Monday, December 20, 2004

One of the byproducts of our local blog/newspaper interplay is Jinni's Journal, an account of Jinni Hoggard's battle with breast cancer, which her husband started covering at his weblog, and the N&R is now running as a regular feature. Here's the latest installment. 4:53:57 PM    comment []

There is an urge among some Greensboro bloggers to kill a goose that has yet to lay a single golden egg. People who write for free are worried about losing money they don't make to a company that doesn't have a clear plan for capitalizing on their work. GiT weighs in on the N&R's online plans...but I think he misses something when he says the editors "have been been put into the situation where the powers-that-be have told them to find a way to take the best writing that the local blogging talent pool has to offer, coordinate it, package it, sell it, take the glory for it, and offer nothing monetarily in return." My guess is that the publishing powers-that-be have no clue about blogs. As John said earlier, he's a cost-center. I had missed that query from Ross Myers cited by The Shu -- does every blogger who writes for the N&R get paid like Ed Cone does? Short answer: no, you get paid the same as people who write letters to the editor. If the local blog media develops into a market of its own, bloggers might get paid. The paper could be the much-needed head of the long tail, the entity that drives traffic to local blogs. It might create an ad network that pays them some small amount. My advice: write for the same reasons today that you did yesterday. Or try to wall off your content, don't publish a syndication feed, discourage people from linking to your work. Dream that the online alt-media is about people with small audiences making big money, and that you are somehow going to replace the newspaper in the ad market. The same forces that are remaking the for-profit publishing industry will roll right over you. 8:52:21 AM    comment []

Backfence.com plans to provide local news on the web, starting in the DC area and then in other cities. My question: who will write the reports? If you "provide opportunities for people to share information with their neighbors and a place for everyone to comment on that information," will people take those opportunities? Will they want to get paid for contributing to an ad-supported business? My vision for G'boro is similar -- community-driven alt-media -- except it starts from the ground up -- people write blogs and then those blogs are aggregated, perhaps (as at Greensboro101) with the aggregator providing forums, too.  The N&R also has a chance to be the hub of local blog/forum activity. I just wonder if this can be driven from the top down, or whether it needs an organic base in the community. As always when I pose these questions, my answer is: I dunno. Yet. 8:02:03 AM    comment []