“CHICAGO NOW” EDITORS MAKE LIKE EARLY ROCKET SCIENTISTS AND MISFIRE WITH BLOGS

ChicagoNOW editors make blog aggregation look like early U.S. rocket science: Misfires (Flickr pic: numberstumper/CC)

Blog aggregation is not rocket science.

It does, however, require common sense.

And common sense would seem to scream: “STOP! DON’T DO IT” if someone suggested creating a stand-alone website made up of a bunch of largely anonymous writers with no organizing principle other than that the writers are all largely anonymous and all from Chicago.

But that’s what the Chicago Tribune’s highly touted “ChicagoNOW” is doing. No categories (well, there’s “recent posts”). Virtually no promotion on the Tribune site. No promotion in the print version of the Trib. No helpful editorial decisions indicating that a couple of blogs that day are really excellent.

Just look at the chaos passing for the main art on their home page:

Most of the completely confusing, graphically chaotic lede piece of art on the ChicagoNOW home page, Monday, Sept. 7, 2009

Given that there is absolutely NO star power in the NAMES of the bloggers, the editors have to grab readers by the compelling nature of the promotional art and the headline. (Can you see the headlines? They’re that teeny type under the teeny photo…)

Let’s go left to right, starting with the “Diva Detour” sign. Not bad. Almost clearly Oprah. Good headline.

Next: A sign in Spanish with the scintillating, come-hither headline “Immigration Reform March.” Did these guys work for the Trib? That’s a snoozer reminiscent of the worst of MSM.

Next: A teddy bear smoking pot and a fun headline. OK, we’re recovering.

Next: I’m not sure WHAT that photo is. Supposedly a crowd at a Packer game. Could be modern art. I’ve never seen a worse photo crammed into such a small space with the intent of drawing me into a story.

Other than LaRussa, the rest of the photos and topics are confusing and completely uninteresting. (Gotta love the “Bloggers on the Food Network” pic — what ARE those guys doing? And that Emmy story fist: One of the worst cropping jobs ever!)

But, hey, you SHOULD be interested because a blogger you’ve never heard of from Chicago wrote these pieces! So click away!

Not.

This is a really bad idea. Don't promote the best; promote the most recent. Four of the eight are about Oprah; two are about sports haiku (sports haiku?!), and one is compellingly titled "Plaid Scarf"! I can't wait to read that one!

The problem with the entire site goes back to its very premise: It’s a stand-alone site of no-name bloggers whose work is presented with no organizing concept and no context and, clearly, little effort by the editors to help harried readers find the very best stuff out there.

There’s nothing wrong with no-name bloggers (most of us ARE no-names!). And many write good stuff, including most of the NOW bloggers. But you have to give readers compelling reasons to dive into a particular post (great visuals and great headlines), and you have to organize the content in a way that makes it easy for readers to find what they want.

Let’s break it down:

1) Perhaps the biggest crime on ChicagoNOW is the almost complete lack of any connection whatsoever to the parent Tribune site or newspapers (Tribune, RedEye). On the Trib website, ChicagoNOW merits no more than a single promotion at the bottom of the home page and some teases on the sports page. Nothing in print.

Gee, that makes sense. Let’s launch a brand new risky venture and totally eschew these monster promotional vehicles we OWN that circulate to tens of thousands of readers in print and online every day.

That’s not smart or gutsy or entrepreneurial. It’s monumentally stupid. Put the stuff in the Tribune, on tribune.com and in RedEye in the context of the categories the bloggers are writing about!

When ESPN launched the “ESPN Chicago” website, they BRANDED it big time (note the first word in the title!). After just three months, they have already passed the Trib’s sports website by almost 150,000 uniques!

According to the New York Times, “in less than three months, ESPN Chicago has become the city’s top sports site, attracting about 590,000 unique visitors in June, according to data from from comScore, an Internet measurement company. Second place went to the Tribune’s online sports section with 455,000 unique visitors.”

What’s ChicagoNOW doing after several months (their official launch was in August but they’ve been “live” for some time)? They are getting 59,000 monthly uniques according to ComCast. Maybe. So who’s the smarter company?

2) The second biggest crime is to throw all the content out there willy-nilly for time-harried readers to graze through. Sure, I have time to scan teeny photos or, worse, take a chance on the only proffered category (“Recent Posts”) to see if there is something worth reading.

