Newspapers latch on to hot trend of pullout web modules

NEW YORK – If you’re not plugged into the Internet, you still have to buy an entire newspaper even if you only want to do the crossword puzzle. But online, that and other stand-alone features are increasingly popping up all over the Web.\nNow you can get The New York Times crossword on a customizable page from Google Inc.,or you can test your “Times IQ” on a Facebook application that launched last week. The Washington Post even offers a gizmo to view top photos or gauge your political leanings.\nThese pullout Web modules are commonly called “widgets,” and they’re one of the fastest-growing trends on the Internet, especially since Facebook opened up its user platform to outside software developers in late May.\nFor newspapers, widgets represent a huge opportunity to draw in new readers and to boost their brands throughout the Internet.\nYet they mark a fundamental change in approach for papers accustomed to selling news, entertainment and information only in prepackaged bundles. With widgets, newspapers are sending some of their content out into the world in piecemeal fashion and allowing users to share them with their friends – for free.\nGoogle, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. all offer large varieties of such modules – in some cases they’re called “gadgets” instead of “widgets.” In the four months since the popular online hangout Facebook opened up its platform, outside software developers have created some 2,000 applications.\nKeenly mindful of steady declines in newspaper circulation and advertising, several newspapers are seeing widgets as a way to reach out to new, and especially younger, users online – those who might not otherwise come to the paper’s main Web site destination.\nAnd the widgets that they’re making aren’t necessarily clones of what you’d see in the paper. The Washington Post just launched a photo-viewing application and one that keeps track of issues most often brought up by the 2008 presidential candidates.\nEarlier, the Post wrote a Facebook application called “The Compass,” in which users take a short survey to gauge their political leanings and then compare results with their friends whom they invite to take the quiz.\nJim Brady, the executive editor of WashingtonPost.com, says widgets can boost a newspaper’s brand online, refer new readers back to the site and perhaps generate revenues through sponsorship deals.\nTraditionally, newspapers and other Web sites have first and foremost tried to drive traffic back the main destination so they can sell more advertising, the way a TV network, magazine or newspaper might do in the non-virtual world.\nBut as people spend more time within networks of their own creation, such as on MySpace (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s media conglomerate News Corp.), Facebook or personalized Web pages with Yahoo or Google, newspapers are bringing pieces of their content to the users.\n“Web reality has kicked in, and it’s hard to get people to your site,” Brady says. “You have to throw a lot of fish hooks out there” to attract new readers.\nFor newspapers, breaking off pieces of their content and coming up with playful applications like online quizzes could be even more monumental than their first forays onto the Web a decade or so ago.\nThe New York Times is still in the early days of widget development, with just a handful launched so far, but many more are in the works.\n“Some of the most fun meetings we have are when we’re sitting around and brainstorming what kinds of widgets we can create,” says Vivian Schiller, the general manager of NYTimes.com.\nAs for getting a traditional media outlet to embrace the newest Web boom, Schiller said that “whatever cultural or institutional barriers to this are long gone.”\nSchiller and others say widgets are no flash in the pan, since they harness the biggest change currently going in online behavior. “It’s both reflecting and accelerating the personalization of the Web,” Schiller says.\nAs for making money, well, that’s still a matter of some discussion. The Wall Street Journal says it’s building traffic to its main site by allowing users to embed WSJ.com video elsewhere, but the paper hasn’t yet signed up advertisers for its first widget.\nAlthough the advertising model remains undefined, many marketers find the idea intriguing.\n“It’s a natural link between information and entertainment, which is a sweet spot for newspapers,” says David Verklin, chief executive of Carat Americas, a major ad-buying firm. “It’s a wonderful delivery strategy for the newspapers to deliver the information they’re gathering anyway.”