapers large and small to present some hard-earned lessons.

Read more here.