Part 2 – Community drives mission

Online community news publishers say enabling comments on stories and blogs is the best way to engage community around their content.

“Those conversations drive what is important to us,” said Polly Kreisman, an Emmy-winning broadcast journalist who founded The Loop NY in Larchmont, N.Y. “That’s one of the reasons you want to build community. They help drive what your mission is. We’re not the voice of God. We give them the platform.”

Our April-May survey of 66 local online news publishers from our list of promising sites also found that:

• Nearly all of the sites enable comments on blogs and stories, solicit news tips from users, feature social networking integration, and publish staff contact information.
• Comments and social networking integration are seen as the most effective ways to engage users. More than two thirds of those surveyed said these are effective for their sites.
• The sites are far less likely enable users to upload content, to host discussion forums or feature polls or calls to action.
• Forums, user uploads, calls to action and polls are seen as less effective ways to connect with users.

The results about comments contrast with what established news organizations might say about them. They often struggle with offensive or off-base comments on their sites. But they do not necessarily invest time in moderating and contribution to comments. (See MU student Kathleen Majorsky’s take.)

Online news publishers such as Kreisman say they pay close attention to the comments, respond to them, and reflect them in their work, while journalists at many established organizations do not see a role for themselves in fostering constructive comments. That may be a key difference between promising local news startups and established sites.

Other research has shown that traditional news organizations enable more site functions to promote engagement than community news sites and blogs. Our survey suggests that while the community sites have fewer technological features, their publishers engage more heavily with the ones they have.

We asked the community publishers what geographic area they served. We thought most would identify a fairly small area, a community or neighborhood. But 44 percent said they served either a large metro area or a state or region. Only six percent said they served only one neighborhood or a few neighborhoods.

The publishers reported an average of about 50,000 unique monthly visitors. The figure is skewed by larger sites; the median was 26,000 unique monthly visitors, still enough to make advertising a viable revenue option.

Average time per visit on site was more than seven minutes; the median was more than five, strong figures compared with what Nielsen attributes to traditional news sites.

Publishers rated the importance to their mission of each of these goals on a scale of 1 to 5 (low to very high)

Engagement and community building are central to many of the local online news publishers. While their top priority is creating original news content, engaging and building community was a close second, followed by making the community a better place to live.

The local online publishers employ a variety of strategies for community building offline as well.

“We are committed to building capacity by training local organizations how to create their own news stories and publish them,” said Susan Mernit, founder and editor of Oakland Local. Oakland Local also heavily uses Facebook and Twitter and hosts regular meetups in the community.

Voice of San Diego, with Knight Foundation funding, has sought to foster engagement by helping develop an online high school news site, publishing the “People’s Post” for user contributions, and fostering constructive commenting by banning anonymous comments.

Scott Lewis, CEO of Voice of San Diego, and Paul Bass, editor of the New Haven Independent, also stressed the importance of engagement at an April meeting sponsored by the Knight Foundation of publishers of large news sites.

Bass said community has been the core mission of the Independent. “We cultivated a community. We’re a journalism-driven community.”

Lewis and Bass tie community engagement to strategies for developing revenue through membership, donations and other means.

“The key to sources of revenue is the creation of a community and engagement,” Lewis said. He said news organizations need to think of themselves as educators, as “stewards of conversations” that support “a higher sense of learning and engagement with issues.”

More survey results:

Part 1: Bloggers no more June 1, 2010
Read More

Part 3: Revenue streams June 15, 2010
Read More

Part 4: Toward sustainability June 22, 2010
Read More

About the survey

Reynolds Journalism Institute conducted telephone interviews with 66 local online news publishers whose sites met our criteria for producing original news, working to be accurate, fair and transparent, and developing revenue in April and May 2010. The oldest site started in 1998 but about two thirds of the sites were founded in 2008 or 2009. The sites vary widely in reach – from 1,200 to 400,000 unique visitors a month. The online publishers are predominantly white men, more than half college educated. They range in age from 22 to 68. Our goal was to learn more about their successes and their challenges in operating local news sites.

The survey was conducted under the direction of Ken Fleming, associate director of research for the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Adam Maksl, a Missouri doctoral student, assisted in developing the survey questionnaire and in analyzing the results.

Kenneth Fleming Director of the Center for Advanced Social Research (CASR) Kenneth Fleming obtained a doctoral degree in mass communication and journalism in 2005 and an MBA in finance in 1993 from University of Missouri. His research interests include the relationship between social capital and mass media, health communication, political communication, and research methodology. He has extensive experience in social science survey research including research design, survey instrument development, sampling, data collection and complex data analysis.

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Adam Maksl is a doctoral student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where he studies new media, censorship, and youth journalism. Previously, he was assistant director of workshops in the Department of Journalism at Ball State University, where he helped coordinate various scholastic journalism outreach programs and taught undergraduate courses as an adjunct instructor. He also briefly worked as a high school journalism teacher. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism and English education from Indiana University and a master's degree in journalism from Ball State University.