Slashdot Mirror
Weblogs and Local News?
DrydenMaker asks: "I am the 'computer guy' for a local paper. We are looking into a revamp of our site, and, being a /. observer for many years, I see the slashdot format as useful for active, up-to-date local content as well. With the word getting arround about the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and USC's Annenberg School for Communication offering blogging classes I have some justification. I was looking for input on examples and justification. Do you, as Slashdot users, think a local Slashdot style newspaper would be successfull?"
I really really think so.
No. As a Slashdot user I would say that a PostNuke (PHP based) site would be successful rather than a SlashCode site.
It doesn't even matter what your content is or who your community is. PostNuke = Success! I used PostNuke to successfully receive a PhD in English from a top University. My friend tried that with SlashCode and failed out after 2 semesters.
If you would like some hard numbers, my friend runs a PostNuke site for Gay RubberBand manufacturers. He receives 20 times the number of visitors as my other friend's SlashCode based Sports website. The friend with the Sports based site also had problems paying his ISP each month, whereas my gay Rubberband manufacturer friend always paid each ISP bill early.
Although, my comment doesn't clearly state that a Slashcode based site will be successful, it does tell you that you will have *more* success with a PostNuke. So why would you go with a Slashcode site?? Sarcasm aside, since a website's success has nothing to do with its audience and content, it clearly doesn't matter which content management system you use. What you are asking sounds like the following: I have a band. If we distribute MP3 songs, will be successful? If we distribute Ogg songs will we be more successful?
Keeping
If the circulation of the paper is large enough to have 100-200 people posting replies per day, then a discussion based site like slashdot is almost workable. What percentage of the readership will visit the site (call it 5%) and say 1% of those people will post if there is something to post about.so unless you have a circulation of about 250,000 people, I would abandon the idea. (If these estimates are way off, please enlighten me.) This is basically because unless you have a discussion going, people will not bother to check in on the discussion and post insights.
I would almost say that an incentive program for good karma for the first month would be useful, so that you could get people started posting. Otherwise, it will start slowly and may never take off.
I'm a concientious
Of course, you could always try it and see.
Do not confuse duty with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different.Duty is a debt you owe to yourself.
The Internet is a wonderful thing in many ways, one important one being that it enables widespread individuals to congregate based on their interests, not geography. It enables the dilute to concentrate and achieve a critical mass for community. It does so by erasing distance barriers and discussing items of widespread interest.
You propose swimming upstream, forgoing the distance erasure and concentrating on local issues. I doubt Berkeley has a large enough interested population to make this work. Most likely, the blog will be taken over by a cabal. SanFranciso or the BayArea might have a population large enough.
The thing that is useful about blogs is that you can draw a community that generates content for *itself*. Now, having a blog so that 3 or 4 employees alone could post "updated news" would probably be rather pointless. However, if the blog was local community-centered and *integrated* with the newspaper, you could do things like publish the most popular posts/threads in a real physical newspaper product. *That* would be useful.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I think that you're going to find that having an open posting area for general news is going to result in alot of rumors and libelous rants being posted by angry and/or disturbed people.
When I was looking at buying property in a town in Northern New York, I ran across a newspaper (now defunct) that offered uncensored forums for users. It was basically a Slashdot "BSD" section, with users accusing the police chief of being a member of a satanic cult, claiming the mayor was molesting 6th graders and similar stuff.
The Albany Times-Union ( www.timesunion.com ) offers discussion forums on a few selected issues on a regular basis. They are heavily moderated and only discuss national or very big local stories.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Slashdot is not designed to support the organization of news. It's a first-in, first-out queue. It's reverse-chron. Major stories and minor stories are treated equally, all jammed together onto a long, windy homepage.
And the whole concept is built around text. Mind you, I'm not opposed to text, but a good news site also employs informational graphics, photography, audio, video and interactive graphics.
It's a poor model for building online community. Slashdot is a fire-and-forget forum. Does anybody go back and read a thread after they've posted? The software certainly doesn't provide any help. Just look at the quality of discussion here. It's primarily snappy quips, and almost never conversation. Conversation is a back-and-forth process.
