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As mainstream media outlets struggle to reverse steep drops in circulation, the emerging and fast-expanding new models of citizen media could offer some salvation. From the coastline of South Carolina to Bakersfield, Calif., news executives who have opened the gates to greater participation by community members have seen increased readership, improved news gathering and, in some instances, new revenue streams. Still, many newsrooms remain reluctant, skeptical of the new breed of citizen journalism. Half-hearted attempts to integrate reader blogs or other user-generated content can fall flat. The challenge, say news executives who have made successful inroads into citizen-driven journalism, is to recognize the important windows hyperlocal news sites offer mainstream media outlets to their communities and their customers. "What we need to do is get outside of our comfort zone and we need to think about this so-called creation generation that's out there on the Internet, that’s growing by the day," said Mary Lou Fulton, vice president for audience development at The Bakersfield Californian. "And the question for all of us is how do we participate with this larger world that is making all this content?" Mary
Lou Fulton, Vice President for Audience Development,
But too many newsrooms continue to ignore the deep pool of tipsters and potential customers participating in hyperlocal news sites or clumsily attempt to create mainstream media clones under the awkward label of "citizen journalism." "Having that window into community interests is really powerful and important. It lets you see trends before they happen," Fulton said. "We're often the last to know, unfortunately, when something is a trend. But if you can see it developing, and you can see that you've got, you know, 600 people in your community are interested in a particular thing, gosh, maybe that's another site; maybe that's another business." As media outlets move toward greater community participation, Fulton said they should consider each of the following:
Steve
Yelvington, Vice President of Strategy & Content, Morris
Digital Works,
"The situation most mainstream media are in today is that they're still too successful to have failed, so they can't let go of the old thing and jump to the new," Yelvington said. "Well, fortunately, we had already failed, so we could move on and try something new." What emerged in the place of the troubled Carolina Morning News was a free daily newspaper, Bluffton Today, created as a multi-media platform that blends print and Internet content to deliver intensely local news coverage and capture a readership area expected to triple in population over the next decade. Designed "for contribution, not consumption," Yelvington calls it "a community in conversation with itself." Yelvington said Bluffton Today now has regular readership levels higher than 60 percent in affluent Bluffton, S.C., and penetration as high as 90 percent when occasional readers are measured. It has 79,000 unique monthly visitors and 6,000 registered users in a market of 16,000 households. There is a staff of 18, but citizen-journalism math still applies: Only 10 percent of the registered users have posted something to the site. And of those 600, only about 60 are regular contributors. For the newspaper managers, reporters and editors, the strategy has demanded key shifts in approach:
"All of this does make the journalism better," Yelvington said. "We rarely miss a story now. If it's going on, somebody's talking about it. They may not have it right, and it's our job to follow it up and get it right, but we don't miss things that are going on. The most embarrassing thing is that your audience knows more than you do collectively and sometimes individually, and when they know that, they think you are terribly irrelevant in their lives." Travis
Henry, Editor, YourHub.com,
"What we can do as newspapers, what we have, is we know our community and we can be local, we can reach out to people," Henry said. "That’s the strength. No site, no gizmo, no gadget is ever going to beat that." At YourHub.com, Henry and his staff of 26 have hosted lunches for their online contributors and taken them to baseball games and provided personalized training. "You need to teach people," Henry said. Each day, the site highlights bloggers, user-generated photos and news items, and the content is reverse published once a week into 15 zoned print editions. YourHub.com editors decide what content goes on each community's main page. YourHub.com has been syndicated to eight other communities, with other launches in the works. In each place, Henry said the same key factors dictate success:
While YourHub has a dedicated ad sales staff, Henry said, "You might think about citizen sales staffs."
J-Lab
is a center of the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College
of Journalism. It is a spin-off of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism
(www.pewcenter.org). © 2004
University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism
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Smart
newspapers and adventurous media leaders recognize participation as
a driving force for Internet content and commerce, said Mary Lou Fulton,
who helped launch of one of the newspaper industry’s first participatory
publications, 
Battered
by competitors and nearly abandoned by readers, the zoned edition
of the Savannah Morning News that reached coastal South Carolina
needed a massive overhaul. Steve Yelvington calls it a stroke of
luck.
For
mainstream newspapers looking to embrace citizen media, lip service
is not enough. Travis Henry, editor of the Denver Newspaper Agency’s