One of the best newspaper industry analysts and practitioners, Ken Doctor, has just published a book, “Newsonomics,” and created a companion website. He asked me to answer some questions about bloggers, the news industry, and how I help bring the two together. Here’s a link to the piece.

In a nutshell, he asked if I was a “blog wrangler.” I told him “blog wranglers” just grab as many bloggers as possible and dump them into blog ghettos on newspaper websites with little regard to organization or quality.

By contrast, as a “blog matchmaker,” I deeply search, carefully analyze, thoroughly vet, and then personally invite only the very best bloggers in a niche to partner with a news or information website to the benefit of both parties.

Read the entire piece on Ken’s new Newsonomics site. And let me know what you think.

ChicagoNOW editors make blog aggregation look like early U.S. rocket science: Misfires (Flickr pic: numberstumper/CC)

Blog aggregation is not rocket science.

It does, however, require common sense.

And common sense would seem to scream: “STOP! DON’T DO IT” if someone suggested creating a stand-alone website made up of a bunch of largely anonymous writers with no organizing principle other than that the writers are all largely anonymous and all from Chicago.

But that’s what the Chicago Tribune’s highly touted “ChicagoNOW” is doing. No categories (well, there’s “recent posts”). Virtually no promotion on the Tribune site. No promotion in the print version of the Trib. No helpful editorial decisions indicating that a couple of blogs that day are really excellent.

Just look at the chaos passing for the main art on their home page:

Most of the completely confusing, graphically chaotic lede piece of art on the ChicagoNOW home page, Monday, Sept. 7, 2009

Given that there is absolutely NO star power in the NAMES of the bloggers, the editors have to grab readers by the compelling nature of the promotional art and the headline. (Can you see the headlines? They’re that teeny type under the teeny photo…)

Let’s go left to right, starting with the “Diva Detour” sign. Not bad. Almost clearly Oprah. Good headline.

Next: A sign in Spanish with the scintillating, come-hither headline “Immigration Reform March.” Did these guys work for the Trib? That’s a snoozer reminiscent of the worst of MSM.

Next: A teddy bear smoking pot and a fun headline. OK, we’re recovering.

Next: I’m not sure WHAT that photo is. Supposedly a crowd at a Packer game. Could be modern art. I’ve never seen a worse photo crammed into such a small space with the intent of drawing me into a story.

Other than LaRussa, the rest of the photos and topics are confusing and completely uninteresting. (Gotta love the “Bloggers on the Food Network” pic — what ARE those guys doing? And that Emmy story fist: One of the worst cropping jobs ever!)

But, hey, you SHOULD be interested because a blogger you’ve never heard of from Chicago wrote these pieces! So click away!

Not.

This is a really bad idea. Don't promote the best; promote the most recent. Four of the eight are about Oprah; two are about sports haiku (sports haiku?!), and one is compellingly titled "Plaid Scarf"! I can't wait to read that one!

The problem with the entire site goes back to its very premise: It’s a stand-alone site of no-name bloggers whose work is presented with no organizing concept and no context and, clearly, little effort by the editors to help harried readers find the very best stuff out there.

There’s nothing wrong with no-name bloggers (most of us ARE no-names!). And many write good stuff, including most of the NOW bloggers. But you have to give readers compelling reasons to dive into a particular post (great visuals and great headlines), and you have to organize the content in a way that makes it easy for readers to find what they want.

Let’s break it down:

1) Perhaps the biggest crime on ChicagoNOW is the almost complete lack of any connection whatsoever to the parent Tribune site or newspapers (Tribune, RedEye). On the Trib website, ChicagoNOW merits no more than a single promotion at the bottom of the home page and some teases on the sports page. Nothing in print.

Gee, that makes sense. Let’s launch a brand new risky venture and totally eschew these monster promotional vehicles we OWN that circulate to tens of thousands of readers in print and online every day.

That’s not smart or gutsy or entrepreneurial. It’s monumentally stupid. Put the stuff in the Tribune, on tribune.com and in RedEye in the context of the categories the bloggers are writing about!

