US newspapers try to cash in on blogs

Mon Apr 3, 2:14 AM ET
source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060403...N5bnN1YmNhdA--



CHICAGO (AFP) - With a new blog created every second, some media futurists have predicted that "citizen journalists" will be producing half of the world's news by 2021.

A number of newspapers are trying to cash in on the trend by creating online venues where bloggers can share local news and opinions.

"It really enforces your leadership in the community as the voice of the community," said Fran Wills, vice president of interactive and product development for the Denver Newspaper Agency, which publishes The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News.

The websites have turned into places where people can share the kind of news that would not fit into a larger local paper like church bake sales or neighborhood chili contests, Wills said Sunday at the Nexpo newspaper technology convention in Chicago.

And they are drawing in readers and advertisers by focusing on individual neighborhoods instead of a large metropolis.

Half of the registered users at Denver's yourhub.com don't read the Post or Rocky Mountain News and 40 to 50 percent of the website's advertisers are new as well, Wills said.

Bringing in new readers and advertisers is critical for American newspapers which have seen a steady decline in readership and a loss of classified ad revenue to websites like eBay which offer free posting.

Just 51.6 percent of American adults read a daily newspaper in 2005, down from 58.6 percent in 1998 when the Internet started to boom according to the Newspaper Association of America.

In the heyday of the 1960's 80 percent of Americans read the paper.

But perhaps more worrisome is that newspapers are failing to attract young readers and those readers often don't start reading the paper as they get older. Less than 40 percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 read daily newspapers in 2005.

A recent study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism said newspapers face "a seismic transformation in what and how people learn about the world around them."

"Power is moving away from journalists as gatekeepers over what the public knows," the report said.

"Audiences are moving from old media such as television or newsprint to new media online."

Newspaper-driven blogospheres can also help shape the way that news is gathered, Kyle Poplin, executive editor of South Carolina's Bluffton Today, said at the Nexpo conference.

Poplin launched a free tabloid in the town of 18,000 people a year ago. Since more than half the people who live in Bluffton have moved there in the past five years "we want to introduce people to each other," Poplin said.

The paper created a website with the aim of giving everyone in town a blog and serving as a community notice board.

The high school principal uses it to send messages to parents. Dog lovers use it to hold informal beauty contests.

And bloggers managed to kick up such a fuss over what they saw as a dangerous intersection that city officials ended up installing a stoplight.

"The system we have is the readers tell us what's important and we don't miss a lot of stories," Poplin said. "We think it works because it takes readers seriously."

An initial concern with launching the blog was that readers would post inaccurate or unfair stories. But the bloggers tend to police each other, Poplin said, and the paper has only had to ban one reader for creating inappropriate posts.

While both papers rely on the town's bloggers for news tips - and sometimes even for photos - neither Poplin nor Wills expect the bloggers to ever replace professional journalists.

"When push comes to shove and there's controversy on a subject (readers) really look for what reputable sources say," Wills said.

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