Joe Think: Tales about relevance, context, storytelling, and local journalism

Stumbled on this at Peter Van Dijck’s weblog
Sites that put “community” in a separate tab most likely think of community as an add-on to their business, not as core to their business.

I’ve seen it countless times: Reporter wants to help out online. Reporter gets the okay to start blogging. Reporter blogs for a few weeks. Without any comments, or any idea that anybody’s really reading, reporter quits the blog.
Or, there’s video. Or audio. Reporter shoots video, hands it off to online team. Neither online team or […]

Snark aside, my employer the Post is up for the General Excellence (medium site), Breaking News and something else relating to our business columnist Al Lewis. That’s terrific, and it comes from the work of our team and Al Lewis. On another Al Lewis-related note, he wrote an excellent and semi-snarky column about leadership […]

It’s cute that the Post wrote a story about its new ‘hyperlocal’ effort (
In Push for Local Readers, Post Unleashes LoudounExtra.com). But, in an article clouded by links on a page cluttered with them, nowhere is there a link to the site-in-mention, LoudounExtra.com.

Now I’m not saying everybody oughta be perfect. But, with one of the […]

“One member at a time” is not the same as “your subscriber base,” and should not be approached in the same (one-)way.
This paragraph matters big-time to the one-way media, and so does the post behind it:

Strong social sites build value one user at a time. If one user finds value, then they’re much more likely […]

It took me about a year to turn “transparency” from a word with nasty connotations to a word with positive ones. The internet gives a great new landscape for transparency. Here are a few places newspapers could start:

Create an index of your corrections that include the correction made and a link to the original article […]

The trib launched a community site today, triblocal.com. It looks like what a newspaper thinks would work for the model of community participation, and in the write-up the Tribune gives the site they mention TribLocal takes its cues from YourHub. The article also includes choice phrases like “taking a tentative step into a brave new […]

The answer: it varies. The problem is it varies a lot.
I was in the middle of writing a guide on writing a guide for online news content (how meta) when this came across the radar:
The editor of the Greensboro N.C. paper spent time interviewing loyal, 7-day subscribers to the paper last week. More than […]

Update: TBO.com’s Rusty Coats explains what happened: “the timing of this job appearing alongside layoff news is coincidental.” That information makes the meat of this post irrelevant. Which is too bad, because I already posted it. This is my first experience with the “shoot-first” blog practice, and if I keep on top of my stuff, […]

Each time I see that last question I wrote I dislike it more. Out with bad ideas, in with new ones (and give the new ones a couple weeks until they’re allowed to be called bad).
This question aims at the idea that newspapers are in a unique place online. No other legacy medium publishes so […]