People have passions (the Bears, Chicago indie bands, Chicago politics) and geographic interests (I live in X community and care about what happens there). How could the Chicago NOW editors have missed the memo about the decline of general interest publications? Put content in verticals that enable readers to find what they want in a hurry and make connections with authors and other readers who share their interests.

3) And, finally, the third crime is the editors’ incomprehensible fear of promoting the best posts, choosing instead to give every blogger their 15 seconds of fame. Instead of a most-popular list or an editor’s choices list (given their judgment, I’d worry about that one), they go with “Most Recent” and here’s the result on Sept. 7: Four of eight promos about Oprah, two sports haikus (sports haikus?!), and one compelling post entitled “Plaid Scarf!” Oh, boy, I’m going to read that one first!

Do you know the real tragedy? Their bloggers are good. Real good. But, despite the site’s traffic gains (hell, they started from zero so big percentage gains are almost inevitable), those writers are not getting the kind of attention they deserve.

UNORGANIZED USER-GENERATED CONTENT DUMPED IN A BLOGGER GHETTO IS NONSENSE

"Hey, honey, I've got a great idea for Friday night! Whaddya say we go home and read some generic user-generated blogs tonight?! Sound like fun?" (Flickr photo by larryfishkorn/CC/With permissions)

HIGH-QUALITY NON-STAFF BLOGS SHOULD RUN IN THE WEBSITE (AND PAPER) SECTION PERTAINING TO THEIR TOPIC.

When was the last time your colleagues said they were heading out for a wild weekend of reading generic user-generated blogs?

Never, right?

No one (in their right mind) reads blogs just because some other reader wrote them.

And yet, that’s what editors must think because they keep putting ALL reader-written blogs together on one big web page (ghetto), whether those bloggers are writing about knitting or martial arts or kitty cats or Jesus. How fascinating. How compelling.

Here's how Gannett's Florida Today displays its reader blogs. All in one place. No differentiation by theme. Or quality (this July 9 screen shot has a blog post about....Mother's Day!).

I just got off the phone with an editor who excitedly informed me that her new website design was going to have a separate page for “user-generated content.” And that the so-called “UGC” would be included on a page of its own in the paper.

She was really excited.

I was puzzled.

What is appealing about a web page filled with an unorganized collection of reader blogs?

Who wants or has the time to read something for the sole reason that it was written by a “user.”

Nobody I know. The bloggers themselves, I suppose. Maybe their friends and relatives. Under duress.

Why would you go to a page where literally anybody can write about literally anything? No filters. No organization, other than that a “user” wrote it. No thematic thread. No culling of the crap.

Why create such a page?

Here's the Detroit Free Press approach to bringing non-staff bloggers into the tent. Look familiar?! It's a Pluck site, so it's a reader blog ghetto as you can tell from the completely random nature of the blog post topics.

The only answer I can come up with is that someone told the editors they should have user-generated content, and so they created such a page, or a company like Pluck came along and offered them a system to collect and present unorganized, unreviewed reader blogs.

Pluck lists an insane number of newspapers as clients and you can go see for yourself how bad it is right here.

Pluck is the company that thinks it doesn’t need to give reader blogs easily recalled web addresses like PaperName.com/ReaderName. Nossir. Here’s an example of what Pluck thinks is a good idea for a Florida Today reader blog URL (the reader blog URLs are like this at all of the papers Pluck “serves”):

http://www.floridatoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=PluckPersona&U
=891fb51ac5a24fa8a172ef40a04b384e&plckPersonaPage=BlogViewPost&
plckUserId=891fb51ac5a24fa8a172ef40a04b384e&plckPostId=Blog%3a891fb51
ac5a24fa8a172ef40a04b384ePost%3a1662f3e9-9bf6-42c7-8464-4ee7b3fe19ae&
plckController=PersonaBlog&plckScript=personaScript&plckElementId=
personaDest

That’s 380 nonsense characters.

Huffington Post gives its reader blogs addresses like: www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones. That’s 36 characters.

But enough about the Pluck madness….

So editors create these blogger ghettos where they bury all their “user-generated content” and then they feel they can say, “yes, I are involving the community in my newsapper and my website!”

Proving that Pluck does not have a monopoly on inane ways to present non-staff bloggers, here's one from the Denver Post. No thematic organization. No rhyme or reason other than someone other than a staffer wrote it. Makes sense to me....

