Advancing Citizen Blogs on News Sites

By: Steve Outing Updated at 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Oct. 16

The online news business has introduced plenty of buzzwords over the last decade. Among the latest crop is "participatory journalism" -- the idea that citizens can be empowered to publish their own "personal journalism," alongside (and complementary to) professional reporters.

The industry has also been dabbling in "blogging" for a while now. Web logs have been around for several years, and now news organizations are taking the trend seriously.

Combine participatory journalism and blogging and what have you got? Why, citizen bloggers, of course -- who could bring big changes to online news.

Advancing Citizen Journalism

An experiment in citizen blogging is underway at Advance.net, the online division of Advance Publications Inc., publisher of newspapers, magazines and Web sites (including Cleveland.com and OregonLive.com). The company has introduced citizen bloggers at two of its local-news sites, MassLive.com and NJ.com. If the concept pans out, it may be expanded to other Advance sites. MassLive.com is publishing the work of six citizen bloggers (covering Northampton, Mass.) while NJ.com has just one (covering South Orange, N.J.).

A few community members have been invited to write and maintain their own personal blogs on specific local-interest topics in the site's blogging sections. Advance isn't running a blog-hosting service where anyone can have a blog; rather, this is a more selective strategy of vetting who can blog as part of their news sites. The idea is to expand the depth of local news on MassLive.com and NJ.com (call it "hyper-local" journalism) -- and offer consumers a more personal local-news experience than what you typically get from a newspaper or local-news Web site.

Heading up the experiment is Jeff Jarvis, Advance.net's fast-talking, energetic president and creative director, supported by a handful of others in the company who are all spending a bit of their time trying to figure out how to make a business out of citizen blogging. Jarvis writes his own personal Web log, BuzzMachine, mostly covering media matters but also occasionally straying to oddball topics (such as his recent rant about a new fast-food sandwich). Jarvis credits his personal blog with helping him to understand the blogging phenomenon.

At MassLive.com, Online Editor Scott Brodeur has thus far found six citizen bloggers and is looking for more, and he writes a local-news Web log of his own, "Blog Beat Northampton." MassLive.com is Jarvis' principal testing ground for the citizen-blog concept.

A Little Background

It's important to understand where Advance's citizen-blogging idea comes from: their successful discussion forums, plus the company's devotion to the notion of Web logs. (You'll find more staff-written blogs on Advance news sites than at those of just about any other news company.) Jarvis points out that Advance has long been more supportive than most news companies of making its Web sites very interactive -- letting the audience contribute and converse online. "We love our forums," he says. Indeed, Advance's discussion areas account for more than one-quarter of all traffic to the company's sites. Forums, when they are successfully managed, tend to have a loyal audience. These are people who are contributing content to Advance's sites -- for free.

You can think of citizen Web logs as somewhat akin to a news site's discussion forums. With a citizen blog, a community member gets a more personal online channel for his or her thoughts, but it's still a similar concept as with discussion forums. Jarvis points out, for example, that his local sites' sports forums regularly feature "news" contributed (freely) by forum participants. Often, it's news about events (especially school sports) that aren't reported on by the professional news staff.

Jarvis looks at community blogging as a way for a news organization to get to the hyper-local level. A motivated group of community members volunteer to write on a regular basis about something they know or care deeply about. They publish "news" and opinion about things that the news organization can't afford to cover.

Think about all the various government and community-group meetings that occur in your town. No newspaper can afford to have reporters attend all of them, but for some of them there may be people who regularly attend and who want to write about what happened.

Think about the Little League coaches and parents who might want to regularly write about their kids' sports activities. Think about the teachers or principals who might blog about goings-on at their schools.

Jarvis says citizen blogs are different from discussion forums because the blogger has made a personal commitment to be the proprietor of that information stream. They care about its quality -- even if it's not "professional" grade and is produced by someone who doesn't have a clue about normal journalistic practices.

Slanted News?

An obvious problem with citizen reporters is that they typically come with a point of view. The person who blogs city council meetings might be a right-wing ideologue who regularly opposes the liberal council majority. Jarvis' answer to that is that the audience will know going in what it is that they're reading. He gives the audience credit for recognizing that the citizen blogger is not a professional journalist and probably isn't writing as objectively as a newspaper reporter covering the same topic. A news organization won't present a citizen blogger in the same way as a staff reporter.

If a citizen blogger is covering the same ground as a staff reporter (say, city council coverage), the average reader is going to better trust the professional's report -- but that reader might still be interested in what the citizen blogger has to say. The bloggers would be treated more like newspaper columnists than reporters.

As Jarvis sees it, it's the personal nature of citizen blogs that will make them work on local news sites. For a small community, he says, the citizen blogs may be how you get to know your neighbors. You'll pay attention to the blogs and read them because they are written by your friends and acquaintances.

This is not a danger to professional reporting, by the way. It's complementary. You'll read the newspaper or news site's professional reporting for an objective look at the facts and for analysis. You'll read blogs to get less professional and perhaps more opinionated views from a neighbor.

Unedited, Unpaid

An interesting -- and possibly controversial -- aspect of the Advance blogging strategy is that citizen bloggers are not edited. As with discussion forums, the bloggers can post what they want, with no professional editors vetting their work, and no formal training on how to write a blog; they are treated as though they are posting to a forum.

