12. Highlight Community Contributions

(NOTE: This post is part of a series. Series index.)

Don’t “ghettoize” content by and about communities in your area—especially if you haven’t been doing a great job of connecting with them before.

Highlight and prominently display (alongside your professional content) the best contributions from community members. Could include…

• Comments left on your site (stories, forums) or letters/voice mails to editors or reporters.
• Stories, photos, etc. contributed to your site or submitted privately.
• Postings from local people to blogs, forums, social media venues
  
• Content from community publications.

Of course, always get permission to republish, and offer payment as warranted. Money demonstrates professionalism, even if it’s not a lot of money. Don’t expect to “use” them for “free content” if you think it’s good enough to highlight.

Examples and resources

• The Fray Front page of Slate.com’s active discussion forums highlights best content picked by readers, editors.

• Construct Your Community’s Info-Structure, Jan Schaffer, J-Lab.

• Misreading the Tea Leaves, Steve Outing: “Since writing my recent Editor & Publisher Online column on the lessons learned about grassroots media from the demise of my company, the Enthusiast Group, a number of commentators seem to have seized on that to suggest that ‘citizen journalism is dying.’ Combined with the demise earlier this year of hyperlocal grassroots news network Backfence.com and other failures in this realm, we now have a new wave of media people professing that this proves the concept is a failure.

  “Good grief. My company’s experience proves no such thing. As is clear to anyone who read my column, I suggested that grassroots media is a mega-trend that won’t abate, but I believe that what user content needs to succeed as a business is professional editors to be the ones to sift through it all to find the stuff that people will care about, and technology to identify and distribute content that matters to very small groups of people (e.g., everyone who lives in your neighborhood).

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