These editors think they’ve done their duty in terms of connecting with their readers and this new social media thing. So now they can go back to operating on their own, trying to create all the content they think we should be reading, never mind that their staffs are shrinking and were never large enough to begin with to create the breadth and depth of content required to appeal to a wide variety of local constituencies.

But, in their minds, they did what their training had prepared them to do in this situation: keep the unwashed writers at bay who have the temerity to create content without the benefit of a journalism degree (poor creatures).

Time to wake up, editors.

Comb your market for the highest quality local bloggers writing in as many categories as possible (and there are dozens, if not hundreds of them), and then aggregate them where they belong: in the section of the website that deals with their topics, not a blogger ghetto. And then excerpt them in your print product (again in the appropriate section) to better promote them and tie the two products together.

Better hurry. There are lots of aggregators out there looking to steal what should be your franchise. They aren’t pretending to be a newspaper. They are simply content providers, each in his or her own niche. Add’em all up, and you will wake up someday soon to find all the pillars of your franchise nibbled away.

Game over.

WHY CAN’T NEWSPAPERS FIGURE OUT HOW TO INCORPORATE QUALITY LOCAL BLOGGERS?

Le Monde's website integrates high-quality non-staff blogs like this one.

In my last post, I looked at the failures of newspapers who are trying to do the right thing (incorporate high-quality local bloggers) but failing because they are either opening the doors to everyone (it’s fun but mostly nonsense), they are putting the bloggers in a blogger “ghetto” all by themselves (as if readers were interested in reading any blog), or they are turning their blogger aggregation operations over to an outside company — for example, in the case of the Des Moines paper, to Pluck (note: Chris Snider pointed out in his comments that the Register is doing good work elsewhere on their site; more on that soon).

It’s not like there aren’t great examples of successful blog aggregation staring newspapers right in the face.

The Huffington Post came into Chicago and stole great local bloggers who otherwise might have appeared in the Tribune and driven traffic to the paper's website instead of the interloping HuffPo.

By embarrassingly stark contrast to clueless newspapers, the Huffington Post came into Chicago and stole the very best local bloggers from under the Chicago Tribune’s nose. HuffPo gave those bloggers an enviably simple and attractive HuffPo URL on one of the most popular sites in the world (e.g., http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones, and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-cusack).

The Huffington Post/Chicago is loaded with top-notch local names (like Mr. Cusack’s) and dozens of less famous but equally high-quality bloggers. The Chicago Tribune has none (they did, however, finally launch their answer to HuffPo/Chicago: A completely separate site called ChicagoNow that proudly boasts all of 50 bloggers from the entire Chicago metro area; it’s colorful and fun, but still a blogger ghetto and mentioned on chicagotribune.com only in teeny weeny type at the very bottom of the page. Way to be proud, guys!).

The Chicago Tribune's answer to the Huffington Post's Chicago site. ChicagoNow offers a collection of what they consider the best blogs in the city, but it's still a blogger ghetto (albeit a nice one) where blogs are kept separate from the main Tribune website.

(Full disclosure: When Huffington announced her Chicago plans months before her launch, I had written to the Tribune suggesting they beat her to the punch and grab all the best bloggers in the city. They never replied.)

The Huffington Post has been selling advertising on its blogger pages for months. The Tribune, obviously, only just started. Aggregation and multiple-author blogs like the Huffington Post are making money by attracting millions of unique visitors to the best content in the verticals of the user’s choice (Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Daily Kos, YouTube, etc.). Those sites don’t (yet) have the local newspaper’s brand recognition or respect. The newspaper still is the best local information source in its market (for now).

Le Monde incorporates high-quality bloggers on their website in the appropriate section right next to staff content, but clearly labeled as a blog. No blogger ghetto

But newspapers must start doing the hard work of finding, vetting, and incorporating the hundreds of high-quality local text and video bloggers in their markets (e.g., 3,000 videos about Washington, D.C. were posted in one month alone on YouTube). If newspapers did that, they would have a wealth of new content that currently is going begging for a home, an audience, and advertising inventory. Newspapers would quickly increase their depth, reach, relevance, and revenue by weaving those high-quality local blogs throughout their websites and by publishing excerpts in the category appropriate pages of the newspaper.

Every imaginable topic is addressed by bloggers, and thus every newspaper could address every reader’s needs simply by aggregating and organizing that content. If, however, newspapers don’t do that, their competitors like the Huffington Post are very happy to step into the void to run the blogs and sell the ads.

