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Weblogs and Local News? 29

Posted by Cliff from the why-not? dept.
DrydenMaker asks: "I am the 'computer guy' for a local paper. We are looking into a revamp of our site, and, being a /. observer for many years, I see the slashdot format as useful for active, up-to-date local content as well. With the word getting arround about the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and USC's Annenberg School for Communication offering blogging classes I have some justification. I was looking for input on examples and justification. Do you, as Slashdot users, think a local Slashdot style newspaper would be successfull?"
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Weblogs and Local News? More

Weblogs and Local News?

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  • I really really think so.
  • If the circulation of the paper is large enough to have 100-200 people posting replies per day, then a discussion based site like slashdot is almost workable. What percentage of the readership will visit the site (call it 5%) and say 1% of those people will post if there is something to post about.so unless you have a circulation of about 250,000 people, I would abandon the idea. (If these estimates are way off, please enlighten me.) This is basically because unless you have a discussion going, people will not bother to check in on the discussion and post insights.

    I would almost say that an incentive program for good karma for the first month would be useful, so that you could get people started posting. Otherwise, it will start slowly and may never take off.
    • Your percentages are pretty far off. A well-operated local news Web site typically attracts over 20 percent of the total local market in a single month. That's total market, not the readership of the local newspaper. Most large newspapers reach less than 50 percent of their own markets in print.

      It's possible that the original poster doesn't have the critical mass to establish a viable system -- he didn't say where he is, and he didn't point to an existing Web site. There are some dismal examples operated by substantial newspapers, sad to say. But that can be fixed. (It's what I do.)
  • How many people visit your current site? Do you get a lot of feedback currently, either by email or snail-mail? If you live in a community that is actively discussing local topics, and you have enough people who already come to your site that can spread the word when the local gossip goes dot-com, then it'll work. If you don't get any traffic now, then it'll never get big enough to be useful if you just revamp it. If your local community is filled with introverts that don't talk to each other anyway, giving them a way to ignore each other online won't make much difference either.

    Of course, you could always try it and see.

  • The Internet is about erasing distance (Score:3, Insightful)

    by redelm ( 54142 ) on Wednesday June 12, 2002 @08:51AM (#3685318) Homepage
    As another poster has said, it depends very much on circulation/readership. If you don't have enough quality posters, your blog will die.

    The Internet is a wonderful thing in many ways, one important one being that it enables widespread individuals to congregate based on their interests, not geography. It enables the dilute to concentrate and achieve a critical mass for community. It does so by erasing distance barriers and discussing items of widespread interest.

    You propose swimming upstream, forgoing the distance erasure and concentrating on local issues. I doubt Berkeley has a large enough interested population to make this work. Most likely, the blog will be taken over by a cabal. SanFranciso or the BayArea might have a population large enough.

    • Whilst concentrating on local issues will limit the audience that audience could still be quite large. I've worked with a number of local/regional sites and we've always found that the readers we get from outside that area are always far more than the local population.

      On the content side I'd reccomend tempering purely local issues with issues/slant that whilst local are likely to be of interest to people outside the immediate area. I guess the Berkeley is going to have a big interest from people who have attended the university or who wish to do so.

      I don't really know enough about Slashcode to comment on it's suitablility. LiveJournal [livejournal.com] might be worth considering?

      Stephen

  • If the community is involved (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Wednesday June 12, 2002 @08:52AM (#3685330)
    The thing that is useful about blogs is that you can draw a community that generates content for *itself*. Now, having a blog so that 3 or 4 employees alone could post "updated news" would probably be rather pointless. However, if the blog was local community-centered and *integrated* with the newspaper, you could do things like publish the most popular posts/threads in a real physical newspaper product. *That* would be useful.
    • Just look at Kuro5hin.org [kuro5hin.org] ... it is not based on slashdot, but IMHO, that's a good thing. It manages to keep a pretty high S/N ratio even though people have never met. (Actually, some people, mostly in the UK do get together on the weekends, all organized through the site)

      It attracts some seriously interesting journalistic content, and to my knowledge, noone has ever been paid for writing a story.

      --Robert
  • I think that you're going to find that having an open posting area for general news is going to result in alot of rumors and libelous rants being posted by angry and/or disturbed people.

    When I was looking at buying property in a town in Northern New York, I ran across a newspaper (now defunct) that offered uncensored forums for users. It was basically a Slashdot "BSD" section, with users accusing the police chief of being a member of a satanic cult, claiming the mayor was molesting 6th graders and similar stuff.

    The Albany Times-Union ( www.timesunion.com ) offers discussion forums on a few selected issues on a regular basis. They are heavily moderated and only discuss national or very big local stories.