When ESPN launched the “ESPN Chicago” website, they BRANDED it big time (note the first word in the title!). After just three months, they have already passed the Trib’s sports website by almost 150,000 uniques!

What’s ChicagoNOW doing after several months (their official launch was in August but they’ve been “live” for some time)? They are getting 59,000 monthly uniques according to ComCast. Maybe. So who’s the smarter company?

2) The second biggest crime is to throw all the content out there willy-nilly for time-harried readers to graze through. Sure, I have time to scan teeny photos or, worse, take a chance on the only proffered category (“Recent Posts”) to see if there is something worth reading.

People have passions (the Bears, Chicago indie bands, Chicago politics) and geographic interests (I live in X community and care about what happens there). How could the Chicago NOW editors have missed the memo about the decline of general interest publications? Put content in verticals that enable readers to find what they want in a hurry and make connections with authors and other readers who share their interests.

3) And, finally, the third crime is the editors’ incomprehensible fear of promoting the best posts, choosing instead to give every blogger their 15 seconds of fame. Instead of a most-popular list or an editor’s choices list (given their judgment, I’d worry about that one), they go with “Most Recent” and here’s the result on Sept. 7: Four of eight promos about Oprah, two sports haikus (sports haikus?!), and one compelling post entitled “Plaid Scarf!” Oh, boy, I’m going to read that one first!

Do you know the real tragedy? Their bloggers are good. Real good. But, despite the site’s traffic gains (hell, they started from zero so big percentage gains are almost inevitable), those writers are not getting the kind of attention they deserve.

"Hey, honey, I've got a great idea for Friday night! Whaddya say we go home and read some generic user-generated blogs tonight?! Sound like fun?" (Flickr photo by larryfishkorn/CC/With permissions)

HIGH-QUALITY NON-STAFF BLOGS SHOULD RUN IN THE WEBSITE (AND PAPER) SECTION PERTAINING TO THEIR TOPIC.

When was the last time your colleagues said they were heading out for a wild weekend of reading generic user-generated blogs?

Never, right?

No one (in their right mind) reads blogs just because some other reader wrote them.

And yet, that’s what editors must think because they keep putting ALL reader-written blogs together on one big web page (ghetto), whether those bloggers are writing about knitting or martial arts or kitty cats or Jesus. How fascinating. How compelling.

Here's how Gannett's Florida Today displays its reader blogs. All in one place. No differentiation by theme. Or quality (this July 9 screen shot has a blog post about....Mother's Day!).

I just got off the phone with an editor who excitedly informed me that her new website design was going to have a separate page for “user-generated content.” And that the so-called “UGC” would be included on a page of its own in the paper.

She was really excited.

I was puzzled.

What is appealing about a web page filled with an unorganized collection of reader blogs?

Who wants or has the time to read something for the sole reason that it was written by a “user.”

Nobody I know. The bloggers themselves, I suppose. Maybe their friends and relatives. Under duress.

Why would you go to a page where literally anybody can write about literally anything? No filters. No organization, other than that a “user” wrote it. No thematic thread. No culling of the crap.

Why create such a page?

Here's the Detroit Free Press approach to bringing non-staff bloggers into the tent. Look familiar?! It's a Pluck site, so it's a reader blog ghetto as you can tell from the completely random nature of the blog post topics.

The only answer I can come up with is that someone told the editors they should have user-generated content, and so they created such a page, or a company like Pluck came along and offered them a system to collect and present unorganized, unreviewed reader blogs.

Pluck lists an insane number of newspapers as clients and you can go see for yourself how bad it is right here.

Pluck is the company that thinks it doesn’t need to give reader blogs easily recalled web addresses like PaperName.com/ReaderName. Nossir. Here’s an example of what Pluck thinks is a good idea for a Florida Today reader blog URL (the reader blog URLs are like this at all of the papers Pluck “serves”):

http://www.floridatoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?category=PluckPersona&U

=891fb51ac5a24fa8a172ef40a04b384e&plckPersonaPage=BlogViewPost&
plckUserId=891fb51ac5a24fa8a172ef40a04b384e&plckPostId=Blog%3a891fb51
ac5a24fa8a172ef40a04b384ePost%3a1662f3e9-9bf6-42c7-8464-4ee7b3fe19ae&
plckController=PersonaBlog&plckScript=personaScript&plckElementId=
personaDest

That’s 380 nonsense characters.

