Greensboro is widely regarded as a successful -- perhaps the most successful -- example of a city using blogs to encourage participation in the civic and intellectual life of a place.

Notably, this was not accomplished exclusively by creating a hub where local residents could add content to the newspaper's Web site. The News & Record's approach, instead, was to encourage conversation by linking to existing local bloggers on their own Web sites. The result was an unusually powerful ecosystem of local voices -- bloggers whose profile had been raised by the fact that the paper linked to them, bringing readers to their blog who might never have discovered their blog via other means. In return, bloggers who had already been writing about issues of civic interest in their blogs linked to the paper to cite articles about those issues.

In fact, in a recent conversation with N&R editor John Robinson, he discussed a shift in emphasis – away from user-submitted content and toward comments and conversation – as the basis for building the N&R’s online community.
“…We have shifted the strategy slightly. While we still want to create a Town Square, we found it was more difficult to generate citizen journalism than we thought. Given that, and given that we thought we could make some faster inroad in multi-media, she took a step back from citizen journalism to learn and to experiment with audio and video.

…We still believe in reader participation and interaction. We've finally cobbled together a comment feature attached to most of our local stories. We're also going to add some blogs from members of the community. (We are one of the fortunate communities that has a good blog aggregator -- run by a private citizen, not the paper -- so that niche is being filled and we don't feel a huge need to compete with them.)”

Commenting on our exchange in his own blog, he writes: “We haven't been all that successful with the contributions, but the conversations on blogs, letters and stories have been compelling and dynamic. I told her that commenters and citizen journalists occasionally are one and the same, but more often are different animals. Commenters are more inclined to discuss and challenge. Their response tends to be a shot from the hip. Citizen journalists have a specific story to tell and take more thought and time -- it's harder to write original work than to respond to someone else's work. For some reason, while it seems as if everyone thinks they can write poetry, many are hesitant to write journalism. And then there is the issue of pay.”
In an online world driven by search engine traffic, it may be more valuable to have readers interacting with the news by writing about it on their own Weblogs and linking to it than it would be for them to log on to a newspaper's own site and add content to it. Why? A site's ranking on search engines -- and thus traffic driven to it by search engines -- is highly influenced by how many other sites are linking to it. The News & Record's approach has the benefit -- intentional or unintentional -- of creating a link economy that's beneficial to the newspaper, particularly since bloggers are often linking to individual stories, rather than the front page of the site, thus driving more visitors to more areas of the site, and to content deeper within the site.

Such a strategy also has another advantage. Many working at newspapers have concerns about what members of the public might write or contribute if they were allowed to add content to the website of a news organization. The Los Angeles Times' "wikitorial" debacle is a case in point. However, managing, grooming, or otherwise censoring community contributions often doesn't sit well with people who are in the first amendment business, either. An interventionist approach to online communities may also be time-consuming.

So what's the advantage of the arm's length approach Greensboro has taken to blogging? For one thing, it allows all the participants in the conversation to have the maximum degree of freedom and control. Bloggers have the freedom to say what they wish on their own blogs, and control what gets said on their own Weblog or Weblog comment section, if they wish to; and the paper also enjoys the same freedom and control. The end result is a blogging community with a great deal of vibrancy and little of the hesitancy that comes from two groups of people who are still working out an uncertain set of rules.

The News & Record wasn't the only power source in the local blogosphere, however; a second initiative, Greensboro101, created a live-aggregated page of headlines from local Weblogs and allowed users to create accounts to add content to Greensboro101 directly, whether or not that user had a separate Weblog of their own. Entrepreneur Roch Smith, Jr, created Greensboro101, and the site has become a place where the Greensboro News & Record's coverage is discussed alongside the many blog entries on life, food, music, and politics. One notable interaction between Greensboro101, the News & Record, and local bloggers occurred within a week of this writing (October 23, 2006) -- Smith opted to publish a confidential report compiled by a consulting firm that detailed controversial allegations against Greensboro's police chief. The newspaper had reported on the report, and it had been widely discussed in the local blogosphere, but the report itself had not been published anywhere -- until Smith posted it on Greensboro101. Several of Greensboro101's board members resigned in protest in the aftermath, and local blogger and News & Record columnist Ed Cone wrote about it in his most recent piece for the paper.

It's precisely this kind of intensity, cooperation, and competition that has created such a vital civic and news community in Greensboro. It's hard to imagine such vitality out of any "walled garden" community on a canned platform hosted by either a news organization or a Web startup. Having many independently controlled sites has led to a uniquely robust local blogosphere with dramatically different points of view, dense interlinking, and vivid, fast-moving conversation that in cases such as this one, actually changes the course of events. And by doing so, changes the news.

Further Reading:

• An audio interview with Lex Alexander, on the Echo Chamber Project Web site
• A July, 2005, New York Times article about the News & Record's citizen journalism experiment
• A Webcam video of an June 6, 2006 open meeting hosted by Lex Alexander, posted on YouTube
• A blog entry about the N&R's effort, on Tapscott's Copy Desk ("tracking the Internet Revolution in Media and Government") blog
• Jay Rosen's January, 2005, in-depth look at Lex Alexander's plan for the N&R

Recent Items from John Robinson's Editor's Log