Think blogging is the Pet Rock of this decade?

Think again. Newspapers are adding blogging features to their Web sites every day, and many large dailies have at least a few writers and editors who share their thoughts about matters large and small.

Non-newspaper sites, such as the one maintained by gaming site ign.com, thrive on the blogger community. When Sony announced its new Playstation 3 at last month’s E3 convention for example, ign.com was flooded with hundreds of blog-style posts within minutes of polling users about their opinions of the new console.

To help newspapers get their piece of the blogging universe, Pluck Corp. in April launched BlogBurst, the industry’s first blogging syndication service.

 

The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, the San Antonio Express-News and newspapers owned by Gannett Co. Inc. and Cox signed up to carry the service, which is designed to display comments from any blogger who wants to distribute his or her commentary.

“BlogBurst provides a simple and innovative way for media companies and top bloggers to work together to expand the reach of blog content to a larger audience,” said Scott Clark, vice president and executive editor of the Houston Chronicle, about expectations of the syndicated service.

Dave Panos, chief executive officer and co-founder of Austin, Texas-based Pluck, said BlogBurst aims to help newspapers fill in particular coverage gaps.

Targeting groups

“A key focus of our company’s technology is to allow publishers to search on their own and discover bloggers in different categories that they might be interested in” distributing, Panos said of Pluck’s Publisher Workbench app.

Using the software, a newspaper could, for example, search for suitable blog entries to support specific coverage areas such as fashion and style.

Panos said Pluck also has pre-assembled collections of blogs publishers can tap into, and it plans to deliver a daily blog wire, dubbed BurstWire, that will feature the best postings from a particular topic group.

“Just like other wire services, it’s priced by size,” Panos said. “There’s a monthly service fee that gives publishers access to the Workbench, and then a performance-based fee structured around page views.”

Publishers are free to post ads on Pluck’s blogged content. Panos said Pluck might sell its own ads, but would do nothing to limit what publishers do to sell advertising on their own Web sites.

Even as Pluck gets off the ground, other newspapers and vendors are fine-tuning their blogging capabilities.

Blogging as core

The State in Columbia, S.C., showcased blogging as a primary component of its community-focused Web site, TheColumbiaRecord.com, when it was launched last fall, said Todd Moshier, production planning manager.

This Web page used by the iUpload software allows site users to submit a news article, an event listing, or a group of photos for editorial approval.
Graphic: iUpload
 

Moshier was part of a group of State staffers that recommended to top management that the paper launch a community-oriented site in which blogging and grassroots journalism was encouraged.

“We saw that was where our industry was going, and our senior management agreed with us,” Moshier said, citing similar efforts in Bluffton, S.C., and Bakersfield, Calif. “It also provided us with what we thought was a very viable project to tackle.”

Bloggers were recruited by word-of-mouth and recommendations, he said.

The debate of how much to moderate public postings came up early, and “it got sticky in several regards,” Moshier said. “At the time, no one in Knight Ridder Digital was going after the type of Web site we were. But they realized that a number of sites had individual blogs so they knew they had to look into the legal end of this. What is our liability?

“We had some conversations with corporate, both Knight Ridder and Knight Ridder Digital, and we talked to our own lawyer here in town. We spent lots of time with user agreements (determining) who owns the content if people post pictures, all of that.”

Avoiding lawsuits

To lessen the chance of expensive lawsuits, all content is viewed first by an editor before going live, although bloggers who earn “approved” status can post content without editorial review. During the development process, the Internet staff took turns reviewing the site, but now that ColumbiaRecord.com is live, there are full-time staff who perform that function. A side benefit: Moshier said having the opportunity to monitor the conversations and comments that fly back and forth allows the paper to keep a close eye on the community’s pulse.

The committee behind ColumbiaRecord.com initially proposed that The State produce a print component of the site, as is done in a number of papers (see “Grassroots Web concept branching out,” Newspapers & Technology, April 2006).

But escalating newsprint and production costs prevented that, Moshier said. As a compromise, The State each Monday publishes a dedicated Letters to the Editor page that includes excerpts of user-contributed content from TheColumbiaRecord.com.

The site is powered by technology from iUpload.com, a Burlington, Ontario, Canada, vendor.



Every Monday, The State newspaper runs excerpts from
blog entries gathered during the prior week on its
community journalism Web site, thecolumbiarecord.com.
 

Business pressures

“We’ve really meshed our product line into one offering that we call Customer Conversation Server,” said Robin Hopper, founder and chief executive officer of iUpload.com. “We’ve seen a dramatic change in the [newspaper] market in just the last 20 months.”

Hopper credits some of that to external business pressures from other media companies and Craigslist, creating communities where none previously existed.

“When some of our first clients were coming online with citizen journalism initiatives, we weren’t allowed to call it blogging, even though it was blogging that was running it,” he said. “That’s changed. It seems to be accelerating even month-over-month now, so it definitely is in full sprint mode for a lot of publishers to get this stuff rolled out.”

Licensing is built on a contributor model, with a flat fee charged for use of the app, which includes a set number of content contributors. Additional contributors ramp up the charges beyond that, and when contributing communities grow very large, the model reverts back to a flat rate again with some bandwidth caveats attached for unlimited contributors.

Prospero Technologies LLC, an online content provider whose software powers sites operated by the Christian Science Monitor, Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat and the Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel, has also seen the impact of blogging.

Long time coming

“The industry really was going for a long time with the idea of just reproducing the newspaper experience online,” said Rusty Williams, vice president, business development of Littleton, Mass.-based Prospero.

“Then somehow blogging really shook things up. The aspect of blogging that I think even many of us in the industry really didn’t recognize fully in the beginning was that the Internet is a publishing model with an editorial perspective. As soon as a blog came along, it became an easy way for someone to write and publish that article, and focus their editorial voice on a topic.”

Williams said publishers can no longer just concentrate on what he calls “inside-out” information flow, where stories are composed entirely internally and then pushed to an audience. Participation and feedback should be welcomed and expected, he said.

“It’s a fundamental change that reporters, writers and editors need to make, and they’re making it. It’s happening. Staff reporters are creating blogs, creating the ability to comment on articles that are written and incorporating pictures from people who have been at events.”