Huffington Post gives its reader blogs addresses like: www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-jones. That’s 36 characters.

But enough about the Pluck madness….

So editors create these blogger ghettos where they bury all their “user-generated content” and then they feel they can say, “yes, I are involving the community in my newsapper and my website!”

Proving that Pluck does not have a monopoly on inane ways to present non-staff bloggers, here's one from the Denver Post. No thematic organization. No rhyme or reason other than someone other than a staffer wrote it. Makes sense to me....

These editors think they’ve done their duty in terms of connecting with their readers and this new social media thing. So now they can go back to operating on their own, trying to create all the content they think we should be reading, never mind that their staffs are shrinking and were never large enough to begin with to create the breadth and depth of content required to appeal to a wide variety of local constituencies.

But, in their minds, they did what their training had prepared them to do in this situation: keep the unwashed writers at bay who have the temerity to create content without the benefit of a journalism degree (poor creatures).

Time to wake up, editors.

Comb your market for the highest quality local bloggers writing in as many categories as possible (and there are dozens, if not hundreds of them), and then aggregate them where they belong: in the section of the website that deals with their topics, not a blogger ghetto. And then excerpt them in your print product (again in the appropriate section) to better promote them and tie the two products together.

Better hurry. There are lots of aggregators out there looking to steal what should be your franchise. They aren’t pretending to be a newspaper. They are simply content providers, each in his or her own niche. Add’em all up, and you will wake up someday soon to find all the pillars of your franchise nibbled away.

Game over.

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.

(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?

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.

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?

I want to introduce you to a very exciting project I am working on as the Director of Global Blog Development for a cool new organization called GlobalPost.com.

It will be the first online-only world news service, and will launch in January with 70 correspondents in 53 countries “to satisfy a growing need for independent, reliable, insightful and up-to-the-minute coverage and analysis of news in every region of the world.”

A pioneer in the development of 24-hour local cable news, former New England Cable News President and founder Phil Balboni came up with the idea with another New England legend, Charlie Sennott, the former veteran Boston Globe foreign correspondent. They have an awesome video about their mission on their home page. Go take a look: <a href=http://www.globalnewsenterprises.com/>

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I approached them over the summer about adding hundreds of local bloggers from around the world to GlobalPost’s corps of correspondents. While the correspondents are great, they can only be in one place at one time. Bloggers are everywhere. And they are very, very local.

Phil and Charlie liked the idea, and since September, I have been working with 12 incredibly talented interns from Emerson College, BU, Suffolk University and elsewhere to find 350 of “The World’s Best Bloggers” (writing in English) in those 53 countries.

Click on the link below to see a PDF of a slide show about how we’re doing the search. The best part of the show is the second half where you’ll get to “meet” 31 of the best of the best bloggers

FINDING 350 OF THE WORLD’S BEST BLOGGERS

Here are some samples of the blogger profile slides, and they are only the beginning!

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.

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….

Editors are not publishing reader blogs on their main website (if at all) and not at all in their print products because of concerns over credibility, professionalism, accuracy, etc. I answer those concerns below and in the previous post. (Photo by cayusa on flickr, CC)

In my last post (“Doubting Thomases“), I began answering the questions of editors who are nervous about publishing local bloggers in their websites and print products.

Prior to my speech Oct. 2 in Vienna, Austria at the International Newsmedia Marketing Association’s Europe 2008 conference, the organizers posed the questions they’d been getting from editors concerned about the use of user-generated content.

In my last post, I answered the first question, “Don’t third-party content providers threaten our hard-earned credibilty?”

Here are questions #2 and #3:

2. Editors are responsible for what they publish. How can they take responsibility for authors and content they know nothing about?

By using good research and good judgment.