Having said all that, I've seriously considered using a Slashdot-alike system for a high-volume college conference sports site. The Slash-like front end would support posting and discussion of major stories, and would be backed by a tremendously deep automated statistical system (built on our proprietary technology). I think the model works for that particular niche application. (Unfortunately, it's simpler to write a system from scratch than figure out how to get Slashcode running on an existing high-volume site.)
Where general news sites can learn the most from Slashdot is just the top-level concept: Let your users become part of the site. I've been agitating on this point for years:
The Internet is a participative medium
Community is a process, not a place or thing
Participation is driven by interest, utility and passion, not by institutions, organization, or geography
Community can and should be at the core of any Web site
A Web site creates value by contextual integration of content, community, and commerce
User-contributed content, especially discussion content, can add tremendous value to a news presentation. I'm not in the least bit dissuaded by examples of morons running amok in message boards -- that's like pointing to examples of bad poetry, and insisting that poetry is bad. A well-administered interactive community is one of the most powerful assets a Web site can ever hope to develop.
A weblog is inherently visible to the entire world. It's hard enough getting a significant readership -- from whereever you can -- than getting the attention of a local group, not otherwise linked by their interests. Therefore, I would say that very few local weblogs would be successful. Exceptions might be a weblog in a small town with no other significant news source. Another exception might be a huge city like LA where only a tiny percentage of the population might be sufficient to make the weblog successful.
A city like mine of about 150K population and several local TV stations, many radio stations, a major newspaper, etc. would be a tough nut to crack. Meanwhile, our newspaper has an online edition, adding online competition.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
I love the idea. I wish my local paper would do this. It makes the news more timely but most of all it provides a way to address the fact that all news is biased, ill informed and flawed to a certain extent. As with Slashdot the real value isn't in the story but in the following discussion. Again, I would love this.
Here's the crux, though. Most people don't get it. I should say almost all people don't get it. Sure blogs are gaining popularity and blogs are getting noticed as a form of journalism but this is with early adopter types and people who feel very comfortable in front of a computer. I would guess that unless a paper is based out of a major tech center or even a college town, it will fail with a blog format - for now. The "internet" was the same way though. I would let the hype do its job and then launch. Then again it may not cost much. You could start today and let it slowly grind along until it picks up enough readers/posters to get noticed. Then you can say you were way ahead of your time.
A news based web site cannot work.
;-)
/. so maybe there's something to that mix. So to have anything like a vibrant community I'd guess you need to have a couple thousand unique visitors a day. Not a ton, but nothing to sneeze at either.
Well, I guess I may be a little bitter.
I actually think that your idea is a good one and hope it works out. There is, of course, a world of difference between a print platform going to the web with all the built in advertising you can give yourself to the target audience and what I was trying to do on poliglut.
Don't underestimate the number of people you need visiting in order to have a weblog work well. Poliglut had something like a 1:200 poster to reader ratio. That looks to be about the same at
I am not a developer neither a paid promoter of Drupal, but I think it has what you need.
It's a news system, pretty much like Slashdot. The major difference is the submission queue, like Scoop that runs Kuro5hin, and anyone can rate comments.
Slashcode, which runs Slashdot, is better for targetted news, IMHO. The selective karma system allows wiser users to rate comments. For a wider audience website, I think you need to give more freedom of choice to your users.
Oh, and Drupal also allows users to build blogs, it has a news feed script, collaborative book and a forum. It has a wider scope.
About the specifics of your problem, yes, I do think blogging can be useful for local newspaper. The citizens will get to know each other, and feel like they were part of a community. I would say go for it. A news script performs the tasks that you want, and if you can enhance the community spirit of your users, better.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Yeah ... I think it will work. At the very least I know that my productivity will drop to zero as I try to stay abreast of and comment on local, regional, national, international and Slashdot news. Bugger.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
Dave Winer proposes a rather radical approach, but you could certainly pick up a few ideas from him.
A decentralized network of weblogs hosted by the paper would have greater 'network effects' that a Slashdot style site, because personal publishing spaces are les vulnerable to attack. Slashdot's meta-moderation, while necessary for this size site, also requires a large number of users in order to work. individual weblogs provide a more immediate benefit.
An alternative to doing this would be to combine a "tradional" web news site with the ability of readers to post comments and relevant links (call it a community board). Also, since news sites are resources for school children, you'd want to do something to insure appropriate content, or lock out underaged kids.
