I COULD have categorised this piece under Business, Advertising, Citizen Journalism, Blogging and maybe a few others from my list - but I ended up sticking with Citizen Journalism.
Jeff Jarvis has written a piece on the challenges of running local websites following the demise of US-based initiative Backfence.com.
And it is that challenge of bringing together so many strands that faces such sites, because really the different elements can't even be running under one site or a collection of similar sites owned by the same group.
The Business side of things is the plan to raise income, often through advertising but possibly through other online means, yet can the Advertising only be running on your own sites?
Which links us into calling on Citizen Journalists, who could run the ads you are selling on their own sites for a slice of the pie, so that you have eyes and ears out on the streets that you can feed back into your own site.
But you also want to provide these Citizen Journalists with strong blogging skills so that you are confident adverts will be running on quality sites, but also so writers are developing strong relationships with their readers so that site visitors don't need to be on your site to see the ads you are selling.
Many news organisations are keen to draw upon citizen journalism as they see local sites as the solution, but if they think they can succeed by slapping this content across their own sites and wrapping their ads around it they may find it a challenge.
In this video of Professor Hans Rosling explaining how poverty can be tackled he talks of the importance of culture and human rights.
To a lesser degree maybe news organisations should be looking at ways to support flourishing cultures and communities online, without looking to cocoon away what is produced and harvest the rights only favourable to them.
Comments