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?