Board The Weblog Bandwagon Now, Please

By: Steve Outing Think about some of the hottest trends in the Internet -- online auctions, online employment services, e-commerce, online city guides, etc.

In nearly all cases, the news industry early on noticed the trends, but did next to nothing about them. EBay took off like a rocket with online auctions, while newspapers merely scratched at the idea -- not sure if this really was something they should get involved in seriously. Today, eBay is the online auctions giant, and its success has surely had a negative impact on newspaper classifieds. (Why pay for a newspaper merchandise classified ad when eBay is more effective and cheaper?)

Monster.com took online employment listings seriously early on, while the newspaper industry took its sweet time. Monster today is one of the leading reasons that newspaper employment ads have seen a precipitous decline -- and the newspaper industry continues to play catch-up to Monster.

The point is that the newspaper industry historically has not been able to notice a hot Internet trend and act to capitalize on it fast enough to beat pure-play Internet competitors to the punch.

How about if next time, the newspaper industry notices a trend and takes it seriously? We can start with weblogs.

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That's right, weblogs

If you had to identify a current hot Internet trend, weblogs would surely qualify. Many thousands of people now publish weblogs -- from school-age kids to retirees, from academics to celebrities. Weblog hosting companies like Blogger are meeting insatiable demand from a wide range of people and organizations that are glomming on to the concept. There can be little doubt that weblogs are hot.

In the news industry, meanwhile, weblogs are still mostly an experiment. MSNBC.com is a leader in journalism weblogs (as it often is in Internet content trends), having recently created five columnist weblogs: Michael Rogers; Eric Alterman; Michael Moran; Alan Boyle; Jan Herman; and Chris Matthews (host of MSNBC Cable's Hardball talk show).

The San Jose Mercury News' well-respected technology columnist, Dan Gillmor, has a long-running and popular weblog called eJournal. The Microsoft-funded webzine Slate recently added political weblogger Mickey Kaus. The Christian Science Monitor's Web site carries several blogs, including MonitorBlog, a weblog by staff writer Tom Regan covering technology topics.

All that's well and good, but it's not enough. Weblogs first emerged as a hot concept a couple of years ago, and in the last year they've graduated to become pretty much mainstream. So isn't it about time that media companies started taking it seriously?

Here are some ideas for news companies to take the next step with weblogs.

1.) Give every reporter, columnist, and photographer in the newsroom their own weblog.

Mandating that everyone maintain a weblog probably isn't a great idea, but offering everyone the opportunity is. Imagine if most every reporter, for example, had an outlet for material that doesn't fit in the print product. A city hall reporter runs across a wealth of interesting tidbits every working day, and some of them can be added to a city hall news weblog. I'm not talking about stuff that's "not good enough" for the print edition, but rather "insider" information that might not be right for a general newspaper audience. The content of such a reporter's weblog would be of high interest to an audience to which city hall news is important. (It could even be a paid subscription service, if the content was good enough and not something duplicated by others.)

Imagine what a newspaper would be like that not only printed general-interest stories by its reporters, but also published (online, via weblogs) ongoing insider coverage of various topics and beats by those reporters. This would significantly add to the value of the newspaper and its Web site to the public.

Promoting such newspaper weblogs is simple enough. In addition to routine marketing/promotion in the print edition and on the paper's Web site, each byline story by a beat reporter should have a footnote referring to the journalist's weblog. ("To read more crime and courts news, visit reporter Jane Smith's weblog. ...")

Weblogs aren't good only for writers. They make a wonderfully attractive outlet for the work of staff photographers -- who never get everything they'd like published in the print edition of newspapers. For a major news story, a photographer can post multiple shots on the Web. In print, the sole or couple photos printed can be accompanied by a blurb telling people to "view more photos of the office building fire on photographer Joe Jones' weblog. ..."

A variation is to create group blogs. All sports writers covering professional football might contribute to a weblog, rather than each have individual blogs. This is not only a bit less onerous than publishing lots of individual weblogs, it also might be more appealing to readers -- who may care more about a specific topic than they do about a specific journalist's work.

It's too much work for reporters to add a weblog to an already-full schedule, you say? There are a couple possible answers to this. First, the ideal-world response: Give any staffer who wishes to publish a beat-related weblog a few hours a week to devote to weblog duties. A good way to justify this time expenditure for a columnist is to have one print column a week by a compilation of the best of the weblog for print readers.

