Make bloggers allies of your newspaper
September 22, 2008 by grzegorz.piechota
Quality local bloggers can help newspapers to make them relevant to readers and to grow revenue, says John Wilpers of Innovation Media Consulting.
There are more than 112 million bloggers in the world today and 30 more are added every minute. By the end of the day, there will be another 120,000.
That is a lot of content – and a lot of meaningless information, too. But even if 90 percent of your local bloggers have nothing meaningful to say, ten percent of them are well-informed or even experts in their field. They create top-notch content in a mind-boggling array of verticals – neighbourhood news, fashion, cars, music, sports, politics, etc. – and this content needs an audience and advertisers.
“Bloggers need exposure and newspapers have the vehicles – web and print – to give it to them. As your staff decreases in size, how will you report on your community and provide more inventory for advertisers? Quality local bloggers are a powerful answer, and not just because of the content they create”, says Mr. Wilpers.
Before he joined Innovation as a consultant, Mr. Wilpers served as an editor-in-chief of BostonNOW and Washington Examiner, free daily newspapers.
He has recently finished a four-month project organizing hundreds of local bloggers for the Los Angeles Times. Check his blog for more information about him and his activities.
John Wilpers will be speaking on October 2nd, 2008, at the INMA European Conference in Vienna, during a session titled “Inspiring change”.
Meanwhile, he gave this interview to forum4editors.com’s Grzegorz Piechota:
forum4editors: 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?
John Wilpers: 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.
(Watch John Wilpers interviewing CC Chapman, one of his best local bloggers from the BostonNOW times.)
As Dan Gilmore, Director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, 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.”
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 ethical or legal lines, you cut them off, just like you would a columnist. ?
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.
That said, however, the bloggers you would choose to publish on your website and in your paper are not “pajama bloggers” writing about their sex lives or kittens or tattoos. You choose people who are either professionals in their field or very gifted writers and observers in the field of their choice.
But to make sure your readers understand the distinction, when you put bloggers and professional reporters on a web or print page together, 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.
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.
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. ?
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 and – as a result – undermine the quality of their content?
Not at all.
An editor cannot direct bloggers. Bloggers are not professional reporters who can go to news events and gather ALL of the information and put it into a story that is as complete and balanced and objective as possible.
Besides, most bloggers do NOT write about news. Most bloggers who write about news or politics are like columnists, commenting and offering perspective.
That’s 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.
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 increased ad inventory. ?
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 reward for their efforts and too often they give up.
The bloggers who posted on BostonNOW were thrilled at the opportunity to be promoted on the website of a dailybig-city newspaper and periodically 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 was possible. They were becoming mini-stars and were increasingly recognized as important voices in their chosen area of expertise.
(Watch Mr. Wilpers interviewing another BostonNOW’s contributor: videoblogger Steve Garfield.)
A few bloggers complained that the newspaper was making money off the unpaid labors of the bloggers (as a start-up, however, we weren’t making money at all, never mind off of the bloggers). Here is a good example of how savvy bloggers currently look at the question of pay versus traffic: 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 him 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, bloggers are happy to get the exposure and reap the emotional and modest financial rewards that come from appearing in major metro daily newspapers’ websites and print products. That might change, but not if the bloggers are smart and maximize their optimization.
Thank you very much.
Tagged: blogs, INMA, innovation, interaction, internet, newspaper
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