Wake up, folks, Huffington is no Backfence

HERE SHE COMES.

If you are a newspaper editor or publisher, and you haven’t worried about Outside.in, YourStreet, Topix, or BackFence (deceased), it’s finally time to worry.

Like Craig Newmark before her, Huffington Post creator Arianna Huffington plans to steal our lunch. In her case, she’s announced she is going to launch at least a dozen local sites, starting with Chicago this summer.

You could ask a stadium full of people if they had ever heard of YourStreet, Topix, BackFence or Outside.in, and you might hear a faint voice or two from the bleachers. You could FILL dozens of stadiums with people who have not only heard about the Huffington Post but have also been there. Like three to eight million people a month, depending on which measurement you believe.

Now Huffington says she’s coming after our most precious asset: our local readers.

(Listen to her comments during a Guardian seminar by clicking on the image below. She discusses her local play starting at minute 25:45 through 29:30. She returns to local at 35:37 through 36:08.)

It’s scary, or it damn well should be. Unlike Craig’s List, she’s telling us in advance that she’s coming, how and when (not where yet, but I wouldn’t wait to find out!).

With her clout and visibility, she may succeed at the aggregation game where others have failed or are struggling. She plans to grab YOUR content and the best local bloggers and citizen journalists — something we should have done long ago. (It’s not too late, but it’s ALMOST too late.)

And she won’t be blowing large amounts of investor money, either. One editor. One reporter. That’s it.

But add all the current and future local bloggers who will be attracted by the opportunity to have the address of: “HuffingtonPost/my name,” and she’ll have critical mass in one hell of a hurry. And those people will be buzzing about HuffPost’s local site rather than your newspaper and its website.

You’ve watched customers walk away from your newspaper’s classifieds to Craig’s List. Do you really think people will go to your paper first and then to her site when they can get it all at her site?

So, beat her to the punch. Now. Start lining up local bloggers today! Claim the turf before she does. After all, you’re local. You can take much better care of these local folks than she can. You still have more clout and much better brand recognition than she does. For now.

My experience at the Los Angeles Times, when I would ask local bloggers about appearing in the LA Times, would indicate that even for the Internet savvy folks, the old-fashioned media still has some magic. They were thrilled at the possibility.

But bringing high-quality local bloggers into your website isn’t enough. To really seal the deal, to really cement the relationship and both reward the blogger and attract more people to your site, you MUST publish their blogs (or excerpts) in your newspaper.

Your print product is a HUGE advantage you have over Arianna. She has no external promotional vehicle; you have what amounts to tens or even hundreds of thousands of daily promotional fliers for your bloggers and your website. Just do it.

Arianna is coming and if you’re not ready, she could join Craig on your enemies list, if you’ve still in the newspaper industry by then.

Here are some of the most chilling comments from her interview with Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger:

“We’re an aspiring newspaper. We’re a newspaper in the sense that we are covering all news…we’re not just a political blog, the way we began just covering politics, we’re covering everything. When I say ‘aspiring,’ I mean we keep adding to that. We’re expanding. In the next three months, we’re launching a books vertical then international and sports and we’re also launching local.

Starting with Chicago, it’s going to be just one page which is going to look like the Huffington Post but it will be all about Chicago: Chicago news, Chicago bloggers, Chicago food, Chicago crime, everything

Once we work out the kinks, we’ll have the template which we want to roll out, staring with a dozen other cities …

(Guardian editor Rusbridger asked what she meant by “covering”): By ‘covering,’ I mean three things: 1) aggregating news from all sorts of sources; 2) we now have a reporting team …

We’re about to do the third round of financing and a lot of the money we’re raising is going to go toward expanding our reporting team as well as to launch local and all the other things we’re planning …

Where is all this going? We’re going to have an editor. That’s how we start. It’s news aggregation and bloggers. We’re reaching out to many people in Chicago. We’re going to be blogging about what’s happening in Chicago. it’s a combination of those two elements: social community and blogging.

(And it will be) supplemented by our citizen journalism project …

It’s the placement, stupid! Newspapers blow UGC

“It’s the economy, stupid” worked for Clinton.

“It’s the placement, stupid” would work for newspapers’ in their efforts to make user-generated content successful.

But most newspaper websites place (“bury”) user-created stuff in UGC ghettos nowhere near the subjects they’re blogging or vlogging about.

If newspapers treated their own content the way they treat users’ content, there would a newsroom revolt and website anarchy. There would be no “news,” “sports,” “entertainment,” or “opinion” tabs. Everything would go under two tabs: “our stuff” and “your stuff.”

Oh, yeah, reporters (and readers) would LOVE that.

