It also prompted a small Twitter storm among online news gadflies about the future of the non-profit business model for news.

For me, the news was a reminder that the genius of CQ is that it has been able to turn a low-value commodity and resell it as a high-value service. To grow the business, its next owner will need to understand that and look for ways to evolve CQ from a service to an experience.

CQ has always fascinated me, even before I worked there. Somehow it had been able to make a business model out of selling commodity information. It took content that was mostly publicly available — much of it even posted publicly online — and found a way to charge subscribers thousands of dollars for this.

The secret to their success, I think, can be found in the book The Experience Economy, in which B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore outline how companies make money by moving up the evolutionary chain from extracting commodities from the land, to turning those commodities in to goods, to selling services around those goods and — in the future — selling experiences that transform the customer. I picked up that book while wondering why Starbucks had been able to sell a commodity for $3 a cup while news organizations had reduced the value of commodity information to consumption to near zero.

Clearly CQ has long found a way to turn commodity in to a good. All news organizations do this. CQ extracts information and re-aggregates it in various publications. Cool. Send me a copy.

But when that commodity information become cheaper to extract, largely because of advances in transparent government enabled by the Internet, CQ smartly found a way to add value by selling itself as a service. Subscribers to CQ don’t pay for the good — mostly in the form of access to various databases on CQ.com these days — they pay for the service in the form of a whole sales support staff that is dedicated to helping them find the information they need at the moment they need it. Can’t find what you’re looking for in the vast trove of data on CQ.com? Call them up, send your sales rep an email. It will be found for you, sent to you via a link in a personalized email to your Blackberry. Sometimes, you might even get your sales rep to call someone on the editorial staff with a request to change the play of various stories on the homepage of the site. (I’m sad to report that this really did happen. Rarely, but often enough that it made my Spidey Senses tingle.)

To me, this is the ultimate lesson that news organizations can learn from CQ. How can they collect commodity information and move it farther up the value chain to sell it as a service of just-in-time knowledge? Someone should fund and do a case study of CQ with recommendations for local news organizations.

I continue to ponder how news can be made in to an experience and whether this is something CQ could do. The down side of buying CQ is that I suspect it’s saturated its market. There isn’t a single lobbyist, government agency or legislative office that doesn’t have a subscription. There are more than three dozen databases that can be sold to extract more income from those clients. The question for CQ for about the last 10 years, how do we expand our market beyond the Beltway.

CQ hired me to help them find the answer to that. Mike Mills and others architected a “front porch” strategy that would begin to distribute some CQ content to a general audience as a way to tease more folks in to the deeper content. In 2006, I helped launch CQPolitics.com as a way to sell advertising around a heightened interest in electoral politics. But I guess the idea that you could start a new Web site dedicated to politics and expect to gain a national audience was crazy.

So how do you make such a wonkish site in to an “experience”? Can you? Should you?

Amy Gahran at Poynter had one idea: “I’d love to see CQ do more with online communities and social media.”

In many ways, I see CQ and Everyblock facing similar challenges in their growth. I think both can be overcome if they get the right suitor. If you’ll allow me some idle speculation…

• Best Suitor
• Worst Suitor
• Best Realistic Suitor

Fifteen years ago I would have gone to the Chapel Hill News, the Durham Herald Sun, the Daily Tar Heel student paper, the Raleigh News & Observer, The Independent Weekly or The Spectator to get the times. Since movie times are commodity news, the paper I would have chosen would have been the one I found first — either at the bottom of my driveway or in a drop box on campus.

But here’s how I did it today:

1. I searched for “southpoint durham movie times” on Google.
2. My search returned 21,000 results, with 10 on the first page. Of those 10 choices, only one was to a newspaper site. I had six other choices before it.

What publisher of 165,000 daily circulation newspaper would have said, “It’s OK if every single one of our customers will walk by six other drop boxes before getting to ours”?

OK. The past is past. What should you do about it now?

1. If you don’t have software that lets you easily see usage stats for your site, now is the time to get some. Many are free. Google Analytics is just one of many solutions. For the moneybags among you, Omniture is a popular (and I think good) choice.
2. Look at your site usage statistics and determine at what percentage of referrers come from Google. See whether there are differences in behavior for different types of content on your site.
3. Start getting serious about search engine optimization. And by “serious,” I mean this: Are you dedicating the same (or more) resources to search engine optimization and social network marketing as you are to your print circulation department? Until you are, you’re just hoping this Internet fad will soon pass.

Election returns are commodity information — news that people primarily differentiate by price. In the case of free online news sites, the monetary price is zero. So, really, people only differentiate commodity news by the effort of finding and consuming it.

Everyone has election returns. The AP sells a very good turnkey solution and most state government Web sites — state governments for crying out loud! — post the results faster than anyone.

But results are seen as something that a news Web site just has to have. A few — like The Charlotte Observer on Tuesday night — just punt and link to the state Board of Elections. I’m glad most news sites do see this obligation. Online election returns put food on my table at washingtonpost.com for a few cycles.

So here’s the deal — legit news sites spend a lot of resources on these one-shot collections of commodity news. They see a spike in traffic on election night, but when it comes to bang for your buck, returns probably don’t match many of the other features a site will build during an election season in its attempt to differentiate its coverage from all others.

It is a game you have to play, but it’s a game you can only lose. A small hiccup in the system that’s spitting out numbers on to your site, or a small design flaw or browser incompatibility sends users clicking off to another site. In the North Carolina primary, I started my hunt for numbers on newsobserver.com, but couldn’t find the percentage of precincts reporting. WRAL.com had that small bit of information, so I moved over to them.

One way sites could get more value out of their election night coverage is to build them in to an evergreen database of political information. Build up an easily navigable collection of votes (and exit polls… you ever try to find exit poll data more than three months after an election? Impossible.) and a site can ride the long tail until the next Bush administration.