Category Archives: Community

10.29.08
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Social Media Cafe Columbus: The elections and foreclosures in St Louis

Sorry for the blogging silence here on Strange Attractor, but as I’ve mentioned, I’m currently driving across the US covering the elections. One of the things that Emily Bell at the Guardian wanted me to do was to meet up with bloggers and other social media folks on the trip, and I’ve managed to meet up with bloggers in LA, Denver and tonight a great meet-up with the Social Media Cafe crowd in Columbus Ohio. Thanks to Tim Eby of WOSU for the invitation. I met Tim and Robert Patterson in London a couple of years.

I came in a little late, but there was already a discussion about local community blogging project Ganther’s Place. People who live in the neighbourhood were using the blog to name and shame absentee landlords. They also mentioned how the blog was helping to gain the attention of traditional media to cover their concerns.

After that, Robert, Andy Carvin, who heads up the social media desk at NPR, and Anna Shoup also of NPR joined the meet-up through the magic of Skype. Andy talked about a project to monitor voting during the elections. They will use Twitter and SMS with the hashtag votereport to collect reports on voting, now during early voting and all the way through election day next week. You can already follow some early Twitter reports via Summize of Dwigger.

Robert has an absolutely fascinating project with the public broadcaster in St Louis. They are using social media to help people either facing foreclosure or falling behind in their housing payments to keep their homes. The entire focus of the project is to help people help themselves but giving them information about resources in the city. It’s about fostering community even as the fabric of the community is under strain from the housing crisis, and it’s about people finding ways to help themselves. Robert’s overall message was the potential of social media to renew community bonds and give people the tools for self-reliance.

I gave a quick overview of my social media efforts during the road trip. Twitter helped me arrange the blogger meet-up in LA. Twitter also helped me to cover the rise of homelessness during this housing crisis. I talked about how Ralph Torres in California contacted me because of the blog and gave me a foreclosure tour of Riverside California.

I also gave a quick overview of some of the technology that I’m using on this trip. I showed off Twibble, the Twitter client that I’m using on my Nokia N82. I also showed the Twitpic and geo-tagging features of Twibble. I’ll be writing more about all of this once the trip is over.

Thanks again to the folks at Social Media Cafe Columbus for the warm welcome. I’ll see you on Twitter.

10.02.08
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Web 2.0: Andrew Woolfson

Social media: use/challenge
Works for an accountancy company, which always sounds really boring. There’s a process mentality, things have to work with the way someone does stuff. Met Euan Semple a few years ago and he was talking about social media, but Andrew didn’t really quite see it. Put it to the side and about six months later, and it dawned on him was that they could do more. Was like the people who was trying to convince others to try new things. Euan set him on this road.

People at company are all worker bees, they want to do things, they don’t want to think about things and work out how things might be done. So have to get their teams working with whatever’s been put in place. So regardless of the fact that blogs and wikis are strange words and odd to say, eventually find out that the word ‘blog’ has become acceptable, ‘wiki’ maybe not so much.

How do we start working with them. Have to capture the imagination within the partnership and to use people who have a perspective. It’s not always the man at the top, could be anyone. Capture their interest and sponsorship and help their people do things. Point is that you can’t do everything for everyone. To do everything you have to go into mainstream IT, and IT is all about security and authentication. To do anything you have to be thoughtful about where you’re doing to do it. Look at points that are flowering.

Tax is one area – it depends upon information being passed quickly around the business, so that they can get an advantage from that knowledge. Soon as it’s public domain then it loses value. Big debate about competition and change, and where the Big Four are going to be, and where the second tier companies are going to be. BDO wants to be able to be apart fro the Big Four, and figuring this out is something social media can do.

In tax area, Daniel Dover, had written series of books to bring tax to life. Had an idea he wanted to do a series of movies. Marketing team were not keen on it. But he carried on and they took his idea, managed to find the money to do a YouTube channel, not a full one because that’s expensive. So started to do video and put that up.

