How your newspaper can monetize citizen journalism

The traditional way: Content, community and local search build brand loyalty and page view traffic to sell your standard leaderboards, skyscrapers, squares and tiles.

Some fresher ideas pointed out by the NAA Presstime magazine:

• Charge a little less for small businesses looking to advertise on your locally-targeted pages.
• Let the community (i.e. the Little League) do the work of selling the ads, then split the profits with them.
• Connect local bloggers with local advertisers and take a commission.
• Roll all that user-generated content up into a weekly print edition and sell print ads.
• Zone your local editions online (instead of consolidating them) to appeal to more local advertisers in more neighborhoods.

If you’re in the online news business and you haven’t taken at least a cursory glance at YourHub, or at what’s going on in Bakersfield, it’s time to take a look.

The tools to help you develop your own hyperlocal site driven by reader-contributed stories, photos and video are already out there.

All you have to do is pick them up and build something. If you build it…

via CyberJournalist