Only a handful of newspapers “get it.” Le Monde, based in Paris, leads the field, publishing select, high-quality non-staff blogs throughout the newspaper’s website. Expert technology bloggers appear in Le Monde’s technology section. Top-quality arts bloggers appear in the arts section. Sports bloggers in sports. And so on.

BostonNOW incorporated high-quality local bloggers much like Le Monde, with nearly 4,000 local bloggers signing up to be hosted on BostonNow.com. The bloggers were highlighted on the home page and in the theme-appropriate sections of the website and the print product. The results were stunning. In less than a year, BostonNOW had at least twice as many monthly unique visitors as similar U.S. free dailies that had been publishing for 1-7 years.

BostonNOW was also selling interactive campaigns to clients who were creating their own blog presence on the site. For example, a local bank paid $90,000 to build its blog on BostonNOW to appeal to recent college grads looking for financial advice. Two condominium developers paid $10,000 each for their own blog sites. (BostonNOW was closed in 2008 when its Icelandic investors pulled the plug as a result of their country’s economic collapse.)

When I spoke at an international conference of journalists and bloggers in NYC, a renowned video blogger said, “Before John Wilpers and BostonNOW came to town, we thought of newspapers as THEIR newspapers; now we think of BostonNOW as OUR newspaper.” Web-centric bloggers who’d posted on BostonNOW and had excerpts of their posts appear in the paper began calling for tearsheets! These were young adults who had not previously picked up a paper!

Non-staff bloggers were featured in BostonNOW's newspaper and on the website.

Another example: BostonNOW published an excerpt from a top Boston-area blog without permission (an accident). The site editor was upset, but the blogger was conflicted. “My phone was ringing off the hook with friends telling me it was great that my blog was in the paper,” she said later. “I knew I should be angry, but I was so excited! I couldn’t wait to see the paper.” That blogger became a regular BostonNOW blogger and a motivated advocate of the paper promoting us and our website to her tech-savvy, print-averse friends some of whom became BostonNOW bloggers and passionate grassroots marketers for the paper.

If newspapers fail to embrace these new content creators, their future is threatened: “They (newspapers) are going to see the relentless emergence of new forms of media that might not even be built or positioned as competition, but which have the potential to siphon off their audience,” said Andrew Nachison, co-founder of media think tank iFOCOS, in a Knowledge@Wharton article. The message is clear: Learn to evolve or join the Dodo bird. Partner with bloggers and other emerging new media, or put another nail in the coffin of a once-thriving industry.

CAN HIGH-QUALITY BLOGGERS HELP RESCUE NEWSPAPERS?

(The INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS 2009 World Report is out and I have a piece in it called, “Can Top-Quality Local Bloggers Help Rescue Newspapers.” I republish it here for those who have not seen the report. It can be ordered here. This is the first of two parts.)

No one knows what the Dodo bird sounded like. But it might have sounded a lot like the bleating of today’s newspaper editors: “Never change, never change, never change!”

The Dodo bird was fatally fearless of its predators and could not evolve fast enough to survive in a changing environment. By the late 1600s, it was gone.

Wake-up call to newspapers: Don’t be dodos! It’s not too late to evolve. But time is running out. And here’s a tip: When it comes to information, people want great content.

They do not really care if the content has been created by the newspaper’s own reporters. Readers simply want the BEST content available.

TECHNORATI: PUBLIC'S RELIANCE ON BLOGS INCREASING

They want access to lots of information, quickly, easily, in one place, and from a reliable source. And they are increasingly willing to trust and rely on reputable blogs for quality content. According to a recent Forrester study, blogs and newspaper websites now have the same audience share—about 17 percent— among Internet users between the ages of 18 and 24.

If newspapers continue to offer only their own content, and readers discover they can go elsewhere to find a better selection that better matches their needs and interests, newspaper sites will be the Dodo birds of the Internet.

On the other hand, if newspapers start aggregating and curating the best local blogs and websites covering a wide variety of subjects, they will provide their time-starved readers with the ultimate customer service: They will save readers time, give them valuable information from trusted sources pre-approved by their local newspaper, and make them both better informed and happy.

Meanwhile, the bloggers featured in the newspaper’s website and print products will gain exposure they never dreamed possible. Those bloggers will become an enthusiastic grassroots viral marketing campaign for the paper and its website. At no cost to the newspaper!