Convinced CEO that blogs are a good way to converse with journalists, audience, all sorts of people. Had something to say and had a good style to say it with. Because of external blog, now have internal blogs too.

How to respond to generational studies, looking at the graduates coming in. Even if you’re 21, though, many of them still have the minds of a 40 year old, they don’t automatically use all the tools. But Facebook is cross-generational. Students coming in had misrepresented the acronym BDO (humorously).

HR Director things that Facebook is about dating; IT thinks that if someone wants to block it, they’ll block it; business leaders don’t know what to do – but normal business rules apply, if someone’s not working they’re not working.

Got to point with Facebook where it becomes intrinsic. Stop Facebook, then you also have to stop phone, email, text…. There is no work/life balance, there’s just life. It’s not fun is fun, work is work, there are elements of fun in work. And CEO said, “Myself, I prefer to trust people”. Write a policy about fair, sensible use. If they want to abuse that, then you have the management ability to do something so why do you need to put an electronic filter in there saying “Don’t do this”. You don’t recruit lazy, stupid people; you recruit smart people who are the leaders of the future, you don’t stop them networking.

Values of the business underpin all that. Have a Facebook group now.

People want to do stuff. Bought an island in Second Life. Wasn’t about the PR side of things, early adopters were all already there, so their entering Second Life wasn’t a story. They wanted to do something, wanted to tie that in to everything else. Have to take a view that thinks about how we look at 3D worlds and virtual solutions, and SL seemed ready made to do that.

Took the tax movie from YouTube and then carried out a session, invited tax clients to SL and premier the movie in SL. Bring a little imagination and play into what BDO is about. If we say we are entrepreneurial, different, then that’s an easy way to show it.

The idea is to take that island and rent it out to member firms. They wouldn’t have thought of that and you can give value back to them by doing it.

How do we do this? Imagination. It’s important to be yourself and to be imaginative. Support form the top. Recruit creatively.

10.01.08
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Web 2.0: Judith Lewis

Online brand reputation management
Why should businesses monitor the web? People say happy and sad things. Consumers are out there talking, blogging, it’s not just word of mouth, it’s much more pervasive – blogs go much further out. Need to commit time and resources to doing this because search results are your company brochure. People see negative messages via Google, don’t even need to go to the website.

Search results for Starbucks, Dell and Land Rover Discovery – lots of negative sites. People search, and often confronted with negative messages and it’s important that businesses know what’s going on.

Was searching for a Starbucks logo, found one in Google Images but it was linked to from a page called “witchcraft and abortion” – not a great association!

Consumerist, shows a lot of negative news or issues. Important to know what’s going on, either to manage expectations and explain what’s going on, or to learn what you need to change.

What should you be monitoring? Lots of stuff going on – websites like Consumerist, ComplaintsBoard, PissedConsumer – which is a lot of competitor-bashing, rather than real consumer issues. Also blogs, Digg, Reddit, etc.

Need to look not just at your companies, but at your key people. Set up alerts.

Example, headline about a guy called Paul Polman from Nestle was poached by Unilever. So did a search on him, found a lot of negative stuff about Nestle, as opposed to Paul, which comes up very highly in search. Digg also has every negative links on it, as does Reddit. Reddit is used, in the US at least, by very politically active people they tend to be more willing to act.

Have to be aware of what’s out there and make a decision on whether to engage. On Reddit, would never engage them because they are crazy and the negativity would mushroom. But need to know where stuff comes from.

This isn’t about panicking and being worried, but be aware.

Use something like Bloglines, or can create Google and Yahoo email alerts. Use shortcuts to quickly monitor, so bookmark a search. Use RSS to manage into. Maybe hire a professional firm if you’re a large corp with a big problem, and make sure that they can show you what they’ve done before. Don’t just use a PR company who think they can do this.

Use misspellings, associated phrases.

Do your PR in a way that it can be instantly repackaged without having to reword it, so put in your links, make sure that the link phrases are relevant, don’t make it look too corporate. Use that to get linked into your sites and push bad stuff down. Make sure that when you need to you can squish that negative message below the fold or onto the second page.