Editors organize and promote their reporters’ and photographers’ best stuff on separate pages by category, displaying it well according to what they think is the best, most compelling stuff.

Not reader blogs. First they bury them, then they don’t promote them, then they gang’em all together with no rhyme or reason.

A post about a Little League game goes next to a post debating sex offenders in the neighborhood. A video post about someone’s kitty cat behaving strangely goes on the same page as a reader’s video of police beating protesters at a rally. Photos of dewy flowers go on the same page as reader pictures from a devastating fire.

That’s stupid.

What are editors thinking in their treatment of blogs? Do they really think that site visitors will go to a tab labeled “blogs” and just graze? They obviously don’t believe that holds true with their own high-quality work.

Put them in context, goshdarnit! And then promote them. People can’t read’em if they can’t find’em!

This absurd treatment reveals editors’ true feelings about user-created content: it’s not really worthy, but it is the rage so we’ll humor them but only allow them in their own little playground far away from our quality stuff.

Well, surprise, surprise: It’s not working.

And the lack of success of UGC on newspaper websites has people debating its merits. Amy Gahran (left) posted recently on PoynterOnline asking “Is Community News Just a Nice-to-Have?”

Some folks commenting on the piece are worried that the apparent lack of citizen enthusiasm for both generating and reading local content is an indication of all sorts of terrible things ranging from a failure of the education system to a failure of any “new” model of journalism.

If the editors put all their staff content under one tab and traffic plummeted, would they then decide their stuff wasn’t working, too?

Well, hell, we haven’t even given it a fair test yet!

First of all, most major metropolitan dailies don’t even allow non-staff bloggers on their sites, never mind in the pages of their papers (that’s stupid, too).

For those that do, we’ll have a much better, more accurate assessment of user-generated content when editors start putting it in the appropriate sections of their websites AND their newspapers.

They should keep the blog directories and most-recently posted blog lists for ease of finding a particular blog and for serendipity, but put goal #1 should be to put UGC stuff in context. And then promote it.

No promotion, no traffic. Put it in the paper and watch what happens. I did it at BostonNOW and it worked like a charm.

Until then, all this debate is almost pointless. It’s like saying a fishing lure doesn’t work when it’s only been tested in the bathtub!

Why are there no user video blogs in newspapers?

We’re blind.

Or stupid.

Great local content is staring newspapers in the face … and we can’t see it. Or we choose not to see it.

Hundreds of thousands of videos are uploaded daily on YouTube. Every MINUTE of every day, ten HOURS of new video is uploaded, YouTube says.

In one month alone (January 2008), nearly 79 million viewers, or a third of all online viewers in the U.S., watched more than three billion user-posted videos on YouTube, according to Fortune.cnn.com.

That’s a ton of content.

And you’d be surprised how much of it is local.

Yes, there is lots of garbage and stuff we can’t touch due to copyright violations or good taste, but take a look at the results (chart on the left) of my one-day survey of local videos posted on YouTube today, this week, and this month:

Even if a measly 10 percent of the videos are terrific, that’s still dozens or hundreds of pieces of local content newspapers are not publishing today.

I checked out a couple days’ worth of the videos posted about Washington, D.C. in April: the D.C. Youth Outreach Fashion Show, an IRS protest (The Post had a story and pics but no video), the Man of Strength Award (a D.C. kid honored by Men Can Stop Rape for fighting violence against women and registering youth voters), the Filipino Festival, the speech of an Iranian princess, video of D.C. mail delivery circa 1903, a TC Williams High School Choir concert, a street trumpeter, a nutrition class for DC kids, etc.

Why do newspapers ignore or turn their noses up at this content? Beats me.

Editors can’t use their favorite excuse for not publishing bloggers (“it’s not professional or necessarily accurate and they could damage our credibility” – all the while ignoring the fact that THEY could choose which blogs to publish).

No, video is pretty straightforward. Videos are, with rare exceptions, a pure record of an event.

It’s free, it’s local, it’s often creative, and, most importantly, it speaks to the lives of real people, especially the folks we’re not reaching with our websites or our newspapers.

Publishing local video bloggers would be like having dozensof additional eyes on the street.

So let’s start publishing local user-generated videos on our newspaper websites. And not in the ghettos where we hide local bloggers. Put them on the theme-appropriate pages: local news videos on the news pages, sports on sports, entertainment on entertainment, etc.

And then let’s get crazy and put screen grabs of the best local videos in in the newspapers themselves. Again, in the theme-appropriate sections.

If we don’t do it, someone else will.

If local TV stations ever wake up, they will realize this is their turf and they will start putting UGC videos on their websites and broadcast them on their news programs. We will rue the day we missed our chance.

Go for it, folks. Today. Before it’s too late.