The other answer is that reporters add weblog duties to their existing schedule -- which is possible because maintaining an ongoing weblog is not an onerous task, especially if the journalist is enthused about the project. Most weblog publishing systems support a Web form that the weblogger simply types in text and hits a Publish button. Such journalist weblogs typically don't add reporting time, because the whole idea is to provide an outlet for valuable material that the reporters collects anyway but heretofore had no outlet for publishing it.

There's also the issue of editing reporters' weblog content. Most likely you'll want to have webloggers post their content without publishing, then have the city and/or copy desk edit it before hitting "Publish." That's going to take some editor time if you have a lot of staff journalist webloggers.

2.) Give your public what they want: weblogs

The other major area for news organizations to consider in the weblog scene is to host them. Today there are many software and Web service solutions for hosting weblogs. One of the largest is Blogger, which has more than a half million registered users. From the outset, Blogger offered free weblog hosting, but recently it introduced a "Pro" service that costs $35 a year (which will rise to $50 after a charter period).

Given the number of people publishing weblogs now, and the significant growth, weblog hosting should grow into a sizable business. Local newspapers, especially, are well positioned to introduce the weblog concept to their readership -- many who will not yet have heard of weblogs -- and profit from hosting their new weblogs. Possibilities include charging for hosting (a la Blogger Pro), selling weblogging software, or selling advertisements to run on free public weblogs.

The approach of publishers selling software for weblogging is being promoted by Userland, a Massachusetts developer of content management software. Userland sells a software product called Radio Userland that integrates with a Web browser and makes hosting weblogs easy. Along with Blogger, it's one of the fledgling weblog industry's star players. According to Userland president John Robb, who sells Radio Userland software on his own for $40, his company is starting to work with other companies (including an as yet unidentified news company) to sell the software and share revenue on the sales.

Radio Userland is interesting in how it ties participating weblogs together into a network, and allows weblog readers to "subscribe" to topics. This would be useful for a local news site that carried many weblogs, because it could offer users a service for delivering weblog content (from a variety of blogs) specific to their wants.

Getting the public to buy in to this concept ties in with the first major idea presented in this column, to give all newsroom journalists weblogs. Robb says that those staff weblogs will serve to seed the idea of a newspaper's readers creating their own blogs -- and have the newspaper Web site host them.

Be sure to look beyond hosting weblogs for individuals, and consider hosting them for community organizations and businesses -- a concept being championed by Userland founder Dave Winer, a well-known weblogger himself.

Community groups are especially interesting. Many will benefit from maintaining weblogs that are made visible by being included on a high-traffic local news site or city portal. The news site benefits by becoming a portal for local community organizations.

(A few years ago, "community publishing" was all the rage in the online news industry. Companies like the now-defunct Koz provided expensive solutions that allowed community groups to publish on a newspaper site. The idea was for this to be ad supported -- but the concept proved too fragile and the systems too expensive to survive the dot-com crash. The idea of a local news company hosting community organizations' weblogs now would appear to be a less expensive, less complex replacement for community publishing systems.)

Also interesting is the concept of hosting weblogs for local businesses -- and charging them a higher fee than is charged to individuals and non-profit groups. Publishers can think of hosted local-business weblogs as alternative forms of advertising -- which can be publicized on the news Web site and in the print edition.

An example of a local-business weblog would be a travel agency that maintains a blog featuring tales and photos from its customers' travels -- interspersed with marketing messages and special offers from the agency. Such weblogs can succeed if the content has enough informational or entertainment value to be attractive to Internet users, while still serving the marketing needs of the sponsoring business.

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Are you convinced yet?

Will weblogs become a huge and profitable industry? No one knows. No one knows yet how business models will evolve for weblogs. Are blogs destined to be nothing more than a neat personal publishing technique that captures minds and hearts but are not a viable business proposition? I can't offer a definitive answer, but my belief is that there's something there for the business side as well as editorial. Like many new Internet ideas, it will take time and experimentation to find the answers.

John Hiler, editor of Microcontent News, a weblog about weblogging, says that perhaps blogs will present the biggest opportunities for businesses with existing revenue streams -- where weblogs can have a big impact on creating more revenues and bringing in more customers. The newspaper industry should consider that.

Weblogs have captured the public's attention. There's no doubt about that. So let's run with the weblog idea and apply it to the newspaper industry. Maybe this time, newspapers won't be following everyone else.

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