Link press releases with website pages dedicated to the news but use different copy. If you want news to get out, use different copy on your website to the news sites so that it will show up.

Don’t undervalue your company’s achievements. Talk about what you’re doing, press release it. Someone will pick it up – don’t be shy about talking about your achievements. Newswire helps you get stuff out. But do not use more than one service – journalists see that as spamming. Do not spam journalists. Use one service, target your press release carefully.

Corporate blogging, if you’re going to blog as a business, make sure that the voice is still authentic. People won’t read your press releases on a blog. Don’t turn off comments. Make sure you’re talking to people, be involved. Don’t engage trolls, if negative feedback appears, don’t delete it, check and see if you need to respond, don’t get into an argument in a public forum, unless you need to counteract negative information but avoid emotive language.

It is possible for a CEO to blog, but their time is usually limited to consider making it part of a larger project where more than one person is blogging – share the load amongst many people to get a better readership – different voices will attract different people and the people who are blogging will enjoy it more. Example, McAfee CEO uses a personal voice and only blogs when there is something to say – sometimes months between posts. Uses first person, his own personal story.

Moo is a great example – follow overheard@Moo on twitter and it’s hilarious and gives you a feeling of being closer to the people in the office, e.g. when they had too many pies (they were pied out!). It was lovely to be engaged at that level even though I don’t work there.

Feature your bloggers (like IBM) – don’t be afraid of exposing your bloggers to external people.

Are laws now that say it is illegal for businesses pretend to be someone you aren’t.

09.27.08
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Your questions about US Elections: a(nother) experiment in journalism

Suw and I talk about the US elections over breakfast all of the time, and I realised since I came back to Washington last week that despite having very little interest in politics when I first came to Washington DC ten years ago, my geekiness has now spilled over into politics. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had about politics and the economy with a range of people since I came back. Suw was asking questions that I’m sure on the on the mind of many Guardian readers, and instead of letting these conversations disappear, I realised that I wanted to capture and share those conversations.

We recorded this conversation this morning over Skype. She was sitting in our flat in London, and I was sitting in my hotel here in Washington. We used the Skype Call Recorder from Ecamm (a bank breaker at US$14.95), but if you use a PC, Pamela will do the same things plus can automatically handle uploads to FTP servers and auto posting to several blog services. I used Pamela to record broadcast quality interviews when I was at the BBC. If you use a nice broadcast quality mic such as the Snowball from Blue (a lovely wedding present that Suw and I received from our friend Vince), the sound quality is stunning. We simply used the mics on our MacBooks. The Call Recorder software has a side-by-side split screen option so we didn’t have to do anything to edit the video apart from top and tail it (edit out our pre-call and post-call chatter). In the end, it took very little production time apart from the time for the call. Viddler, the site we used to host this doesn’t like stereo audio so I had to merge the channels, but QuickTime Pro handled that with ease.

That’s the technical side of things. Technology is simply a means to a journalistic end for me, and the real aim is to expand my little experiment to anyone with a Skype connection, a webcam and a question about the US elections. Sure, I love talking to Suw about anything and everything, and she wants to talk after the vice presidential debate next week between Democratic nominee Joe Biden and Republican nominee Sarah Palin. I want to use this to open up a discussion with as many people as possible about the US election, around the US and around the world. I’d also like to see how feasible this is on the road. After next Thursday, I’ll be traveling across the US. The technical challenges are pretty minor, especially compared to previous election trips that I’ve taken. The real measure of success for this and many other journalistic experiments I have planned for the next month is the depth and breadth of the conversation. If you’d like to take part, drop me an email or leave a comment. Let’s talk. There are lots of important issues on the table, and I’m so excited about how technology opens up new possibilities for civic dialogue.

09.15.08
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Is this “against pretty much every journalistic principle”? Should it be?

Last month, Mohamed Nanabhay of Al Jazeera asked what would be the most important things to include if one was building a news website from scratch. It kicked off a great conversation, largely via Twitter. I think it’s a question that more people are asking as we are open to more radical ideas to support journalism as the print business model comes under increasing pressure.