When editors sign contracts with columnists, they read the columnists’ past clips, interview them and “take their measure.” After that, they have no idea what any columnist is going to write and, unless the editor practices censorship, they don’t interfere. The editors trust their own initial judgment and, increasingly, the reputation of the writer for producing quality work.

It’s the same thing with any blogger an editor chooses to aggregate on his or her website. Either the editor or someone like myself conducts the same “due diligence” on bloggers you would do for columnists. In my work with newspapers to identify the top local bloggers, I bring 36 years of publishing experience and high journalistic standards to my analyses of those bloggers. I review their body of work with a critical eye and determine that not only do they know what they’re writing about but also that they write well. I also check to see what their peers in their field think about them.

And you don’t stop there. Just like your columnists, you monitor what the bloggers are writing. If any cross any accuracy, ethical, or legal lines, you cut them off, just like you would a columnist.

A sample of a header the Houston Chronicle uses to identify user-generated blogs

3. Don’t you see any difference between blogs written by professional journalists and blogs by readers with no such a background? When you put them together on the website or in print, you make this distinction disappear. Are you sure it is right?

There IS a difference between professional journalists and bloggers.

Most bloggers are not trained journalists. Professional journalists have years of experience writing well-researched, well-reported stories and are held to standards of balance and research that do not necessarily apply to bloggers.

Additionally, editors cannot direct bloggers. Newspapers need staffs to cover what the editors determine is news worthy. Look at the randomness, and often slanted nature, of sites that depend solely on user-generated content. We will always need editors and reporters to carry on the mission of good journalism.

That said, however, the bloggers you would choose to publish on your website and in your paper are not “pajama bloggers” writing about their political rants, fantasy sex lives or cool tattoos. You choose people who are either professionals in their field or are very gifted writers and observers in the field of their choice.

The bug that accompanies the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's reader blogs

Nonetheless, to make sure your readers understand the distinction between your staff writers and the bloggers, when you put bloggers on a web or print page with or near your staffers’ work, you should make a graphic distinction between them. Use an icon, a logo or some form of text or graphic that makes it clear that the blogger is distinct from a professional staff member of your paper.

Questions #4 and #5 in my next post (soon!):

#4: Do you see any limits of readers’ involvement in the editorial process?

#5: Aggregating existing content is cheaper than producing original content. It is a nice idea for publishers looking around for cost-cutting.

Newspaper editors mimic these monkeys when it comes to incorporating local bloggers in their print and Web pages. (Photo by by Demi Sourire/CC)

Even as Technorati is releasing its 2008 State of the Blogosphere report documenting the fact that 346 million people world-wide read blogs, that 184 million people world-wide have started a blog, and that there are almost a million blog posts a day, there are still doubters.

If blogging weren’t such an information creation and disbursement tsunami, I could shrug off editors who shrug off bloggers.

But bloggers represent one very powerful solution to the circulation/readership problems faced by newspapers. And editors ignore them at their peril.

In advance of my speech at the INMA Conference in Vienna, Austria next week, one of the organizers, Grzegorz Piechota, special projects editor/ product development manager of Gazeta Wyborcza in Poland, said he’d heard the doubts from editors.

And he wanted my answers for his blog: Forum4Editors.

So, over the next several days, I’ll be publishing their questions and my answers.

1. Newspapers have built their credibility by offering their readers selection and intelligible conveyance of news and stories of importance. Now you say that to stay relevant, they should integrate third-party content to their online and print service. Do not they risk their credibility?

Not at all.

I am NOT advocating that newspapers open their websites and print products to ALL third-party content, only to the BEST third-party content. Newspapers must use the intelligence and judgment that has come to represent their brand and apply it to the process of selecting the highest-quality local blogs.

Newspapers have historically been the source of the very best information about what’s going on in their market. It used to be that newspapers were the ONLY source in their market for high-quality information.

That is no longer true.

With the advent of the Internet and, in particular, blogging, there are now countless sources of high-quality information written by authors more expert in their fields than the newspaper’s reporters. Now, knowledgeable people in their fields, from health, automobiles, and art to finance, travel, and any number of other topics, are writing beautifully and intelligently about issues and events in those fields.

