Comments on: Innovation at newspapers won’t succeed if the organization doesnâ€™t support it

By: Bill Dunphy

Bill Dunphy — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:17:17 +0000

@Deryck
You’re right, of course. There are precious few examples of what I’ve been talking about among newspaper.coms because it runs counter to our culture. We’re the authorities, we’re the source, we’re the arbiters – and have been for decades upon decades. We need to own the content we “publish” and god forbid we point our readers at someone else’s useful content. And, as you seem to have found out, we need to own and control all the tools we use to publish and produce content.
All of that runs counter to the creative, roiling, fascinating parts of the web where a new information culture (and economy) is being built, largely without us.
The examples I’d point you to for the community engagement piece are mostly outside of the newspaper.com world, although not all.
One that’s impressed me is the Knight Foundation Challenge winner, Village Soup, as hyperlocal a news site as you can imagine (you can find the restaurant’s daily lunch specials on the front page). The Village Soup asks readers, community groups and businesses to become “members” of the Village Soup community and paying for the privillege (at costs ranging from $1-$20 per week). That gives them the right to post content alongside the work of the professional journalists on the site – everything from events to blogs to new products to births and engagements and death notices and, yes, the lunch specials.

According to founder Richard Anderson, something like 33% of their readers visit the site 7 or more times a day .
I think most news web sites would be very, very happy with that kind of engagement from their “readers”.
Beyond that I think we have a lot to learn from Digg and Fark and Metafilter and, of course, Slashdot – sites where members of their online community take responsibilty for the editor’s job – chosing the site’s content. The entire world’s news gets filtered through one single brain before the decisions are made about what should be in my paper. On these community news aggregator sites that job is crowd-sourced to hundreds, even thousands, of people and those people don’t care about owning that news, they care about linking to it and sharing it – commenting and discussing and debating it.
Build me a tool that allows my community to suggest and control what news they see and get rewarded for participating in that process (I guess Newser and Knewsroom are trying to do that) and I think we’re a good way there.
Please re-read the end of my first comment: this isn’t about Rob or his crew or their worth. This is about what can we learn from the amazing work you folks put in there in Loudoun county.

By: Deryck Hodge

Deryck Hodge — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:20:13 +0000

@Bill

So where is this innovative “multi-directional conversations and content” you’ve done? I’m just having a hard time understanding what you mean. If you don’t have any examples to show, perhaps you can just unpack all that language for me. Give me some example, please, of what you mean. Facebook? Twitter? Would a user-to-user chat system have been more interesting to you? Or would you criticize us for copying those other sites?

I appreciate the kind words you say about other aspects of our work (I am a programmer who works with Rob and Levi), but it just seems to me your criticism is rhetoric rather than substance. And to be fair, you’re criticizing a feature that was never released. True, LoudounExtra lacked the kinds of community tools and engagement you desire, but it wasn’t for our lack of trying. So I take it as bit unfair for you to make sweeping generalizations about Rob or our group not grasping “where this nascent web culture is going.”

It was our goal to engage the Loudoun community and provide the readers with tools to have their voice on the site. We were going to put the tools in place, then see where the dialog went. We really have no idea even among ourselves what that would have looked like because we never got the tools up. No Web feature emerges fully formed — not at newspapers or at other types of dot coms. Sites become great as they gain an audience and grow with that audience. Unfortunately, we didn’t get there with LoudounExtra, but I assure you we are very much aware of what the Web is really like.

By: Bill Dunphy

Bill Dunphy — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:24:43 +0000

@Will and @Levi,
Gentlemen – I fear I must have been unclear. I have absolutely no problem with newpapers aggregating community content that already is being posted on services like YouTube or Flickr, (both are commonplace strategy of place bloggers) nor do I imagine for a second or recommend that newspaper.com’s should seek to do the video or photo sharing job that YouTube and Flickr do. That would be a fools mission, certainly. And I agree with you both that using those services to capture and then aggregate community content is simply smart. I was merely trying to point out that it is not a strategy that is indicative of a commitment to the local news site as a community platform, a place for multi-directional conversations and content.
Curley and his crew have been brilliant, persuasive, innovators in providing useful community information online. But they have yet to do very much innovation – or very much at all – in building web components that permit people to create and engage in communities of interest around that information and news. And I’m suggesting that that piece is what’s missing at LoudounExtra.com and at too many local news websites – much to our peril.

By: Beth Lawton

Beth Lawton — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:49:12 +0000

Thanks for writing this, Will. Having worked with Rob Curley (and other members of his team) in the past, I constantly praise Rob for coming up with good ideas and inspiring others to love the work as much as he does. One of my classic memories of Rob from Lawrence was when he would come bounding up the stairs as say something like, “You know what would be really cool? We should….” That type of thought, innovation, ability to learn and all-out passion is what the newspaper industry needs. Sorry to see him leave the D.C. area, but I hope the entire group goes out and rocks Vegas.

By: Will Sullivan

Will Sullivan — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 01:19:33 +0000

Rob Curley speaks on the matter:
http://robcurley.com/2008/06/08/after-the-flop-flap-lessons-learned-from-loudoun/