Get Published!

Just caught up with a great piece in Wired on Gan­nett’s crowd­sourcing strategies. Here’s les­son num­ber one from a woman on the sharp end at the Cin­cin­nati Enquirer:

Linda Parker has a memo for pro­fes­sional journ­al­ists: Con­trary to the fear rip­pling through news­rooms, cit­izens don’t want your job. They don’t want to inter­view obscure offi­cials to write bor­ing stor­ies about arcane changes in local zon­ing laws. As online com­munit­ies editor, Parker should know. A Get­Pub­lished! but­ton fea­tures prom­in­ently on many Enquirer Web pages, and the sub­mis­sions land in Parker’s queue. They almost never resemble any­thing com­monly con­sidered journalism.

“It used to read, ‘Be a Cit­izen Journ­al­ist,’” Parker says. “And no one ever clicked on it. Then we called it ‘Neigh­bor to Neigh­bor,’ and still noth­ing. For some reason, ‘Get Pub­lished’ was the magic phrase.” …

There’s a valu­able les­son here — and not just for news­pa­pers. Cit­izens are des­per­ate to broad­cast their mes­sage to their com­munit­ies; they just aren’t going to employ the con­ven­tions of journ­al­ism to do so. “One of our most pop­u­lar cat­egor­ies is called First-Person,” Parker says. “People really love to remin­isce about the 1937 flood. We got great stor­ies on that.” The reader sub­mis­sions do more than provide the Enquirer with addi­tional con­tent to sell ads against. “Our 27 sub­urban papers could never fill their pages without this mater­ial.” One of the com­mon cri­ti­cisms levied against Gan­nett is that it is crowd­sourcing con­tent in order to cut staff, but this charge misses the point. Crowd­sourcing enables the pub­lisher to expand: more Web pages, more niche pub­lic­a­tions, more ads.

Tagged as: Online