News Leadership 3.0
July 02, 2009
The mega network of women bloggers fosters a clean online conversation with clear guidelines and engaged users. “The Internet is perfect for passionate debate about issues people really care about. However, these debates must stop short of abusive behavior ... if the community is going to thrive,” says CEO Lisa Stone
I still hear complaints from journalists at established news organizations about vile comments posted on their sites and the amount of time they spend monitoring them (either before or after the comments go live). Sadly, the frustration gets between journalists and communities they need to engage.
BlogHer is a network of women bloggers that reaches about 14 million women each month. With thousands of bloggers and such a large audience, you might expect a deluge of problematic comments, right?
Not so, says BlogHer CEO Lisa Stone. Other than SPAM, take downs are fairly rare, Stone says. She believes having clear guidelines for comments and engaging users in helping enforce them is key. Guidelines, Stone emphasizes, not rules that limit expression.
“The First Amendment is a key part of my personal religion as a journalist. And I don’t believe in a universal code of conduct for all sites on the Internet—sites on the Iraq war should not be held to the same standards as sites about children’s programming.
“That said, my experience working with women online since 1997 has convinced me that Web conversations are consistently more predictable and valuable to a community if they are moderated within certain guidelines. I’ve learned that civil disagreement should be encouraged. The Internet is perfect for passionate debate about issues people really care about. However, these debates must stop short of abusive behavior (harassment, abuse, stalking) if the community is going to thrive.”
Stone wrote the BlogHer guidelines in 2005, when she and two colleagues founded the network. She says they still work today. In “What are your community guidelines?” BlogHer explains its commitment to civil discourse and describes types of comments that are unacceptable and will be taken down. It’s a fairly long list with specifics.
Stone says they work for BlogHer’s bloggers and for the site’s advertisers as well.
The site’s content management system (Drupal) makes it “easy for any user to report content that violates these guidelines. And that’s the key. If you have an engaged community, where members care about the environment and conversation, users will help moderate and protect the space. Our amazing contributing editors have always reinforced our guidelines, but the guardians now are our users.”
I see an important distinction here. BlogHer sought to create a community around blogs and comments and has succeeded in growing it and making money from it. I suspect many traditional journalists still see comments as a sideshow to be tolerated rather than a main event. I think that perspective has to change before news sites can achieve anything close to a robust, civil conversation. Unfortunately, newsroom staff reductions make that ever more challenging.
In addition to guidelines, there are other practices that help foster good conversation online. I recommend this post by Mark Potts for details.
(Thanks to Susan Mernit for pointing out BlogHer’s guidelines.)
By Michele McLellan, 07/02/09 at 1:25 am
Posted in Blogging | Commenting
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July 01, 2009
EveryBlock, which aggregates news and data at the neighborhood block level, makes its source code public so developers in any community can make it their own
EveryBlock scrapes the Web for content of interest and makes it available by neighborhood down to the block level. Simply input an address and it will show you links to news, links to public data such as building permits, rezoning proposals, liquor licenses, restaurant inspections and, of course, crime reports. Developed with the help of a $1.1 million grant from the Knight Foundation, It’s online in more than a dozen cities.
EveryBlock developer Adrian Holovaty announced publication of the code.
Over the past two years, EveryBlock has been funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The purpose of the grant was twofold: to launch this experiment in “micro-local” news, and to release the source code. Today, as our grant period comes to an end, we’re fulfilling that second purpose.
“You can read more about the open-sourcing and download the code at our source code page. (Keep in mind it’ll probably make sense only if you’re a web developer/programmer.) We hope this extensive code base helps spark lots of great work.”
Holovaty said EveryBlock would continue operating as a private company. But he wouldn’t say more about plans for now.
By Michele McLellan, 07/01/09 at 1:30 pm
Posted in Databases | Knight 21st Century News Challenge | Local news
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June 29, 2009
The Minneapolis online news start up brings a Twitter sensibility to serve small, local advertisers
As Paul Gillin pointed out, local news organizations can do much more to serve small local advertisers—a $24 billion market nationwide. So it’s exciting to see MinnPost.com experimenting with a new service that enables small local advertisers to post short feeds on all pages of the Minneapolis news site for a modest weekly fee.
Here’s how Kramer describes the goal of the service, Real-Time Ads, in his blog:
Very simply, our goal is to create a fast-paced marketplace, full of advertisers’ messages that are newly posted and thus up-to-date, so that readers will want to keep coming back to check out what’s happening.
