Local bloggers search for community connection in legacy media
Yesterday, Gannett’s Tennessean newspaper launched a local blog directory called On Nashville. It’s a work in progress as they figure out who is going to author the posts and what the site will offer local bloggers.
In OnNashville’s last post authored two days ago, the Tennessean’s Knight Stivender ended her thoughts with “R.I.P. Nashville is Talking. We’ll miss you,” a reference to a local pioneering aggregator blog, Nashville Is Talking (NIT). WKRN-TV shut the site down after I left to pursue opportunity in digital media.
The effort by mostly print and broadcast to figure out how best to harness the power of local blogs seems to languish in experiment mode as legacy media resources shift to triage a dying industrial-aged distribution model for news and information. Blogs have long urged legacy media for the better part of the past decade to pay attention to the dramatic shift in the way people prefer receiving news and information. The message seems to have arrived on the desks at the top ten years too late.
None the less, the experiments continue. Last year, KOMO-TV partnered with Datasphere to create what they called “hyperlocal neighborhood websites.”
Curiously, Datasphere doesn’t link to examples of their own work at KOMO or elsewhere. On my last visit to see how they were doing at KOMO, all I saw were sparse postings by KOMO staff and AP on “hyperlocal neighborhood websites” that simply listed links to local blogs.
And here lies one of the problems. When legacy media focuses solely on how to, as Datasphere puts it, “get the most from online opportunities, helping them to develop new markets and generate maximum return from their investment in content,” you get this, and then you end up with this.
There are other examples, but what I want to hear are your ideas.
What should a serious effort involving local bloggers in a community website look like, and what would you tolerate to make it viable? What value do you want to see from an “NIT” in return?
What do I want to see and what is cost-effective are obviously two different animals.
What I want to see is the return of the model as it was when there was a full-time HOST of the forum who could devote their entire day to culling through the local and national blogs to find the most compelling items to post and link, along with their commentary. Add to that the opportunity for that person to organize activities that the local blogging community could come together and learn (via special speakers, etc.), participate in charitable activities), and have meet-ups. THAT’S what I would love to see. That’s always been my vision.
Yup, I agree with Ginger, but I would add that due to the caustic atmosphere online these days, comment moderation is a must. That takes up time, of course, but it is my contention that it is as important as linking to other posts and writing commentary. Finding and featuring new voices is critical, since the other local aggregators have become mutual admiration societies, instead of an overview of the collective local blogosphere.
Whatever happens, best of luck!
Very constructive. Thanks you two! Ginger, I do wish we had the resources to do events over the past three years. Those were nice, and bringing in speakers to teach skills or share tools is a great idea.
Mack you raise an issue I think is a common problem that even Music City Bloggers experienced. That is when you aggregate personal posts, authors / curators do tend to have their favorites. There is nothing wrong with that until people feel left out or feel you are judging their person life with snark or pith.
I’m not sure how that’s best addressed other than having a managing editor help refresh the curator’s perspective by tasking them with finding themes among the day’s offered postings. That can have curators look for content in places you might not otherwise read. Thoughts?
Interesting thoughts. You’re right, Christian. When you have a moderator, it can be difficult to be objective. I know I have my favorite blogs I visit repeatedly and they certainly wouldn’t appeal to everyone. Themes might help or maybe you have guest moderators who could cull the web for content. It all depends on what you are trying to achieve - a news aggregator or a news commentary. I think those are slightly different.
They certainly are, Laura. I think news aggregation and commentary generally doesn’t polarize an audience personally as much as it does on policy. But aggregating more personal content has its own set of challenges many aggregators can tell you all about. That said, there is a large portion of the community that thoroughly enjoys keeping up with characters curated by a single author.
I like the term “legacy media.” Did you coin that term?
I think the problem, as you pointed out, is that the “legacy media” views the blogosphere as a money-making opportunity. What they fail to recognize is that most successful blogs have come about and have a following because they provide information people can’t get anywhere else. The blogosphere is a reaction to the failure of the “legacy media”; the fact that corporate news outlets like Gannett are trying to get a piece of the action shows that they really don’t understand what they did wrong to begin with. They haven’t come to terms with their failure.
Southern Beale, as far as I know. I haven’t heard anyone else call it that. I started calling it that knowing that “legacy” within corporate parlance means “the old way.” I hate the term “main stream media” because you can’t get more mainstream than, say, mobile or web.
The industrial-aged distribution of news and information through print, radio and TV truly are “legacy” systems. They are no longer in the business of delivering news. They are in the trucking business, the paper business, and everything else that cost more than simply delivering a low cost digital copy of the news directly to consumers.
The challenge it seems to me is to get the industrial age media to stop treating all blogs simply as detached letters-to-editors. Expressing opinion may be all to which some bloggers aspire and all for which some journos and politicos wish, but some of us have larger intentions. I have been told on several occasions that my hyperlocal blog helped inform opinions, spur public attention, and organize and leverage action, which were definitely goals I set. Taking blogs seriously as the products of independent writers coordinating work off the monitor will go a long way to creating an effective community website in my opinion.
I’m honestly hoping that blogging is thinning out, which suggests to me that those who remain are serious about the craft of writing or of long-form social & artistic expression regardless of the medium. By expanding, Twitter and Facebook are doing die-hard bloggers a service. That prospect should also make logistical work of a blogging community moderator easier in my opinion.
But I think the media ship–if it doesn’t sink under its own weight–is going to be slow turning to change. I fully expect that it will continue to gravitate toward public relations, political influence, and unabashed celebrity so that any claims to objectivity beyond pretense disappear. The only people left to journal everyday life in communities in the same ways that Pulitzer did are going to be bloggers, other independent writers, and a few broken-arrow reporters kept around to stave off media boredom. In that sense, I don’t see any viability, Christian.
Very simply: There is not a good model for legacy media that includes citizen journalists/bloggers when legacy media’s objective is to “generate maximum return from their investment in content”. Southern Beale makes a great point, “most successful blogs have come about and have a following because they provide information people can’t get anywhere else.” Doesn’t it seem odd that local, legacy media outlets seem to cover less and less hyper-local material? Do they believe that they can somehow cover the national news better than organizations well equipped to cover national news? Do they not understand that a generation of web2.0 users will find other news/information sources and consume data on their personal schedules rather than a model based on a boy making daily deliveries on a bicycle?
Legacy news media, unless it evolves quickly, will not survive another decade. People will find other/better/user-friendly sources for information. Legacy media will drown from maximizing their investment in information people can get somewhere else.