It is a win-win situation for everyone.

HOW NOT TO DO IT: The Des Moines Register allows anyone to blog, does not organize bloggers by category, and, no surprise, it looks like amateur hour.

Remarkably, only a handful of the world’s newspapers have employed this strategy, preferring to remain “pure” journalistic operations. What a noble epitaph: “Here lies the daily newspaper. It was a pure journalistic operation that saw no reason to evolve.”

There are roughly 133 million blogs on the Internet, according to technorati.com’s most recent “State of the Blogosphere” report. Millions are silly. Millions more are garbage.dreck or worse. Millions, however, represent some of the best thinking, writing, and reporting in their fields.

But a reader of most newspaper websites would never know that. Where bloggers exist at newspapers, they are almost exclusively staffers writing what used to be called columns posing as blogs to appear ”with it.”.

A few dailies have created lists of local bloggers or invited bloggers to write on the newspaper’s website. But the editors rarely vet the blogs for quality and almost always ghettoize those bloggers on a single page where blogs about sex, baking cookies, assault rifles, Jesus, kittens, baseball, and pot smoking are thrown together with no thought to organization other than chronology. Unless someone likes to read random blogs without regard to topic, these pages are useless.

Even if readers like that serendipitous approach, most newspapers also make it very difficult to find their bloggers. Newspapers tend to give their blogger ghettos non-intuitive URLs only tangentially connected with the newspaper. Consider these ridiculous reader blog site URLs:

• http://projects.washingtonpost.com/local-blog-directory/
• http://www.indystar.com/section/OPINION11
• http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/reader.asp, and the least easily recalled URL:
• http://www.statesman.com/news/content/standing/sitelife_blogs_faq.html

And then those newspapers give each non-staff blogger an equally useless URL such as:

• http://www.azcentral.com/members/Blog/Jim8413
• http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/community_altamonte_blog/;

And finally, there is the stunningly idiotic:
• http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=PluckPersona&U=ea20d351
1a8416ab0dd09e30c2d84b6&plckPersonaPage=BlogViewPost&plckUserId=ea20d35191a8416ab0dd09e30c2d84b6&plckPostId=Blog%3aea20d35191a8416ab0dd09e30c2d84b6Post%3afcbb16fb-dcd1-4fc4-ad23 0aeb12e3a212&plckController=PersonaBlog&plckScript=personaScript&plck ElementId= personaDest (To be fair, this is a URL provided by a service called BlogBurst that develops the “Pluck” blog platform for newspapers. But that is no excuse for such stupidity.)

NEXT: WHO’S DOING IT RIGHT?

Nine minutes that could help save your newspaper: How local bloggers can add content, revenue, reach

When I spoke at the International Newsmedia Marketing Association “The Newspaper Outlook Experience” conference in Vienna, Austria last fall, I was interviewed by Artur Karda, multimedia reporter at Media Regionalne, for the Forum4Editors report on the conference.

This is a shot taken during my presentation at the INMA Europe "Outlook" conference in Vienna, Oct. 2008

Artur e-mailed the video to me recently. In it, he poses all the questions I hear from newspaper publishers and editors, and gets it all into a tight 9-minute piece.

I’m putting it up so everyone can hear, in one concise presentation, all the editorial, advertising and traffic arguments for incorporating high-quality local bloggers into newspaper print and online products.

GlobalPost launches with hundreds of global blogs

With the recent launch of GlobalPost, high-quality bloggers are being given positions of prominence for the first time on a major news media website, starting with promotion on the home page. Hundreds of top-notch bloggers from 41 countries around the world also appear on the region pages (e.g., Europe), the country pages (e.g., South Africa), and pages of their very own (e.g., Iraq Pundit, South Africa Rocks, Mexico Woods, The Soul of Japan, etc.).

"An Indian Muslim's Blog" on GlobalPost.com

GlobalPost, where I am the Global Blog Coordinator on a consulting basis, recognized that there is a lot of terrific content being created around the world by excellent writers who are experts in their field or who are simply well-informed or passionate about a subject or country. That on-the-ground, grassroots-level reporting adds to the professional work of our correspondents in each country, giving GlobalPost readers a complete picture of life, events, trends, and peculiarities in each of dozens of countries worldwide.