    • Yep. I ran a newspaper site with open forums, and it devolved into a cesspool of libelous acrimony. It became a lawsuit waiting to happen. I don't think any lawsuit against the paper would have succeeded, but the forums were really pissing off a lot of people - parents, and some members of the community who had been maligned in them.
      So, considering not only the legal risks but the fact that the forums were no longer contributing anything positive to the paper or community, we shut 'em down.
  • The Slashdot model isn't a good one for local news, but there's much that news sites can and should learn from it.

    Slashdot is not designed to support the organization of news. It's a first-in, first-out queue. It's reverse-chron. Major stories and minor stories are treated equally, all jammed together onto a long, windy homepage.

    And the whole concept is built around text. Mind you, I'm not opposed to text, but a good news site also employs informational graphics, photography, audio, video and interactive graphics.

    It's a poor model for building online community. Slashdot is a fire-and-forget forum. Does anybody go back and read a thread after they've posted? The software certainly doesn't provide any help. Just look at the quality of discussion here. It's primarily snappy quips, and almost never conversation. Conversation is a back-and-forth process.

    Having said all that, I've seriously considered using a Slashdot-alike system for a high-volume college conference sports site. The Slash-like front end would support posting and discussion of major stories, and would be backed by a tremendously deep automated statistical system (built on our proprietary technology). I think the model works for that particular niche application. (Unfortunately, it's simpler to write a system from scratch than figure out how to get Slashcode running on an existing high-volume site.)

    Where general news sites can learn the most from Slashdot is just the top-level concept: Let your users become part of the site. I've been agitating on this point for years:

    The Internet is a participative medium

    Community is a process, not a place or thing

    Participation is driven by interest, utility and passion, not by institutions, organization, or geography

    Community can and should be at the core of any Web site

    A Web site creates value by contextual integration of content, community, and commerce

    User-contributed content, especially discussion content, can add tremendous value to a news presentation. I'm not in the least bit dissuaded by examples of morons running amok in message boards -- that's like pointing to examples of bad poetry, and insisting that poetry is bad. A well-administered interactive community is one of the most powerful assets a Web site can ever hope to develop.

  • A weblog is inherently visible to the entire world. It's hard enough getting a significant readership -- from whereever you can -- than getting the attention of a local group, not otherwise linked by their interests. Therefore, I would say that very few local weblogs would be successful. Exceptions might be a weblog in a small town with no other significant news source. Another exception might be a huge city like LA where only a tiny percentage of the population might be sufficient to make the weblog successful.

    A city like mine of about 150K population and several local TV stations, many radio stations, a major newspaper, etc. would be a tough nut to crack. Meanwhile, our newspaper has an online edition, adding online competition.
  • I love the idea. I wish my local paper would do this. It makes the news more timely but most of all it provides a way to address the fact that all news is biased, ill informed and flawed to a certain extent. As with Slashdot the real value isn't in the story but in the following discussion. Again, I would love this.

    Here's the crux, though. Most people don't get it. I should say almost all people don't get it. Sure blogs are gaining popularity and blogs are getting noticed as a form of journalism but this is with early adopter types and people who feel very comfortable in front of a computer. I would guess that unless a paper is based out of a major tech center or even a college town, it will fail with a blog format - for now. The "internet" was the same way though. I would let the hype do its job and then launch. Then again it may not cost much. You could start today and let it slowly grind along until it picks up enough readers/posters to get noticed. Then you can say you were way ahead of your time.
  • A news based web site [poliglut.com] cannot work.

    Well, I guess I may be a little bitter. ;-)

    I actually think that your idea is a good one and hope it works out. There is, of course, a world of difference between a print platform going to the web with all the built in advertising you can give yourself to the target audience and what I was trying to do on poliglut.

    Don't underestimate the number of people you need visiting in order to have a weblog work well. Poliglut had something like a 1:200 poster to reader ratio. That looks to be about the same at /. so maybe there's something to that mix. So to have anything like a vibrant community I'd guess you need to have a couple thousand unique visitors a day. Not a ton, but nothing to sneeze at either.
  • I am not a developer neither a paid promoter of Drupal [drupal.org], but I think it has what you need.

    It's a news system, pretty much like Slashdot. The major difference is the submission queue, like Scoop [kuro5hin.org] that runs Kuro5hin [kuro5hin.org], and anyone can rate comments.

    Slashcode [slashcode.com], which runs Slashdot, is better for targetted news, IMHO. The selective karma system allows wiser users to rate comments. For a wider audience website, I think you need to give more freedom of choice to your users.

    Oh, and Drupal also allows users to build blogs, it has a news feed script, collaborative book and a forum. It has a wider scope.

    About the specifics of your problem, yes, I do think blogging can be useful for local newspaper. The citizens will get to know each other, and feel like they were part of a community. I would say go for it. A news script performs the tasks that you want, and if you can enhance the community spirit of your users, better.

  • Yeah ... I think it will work. At the very least I know that my productivity will drop to zero as I try to stay abreast of and comment on local, regional, national, international and Slashdot news. Bugger.