When it comes to publishing bloggers, you and only you decide which blogs will appear in your newspaper and on your website. This is NOT an open invitation to ALL bloggers. This is an opportunity for you to find, “vet” and then aggregate the very best local bloggers.

By aggregating the best local bloggers on the theme-appropriate pages of your website and newspaper (sports, fashion, business, sports, etc), you increasingly become THE source for all the best local information, whether you have created it or not. You save your readers the headache of having to search in multiple places for information they can now get in one place: your website and newspaper.

You instantly increase your reach, relevance and, if you monetize those pages, your revenue.

As Dan Gilmore, Director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State, said: “”Stop pretending that your organization is an oracle. It’s not. You don’t know everything, and even if you did, you couldn’t publish as much as you’d like to. Pointing to outside sources of information — especially local blogs and other media — is a great start. It does not mean that you endorse what these folks are saying or vouch for it, but it does mean that you recognize that others in your community are creating media with at least some information other people might want to see.”

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 cover slide of the presentation about blogs and newspapers I gave to the national Brazilian newspaper association in August, 2008. Click on the picture to see the high-quality version. (Warning: It is a 21-minute presentation with six embedded video interviews.)

I’m back.

I spent most of August preparing for a big speech at the national Brazil newspaper association’s annual convention about how bloggers can build a newspaper’s circulation, web traffic, and revenue. It took a lot of time gathering data, doing video interviews, editing, creating, etc. (see show above).

My daughter and I at Newport, RI.

Full disclosure: I also spent a wonderful ten days on a work-free vacation on Buzzard’s Bay with my wife and two daughters surfing real waves, not the Web (Melissa and I with our boards on the left)!

Speaking at the Brazil national newspaper conference.

I presented the slide show with six embedded videos in Sao Paulo in late August. You can view it here (medium quality, and it might not work on Firefox) and here (high-quality). More thoughts on the incredibly healthy Brazilian newspaper industry later…
If you don’t want to sit through all 21 minutes of the show, I am going to publish pieces of it here in my blog all week. Each interviewee, in particular, makes a compelling case for newspapers to include local bloggers in the print and online products in a significant way.

The first interview is with CC Chapman, a prominent Boston-area blogger and co-founder of Advance Guard, which focuses on creating radical marketing programs using social media and emerging technologies. Their clients include American Eagle Outfitters, Verizon FiOS, The Coca Cola Company, HBO, and mDialog.

CC Chapman

CC is also the host/producer at both Managing the Gray and Accident Hash. Previously he was VP/New Marketing at crayon, LLC, and Digital Marketing Manager at Babson College.

Like hundreds or thousands of high-quality bloggers in your community, CC is an expert at what he’s blogging about, and his top-notch blog added value to my newspaper (BostonNOW). You have lots of CCs in your market just waiting to collaborate with you.

CC describes the thrill he got when he picked up BostonNOW and found his blog inside. CC is no spring chicken (sorry, CC) and he’d been in print before. Many times. But he was STILL excited when his work appeared in a newspaper that was going to be read by a quarter of a million people.

Here’s the interview (or you can go to my MobileMe gallery to see a higher-quality version):

Bloggers in your community will be excited, too. And they will tell their friends. And they will pick up your paper. And they will go to your website (we also published bloggers on the subject-appropriate pages of our website). And, if they like what they see in the paper and on the website, some will come back on their own. Regularly.

Part of my presentation in Brazil with Boston videoblogger Steve Garfield on the screen.

So you build a new, bigger (mostly younger) audience, delivering more valuable eyeballs to your advertisers.

The crazy thing is that this is not rocket science. It’s pretty easy, and it’s one of the few dead-bolt cinch guarantees of audience attraction and retention.

So tell someone at your paper to find a few of the best bloggers in the community and start pointing off to them and excerpting their work in the paper. Start small, in non-controversial sections (sports, auto, travel, fashion, food, etc.). No big deal.

And then sit back and watch the magic happen.

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)

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″

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” 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!

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.

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.