How to engage bloggers into the newspaper

Here are some tips from John Wilpers of Innovation: You need to go out into the community, find the quality bloggers, send them an e-mail or call them on the phone. ”It does not take a lot of convincing.”

Mr. Wilpers, a consultant for Innovation Media Consulting Group, promotes an idea that quality bloggers can help newspapers to be more relevant to the audience, grow readership and traffic and even revenues.

He has recently succesfully engaged hundreds of bloggers to cooperate with the Los Angeles Times.

In September he gave an interview for forum4editors.com about his ideas and in the early October he spoke on that at the INMA Outlook 2009: European conference in Vienna.

”Most newspapers are run by a very small group of mostly older, mostly male people who don’t have a clue what’s going on in the community at large, particularly in a younger community. So we need what is going on in the blogosphere outthere to be brought in to bring people from the community to the newspaper and the website,” said Mr. Wilpers.

Artur Karda, a multimedia reporter at Media Regionalne, Polish part of Mecom Group, asked Mr. Wilpers for tips how to engage bloggers.

1. Research. ”You need to go out into the community, into the internet and search by either the community, your country, your city whatever your circulation are is. Find the quality bloggers. Probably there are tens of thousands bloggers and even if 10 per cent of them are good, that’s still a ton of content.”
2. Invitation. ”And then you bring them in. You write them a letter, you send them an e-mail rather, you call them up on the telephone, and say: ‘We would like to bring you into the newspaper’s website and the print paper’s pages. Excerpt is in the print paper and the current post on the website - pointing back to your website. So what we gonna do is we gonna initially drive traffic to our website and then send it to you. So you are going to gain vastly more readers than you could even dream of today, because of the power of the newspaper.”
3. The main reason for bloggers to accept this invitation. ”There are only a few of bloggers who get a lot of traffic and most bloggers don’t. So if you go to a blogger and say: ‘I am going to put you in front of 800 thousand people [who read the LA Times],’ it does not take a lot of convincing. That’s a lot of eyeballs.”

According to Mr. Wilpers, the newspapers’ blogging platforms he worked on were closed only to politicians. ”If a politican wants to get in, he should pay like an advertiser,” he thinks.

Watch full interview with John Wilpers

(Video interview made by Artur Karda, a multimedia reporter at Media Regionalne, Polish part of Mecom Group.)

More ideas and tips from Mr. Wilpers

• Read Marek Miller’s post on forum4editors.com: Blogs may help newspapers grow revenues
• Read Grzegorz Piechota’s interview on forum4editors.com: Make bloggers allies of your newspaper
• Read John Wilpers’ blog: Newspapers and local bloggers, a powerful partnership

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