Better Strategies for Online Commentary and Zoning Editorial Content

Their strategies included:
1. Require registration for user comments to serve reader interests and the agenda of the newspaper. One paper currently doing this is USA Today’s website. On USA Today they actually take pull quotes from user comments and put them up at the banner of the page. I think this means the paper wants to show their readers they care about their user comments, and they even have user profiles. This is borderline “MySpace-y,” but if it is managed well, I think it could work. The biggest idea behind user comments is to create discussions and then nourish them along. This will require a lot of staff time at first, and I think this is something the editors need to be aware of.
2.Utilize Widgets on website. These tiny windows of information are portable and can be taken from the newspaper and placed on people’s own blogs or websites and passed around.
3. Geo-tagging. This concept was discussed on Monday, and although the concept seems very complicated, it can be very useful. You really just need to have stories tagged to specific places and geographical coordinates. A good way to see where you should have geo-tags is to see where the majority of your users are from and then have stories tagged to that location. This is another good way to utilize user comments and incorporate their content and voice onto your page. The real point behind this is to let people use the computer to virtually visit a location and then join a discussion.

I am happy to see some mid-size dailies taking a part in the discussion of improved online content. What I think they need to remember is that just because their papers may have a local focus, that does not mean they need to have sub-par interactive capabilities. Local focus news is very conducive to these types of tools because communities really care about “their” paper and its content.