Imagine a restaurant that can post its daily lunch special in the morning and then its dinner special in the afternoon. Or a sports team that can keep you up-to-date on its games and other team news. Or a store that could offer a coupon good only for today. Or a performance venue that can let you know whether tickets are available for tonight. Or a publisher or blogger who gives you his or her latest headline.
Real-Time Ads looks like it offers a few things that have often been missing from the advertising portfolios of news organizations:
- It’s easy to post. Anyone who is already sending out promotional messages on Twitter or via RSS can push them out on MinnPost.
- It’s cheap. The service is free during a four-week beta test. After that, MinnPost Editor Joel Kramer expects to charge each advertiser under $100 a week for the service.
- It likely will not require a great deal of labor on the part of the news organization if it catches on.
Kramer notes that other sites are trying similar models, including Chicago’s news www.windycitizen.com.
The service is very Twitter-like, with the most recent ad appearing at the top of the list. It does not look like it will lend itself to comparison shopping the way a good online classified service might.
Still, it’s a promising piece of the advertising puzzle. Perhaps most importantly, the service recognizes that small is the new big. Local news organizations are unlikely to a return of anything remotely resembling the traditional advertising portfolio dominated by relatively few very large accounts. Instead, news organizations must build portfolios of small local accounts and give them diverse ways of reaching the public.
Bill Mitchell at Poynter Online discusses Real-Time Ads and Zachary Seward has a video interview with Kramer at the Nieman Journalism Lab.
Do you think this model would work for your site? How are you capturing local advertising dollars online?
By Michele McLellan, 06/29/09 at 4:38 am
Posted in Advertising | Innovation
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June 23, 2009
In a guest post, Julia Scott of BargainBabe.com offers tips for news entrepreneurs. BargainBabe.com helps people save money on everyday expenses.
Knight Digital Media Center recently hosted a bootcamp for news entrepreneurs. Most were start ups in the making, but Julia Scott’s BargainBabe.com is up and running. I asked Julia to share a few lessons and tips from her experience so far.
Scott says she is “a cheapskate by nature and a journalist by training.” She makes a living off her savvy-spending BargainBabe.com.
By Julia Scott
I left my job as a reporter/blogger/columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News in January 2009. Now I work for myself as a blogger at BargainBabe.com, which helps people save money on everyday expenses. In almost six months of working for myself I’ve learned a few things.
- The customer is no longer the reader. My site is free to visitors but I make money by syndicating my content and selling advertising. As a print reporter, my primary goal was to serve readers. In business, you answer to the people who pay you - your customers. As an entrepreneurial journalist, I combine both priorities: meeting reader needs and serving customers. Without both, I won’t survive.
- Social media is as important as everyone says it is, but also because it’s free. I’m bootstrapping BargainBabe.com not just because I’m frugal, but because I have little money to invest in my business. If you are an entrepreneurial journalist, you will find yourself in the same moneyless boat. You need to be on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to gain new readers and develop your brand in the Internet age, but also because it costs nothing. No publicity is bad publicity, but free publicity is even better.
- Learn from failures. Working independently means forcing yourself to find successes in each misstep, because otherwise it really is too depressing. You’ve got no one to gripe and vent and commiserate with. Plus, self-doubt can kill your tolerance for risk. And without taking chances and pursuing many, many opportunities, you probably won’t be successful. Instead of carrying out failures, create successes from them by taking away a lesson or remembering what you did well.
- Do what you do best. The internet will run you over unless you are hyper-efficient. Not only are 100 people or more doing something just like you, many of them are probably doing it better. You could spend all day running after a story a rival beat you on, or you could link to it and move on. Figure out what can you alone offer and crank that out. Do what you do best, and link to the rest.
- Forget loving what you do, you’ve got to be obsessed with your job. That means telling every person you meet about your site, constantly forging business relationships, and living your brand. When people ask what I do I take it as an opportunity to recruit a new reader by telling them about BargainBabe.com and passing out one of my hot pink fliers. I write my own press releases partly because PR firms are so expensive, but also because I can’t pay anyone to be as passionate about my business as I am.Harness your passion for your business and share it with the world.
By Michele McLellan, 06/23/09 at 3:14 am
Posted in Blogging | Business model | Emerging roles and jobs
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