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?

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?

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….

BRINGING BLOGGERS INTO YOUR NEWSPAPER MAKES YOUR PAPER “OUR PAPER” FOR READERS

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.

The Worst “Blind Pews” of U.S. Newspapers, PT II

You might think that as you move down the list of large American newspapers, away from the tradition-laden (tradition-handicapped?) major metros of the east and west coasts (and, OK, Chicago), that you might find a greater connection between a newspaper and its community (e.g., more local bloggers and vloggers on the papers’ websites).

After all, among the 19 largest circulation metro dailies, we only found seven papers that welcomed bloggers — Denver, Dallas, Houston, Detroit, Minneapolis, Phoenix, and Cleveland (hmmm, no east or west coast papers among that group….). It HAD to get better, right?

Wrong.

Sad to say, local bloggers are no more likely to be integrated into daily newspaper websites as you move down to papers below 400,000 circulation.

Of the next 15 largest metro newspapers (numbers 20-34), only five integrate local bloggers (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Portland Oregonian, Indianapolis Star, Orlando Sentinel and San Antonio Express-News).

So, as editors wave goodbye to more and more laid-off, right-sized, bought-out staffers, those editors remain as incapable as “Blind Pew” of seeing the rich content being created all around them. As the old proverb goes, “God protects fools, children and drunkards,” but probably not purblind editors and the newspapers they work for.

THE SECOND TEN “BLIND PEWS” OF AMERICAN NEWSPAPERING
Of the top circulation newspapers in the U.S., these are numbers 11-20 that have chosen to ignore the existence of top-quality bloggers in their midst. (See my Top Ten list here.)

11.    The St. Petersburg Times: Bloggers are about as visible as the Devil Rays in the playoffs (but, giving the devil his due: they do have a cute and largely ignored itsyourtimes.com site where the proletariat can play and not sully the rep of the Times).
12.    Seattle Times: The fog (physical and intellectual) at the Times must be intense because they can’t see what their JOA partner, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is doing right under their noses (more than 200 local bloggers!)
13.    St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Meet Me in St. Louis? Not if you’re a blogger looking to break into print or the paper’s website.
14. Milwaukee Post-Sentinel: Laverne and Shirley would feel completely at home; it’s like nothing has changed since their sit-com went off the air in ’83. No radical stuff like reader blogs in this newspaper. Nosiree.
15. The Baltimore Sun: If Edgar Allan Poe were a local blogger today, he wouldn’t stand a chance of getting into the Sun, unless he wanted to share a cute picture of his cat or dog or his wedding (but he married his cousin, so the editors probably would have nixed it….).
16.   The Kansas City Star: The “Show Me” state’s junior metro daily doesn’t show squat when it comes to community involvement, unless you count their two specialty pubs  — Ink (a terrific alt-paper mimic) and Mom2Mom — both of which are crawling with a delightful mix of serious and silly local blogs.
17.    The Columbus Dispatch: Whoa, I KNOW websites didn’t exist in the 60s, but this one sure looks like it did … and it hasn’t changed since. But, give them credit, they DO know there weren’t any bloggers in the 60s, so they don’t have any now, either!
18.    Miami Herald: Crockett and Tubbs were the last New Wave to hit Miami. So far this month, the Herald’s sterile website has attracted readers to post in a mere 12 of 31 reader forums! Some “most recent posts” were in JANUARY! Would bloggers want to be here even if they were invited?
19.    Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Pittsburgh will apparently see another World Series Championship (last one was 1979) before they see bloggers in the 222-year-old newspaper.
20.    Orange County Register: No local bloggers. No surprise. There’s no one left in the newsroom after four rounds of layoffs beginning in 2006. Circulation is also at an all-time low with the paper dropping from third largest in California to fifth. All the more reason to welcome local content creators into the fold.

NEXT POST: The best U.S. newspapers in the use of top-quality local bloggers: Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Portland Oregonian, and the Indianapolis Star (I’ve already heaped praise on the very best: The Houston Chronicle). I’ll also look at the local blogger success of the Kansas City Star’s specialty pubs (Ink and Mom2Mom)

THE BLIND PEWS: The Top 10 Most Purblind Papers

It’s time to be name names.

Too many big, ordinarily smart newspapers still refuse to involve high-quality local bloggers and vloggers on their websites and in the pages of their paper in any significant way beyond a lame, well-hidden, token local blogger index page (if that).

Now the thieves are at the door, about to make off with the family jewels (audience and advertising) and newspapers are leaving the doors unlocked and the valuables in plain sight.

Arianna Huffington’s announcement last week that she will be launching 12 local Huffington Posts with aggregated news and local bloggers is only the tip of the iceberg, the flashiest fox in the henhouse. The chairman of the board of one of the top U.S. dailies told me last week that he is seeing a lot of other crafty characters coming into his market looking to steal market share in exactly the same way, and he’s finally ready to act.

It’s time for editors to drop their tired excuses: “Bloggers aren’t journalists,” and “they’re just loonies in jammies,” and “my paper’s reputation will be sullied” (hey, guys, YOU choose which ones to publish!).

Pull in the best local bloggers and vloggers now or lose them and the thousands of folks who follow them, going where they can find the best local content and communities of shared interests.

So, in the spirit of your mom’s classic “I’m only going to tell you once more” warning, here’s a whack upside the head for what I’m calling:

THE BLIND PEWS: AMERICA’S TOP 10 MOST PURBLIND PAPERS
The biggest papers in the biggest markets with the biggest collections of local bloggers…that don’t have a single non-staff blogger on their website or in their paper. (Psst: Blind Pew was a blind pirate in Robert Louis Stevensen’s “Treasure Island”; the photo is of Blind Pew from “The Muppets Treasure Island.”)

1.  New York Times: (All the news that’s fit to print but none of the local blogs)
2.  Chicago Tribune (TribLocal is a great hyperlocal site, but it ain’t tribune.com and thus keeps the bloggers where they belong)
3.  Washington Post (Local bloggers are merely indexed and place on a non-intuitive, hard-to-find site called “projects.washingtonpost.com/local-blogs-directory”)
4.  New York Daily News (Daily News to Bloggers: Drop Dead)
5.  New York Post (Blog-less Website In Clueless Paper)
6.  Philadelphia Inquirer (“Yo, Adrian, where are the blogs?”)
7.  Boston Globe (Just two index pages, the biggest at boston-online.com, not boston.com.)
8.  Atlanta Journal-Constitution (“Frankly, my dear bloggers, we don’t give a damn…!”)
9.  Newsday (Local bloggers are phantoms like so many readers were.)
10. San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate: From leaders to laggers)

Next post: “The Blind Pews, Members 11-20″

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.

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.