Houston Chronicle is local blogger heaven

Talk about doing it right.

The Houston Chronicle gets it.

They have local bloggers EVERYWHERE on their site, even on their specialty sites: MomHouston.com and HoustonBelief.com (left).

Most importantly, the citizen bloggers are not buried on a “blogs” page. They are incorporated on the theme-appropriate Web page: citizen sports bloggers are on the Sports home page; local political bloggers are on the Politics home page; ditto, Health, Tech, Gardening, Entertainment, even Real Estate!

Not only that, chron.com promotes the most recent local blogger posts prominently on the chron.com home page, right below the main news stories.

And just to be sure, they also offer the standard blogger page, usually a purgatory where bloggers languish unseen and un-promoted. But in Houston’s case, given all the attention the bloggers get on the home page and the section pages, this blogger page becomes a helpful index.

The only place chron.com falls down is with video bloggers. They have a “share your video” link right on the home page, but no repository for those UGVs that I could find.

It would be a rich vein to mine: A quick search on YouTube turned up more than 2,500 video posts about Houston in the last 30 days alone.

While many of the clips about concerts and TV news reports probably have copyright issues, there are hundreds of fascinating videos about all sorts of disparate subjects, including: the handcuffing and arrest of a girl at her prom for wearing a short dress, raspberry ants invading a neighborhood, a cool profile of a local high school, a stunning story about the Women’s Center for homeless women, a great gospel choir concert, the first national black book festival, and much more.

How much richer would the chron.com experience be with all these citizen videos?

But that’s a small criticism of a site that is light years ahead of the rest of the newspaper industry in terms of making local bloggers part of the leading information and community hub in Houston.

Solving the blogger payment problem

The old dust-up over newspapers (and other media) paying non-staff bloggers for their contributions is being debated on the Center for Citizen Media Blog and only Tish Grier got it right in her comments (“…what’s wrong with just aggregating this content and sharing traffic with local bloggers?”).

I think that’s the answer for newspapers: Aggregate and point off.

It’s a win-win.

Newspapers get great local content (but not all of it), and bloggers get traffic most of them couldn’t get on their own.

If the bloggers optimize their sites and the traffic amounts to even modest numbers, they can make more money than the newspaper would be willing to pay.

From the newspaper’s perspective, it’s not essential to own ALL of the content, only to be able to point readers to it.

The newspaper’s new role is to give readers the opportunity to find the best information in their areas of interest, either geographic (neighborhood) or thematic (sports, movies, news, politics, etc.).

Newspapers don’t have to create all the information, although we must continue to bring our trained journalists’ lens to bear on key issues that require the skills they’ve learned. We must retain our watchdog role.

But we don’t necessarily need trained journalists to report on local grade school plays, car shows, local festivals, etc. It’s great if we can, but isn’t it better to have a mom or dad or interested citizen put something up than to have nothing at all?

Besides, bloggers are in many more places than the newspaper staff could ever be. And their interests are more diverse by dint of numbers alone. So a newspaper’s reach and relevance are increased many fold.

But aggregation is worthless if the links aren’t posted in the appropriate sections of the newspaper’s website and if excerpts aren’t published in the appropriate sections of the newspaper itself. You can’t drive traffic to your website and to the bloggers websites without constant, pervasive promotion.

Huffington sticks it to the NYT

How many bloggers would brag that their standards surpass the New York Times?

Arianna Huffington would, and she did.

When asked about the HuffPost’s accuracy standards Thursday, she outlined her 24-hour correct-it-or-lose-your-rights deadline. Then, without skipping a beat, she compared her one-day correction turn-around requirement to the NYT which “took years to issue a mea culpa” for the “lies and distortions” about the lead-up to the Iraq war that it printed on the front page.

Ouch. (Watch below.)

She added that when someone points out an error to her, “the transparency of error corrections means I don’t just go in and correct it in the post, but I also say that I made an error.”

Accuracy isn’t the only thing that Huffington likes about bloggers. Which she likes a lot.

She told the Interactive Media conference in Las Vegas that her blog and others like it are a “court of appeals.” Crediting NYU professor and PressThink blogger Jay Rosen with the term, Huffington said that when mainstream media drop a hot story, the blogosphere can bring it back to the public’s attention.

Huffington also said the quality of the press coverage of the campaign (a smile) caused her to start a project called “Off the Bus” (a twist on Tim Crouse’s book about the press coverage of the 1972 campaign, “Boys on the Bus”).

“We now have 2,000 people from around the country” reporting on the campaign, she said. Mayhill Fowler, the blogger who broke the story about Barack Obama’s “bitter” comments was one of Huffington’s “Off the Bus” cadre (a fact, Huffington noted with a scoff, was never mentioned in the media storm that followed).

She attributed some of her success to “the disgust of the public with the way the mainstream media has done its job.”

Despite her digs, Huffington thinks enough of newspapers to say “I don’t believe for a moment that print is dead. I don’t believe it’s an either/or situation (either print or online), either. Provided newspapers continue efforts toward a full online operations, they have a great future.”

As a matter of fact, Huffinton admitted that “our home page is more like the front page of a newspaper. Entertainment, business, politics — all on home page. And we have plans for the future expanding into new verticals, including sports, and we’re expanding our reporting team.”

Introduction

It’s about time….

I’ve been promoting newspaper collaboration with bloggers (and vloggers, podcasters and readers in general) for more than a year now, but I never found (took) the time to write my own.

No more.

It was embarrassing.

In 2007, I launched the first metro daily newspaper (the recently shuttered BostonNOW) that included bloggers not only on the newspaper’s website but also in the pages of the paper.

But I didn’t have a blog.

I worked with the LA Times over the winter and identified hundreds of local neighborhood and LA-themed bloggers to populate their new local site when they re-launch it.

But I didn’t have my own blog. Bad boy!

So, here I am.

I’ll be looking at newspapers’ use of bloggers/vloggers/podcasters and community building. Who’s trying what? What’s working? What isn’t? Can anyone monetize it? What can we learn from everyone’s efforts?

I’ll be hunting around myself. But if you know of any cutting-edge newspaper blogger initiatives, let me know and we can take a look together and spread the word.

And if you just have ideas about what might work, let me know and perhaps we can convince a newspaper to give it a try!

Coming next: Reporting from the Interactive Media Conference this week (May 14-15) in Las Vegas.