South Africa Rocks blog on GlobalPost

Just this morning, for example, we had bloggers writing powerful pieces about the Australian fires, emoticons on Japanese cell phones, new evidence in the Mumbai terror attacks, a powerful music video encouraging youth voting in South Africa, Rome citizens reacting to the financial crisis, the Irish celebrating St. Pat’s Day with REAL green activities, a UK scheme to scrap cars, and an Israeli election primer. And those were just the most recent blogs posted on the home page! There were dozens more on the country and theme pages.

GlobalPost readers are clearly enjoying our “ground-truth” reports from dozens of countries. Traffic to the blog pages has numbered in the thousands from more than 150 different countries.

Given GlobalPost’s success, I continue to be puzzled by the refusal of mainstream media to do likewise: incorporate high-quality bloggers in their print and online products.

Can someone explain to me why a newspaper or television station or online news site would NOT want great content like this on their website? It’s not like we invited every blogger in the world to post on GlobalPost. We went out and found top-notch bloggers and invited them. We controlled the type of bloggers appearing on our site. So could other media.

Great content, great grassroots buzz, great traffic…what’s not to like?

FINDING THE “WORLD’S BEST BLOGGERS” PROJECT AT GLOBALPOST.COM

I want to introduce you to a very exciting project I am working on as the Director of Global Blog Development for a cool new organization called GlobalPost.com.

It will be the first online-only world news service, and will launch in January with 70 correspondents in 53 countries “to satisfy a growing need for independent, reliable, insightful and up-to-the-minute coverage and analysis of news in every region of the world.”

A pioneer in the development of 24-hour local cable news, former New England Cable News President and founder Phil Balboni came up with the idea with another New England legend, Charlie Sennott, the former veteran Boston Globe foreign correspondent. They have an awesome video about their mission on their home page. Go take a look: <a href=http://www.globalnewsenterprises.com/>

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I approached them over the summer about adding hundreds of local bloggers from around the world to GlobalPost’s corps of correspondents. While the correspondents are great, they can only be in one place at one time. Bloggers are everywhere. And they are very, very local.

Phil and Charlie liked the idea, and since September, I have been working with 12 incredibly talented interns from Emerson College, BU, Suffolk University and elsewhere to find 350 of “The World’s Best Bloggers” (writing in English) in those 53 countries.

Click on the link below to see a PDF of a slide show about how we’re doing the search. The best part of the show is the second half where you’ll get to “meet” 31 of the best of the best bloggers

FINDING 350 OF THE WORLD’S BEST BLOGGERS

Here are some samples of the blogger profile slides, and they are only the beginning!

 

NERVOUS EDITORS, PART 3: HOW LONG WILL BLOGGERS TRADE CONTENT FOR EXPOSURE?

Over my last two posts, I have answered five of the most common questions I get from editors curious or nervous about incorporating bloggers in their newspapers and websites. Three posts ago, I answered questions about risking hard-won credibility. Two posts ago, I addressed fears of losing control of content, and the differences between professional journalists and reporters. And in my last post, I talked about the limits to reader involvement, and the fear of bloggers enabling publishers to cut staff.

The sixth and last question, about bloggers’ willingness to trade content for exposure, is one I get from editors and bloggers alike. Here are my thoughts on that subject:

6. Are you sure that community bloggers will be willing to produce their content for free in the future, as they mostly do now? How will it affect newspaper economics if these bloggers ask for a payment?

Right now, most bloggers are DYING for exposure. Most bloggers get a trickle of traffic and make no money at all. Many bloggers start out writing lots of posts but then lose steam as they discover very few people are reading their work. They get no psychic or financial reward for their efforts and too often they give up.

The bloggers who posted on BostonNOW were thrilled with the opportunity to be promoted on the website of a daily big-city newspaper and periodically to be excerpted in 110,000 copies of the print product. Suddenly, those bloggers were getting traffic from people and places and in numbers they’d never dreamed possible. They were becoming mini-stars and were increasingly recognized as important voices in their chosen area of expertise.

(Here’s an interview with a BostonNOW blogger, videoblogger Steve Garfield, who talks about the benefits of being a blogger in a metro daily.)

A few bloggers complained that the newspaper was making money off the unpaid labors of the bloggers (note: as a start-up, however, we weren’t making money at all, never mind off of the bloggers). But they were in a minority.

