For news media organizations, the focus on Web 2.0 tools and strategies that gathered momentum in the mid-2000s has mainly been about using the Internet to distribute stories to and participate in a larger network. Blogs, widgets, social networks, mobile devices, etc. are being used to reach people wherever they are engaged on the Internet.

Also important is the need to create news websites that draw people to them. This is reminiscent of discussions that occurred back in the 1990s over "push versus pull" strategies for online news sites, which then meant pushing out content via email story feeds versus pulling people to more in-depth stories and content on news websites.

Pulling people to news websites serve two important functions:

• More in-depth stories and richer content can be published on a website than in the relatively short snippets of information distributed to people via mobile devices, on YouTube and Flickr, or through blogs and micro-blog postings. Providing deeper content fulfills the public service function of journalism and can help form online communities at news websites where people can gather to discuss issues of importance to their communities, both geographic and topical. 
• Attracting a loyal audience of repeat users to a news website offers a way to monetize journalistic content by selling that dedicated audience to advertisers. Creating a viable business model for online content has been a particular challenge for news organizations, with web site advertising rates, as measured by CPM's or costs per thousand views/impressions,  usually a fraction of what can be charged for a print or broadcast product.

The problem of generating revenue from news content is exemplified in the struggles of newspapers. Most newspapers boasted big increases in unique visitors to their websites in 2007 and 2008, due in part to their distributing links to their stories via blogs, social networks and other Web 2.0 techniques.

But most of those new visitors dive in, glance at a single story and then leave (behavior referred to as a website's "bounce rate"), spending little time on the newspaper's website and developing no sense of loyalty to it.

Thus while the number of unique visitors to the average newspaper site increased in 2008, the average time spent by each person on a site only crept up, or, in the case of most major newspapers, declined. Check Editor & Publisher for their monthly reports on time spent at top newspaper sites and reports by the Newspaper Association of America: Newspaper Web Site Audience Rises Twelve Percent In 2008. and Newspaper Web Sites Attract Record Audiences in First Quarter (which showed a decrease in average time spent online in the beginning of 2009).

The average visitor spends about 1.5 minutes per day on a newspaper website. Compare that with the 15 to 20 minutes per day the average newspaper reader spends perusing the print product, according to various studies.

Increasing time spent on news sites and developing engaged and loyal audiences requires creating more focused and in-depth topical content and making use of multimedia and digital tools like databases and games to engage people.

Resources and Readings

Times Extra Aims to Reclaim the Digital Page One - Content Bridges

Staking out newspaper survival in Web analytics - Online Journalism Review - measuring online engagement to attract advertisers

NAA/Nielsen stats show newspapers own less than 1 percent of U.S. online audience page views, time spent - Nieman Journalism Lab