Three and a Half Signs the Old-Media Cluetrain is Picking Up Passengers

In this era of buyouts, shrinking circulations and general mainstream-media malaise, it's easy to poke fun and point fingers. But there are lots of smart people fighting the good fight, and finding new ways to weave their print and broadcast businesses into the Interweb. To wit:

1. The Wall Street Journal's new Blackberry application. Not only does it help the WSJ hit their core audience where it lives -- ie, on their Crackberries -- but it also provides a subscription-free side door into "nasty walled garden that is WSJ.com." That free access is supposedly temporary, and the Journal has done better than most with online subscriptions, but I'm betting they'll find real value in this expanded mobile audience.

2. Speaking of walled gardens with their gates temporarily opened, NationalJournal.com is once again free to the world during the Democratic and GOP conventions

   This is not exactly new -- we did the same in 2000 and 2004, when I was editor of the site -- and it's a necessity as much as a strategy, given how many important subscribers are let in based on their office IP address, rather than a password. Still, it's a great chance to be reminded why Washington insiders pay thousands of dollars for NJ, Hotline & CongressDaily -- and for the NJ team to dive headfirst into the "link economy."

   As someone who'll happily be staying as far away from Denver and the Twin Cities as possible, I'll be taking full advantage -- you should do the same.

3. WUSA9 followed me on Twitter last week -- along with nearly 1700 other DC-area Twitter-ers, apparently. I didn't return the favor, as I'm about as interested in local-news-headline tweets as I imagine WUSA is in my dog-walking updates, but a couple hundred of the local Twitterati have.

   As the mystery WUSA staffer manning their Twitter account told me when I asked, they decided that letting locals "know once that we were here was sufficient," and an appropriate Twitter outreach. I agree -- followers whose own feeds have nothing but "get rich with my system" tweets annoy the crap out of me, but I think WUSA is being smart.

   And as I noted when first experimenting with Twitter, it can be a tremendously valuable breaking-news tool if done right. I may have to go back and start following WUSA9 after all...

And finally, WashingtonPost.com is protecting its brand (and page views) by purchasing and forwarding typo versions of its URL. Or some of them, at least -- www.washintonpost.com redirects, but some other squatter owns www.washingtopost.com.

With domain names running less than $10/year, this is branding and traffic-building 101 (hence the "half" in this post's title). But I can tell you from years of sloppy-typing experience, not enough media outlets are making this minimal investment.

None of the above is rocket science, but they're all good steps. And traditional media outlets are going to need a whole lot more of them.