Can I bum a sig?
How do you deal with the likes of serial goatse.cx posters? Mrs Angry Mother of America will launch a campaign (or lawsuit) against you the first time she's sees a goatse.cx post before it's moderated. She won't want to hear that you're a common carrier, or that it's her responsibility to "police" this community. She'll just want to know why you aren't taking reponsibility for protecting her children for her.
Likewise, what about UC spammers, people who will use it to advertise local services? Are these welcome? Unwelcome? Will you welcome plumbers but not prostitutes? Will you have a "no advertising" policy? If so, what about people who recommend (genuinely or otherwise) local businesses in response to questions?
Sadly, I think that if you're going to do this, it will run until the legal fund runs dry, then the paper will pull it. But hell, go for it. I'd like to be proved wrong.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I am the 'computer guy' for a local paper.
Since you're THE computer guy and not A computer guy, I take it you're in a smaller market (under 75K Sunday?).
We are looking into a revamp of our site,
Before you even think about online discussion groups, make sure your core web site is solid. I am an avid newspaper reader but can't stand most newspaper web sites. (Including my own to a large extent.)
Do you, as Slashdot users, think a local Slashdot style newspaper would be successfull?"
Maybe, but you haven't really give us enough information. How many of your readers use the internet? How large is your existing web audience? Do you get lots of letters to the editor? Do you have a huge out-of-town audience?
Let me give you a little background.
I'm a Senior Unix Sys Admin in the Editorial Systems Support group of my newspaper (265K daily / 385K Sunday -- and growing!). Before entering the technology end of the business, I was studied photojournalism and was Managing Editor of my college paper. I have more than 12 years in the industry pretty evenly split between content and support.
On top of that, my paper is very aggressive when it comes to multiple mediums. We have the paper as well as online (of course) but we also have a 24-hour cable station and will probably buy a radio station as soon as the FCC gets off our back. (We also are telephone interactive for horoscopes, news, sports, etc., have a branded sign company, weekly shopper and a direct marketing group. We cover all the bases but these are smaller parts of a very big whole.) Because of the high level of integration between our three primary formats, we have been a model for other newspapers.
So, we're a fairly forward-thinking newspaper with a huge corporate footprint backing us up. Which brings us to Slashdot style web logs... they aren't even on the radar screen.
When I ask about them I hear that they are too resource intensive. Unless you are prepared to have them run totally unmoderated (not an option for most 'family' newspapers), they require staff to approve every post. And, what is the upside, really? They only tend to draw the most rabid readers -- readers we already have in our back pocket. So, there is a support burden but no net gain in readership.
Web logs are great when you want to sell ad impressions and don't mind links to http://goatse.cx/ on a regular basis. Banner ads ain't what they used to be and goatse.cx in unacceptable. There isn't money to be made here.
I won't say that the web log is a bad idea since letters to the editor, Dear Abby and the gripe line are fairly popular, but I also wouldn't put my job on the line for that functionality. Get your core site working and then see if you have enough traffic and participation to see if the web log is going to be workable.
InitZero
Honestly, there is only one way to find out. Set up a blog, and see if they come. The 'slashdot community' has no idea as a whole what kind of environment you're setting it up in. We have no idea how folks in your community behave, think, and act. We have no idea about your traditions, and the other fun things that make up the soul of a community. Why are you asking us? Maybe next we should as the Canadian medical industry whether a social healthcare system will work in Zimbabwe. Afterall, they know all about health care and Zimbabwe, right?
There is a network of locally based media groups, called Independent Media Centers, that maintain sites of locally oriented news content contributed by users. Content is not limited to just text stories, users are able to contribute any kind of multimedia file. There is a network of approximately 100 such sites located on 6 continents and in over a dozen languages. The network is decentralized with each local group completely autonomous.
The origins of Indymedia are through the anti-corporate globalization movement and that tends to the kind of content on most sites. The audience has been widening gradually so there's more content on a wider range of issues.
There's an umbrella site at www.indymedia.org that pulls content from the local sites.
I should say the Indymedia network is much more than just a bunch of websites. With each site there is a group of people that do media tranings, film showings, public access tv shows, newspapers. Some maintain offices that act as community centers.
We're always looking for people to contribute content and to volunteer, especially geeks. Check out an IMC near you.