How many newspaper readers feel a personal connection with their metro daily newspaper? How many think of the paper as “our newspaper” or “my newspaper”?
Nobody I know.
Readers see their metro paper as “their” newspaper, a publication reflecting the interests, opinions, and work of other people not remotely connected to the them and their lives.
Not BostonNOW.
When BostonNOW was up and running (I was the editor-in-chief), we had 3,900 local bloggers posting to their blogs on our site (which, sadly, closed after a year in business when the investors ran out of money in April).
Our bloggers, and their friends, families and business connections, considered BostonNOW “our paper.” And it truly was. The website AND the paper carried their work, and the work of people like them.
One of those bloggers was the, no exaggeration, world-renowned video blogger Steve Garfield. He was the first local blogger we approached about being in the paper and on our website (he started posting on BostonNOW and we pointed back to his personal sites).
I spoke with Steve recently about how he felt about the power of including local bloggers in the pages of a newspaper’s print and Web products. It’s a very entertaining interview (Steve is a wonderful storyteller!). You can watch the YouTube version of the interview below, or click here for a higher quality rendition.
2 responses so far ↓
Steve Garfield // September 18, 2008 at 11:02 am |
Thanks John and thanks to David Weinberger for the idea of theirs/ours.
David Weinberger
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/
Bart // September 18, 2008 at 12:38 pm |
It looks like SOME papers are at least taking baby steps forward…
An Eagles blogger was printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer:
http://www.bleedinggreennation.com/2008/9/12/613245/bgn-in-the-inquirer
But he didn’t seem to make a big deal out of it. It could have something to do with the treatment (or lack thereof)…or perhaps being printed just isn’t that exciting to some bloggers.