I collected some of the responses and added some of my own, but I wanted to flag up this response from Mads Kristensen in Denmark. He recast the question in terms not of building a news site but rather a media site “since the news business is so over-commoditized by now that it’s arguable if there’s any strategic advantage in looking just at news”. Some journalists might wince at that statement, but there is a lot of truth in it. We really need to ask some hard questions about what is our unique selling point. What information, analysis or entertainment are we providing that one else does?

Mads asks a question that is increasingly on my mind:

So to my mind this is more an idea of how to redefine media as such without the legacy of the old media companies. So what would I do?

I really am beginning to think that the ideas that will redefine media, news and information in a digital age will not come from legacy companies. They are in the awkward position of trying to build a new business to support the old, and I increasingly think that two motivations are mutually exclusive.

Mars’ vision is very customer oriented, which is not a view that one would hear in most news rooms. The question is what do our readers want to read or viewers want to see but rather what do we think they need to read an see. Mars believes:

Yes, I would act a lot more according to the stated needs of the community rather to what I myself would find important. I realize that’s against pretty much every journalistic principle in the book, but ultimately I think that’s one of the reasons why media companies struggle to stay relevant. And at the end of the day I would rather stay relevant and in business.

It’s sad to think that it would be considered against ‘every journalistic principle in the book’ to think this way. Every time I express that view, I’m accused of wanting to pander to the audience. I beg to differ. Journalists who don’t know want their communities want are both out of touch and these days soon to find themselves out of a job, and only a journalist in touch with their community knows what they really need to know.

09.10.08
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Running a small to mid-size news site? Try this CMS

Steve Yelvington is one of my heroes. Last summer, we swapped stories over beer in Kuala Lumpur with Peter Ong after talking citizen media at an IFRA Asia workshop. Steve told me how he wrote a newsreader for the Atari ST in 1985 and how he got the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newsroom on the internet in 1993.

Now, Steve should be everyone’s hero. He’s working on a next-generation news site management system, and he and the folks at Morris Digital Works have pledged to release the code under the open-source GPL licence. Steve describes the design ethos of the system:

When we’re done, this will be an innovation platform, not just a content publishing and community platform. …

Open tools and open platforms are great for developers, but what we really want to do is place this kind of power directly in the hands of content producers. They won’t have to know a programming language, or how databases work, or even HTML to create special presentations based on database queries. Need a new XML feed? Point and click.

It’s based on the open-source Drupal platform, and he talks what is possible with the system.

We’re integrating a lot more social-networking functionality, which we think is an important tool for addressing the “low frequency” problem that most news sites face.

We’re going to be aggressive aggregators, pulling in RSS feeds from every community resource we can find, and giving our users the ability to vote the results up/down. We’ll link heavily to all the sources, including “competitors.”

Ranking/rating, commenting, and RSS feeds will be ubiquitous. Users of Twitter, Pownce and Friendfeed will be able to follow topics of interest.

I couldn’t agree with Steve more when he says that internet start-ups have been smart in adopting open-source tools while newspapers have failed to embrace them. That thinking has to change. Steve is looking for collaborators on the project, and I think this is a golden opportunity for news sites to work together to build a platform for their future.

08.22.08
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News site from scratch: What are the most important things to include?

I didn’t ask this question, although I think about it quite frequently. Mohamed Nanabhay, the Head of New Media with Al Jazeera, posed the question on Twitter:

Twitterverse : If you were building a news website from ground up what would be the most important things to include?

It’s a good question, a pressing question. I think that there will be a site with related services that radically disrupts the news industry. Last month, I wrote a post that asked the question of what had prevented newspapers from being successful in the digital age. Steve Yelvington, who has great depth of experience in journalism, digital or otherwise, left a left a great comment and concluded:

This ain’t just another channel. The new players, coming into the game without any frame of reference other than what’s right in front of them, are much more able to recognize that than those of us from legacy media.

What would you do with a blank tablet? What would you do without the legacy business? What do you think would be most important in launching not just a news website but a digital news service with no baggage?

