Sponsoring news organization: Concord Monitor
Founded: 1864
Location: Concord, N.H.
Owned by: Concord Monitor
Community engagement initiative launched: The Concord Insider - October, 2006, BlogsNH - Summer, 2006
Publisher, The Concord Insider: Geordie Wilson
Editors, The Concord Insider: Mark Travis, Danielle Kronk
Blog Wrangler: Clay McCuistion
Software used: The Concord Insider - Drupal for reader-posted content and Saxotech for staff-generated content; BlogsNH - Drupal

The Concord Insider is simply the latest venture into community engagement for the New Hampshire daily Concord Monitor.

Early spring 2006 saw the launch of blogsNH, which was an attempt by Monitor staff to provide a space where citizens could create their own community for sharing information and matters of daily life. The result was both beyond and different to what Monitor staff expected.

“We just started putting notices online and in the paper,” co-editor Mark Travis said, “and people responded right away – but it wasn’t the usual suspects. It wasn’t the usual print letter writers or public officials. It was just regular folks, like a registered nurse and a single mom. They jumped right in and began posting about everything from health care issues to just what’s going on in their lives – and they created a remarkable community that’s just as strong today.”

Just like a regular individual Weblog, blogsNH has categories such as “health care,” “family life,” "Concord and around,” “sports,” “life’s challenges” that individual bloggers can use to tag their posts. Readers can then browse by category or click on one of the links under the headings, “Recent blog posts,” “Popular content” or “Most commented posts.” An entry titled “Where have all the manners gone” is currently leading the pack with 33 comments.

The approach when creating the Insider was a little different. Launched simultaneously in print and online, the Insider is a weekly newspaper with an online community portal.

The Insider’s Web site has been designed to engage readers and solicit their submissions. No actual news is posted on the site in this, its month-old incarnation; rather, the emphasis is on fun elements that its creators hope will inspire community contribution.

The site includes interactive features such as a bulletin board page where readers can post community news items, recipes, photos and amusing sights or overheard snatches of conversation, and a feature called The Instigator, where Insider staff pose a “discussion starter” to which readers submit responses.

“We wanted the Web site to serve as a portal where people can post things of interest to them, and each week we’ll pull out the best for the paper,” Travis said. “It’s still very much a work in progress, but traffic and awareness are starting to build.”

As of the one-month anniversary (Nov. 14, 2006) of the launch of the Insider, most of the effort has been put into the print product, and most citizen postings on the Web site have come in response to a prompt or request published in the newspaper (e.g. “post your jack o’lantern photos!”), but Travis, co-editor Danielle Kronk, and the high school students who constitute most of the rest of the staff, hope to turn the Insider Web site into as vibrant a community as blogsNH has become.

To monitor or not to monitor

One of the questions all managers of Web sites that allow user-posted submissions have to grapple with is whether and how much to monitor or even edit or delete those submissions.

Concord Monitor editors have established different rules and varied levels of editorial control for their two different community-engagement ventures.

With blogsNH.com, the rules were established at the beginning: No profanity, no posting of anything that’s not true and no pictures. Additionally, there are three levels of monitoring: Anybody can read, those wishing to comment must register, and bloggers must be approved by Monitor staff.

With the Insider, the initial approach was to be “wide open,” with no registration to comment and voluntary registration if users wished to edit their own posts, Travis said, but that policy eventually backfired.

“We found that, one, nobody’s wanting to register, and two, there’ve been several comments that we’ve considered inappropriate or we’ve been concerned they might be libelous,” Travis said. The inappropriate/libelous comments were removed and now registration is required. Besides being educational, the experience was disappointing for Monitor staff.

“As much as possible we’d like to get out of the way and let people talk to each other,” Travis said, “because it’s a good complement to the more highly edited content of the newspaper. But when people post mean-spirited comments it may be off-putting—that’s not the kind of community we want to create. We’re a community weekly so we want a Web site that’s consistent with that community.”

The lesson drawn from the two different experiments is that if the terms of the community are defined, especially if they’re defined early on, people will abide by them and still participate.

Everyone loves pictures

Monitor staff have engaged their community in one other wildly successful way.

Some time ago, a photo reprint service was launched on the Concord Monitor Web site using myCapture software. At first, only staff photos were posted and available for purchase, but then the service was expanded to allow citizens to post their own photos, either in existing albums (e.g. recreational adult sports, election 2006, scenic and weather) or in albums they created themselves. User-posted photos are not available for purchase, but are very popular viewing, as Travis found out when Concord flooded in spring 2006.

“The flooding happened on Sunday,” he said. “On Monday morning I went into the office and the first thing I did was create a “flood” album on myCapture. I turned away from the computer to take a phone call, which lasted maybe five minutes, and when I turned back three people had already posted photos.”

Altogether, flood photos submitted by members of the community generated more than 80,000 pages views, vastly more than were received by staff photos displayed in the same way and available for purchase.

Newspaper editors have long known that photos help sell papers, and the maxim holds true online.

One hand feeds the other

Monitor staff are using all three of their online ventures to enhance the print version of both the Monitor and the Insider—and vice versa. Blog posts, Insider Online comments and photos are all fair game to be snagged and printed in black and white (or color) ink.

Also, feeds to blogsNH entries are posted on the Monitor Web site, and bloggers will link to staff-written articles, giving both citizens and journalists the best of both worlds, with each world enriching the other.

Future

Looking into the future, Travis said the “inclination” (he was reluctant to give it so definitive a name as “goal”) is to “create a kind of ‘Concordapedia’ – a site where people can write their own story of the community.”

Journalistically, Travis is excited about the opportunity to blend staff-generated content moderated by editorial judgment and selection with vibrant, citizen-created content. “We’re trying to build a forum online so that print and online reinforce each other and make each other better,” he said.

What hasn’t yet evolved is a forum where there is an active discussion of community issues, with vibrant, varied and consistent contribution from both citizens and reporters/editors – but this seems to be the aspect of “citizen journalism” that even the best and most successful community-engagement newspaper Web sites have not been able to successfully foster.

For the Monitor staff, as for all involved in creating the new world of citizen-newspaper online engagement, the name of the game is dabble in everything and learn as you go.

“We’re trying to do a variety of things under a number of different umbrellas to open ourselves to community content, and we’re trying to do it in an ever-expanding and ever more integrated way,” Travis said, before uttering the dilemma faced by so many of his fellow editors:

“We’ve created this online portal, now how do we develop it?”