Right here, right now, I’m going to give you a great idea, for free. Enter it in the Knight News Challenge (deadline: Oct. 15), or perhaps more likely, the Community Information Needs challenge (next year). Or fund it yourself. Or bootstrap it. Or pitch it to a local nonprofit with stimulus money to spend on [...]
All about community
New at IdeaLab: The People Formerly Known as the Audience need a new name
July 21, 2009
Over at IdeaLab, I’m continuing a conversation I started on Twitter a couple weeks ago that spilled over here as well.
What do you call your readers now that they’re participating actively in the creation and curation of unbundled media?
Do you call them a community?
Better yet, what makes an online “community” and how can local news [...]
Are your readers a community?
July 8, 2009
I asked my Twitter followers what they think of substituting the word “community” for “readers” and I’m getting lots of good responses, many of them negative.
Either I didn’t know “community” had much of a stigma, or I spent too long working with “community” newspapers to notice. Back then, it seemed like a great linguistic [...]
On IdeaLab: Reporter-turned-blogger covers the island of Alameda
March 19, 2009
Over at the PBS IdeaLab blog, I interviewed Michele Ellson, editor and publisher at The Island, a local news site devoted to covering the city of Alameda, which sits to the west of Oakland in San Francisco Bay. (Yes, it’s an island.)
Michele left newspapers in 2007 and launched The Island in early 2008, continuing a [...]
Why commenting on news sites still stinks: Further notes on the commenting survey results
The most striking conclusion I’ve come to based on the results of the commenting survey that 49 online news folks answered over the last week or two was this:
Commenting on news stories is still broken. Busted. Stinks. It’s a mudpit. Still.
I’ve been writing about how to improve commenting on news sites for a couple years [...]
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