To prove the point, I talked with one of the most savvy bloggers in the US at a conference in Lowell, MA early in the life of BostonNOW. Robert Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association, was accredited by the Associated Press to cover the trial of the former chief of staff for U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. The Lewis “Scooter” Libby trial was a big deal and Cox’s blog was distributed to 600 newspaper websites in the U.S. and around the world. I asked Cox if the AP paid him. “No,” he said. Did the papers that picked up his stories pay him? “No.” Did that bother him? “No.” Why not? “I have optimized my site for monetization and the amount of money I can make dwarfs any freelance check the AP might write me,” he said.

For now, most bloggers are happy to get the exposure for their message and reap the emotional and modest financial rewards that come from appearing in major metro daily newspapers’ websites and print products. If a blogger doesn’t want to trade content for exposure but wants to get paid, he or she can wait to share their content with a newspaper until media companies figure out a way to monetize their websites more effectively. In the meantime, I believe they are cutting off their noses to spite their faces….

All this might change, and it should change for any bloggers who break away from the pack and become key factors in the success of a media company. But if bloggers are smart and maximize their optimization, they should be happy with the symbiotic relationship newspapers offer for the foreseeable future.

REASSURANCE FOR EDITORS NERVOUS ABOUT USING BLOGS IN THEIR PAPERS & WEBSITES

Editors are worried about publishing local bloggers in their web pages. I answer their concerns below. (Photo by Tom Carmony, on Flickr/CC)

I just returned from Vienna, Austria where I spoke to the International Newsmedia Marketing Association’s Europe Outlook 2009 Conference about using local bloggers to enhance their reach, relevance and revenue.

Olivier Bonsart, Director Délégué of Ouest-France, leads a song at INMA 2008 Europe conference in Vienna. (Photo by Knallgrau; courtesy INMA)

(By the way: Those folks know how to drink! Unlike too many of my American editorial friends who drink to get morose — not a long trip — and stupid, these people drank to have fun. We started with a traditional “Heuriger Dinner” at 8 and were still going strong at 2, taking turns singing drinking songs from each country. With more than 20 countries in attendance, we provided quite a musical buffet at the restaurant, on the bus back to the hotel and in the hotel bar! I’m looking for good American, especially Boston, drinking songs if anyone has suggestions!)

The audience — publishers, editors and marketing directors from more than 20 countries — were very interested in adding local bloggers to their content mix. I have already heard from newspapers in Hungary, England, India, France, Sweden, Belgium, and Poland about how to go about integrating user-generated content in their publications’ websites and print products.

The questions and concerns were the same that I hear when I speak to American editors: What about our hard-earned credibility? How can I trust writers I don’t know? Isn’t there a difference between professional journalists and bloggers? Is there a limit to reader involvement? Couldn’t this just be a publisher trick to cut staff? And, how long will bloggers be willing to do this for free?

Exaggerating perhaps a bit, I used a Sherman Williams Paint "Cover the Earth" logo to explain the extent of blogging in the world today (Photo by Knallgrau).

I have answered the first three questions in the last two blog posts: The answer to the concern about protecting your credibility is here. And my answers to the questions about trusting writers you don’t know and about the difference between pros and bloggers are here.

Now I’ll tackle two of the last three questions:

#4: Do you see any limits of readers’ involvement in the editorial process?

Absolutely.

On the one hand, readers have a much broader knowledge of what is going on in your market than you do. After all, they are everywhere while you and your reporters are not. They are also more diverse than the usual contingent of a few older males and smattering of females in a news meeting trying to decide what’s of interest to their readers. Using readers as sources of stories and story ideas can expand the breadth and appeal of your story selection and should be an essential part of the editorial process at all newspapers.

A figure in a monument at the Hofburg in Vienna reminded me of editors' reactions when I suggest incorporating local bloggers in their papers and websites (John Wilpers photo)

At BostonNOW, I webcast my daily news meetings. Readers could watch and listen to our discussions. If they had a suggestion, they could type it out and it was projected on the wall of our meeting room. We would then respond directly to the reader. We’d actually turn to the camera and talk to them! We got story ideas that we would NEVER have thought of on our own. And the readers got the feeling that they were a part of our newspaper and that it reflected their interests.

But that’s as far as it should go. Ultimately, the newspaper and website are OUR products. We decide what we publish. No one else.

5. Aggregating existing content is cheaper than producing original content. It is a nice idea for publishers looking around for cost-cutting. Aren’t you afraid that your idea to integrate reader-generated content in the newspaper online and in print will in fact lead to further downsizing of professional newsrooms?