  • How about a network of weblogs? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Dave Winer [userland.com] proposes a rather radical approach, but you could certainly pick up a few ideas from him.

    A decentralized network of weblogs hosted by the paper would have greater 'network effects' that a Slashdot style site, because personal publishing spaces are les vulnerable to attack. Slashdot's meta-moderation, while necessary for this size site, also requires a large number of users in order to work. individual weblogs provide a more immediate benefit.
  • I think it could work quite nicely. You obviously wouldn't want the same exact /. model. Your editors would continue to be true editors, and the story submissions would really be lead submissions.

    An alternative to doing this would be to combine a "tradional" web news site with the ability of readers to post comments and relevant links (call it a community board). Also, since news sites are resources for school children, you'd want to do something to insure appropriate content, or lock out underaged kids.

  • How do you deal with the likes of serial goatse.cx posters? Mrs Angry Mother of America will launch a campaign (or lawsuit) against you the first time she's sees a goatse.cx post before it's moderated. She won't want to hear that you're a common carrier, or that it's her responsibility to "police" this community. She'll just want to know why you aren't taking reponsibility for protecting her children for her.

    Likewise, what about UC spammers, people who will use it to advertise local services? Are these welcome? Unwelcome? Will you welcome plumbers but not prostitutes? Will you have a "no advertising" policy? If so, what about people who recommend (genuinely or otherwise) local businesses in response to questions?

    Sadly, I think that if you're going to do this, it will run until the legal fund runs dry, then the paper will pull it. But hell, go for it. I'd like to be proved wrong.

  • I Wouldn't Bet On It (Score:2, Informative)

    by InitZero ( 14837 )

    I am the 'computer guy' for a local paper.

    Since you're THE computer guy and not A computer guy, I take it you're in a smaller market (under 75K Sunday?).

    We are looking into a revamp of our site,

    Before you even think about online discussion groups, make sure your core web site is solid. I am an avid newspaper reader but can't stand most newspaper web sites. (Including my own to a large extent.)

    Do you, as Slashdot users, think a local Slashdot style newspaper would be successfull?"

    Maybe, but you haven't really give us enough information. How many of your readers use the internet? How large is your existing web audience? Do you get lots of letters to the editor? Do you have a huge out-of-town audience?

    Let me give you a little background.

    I'm a Senior Unix Sys Admin in the Editorial Systems Support group of my newspaper (265K daily / 385K Sunday -- and growing!). Before entering the technology end of the business, I was studied photojournalism and was Managing Editor of my college paper. I have more than 12 years in the industry pretty evenly split between content and support.

    On top of that, my paper is very aggressive when it comes to multiple mediums. We have the paper as well as online (of course) but we also have a 24-hour cable station and will probably buy a radio station as soon as the FCC gets off our back. (We also are telephone interactive for horoscopes, news, sports, etc., have a branded sign company, weekly shopper and a direct marketing group. We cover all the bases but these are smaller parts of a very big whole.) Because of the high level of integration between our three primary formats, we have been a model for other newspapers.

    So, we're a fairly forward-thinking newspaper with a huge corporate footprint backing us up. Which brings us to Slashdot style web logs... they aren't even on the radar screen.

    When I ask about them I hear that they are too resource intensive. Unless you are prepared to have them run totally unmoderated (not an option for most 'family' newspapers), they require staff to approve every post. And, what is the upside, really? They only tend to draw the most rabid readers -- readers we already have in our back pocket. So, there is a support burden but no net gain in readership.

    Web logs are great when you want to sell ad impressions and don't mind links to http://goatse.cx/ [goatse.cx] on a regular basis. Banner ads ain't what they used to be and goatse.cx in unacceptable. There isn't money to be made here.

    I won't say that the web log is a bad idea since letters to the editor, Dear Abby and the gripe line are fairly popular, but I also wouldn't put my job on the line for that functionality. Get your core site working and then see if you have enough traffic and participation to see if the web log is going to be workable.

    InitZero

  • There is a network of locally based media groups, called Independent Media Centers, that maintain sites of locally oriented news content contributed by users. Content is not limited to just text stories, users are able to contribute any kind of multimedia file. There is a network of approximately 100 such sites located on 6 continents and in over a dozen languages. The network is decentralized with each local group completely autonomous.

    The origins of Indymedia are through the anti-corporate globalization movement and that tends to the kind of content on most sites. The audience has been widening gradually so there's more content on a wider range of issues.

    There's an umbrella site at www.indymedia.org [indymedia.org] that pulls content from the local sites.

    I should say the Indymedia network is much more than just a bunch of websites. With each site there is a group of people that do media tranings, film showings, public access tv shows, newspapers. Some maintain offices that act as community centers.

    We're always looking for people to contribute content and to volunteer, especially geeks [indymedia.org]. Check out an IMC near you.

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