Thursday, December 02, 2004

Today there are enough local weblogs to create, in aggregate, an interesting and useful alternative media community in Guilford County. My guess is that many more local blogs will emerge in the future to cover a wide range of subjects that are of interest to various groups of people (e.g. high school sports, religion, arts, neighborhoods, etc, etc). The local online alt-media will get much deeper and broader. In this environment, blogs are the long tail and the N&R may be emerging as one of the players in the fat part of the curve. If the N&R does its part well, this is a good thing. As Chris Anderson says, "you need both ends of the curve." Is there money to be made by local bloggers? Maybe. But online advertising seems unlikely to generate many dollars for hyper-local sites of interest to a few people out along the tail. More ad dollars may flow to a central point, or points, which serve as portals into the local scene, and thus get relatively high traffic, which is what advertisers are buying. These sites may set out to be portals, by aggregating fresh links, or maybe they'll just be interesting sites that lots of people visit regularly and use as springboards to other sites. TheShu raises good questions about the economics involved, but I don't think he's right that the N&R, or other portals, would be making money by "selling your content." They will be selling ads around links to your content , which is a different thing, and presumably sending traffic your way in return. Why should we look at an aggregator site differently than we do, say, InstaPundit, which earns substantial ad revenue and is built around links to and clips of other people's work? If you are out to make money from a local weblog, good luck. If you have a plan that shares the wealth and pays the folks along the long tail, great. But let's keep doing what we're doing.  Let it grow. 4:22:32 PM    comment []

ACC Hoops: "And when it was over, the ACC - Big 10 Challenge was another rout for the ACC. That's six in a row for our guys if you're keeping score at home." 9:20:20 AM    comment []

Hoggard on the Rhino's lagging web presence, and its effect on Rhino mindshare. Hogg also taps into one of the alt-media business models, Pegasus News, which despite citing both the Rhino and me as inspirations seems smart and interesting. 9:17:59 AM    comment []

Eugene Volokh has an op-ed about legal protection for journalists and bloggers in this morning's Times: "(T)he rules should be the same for old media and new, professional and amateur. Any journalist's privilege should extend to every journalist." More Volokh on blogger rights and responsibilities here. 8:54:34 AM    comment []

John Robinson on the new media model described by Mark Glaser: "(I)t's precisely the sort of media company the News & Record intends to become. Creating new content. Serving the public and allowing the public to serve journalism. Building a new way of doing smart, citizen journalism. More transparency. News as a conversation. We've been having serious, detailed, how-to discussions about all of those things here. This blog is one result. All of the recent discussion about aggregated content -- what Greensboro101 is doing -- is where we're going, too. Roch just beat us. But there's plenty of room." Promising words for local bloggers, or ominous ones for an emerging online alt-media? I told Roch before he launched to expect the big paper to explore the aggregator space -- an observation based not on inside knowledge, of which I have none, just common sense. Roch has been squashed by the N&R before -- his local online news site, The Wire, died a noble death a few years back. This time is different, I think. The N&R doesn't control the content or the brand. They need bloggers. And the big paper has a lot to offer bloggers, too. The N&R could create a local blog-ad market overnight. A strong local online community helps us all. So far, the N&R has been very clueful in blogland. We natives should welcome them, and not be distracted from producing good work and continuing to figure out the alt-media landscape. 8:33:16 AM    comment []