Tag: community

  • Newspaper community site philosophy

    Steve Yelvington talks about Bluffton Today in an e-mail interview he’s posted, reminding me that there are reasons why community sites work and there are methods to manage and market them to the community: “There’s a lot we can learn from Internet startups if we just recognize that geographic community is actually a special interest.…

  • Crowd wisdom, some assembly required

    Scott Karp points out the difficulty in waiting for the monkeys to write Shakespeare and Ian King reminds us all that free content requires filtering that costs time and money. Both are talking about the NYT bit on Heinz’s ketchup-stained UGC ad ploy. Which brings me to the point: User-generated advertising content should be amateurish.…

  • Provide your readers with somewhere to talk about the news — before someone else does

    Topix.net becomes a dot-com, re-aligns to spotlight human editors in geographical and, um, topical communities. As with Digg or Fark or any other news aggregator that allows readers to comment on the stories (from your newspaper) people post to them, the conversation that belongs with the story on your own site, with your branding at…

  • Why Citizen Shovelware doesn’t work

    …or “Sometimes hyperlocal just ain’t enough.” Community site engine/citizen journalism startup Backfence (Here’s the Palo Alto version.) appears to be well on its way to falling apart. Why? Because people don’t want to participate in your brand, they want to participate in their community. I don’t know if YourHub, a hyperlocal site framework developed by…

  • Your newspaper isn’t MySpace. Should it be?

    I’ve often heard conversations about launching a social networking site at a newspaper start with the words “Not that we’re trying to be the next MySpace, but…” And it always begs the question, well, should we? Should a newspaper-hosted site be the social networking spot for your geographical area? Here’s a few variations on an…

  • How would you create an online community at SJSU?

    Daniel Sato, online editor of the Spartan Daily student newspaper at San Jose State University, is trying to come up with a way to let readers vote their own stories up the charts, to tackle the twin problems of there being little sense of community at SJSU (online OR off, in my opinion) and organizations…

  • How to juggle multimedia and Digg interactivity

    In two back-channel online news discussions this week, folks have been debating how newspapers should be gathering video and how they should handle comment moderation. The video discussion among Howard Owens, Mindy McAdams, and others, is notable because the question is no longer IF newspapers should be running video online (Yes) or HOW they should…

  • The truth about online community building at newspapers

    Let’s get something out of the way here. From an idealistic, do-gooder, journalistic point-of-view, building a community around/at/affiliated with your newspaper’s Web site is all about giving people a place to talk to each other, find like-minded individuals, debate, discuss, share, and participate in local and far-flung news. That’s great. In fact, it’s so great…

  • Vanderbilt student media site opens up to the community

    In Nashville, Vanderbilt University‘s student newspaper has completely retooled and reimagined what a college media Web site should look like and what its purpose should be in the university community. InsideVandy.com is the result. Straight news and blogs written by the staff mingle with reader photos, stories, and blogs. The site is run with Drupal,…

  • A framework for networked journalism

    Jay Rosen lays all his cards on the table, posting his plans for NewAssignment.net, a to-be-constructed site where reporters and The People Formerly Known As The Audience can party together. And by “party together,” I mean the masses can use all their social bookmarking/tagging/networking power to point to the stories they want to see covered…