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.