Mohamed started thinking about three guiding principles for visitors: Relevance, discoveribility and depth, and Robin Hamman, of Headshift, suggested wrapping all of this in a social media layer. Lars Plougmann, also with Headshift, suggested “syndication, participation, embeddable content, bridges to the flow on the web, mobile access”.

Mandy De Waal, editor of MoneyWebLife, had several interesting ideas.

  1. Story tracking tool – which stories most popular, searched for etc ala Google, live chat with newsroom at certain times.
  2. Satire… satire… satire! A section showing people how to easily become vloggers, Thought Leader type guest columns, polls.
  3. Live feed of the newsroom in action – (but not close enough to see what they are writing about 😉
  4. Ticker tape of hyper links showing breaking story – this could be a new form or type of content aggregations.

I re-tweeted Mohamed’s question and got some great responses. John Thompson, of journalism.co.uk says: “Automatic semantic tagging, related links, user-customisable RSS, SEO friendly URLs, Apture-style auto linking, good comments system”.

Paul Bradshaw, Senior Lecturer in Online Journalism and Magazines at Birmingham City University and the man behind the Online Journalism Blog, also had a number of good ideas:

  1. RSS at every juncture – automating all activity so it’s publishable: bookmarking, twittering, blogging, email, browsing.
  2. pingback in all external linking. I’d also move away from one big powerhouse towards a network of little niches.
  3. and I’d set it up so journalists got alerts or digests when people comment on their stories, with time set aside for response

On the last point, I think that commenting systems should have RSS. With Movable Type, I occasionally use CoComment to follow the conversations that I participate in.

Revenue

And I think Craig McGinty has an excellent bit of advice: “Be as creative in making it pay as editorially.”

We all realise that the business model for newspapers is broken – especially in the United States – and it’s time to consider revenue models and multiple revenue streams. This would be especially critical for an all digital news service. The cost basis of a digital news service could be much lower than a newspaper or broadcast outlet, but the reality is that the revenue is also lower for digital right now.

Businesses need to look at new revenue streams. PaidContent (recently acquired by the folks who pay my wage) has built a successful business not simply by focusing on the digital content vertical but also by building a successful events business. I don’t think the business conferences are the only events-based businesses that content companies could sponsor. And events aren’t the only new revenue stream that a digital business should develop.

Cost basis

Legacy media companies haven’t taken advantage of the disruptive economics of digital technologies. I see a lot of newspaper companies getting into video, but instead of using low-cost digital technologies, they are chasing television and buying high-cost broadcast technology.

Smart companies are leveraging open-source technologies, but many companies suffer from ‘not made here’ syndrome, delivering projects over-budget and behind schedule.

The digital project would also start with a much leaner staff. Jeff Jarvis had this suggestion on the Guardian’s media blog:

But on my blog, I took a hypothetical newsroom staff of 100 as a round number, then cut by 30% – not draconian by today’s precedents – and asked what the priorities should be when the cutbacks come. In my hypothetical newsroom, reporting is the highest priority. The more original journalism that is done, the higher the value of the paper and its web service, the better the opportunity to stand out in links and search. Breaking news is worthwhile, but I come down heavily on the side of beat reporting: journalists who are devoted to watchdogging an area.

The Social Layer

I agree with Robin. The successful site would have a social media layer. The site has to have attention data (most viewed, commented, linked, Dugg, etc), recommendation, rating and several levels of participation.

However, I think the social-ness of the strategy can’t stop with the technology. I think the news site of the future will also have a staff focused on building community around the content. People make technology social. Journalists connected to their communities provide more relevant content to those communities and build deeper relationships with them. Social journalists, comfortable creating social media and facilitating social interaction around that content, will be the core of disruptive digital business coming to a community near you.

08.07.08
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Become a better citizen, journalist

Andy Dickinson has posted this thought-provoking illustration on his blog. To sum up the illustration: The community feels used. The audience feels ignored, but the journalist? “I got what I needed.” Andy promises more thoughts soon, but the post alone is a great beginning for a conversation.