Currently, with only a handful of citizen blogs in action, it's simple enough for site editors to keep an eye on them. If someone writes something inappropriate (or even libelous; these are non-journalists, after all), they'll probably be asked to take it down or change it. But if the concept grows to include dozens of citizen bloggers, consistent staff monitoring ceases to be practical -- just as it's often impractical for a news Web staff to monitor everything that gets posted in a busy discussion forum.

As with discussion forums, Jarvis envisions that users will be the ones who report problem blog postings. In forums, the community itself polices what gets posted -- reporting inappropriate postings to the Web editorial staff. Upon receiving a report about something inappropriate being posted to a forum, Advance editorial employees will deal with it -- perhaps removing an offensive posting, or banning the perpetrator from future posting privileges. Citizen blogs will be treated in the same way. (Advance seems to be counting on its liability being minimal should a citizen blogger libel someone. Its argument would be that a citizen blogger saying something harmful is akin to a discussion forum participant saying the same thing -- or a talk radio show listener blurting out something slanderous during a call-in segment.)

Jarvis does point out that bloggers who misbehave or just fail to meet quality standards will be asked to leave. It's the equivalent of Advance.net acting as the mayor or sheriff of a town, keeping law and order.

As the Advance citizen-blogger program is envisioned (it's currently in "alpha" phase, says Jarvis), the bloggers are not paid -- which fits into the no-liability-for-content idea. The reward for the bloggers is in having a forum to write and opine on local topics that interest them, and a news organization to bring them a sizable audience and notoriety. It's possible that some particularly outstanding local bloggers might get paid something. And Jarvis also envisions people perhaps getting paid modestly to serve as facilitators to groups of citizen bloggers -- say, to umpire a group of Little League team bloggers. Those positions would likely not be staff, but freelancers working part time.

Paying for It All

If the citizen-blog program succeeds, it will be because a low-cost business model has been developed. On the expense end, costs are minimal. Advance is deploying Movable Type blogging software, so technology costs are reasonable. Without editing, staff time is kept down, too. Staff resources will mostly go toward recruiting bloggers from the community, developing an advertising system to support the effort, and marketing programs.

Jarvis envisions a Google AdWords-like model, where advertising sales are automated. Local advertisers seeking low rates and selective targeting -- for example, a sporting goods store selling ads into a town's sports-related blogs -- will be a central target to fund the citizen-blog initiative. Advance also knows the ZIP codes of its customers (collected in a brief registration screen before Web-site content can be viewed), which will combine targeting by location with targeting by topic interest.

Are there significant revenues to be had in low-fee advertising, a la Google AdWords? Maybe, maybe not. But Jarvis also looks at selling the automated citizen-blog ads as an opportunity to upsell the advertisers on other Advance buys -- online, print, even cable television.

Remember Koz?

If you've been in or followed the online-news industry for some time, you may have a feeling of deja vu by now. Back in the 1990s, "community publishing" was a hot topic. Companies like Koz developed proprietary systems hosted by news sites that tried to convince community organizations to publish content on mini Web sites, hosted under the news company's banner. The idea never really caught on, and Koz failed during the dot-com bust.

Advance's citizen-blogger initiative has some things in common with the Koz approach. But perhaps this is different, and here's why, according to Jarvis:

* Advance sites have spent a lot of time and effort nurturing their discussion forums, which by now are quite active online communities. With several million page-views per day for the forums, the company already has demonstrated that it can build online communities. Koz and the "community publishing" concept were perhaps ahead of their time -- but now the time is right, Jarvis believes.

* The tools are much simpler today, and that simplicity is what sparked the blog revolution. Blogging applications make posting to and maintaining a Web log fast and easy. Koz's proprietary content-management tools were a different animal.

* Koz's community-groups sites tended to be institutional. Koz and its news-company partners sought to get church groups and community organizations, for example, to publish their news and information on the Web. Advance.net's citizen-blogger strategy aims to get individuals (or "personalities") to post on what often are similar topics. Jarvis believes that if anything makes community journalism work this time around when it failed for Koz, it's that the emphasis is on personality, not bland institutions.

Words of Caution

Advance's citizen-blog initiative is one of the first of its kind. Similar programs that I'm aware of include Lawrence.com's bloggers, a mixture of staff and community members, plus OhMyNews, the South Korean news site featuring several thousand citizen "reporters."

Are these sites ahead of the curve? Or will citizen blogging be just another industry fad?

"Generally, initiatives like this are really good for media companies," says Paul Grabowicz, new media program director of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. "It's a way for media to reconnect with readers or viewers, bringing them in under the tent." As journalism evolves in the digital era, it's important to make people feel that they are a part of the media organization, and not just a passive receptacle, he says.

That said, he does have a word of caution to news companies heading into the mostly uncharted waters of citizen journalism: Use techniques like citizen blogging only to enhance what you're already doing. "The danger would be that media companies would start jettisoning staff coverage and relying on participatory journalism," Grabowicz says.

Community publishing was a good idea in the late '90s that just didn't pan out. Maybe this time the industry will get it right.