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?"

Comments

Well, it dependes on the paper's circulation

[gartogg]

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.

Re:Well, it dependes on the paper's circulation

[yelvington]

Your percentages are pretty far off. A well-operated local news Web site typically attracts over 20 percent of the total local market in a single month. That's total market, not the readership of the local newspaper. Most large newspapers reach less than 50 percent of their own markets in print.

It's possible that the original poster doesn't have the critical mass to establish a viable system -- he didn't say where he is, and he didn't point to an existing Web site. There are some dismal examples operated by substantial newspapers, sad to say. But that can be fixed. (It's what I do.)

Depends on your readers

[pythorlh]

How many people visit your current site? Do you get a lot of feedback currently, either by email or snail-mail? If you live in a community that is actively discussing local topics, and you have enough people who already come to your site that can spread the word when the local gossip goes dot-com, then it'll work. If you don't get any traffic now, then it'll never get big enough to be useful if you just revamp it. If your local community is filled with introverts that don't talk to each other anyway, giving them a way to ignore each other online won't make much difference either.

Of course, you could always try it and see.

The Internet is about erasing distance

[redelm]

As another poster has said, it depends very much on circulation/readership. If you don't have enough quality posters, your blog will die.

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.

If the community is involved

[Hard_Code]

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.