Maybe the problem isn’t about creating citizen journalists but re-awakening the citizen in journalists? Steve Yelvington has often mused that possibly one the unintended consequences of the professionalisation of journalism is that we’ve become isolated from the communities that we serve. Put succinctly, he said:

Arrogance is the cancer of professional journalism, and we need to stop it.

A few years ago, colleagues asked me why bloggers responded to my interview requests when they had trouble getting a response. The problem was, they were often sending out form e-mail interview requests and treating bloggers, usually ordinary people, as if they were members of government or industry spokespeople. I usually started my search for a blogger through a blog search engine like Technorati. When I found a relevant post, I would quote the post and ask them if they wanted to join a discussion about the topic they had blogged about.

I also use Creative Commons licenced pictures in Guardian blog posts (Attribution licence that allows for commercial use). Unless, I’m really pressed for time, I send the Flickr user a short note and a link. They always thank me for being a good member of the community, and the sometimes even blog about the post. I’ve acted in good faith, and they have reciprocated by flagging up their photo on a Guardian post. We can be good members of both virtual and real world communities, and I think it’s one of the things that can rebuild journalists’ relationship with the people formerly known as the audience. Becoming better citizen journalists might just save professional journalism.

07.29.08
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NPR’s On the Media and ‘Comments on Comments’

As I’ve mentioned before, National Public Radio’s (US) On the Media is part of my weekly podcast diet. It was an interesting look at three different views on internet comments on articles and radio programmes. Host Bob Garfield interviewed This American Life’s Ira Glass, ‘professional writer and critic’ Lee Siegel and Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant. It spawned a round of very interesting blog posts and comments – Comments on comments on comments, as Jeff Jarvis put it. It soon spilled out onto Twitter from with an interesting discussion between Jay Rosen and Kevin Marks.

Kevin Marks comments on NPR's On the Media

Jeff says:

But I’ve argued that we’re looking at commenting the wrong way. We spend so much of our time playing wack-a-mole with the dirty little creatures who dig up the garden that we miss the fruits and flowers. It is far more productive to curate the good people and good comments — whether they occur under an article or, better yet, via links — than it is to obsessively try to clean up life, which can’t help but be messy.

The tsk-tskers treat the web as if it is a media property and they judge it by its worst: Look what that nasty web is doing to our civilization! But, of course, that’s as silly as judging publishing by the worst of what is published.

And I have to agree with Jeff that it’s a bit rich for Gawker to be arguing against comments on newspaper sites. On the Media linked to the post, and Gawker sounds like many in the newspaper industry who pine for a simpler time when newspapers enjoyed a near monopoly when it came to people’s time and attention. Channeling their inner newspaper nostalgist, Gawker says:

Newspapers have more important things to do than worry about comments—like, say, report the stories that blogs so desperately need in their 24-7 quest for content! After all, blogs are often not equipped to regularly break the news, and we need content to chew on.

Of course, comments are OK on Gawker because they’re a blog, they argue. Might the mighty Gawker be a suffering a crisis in ComScore with all the competition?

Of the three points of view, I almost said Amen out loud as I travelled on the Tube when Roanoke Times editor Carole Tarrant said, that she was surprised that newspaper are still having this conversation.

It’s not the Wild West. I don’t believe in putting comments on every story. … I thought we had this (conversation) in 2002, and papers are getting in this conversation and acting surprised that there is this ugliness out there.

She then goes on and lays out a considered approach to comments and communities online. After the Virginia Tech shooting, they originally put up their standard message board. They took it down when it devolved into a loud discussion about gun rights and replaced it with a tribute site from Legacy.com (in the interest of disclosure, a good friend of mine works for Legacy), a site that powers the obituaries of several newspaper sites. The message boards are moderated by Legacy.com, and she said that the tribute site is still active.

