10 | 26 | 2008

DPC Website Featured in SNA Article on Blogging

Blah, blah, BLOG! 9/29/2008 By Deb Shaw The Traverse City region in beautiful northwest Lower Michigan is known for its’ natural beauty and miles of sandy Lake Michigan shoreline. The cherries aren’t bad either — this area has been hosting the exceedingly popular National Cherry Festival since 1926, an event that brings scores of tourists into the area every July; they take their cherries seriously — the airport is named Cherry Capital Airport! But when you dust away all that tourism brings to the region you’re left with a community of hard working and community oriented Michiganders who call this region home. The local newspaper, The Traverse City Record-Eagle, is like many community newspapers across North America — deep roots, steady readers, and niche products to cover the regional and lifestyle topics but, unlike its’ brethren elsewhere, this paper has done a phenomenal job of attracting citizen contributions in the form of blogs. This 29,000 daily/40,000 Sunday newspaper decided a couple of years ago that they wanted to make their Web site more than just a re-print of the daily news. Their online quest was to keep news current and readers informed but they also wanted to invite the public in as contributors of original content. Blogs in Traverse City were born in 2006. “Knowing that we were too short-staffed in the newsroom to do any staff blogging, we started first by offering blogs to our freelance columnists,” reports Webmaster Jeanne Hubbard who added that the offer did not include any additional pay. In addition to contributions from some of her freelancers, she started blogging herself about some of the improvements they were making on their Web site and also got a couple of the papers columnists in at the start. “We launched the blogs and included a page titled "Be a Record-Eagle blogger." That was all we needed to get started, as would-be bloggers then began to approach me via email quite often,” says Hubbard. Today the Record-Eagle Web site has an impressive volume of local bloggers (http://blogs.record-eagle.com) who write about every conceivable topic. From the staid to the sublime, this group of close to 40 contributors is prolific and definitely feed the appetites of locals interested in the various topics. Most of the bloggers are not contributors to the print edition. Hubbard reports that she’s never at a loss for contributions but laments a decline in readership — a fact she believes has to do with moving the blogs link to a less prominent position as a result of a recent Web site redesign. She added that “We always have bloggers who start with a head of steam and then peter out, never to be heard from again. But we also get the same amount of bloggers who turn into steady contributors. I have more submissions now than ever before.” Take Two The Victorian charm of the seaside town of Cape May, NJ, situated on the southernmost tip of the Jersey peninsula that straddles the Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware Bay, is popular among summer tourists seeking a unique beach experience. The lineup of brightly colored and wonderfully tended historic homes provides a backdrop to the azure sea like nowhere else on the Atlantic coast. But, like its’ brethren in northwest Lower Michigan, when you take away the flow of people and attention that tourism brings, you’re left with a community of hard working residents who call this region home. The tough work of commercial fishing and agriculture related industry figure prominently here. The Cape May County Herald, a 32,300 weekly, serves the region with a well read print product and delivers an online experience that is remarkably dynamic and deep. Ben Hall, Director of Online Application Development for the company, has been a frequent speaker at SNA gatherings to discuss the advanced Web applications that come out of his company. Ben and his colleagues are in full throttle mode when it comes to evolving their online undertakings and there is nothing willy-nilly about their approach. This is a group of intelligent and deliberate folks who make informed choices and put them into play with a flair for doing it right. Of course, blogs play a role in the www.capemaycountyherald.com experience. However, this isn’t a story about instant success; rather, it’s about not letting failure get in the way. According to Preston Gibson, Director of Development for Herald Newspapers, they started to experiment with blogs two years ago, using Blogger (a free publishing tool from Google). It was a so-so experience that didn’t garner much traffic and by this past spring, it had fully fizzled out to the point of being discontinued. “From this experience, we did not conclude blogs don’t work,” says Gibson. “Instead, we concluded that we weren’t doing blogs well.” Just a couple short months ago the Herald launched a new round of blogs that related to a self developed Web site platform within their Digital Press Consortium (www.digitalpressconsortium.com). Beginning in July, they primed the pump with blogs from staffers — “mostly younger folks” — and began actively seeking community bloggers from people who were both credible and passionate about their areas of interest, i.e. arts, dining, motherhood, and sports. The resultant approach is very targeted with just 6 active blogs, all of which are generated/moderated by non-Herald staffers. The most popular of these is “Motherhood Avenue” which has garnered over 2000 reads and over 40 comments since it was launched in July. Gibson and his colleagues recognized immediately that the strong response to this enthusiastic blogger offered an opportunity and they are now facilitating the “Motherhood Avenue” community by extending the conversation to include calendar and forum (“Spout Off”) features of the Web site, each bearing the “Motherhood Avenue” label. With this approach, according to Gibson, they can promote coordination of activities (e.g., playgroups and ‘moms night out’ gatherings) via the calendar and more interactive dialogue via the forum. “The first topic was posted to the Motherhood Avenue forum on Sep 2nd; so, it’s very new. It now features 9 topics, 23 posts and 1699 reads,” reported Gibson on September 11th, who added that “In less than two weeks, the number of forum reads almost matches the number of blog reads accumulated in almost two months.” The Cape May Approach Gibson describes their mission clearly — to promote meaningful and relevant expression and connection in as many ways as possible to support the “communities” represented by their audience. They expect these communities will materialize as audience needs & interests arise and they fully expect to be the primary connection point for these communities by offering robust features to support the connections — blog, forum, calendar, gallery, mobile text alerts, etc. They also expect to capitalize on the business aspect of these connections by delivering significant audiences in terms of size and/or socio-graphics. They expect these audiences to have strong value for advertisers who want to target communities of shared interests (e.g., moms, pets, sports). “Overall, our vision is to host interest-based communities on our Web site by creating ‘channels’ which support meaningful audience engagement and relevant advertiser connections. In executing this strategy, we want to be rather intentional about the ‘communities’ we are facilitating, seeking to promote active engagement without diluting the broader community with a large number of relatively isolated conversations. We want to promote open expression without facilitating confusion and noise,” says Gibson. “We are now steering a course to develop more of these channels. Consistent with the extremely dynamic nature of our industry, some course adjustments are expected, but it’s an exciting ride!" So far, so good. With this second foray into blogs, they are seeing appreciable and growing blog-specific traffic. As shown in this chart, the trend so far is a good one. URLs Viewed Page Views Unique Page Views July 32 970 731 August 122 2,903 2,222 Contacts Jeanne Hubbard, jhubbard@record-eagle.com Ben Hall, bhall@cmcherald.com Preston Gibson, pgibson@cmcherald.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For some additional examples of sites with noteworthy blog aspects, Ben Hall offered the following insights: Rust Communications http://semissourian.com/section/bloggers They’ve been doing significant blog work in their community and have given it great prominence on their site. They are farther along in terms of bloggers than the Herald organization is. WisconsinNative.com http://www.wisconsinnative.com This site was created by a fellow named David Stoeffler, who has deep newspaper roots. His Wisconsin portal has former newspaper talent writing for it and some of that content even appears in newspapers in Wisconsin. The site is using our Digital Press Consortium software to encourage citizen contributions and blogging is one of the core areas. Much of the homepage has blog content — don’t miss “Best of the Blogs”. Market Directly to the Community Newspaper Industry Each month the SNA Web site attracts over 6,000 unique visitors and over 70,000 page views. Learn More