Greensboro, N.C. Newspaper Tries Blogging to Lure Readers

The Boston Globe reports that the Greensboro, N.C., News-Record, a daily newspaper with a 93,000 circulation has 11 bloggers. Hailed as a bold experiment, this story highlights many of the problems confronting the main stream media (MSM) today. MSM is challenged by non-traditional, citizen journalists, who are often passionate, opinionated and unfettered by a need to be objective about their topics. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a passion in the Greensboro, journalist bloggers, if this is any indication:

Night cops reporter Eric Townsend, a 26-year-old who also contributes to a blog about traffic, said he's happy to post to the blog, but he thinks declining newspaper readership among the young is more a symptom of a decline in civic engagement than anything else.

Can hardly agree with this assessment. Since the growth of the blogosphere shows an increasingly engaged population taking on the issues.

Also, the story reports News-Record bloggers have a reluctance to engage in being purely editorial in their blogs and don't touch the hot topics. If the slide in readership of newspapers is to turn around, they must provide something for the reader -- a viewpoint maybe?

 

Comments

[Lex]

How much editorializing to do on our blogs is still a matter of much newsroom discussion. I think that as our online audience is increasingly affected by, and becomes more accustomed to, the online tone set by bloggers, acceptance of editorializing will go up and ethics will evolve accordingly. We'd like to lead our readers in that direction without getting too far out in front of them. And even when readers become completely comfortable with the notion, editorializing won't always be appropriate, depending on the timing and substance of the post.

At any rate, at least four of our blogs regularly contain opinion: Off the Record and Thinking Out Loud, posted by editorial-page folks; editor John Robinson's blog; and my own. And we publish our printed Letters to the Editor in the form of a blog, too, with comments enabled on each letter. There's no shortage of passionate online dialogue.

Best,

Lex Alexander, citizen-journalism coordinator
www.news-record.com