Saturday, December 8, 2012

Can Local Newspapers Collaborate with Blogs? J-Lab Finds Answers

mediashift reporting;
J-Lab recently released the results of its Networked Journalism pilot project, a three-year initiative that "called for eight newspapers and one public radio station to network with local blogs," resulting in "nine different models of collaboration," J-Lab reports.
In a detailed report called Networked Journalism: What Works, J-Lab's executive director, Jan Schaffer, outlines the problem the project was designed to explore:
With U.S. newspapers losing more than 42,000 journalists since 2007, local news coverage has suffered. At the same time, hundreds of local blogs and news sites have launched in their markets ... What role can traditional news organizations play not only to expose their audiences to more news than they themselves can deliver, but also to connect new sources of information rising throughout their communities?
She concludes that for a partnership between a legacy newsroom and its community partners to succeed, two things are needed: First, "it is the responsibility of the hub news organization to provide their news networks with enough visibility and outbound links to drive traffic to their partners' sites." And second, "it is the responsibility of the community news partners to post frequently enough to be robust participants and to nab the visibility -- either on the network page or the home page -- that would bring them traffic."
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/12/can-local-newspapers-collaborate-with-blogs-j-lab-finds-answers341.html

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