What do we mean by “doing well?” We have four criteria:
- Conversion: How successful are news organizations at converting visitors to their sites into participants?
- Traffic: Do the new community sites draw enough visitors to justify the expense of developing and running the sites?
- Revenue: Have the sites attracted enough attention from visitors and from local advertisers to begin to build a stream of revenue?
- Quality: If the site has attracted a significant number of participants, has that created new avenues for distributed journalism that have had an impact on the news organization as a whole?
All of the organizations profiled in this report have been selected because they are leaders in the movement to engage nonjournalists from the community in the newsgathering process. Often, this involves creating an online community whose topical areas may contain newsworthy items and ideas amid a larger conversation about the lived experience of members of the community. Sometimes it goes deeper.
Some are notably successful or unique even within this context:
Bakotopia: This site, created under the auspices of the Bakersfield Californian, is to our knowledge the most advanced social networking site currently offered by a newspaper in the US. Bakotopia.com has been described by VP of Interactive Mary Lou Fulton as “a MySpace for Bakersfield.”
Lawrence.com and LJWorld.com: Created with the input of news/web luminaries Adrian Holovaty and Rob Curley, Lawrence.com managed to blow the lid off of the tightly sealed 18-24 market by employing conversational, two-way technology; the progress filtered over to LJWorld.com, where features like Game covered youth sports in depth by engaging parents and coaches to file reports and photos.
Bluffton Today: Bluffton Today manages to pull off what so many are trying to do: gather a bustling community on the site that turns over content, making the site fresh to all viewers whenever they might visit. Not only that, the reverse publishing experiment is going well too.
YourHub [Colorado]: Travis Henry of YourHub.com reports $5M in revenue from YourHub operations in the first year. In a market where most online operations are struggling to show significant revenue, that’s a signal achievement.
We’d classify sites like WickedLocal.com and Hartsville Today as “still working on it.” Some of these sites simply haven’t had time to grow a thriving community yet – an organic process that can’t be rushed. Others, like the Greensboro News & Record, are moving on to the next stage of their experimentation.
The News & Record has demoted its “Town Square” feature, where readers could submit stories, from its front page, shifting emphasis to where they’ve had success – an interactive Letters to the Editor section and staff blogs, which attract substantial numbers of comments. John Robinson, editor of the Greensboro News & Record comments: “We haven't been all that successful with the contributions, but the conversations on blogs, letters and stories have been compelling and dynamic.” additional comments from Robinson in the profile of the Greensboro News & Record in the Profiles section of this report).