No. Only a publisher determined to destroy his local news franchise would replace journalists with bloggers.

Bloggers are not professional reporters who are trained to gather ALL of the information and put it into a story that is as complete and balanced and objective as possible.

Editors can direct reporters to cover important news events. Bloggers go where they want and write what they want.

Besides, most bloggers do NOT write about news. And those good bloggers who do write about news are more akin to columnists, commenting and offering informed perspective.

News is not where you would be using bloggers for the most part anyway. You will find far more bloggers writing in your market about sports, fashion, cars, entertainment, lifestyle, music, technology, etc.

Another statue, this one in St. Peter's Church in Vienna, also reminded me of editors' reaction to using local bloggers. (John Wilpers photo)

You are looking to bloggers to expand the breadth of your coverage, adding value to existing verticals and enabling you to create lots of new verticals and increase ad inventory.

The last question posed by the European editors was:

6. Are you sure that community bloggers will be willing to produce their content for free in the future, as they mostly do now? How will it affect newspaper economics if these bloggers ask for a payment?

The answer to that one in my next post….

ANSWERS TO EDITORS WORRIED ABOUT PUBLISHING LOCAL BLOGGERS, PART 2

Editors are not publishing reader blogs on their main website (if at all) and not at all in their print products because of concerns over credibility, professionalism, accuracy, etc. I answer those concerns below and in the previous post. (Photo by cayusa on flickr, CC)

In my last post (“Doubting Thomases“), I began answering the questions of editors who are nervous about publishing local bloggers in their websites and print products.

Prior to my speech Oct. 2 in Vienna, Austria at the International Newsmedia Marketing Association’s Europe 2008 conference, the organizers posed the questions they’d been getting from editors concerned about the use of user-generated content.

In my last post, I answered the first question, “Don’t third-party content providers threaten our hard-earned credibilty?”

Here are questions #2 and #3:

2. Editors are responsible for what they publish. How can they take responsibility for authors and content they know nothing about?

By using good research and good judgment.

When editors sign contracts with columnists, they read the columnists’ past clips, interview them and “take their measure.” After that, they have no idea what any columnist is going to write and, unless the editor practices censorship, they don’t interfere. The editors trust their own initial judgment and, increasingly, the reputation of the writer for producing quality work.

It’s the same thing with any blogger an editor chooses to aggregate on his or her website. Either the editor or someone like myself conducts the same “due diligence” on bloggers you would do for columnists. In my work with newspapers to identify the top local bloggers, I bring 36 years of publishing experience and high journalistic standards to my analyses of those bloggers. I review their body of work with a critical eye and determine that not only do they know what they’re writing about but also that they write well. I also check to see what their peers in their field think about them.

And you don’t stop there. Just like your columnists, you monitor what the bloggers are writing. If any cross any accuracy, ethical, or legal lines, you cut them off, just like you would a columnist.

A sample of a header the Houston Chronicle uses to identify user-generated blogs

3. Don’t you see any difference between blogs written by professional journalists and blogs by readers with no such a background? When you put them together on the website or in print, you make this distinction disappear. Are you sure it is right?

There IS a difference between professional journalists and bloggers.

Most bloggers are not trained journalists. Professional journalists have years of experience writing well-researched, well-reported stories and are held to standards of balance and research that do not necessarily apply to bloggers.

Additionally, editors cannot direct bloggers. Newspapers need staffs to cover what the editors determine is news worthy. Look at the randomness, and often slanted nature, of sites that depend solely on user-generated content. We will always need editors and reporters to carry on the mission of good journalism.

That said, however, the bloggers you would choose to publish on your website and in your paper are not “pajama bloggers” writing about their political rants, fantasy sex lives or cool tattoos. You choose people who are either professionals in their field or are very gifted writers and observers in the field of their choice.

The bug that accompanies the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's reader blogs

Nonetheless, to make sure your readers understand the distinction between your staff writers and the bloggers, when you put bloggers on a web or print page with or near your staffers’ work, you should make a graphic distinction between them. Use an icon, a logo or some form of text or graphic that makes it clear that the blogger is distinct from a professional staff member of your paper.

Questions #4 and #5 in my next post (soon!):

#4: Do you see any limits of readers’ involvement in the editorial process?

#5: Aggregating existing content is cheaper than producing original content. It is a nice idea for publishers looking around for cost-cutting.