Monthly Archives: March 2007

03.18.07
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How much ‘lived experience’ does your news site cover?

News, Community, and Lived ExperienceOne of the most common mistakes that news organisations make when it comes to community is trying to build participation strategies around an extremely narrow, overly-professionalised definition of news. If you want to miss the opportunity with blogs and other forms of participation, go ahead and focus solely on news. You’ll be missing out on the vast majority of ‘lived experience’ as the Center for Citizen Media called it in a must-read report called “Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement“. I’ve been quiet this week because I’ve spent a lot of quality blogging time digesting the 66-pages in this report and the annual State of the News Media 2007 report, which if printed out would come to 600 pages.

In the Frontiers of Innovation report, Lisa Williams, with Dan Gillmor and Jane Mackay, have examined in detail both what works and the commonest mistakes and misconceptions made in building communities online. This paragraph and the graphic above just leapt off the screen at me.

Broadly speaking, the most successful sites are most effective at translating the lived experience of their community onto the web. But only a tiny fraction of lived experience is news. One way of looking at the process of wrapping an online community around a news organizationis that it’s an effort to dramatically broaden the range of lived experience represented by the news organization’s output – output that now includes content supplied by nonjournalists.

Too many times, news organisations look to participation to simply bolster the mainstream news agenda, not to broaden it. What stories are we missing? What part of the audience are we ignoring? Whose viewpoint are we ignoring?

I still remember last December when Clyde Bentley spoke about his MyMissourian.com project at a Journalism.co.uk event where I also spoke. Clyde said that his team had expected more discussion and stories about politics, especially during the US Midterms elections last year. As a matter of fact, he said:

You know what’s not popular? Politics. … Religion is far more popular than we predicted. And pictures of dogs, cats, even rats trump most copy.

Banal? Clyde even went on to say that journalists are rather poor judges of banality.

Sometime we get so close to the stories we cover that minutiae excite us a lot more than they should. I lived in and covered Washington for six years for the BBC, and I saw this happen in the Beltway bubble. Certainly, there are C-SPAN junkies that love to watch the minute-by-minute movements of the machinery of politics, but for every political news junkie, there are hundreds if not thousands of other people interested in a myriad of other things – minutiae by journalists’ standards but deeply important to them and their communities.

That’s where the bulk of the opportunity is for communities for news organisations wishing to launch community sites. It’s not all about hyper-local sites, although location is a good thing for people to coalesce around. But it will definitely require journalists to think outside of their own box if their community strategies are to succeed.

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03.17.07
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links for 2007-03-17

03.15.07
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links for 2007-03-15

03.14.07
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links for 2007-03-14

03.13.07
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Search useless for blogs

Interesting little piece from eMarketer about how people find the blogs they read. It’s really no surprise to discover that 67% of respondents find blogs through links from other blogs, and 23% via recommendations, but I like the way they analyse this for the benefit of businesses used to dealing with old-style websites who try to use search engine optimisation techniques to make their site more visible:

The fact that blog awareness is effectively spread by word-of-mouth is key for anyone using one in a campaign. Not only can you not build it and expect them to come, you cannot even build it and optimize it for search and expect them to come. Blog launches must be accompanied by links on established blogs, and some good recommendations from established, influential bloggers.

My only quibble with that advice is that you have to launch your blog without links from established blogs – you can’t just go round emailing influential bloggers and asking them to link to a blog they’ve not yet had the opportunity to read! Trust – and links – have to be earnt over time and there’s just no way round that. You can’t have a “launch accompanied by links on established blogs”, you have to launch, write what you write, and the links will come if you are good.

Another quote:

Two-thirds of blog readers said that they read to be entertained, and 43% said that they read to keep up with personal interests or hobbies (multiple answers were allowed).

Businesses really need to understand this point. People don’t read blogs to be marketed at, they read blogs to be entertained and kept up to date with stuff they are interested in. If your blog doesn’t do either of those things, it just won’t be read. Bunging any old crap up on a blog isn’t going to cut the mustard – you’ve got to be passionate, interesting, and entertaining.

Of course, none of this is news, but it’s good to see some statistics to back it up.

03.13.07
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links for 2007-03-13

03.12.07
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links for 2007-03-12

03.11.07
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Online communities thrive offline

In the late 80s, friends of mine in Rockford Illinois, where I went to high school, used to meet up with friends they met on D-Dial, a BBS system. They got together for pizza, for bowling and for D&D. It was my first experience with any type of online community, and I remember playing around online in my buddy Chuck’s attic on his Commodore 64, chatting with people and downloading the Anarchist Cookbook so we could make our own fireworks (Well, that was the plan. We never quite found the right fertiliser, although I know we scared the bejeezus out of my girlfriend at the time as we drove around town listening to free jazz and dreamed out loud about the massive rockets we’d make.) My friends had been online for years, using the simple text-based systems that pre-dated widespread access to the internet outside of universities, scientific institutions and the military.

But even then, I knew that offline community was important to online communities. It’s a common misconception that people use online communities to replace or in lieu off face-to-face, ‘real’ community. I have always rejected that, and my online communities in Flickr and via blogs reinforce or support my offline social ties, especially having friends spread over a few continents.

That belief was reinforced Friday night as I attended the DCist’s “Exposed” photo exhibition. The Warehouse Gallery was filled overflowing with people, many of whom had name tags with their real names and their DCist user IDs. Thanks Kyle for the invitation. Congratulations to the DCist crew on such an astounding success.