Derek Powazek also wrote an excellent post criticising the On the Media segment. The main problem he saw with the piece was that Bob Garfield “lumps all commenters, and commenting systems, together. On the web, not all comments are created equal”. He says:

Yes, if you open your site to comments from people who do not have to register or create an account, you’ll get a lot of unfiltered craziness. That’s because you’re not doing your job as a host. Imagine a newspaper of infinite pages with no editors where anyone with a keyboard could contribute. Sounds fun to me, but not a recipe for consistent thoughtfulness. …

The story completely missed moderation queues, reputation management systems, or any of the hundreds of comment systems built over the last decade to address this very problem.

I’m with Derek. The media never focus on positive communities online, but it’s not just the media’s coverage of online communities that needs to improve. Most online communities hosted by media companies could use some improvement, but as Derek points out, there are tools and a lot of experience out there. Unfortunately, most of it is either outside of media organisations or was lost when digital departments at news organisations were gutted after the dot.com crash.

Some of the solution to improving online communities and conversations on websites is using the best technology, but there are also content and culture issues to be aware of. Kevin Marks shares wisdom and lessons learned about online spaces. For people who are part of internet culture, some of this is well known, but it’s not common knowledge in media companies. (I’m fortunate to work with one of the best in the business, Meg Pickard, our head of communities at the Guardian.) Kevin highlights some great work done in terms of online communities and some common traits of those communities that don’t work:

The communities that fail, whether dying out from apathy or being overwhelmed by noise, are the ones that don’t have someone there cherishing the conversation, setting the tone, creating a space to speak, and rapidly segregating those intent on damage.

News websites were never a ‘build it and they will come’ proposition, especially in today’s distributed world, and in the rush to build communities so that they will come, news oganisations are building the spaces but sometimes not preparing for when people come. Get enough people together online or offline, and not all of the experience will be positive or pleasant. The response shouldn’t be to shut down the community and bar the door.

News organisations need to look outside of their immediate area of experience and find communities that have worked and learn from them. This isn’t an area of blue-sky experimentation. There is a lot of experience and expertise out there. With a lot of this, news orgs will just have to look beyond other news orgs. There’s a big world out there on the internet, but it’s not always scary.

UPDATE: As Jay Rosen says via Twiter: “Jeff Jarvis tells Bob Garfield to join the conversation, and points out how many people online did the homework he didn’t.” Jeff highlights not only posts but excellent contributions from Doc Searls and Tish Grier in his comments. There is a lot of history to be learned from, and news organisations don’t need to re-invent the wheel or feel that they are starting from scratch.

In defence of news orgs, I not only believe but have said publicly, that when the media adds community features, they need to be ready to manage that community from day one because they already are dealing with large amounts of traffic. They often run into teething problems that most communities don’t reach until much later.

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07.24.08
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Local can work, complete with facts and figures

In the recent round of virtual mud-slinging in the ‘curmudgeons’ versus digital journalists, one of the arguments by way of assertion is that hyper-local doesn’t work. It is, of course, a reductionist argument, lumping together a wide range of strategies. A lot of the assertions are short on facts, but Vickey Williams at the Readership Institute highlights two dailies that are succeeding in creating local community. From the Bakersfield Californian:

My thought is that it’s because this paper lives up to its role as an essential connector and network builder. Some stats from Molen this week: 1,192 individual Bakersfield.com blogs launched since the newspaper’s site began hosting weblogs two years ago this month; 314 updated within the last three months. Add in the newspaper company’s nine other sites (including MasBakersfield, NorthwestVoice, NewToBakersfield; and their newest, RaisingBakersfield.com) and the number goes to 2,780 blogs launched, of which 655 have been updated in the last three months.

That community content represents about 18 percent of Bakersfield.com’s traffic and 25 percent of total traffic throughout the local network of sites, Molen said. “It is easily the fastest growing source of traffic for us.”

Another interesting metric is the number of people who have created public profiles in the company’s online social network, and in doing so, essentially endorse its brands. For Bakersfield.com, the number is 16,792; across all 10, it’s 31,868.

I would be curious to see their frequency numbers. What is the average frequency of their visitors? Is it better than the average visit of two pageviews per visitor per month?

,