Murdoch courts bloggers
After years of dismissing the internet, News' CEO
Rupert Murdoch discovers blogging.
News
Corp's website is running the transcript of a
speech CEO Rupert Murdoch gave to the American Society of Newspaper Editors last
week.
Murdoch also mused on the possibilities of "harnessing bloggers to the corporate news cart", PR Watch mused.
"We need to be the destination for those bloggers," Fox told editors. "We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented."
Well, d'oh, Rupes.
You are like the bloke who rocked up to the Year-12 Ball ("prom" for you Americans) and discovered they were so late they were the first to arrive for the ten-year reunion.
We had a proposal nearly a decade ago for readers to pass threaded-comment at the end of stories, but lawyer-induced timidity has stopped most major publishers from implementing this feature. The fear is that if someone is libelled by a comment that it is the paper that will be sued. There are solutions to mitigate the risk, but try to get those past the crusty layers of senior management.
My latest thinking is that we should invite community influencers -- the cardinal, youth worker, hefty CEO, social demographer, marketer etc -- to blog on our newspapers' websites on issues of importance for them. This builds deeper relationships with people who have important voices that deserve to be heard that will generate news leads while giving readers another reason to read us.
Step two is to have "blog this" links on each story to invite bloggers to pass comment on stories, thereby also driving traffic to the originating news site (ie us). This gives readers a chance to converse on topics that matter to them and provides a reality check for so many out-of-touch journos. But this is likely to meet resistance because lawyers will say bloggers are infringing our copyright.
Finally, bloggers' comments are harvested and run in the news pages after each relevant story. Just a quick grab that would then point to the bloggers column in the op-ed or letters pages. More content, more context.
All of this would cement cracking relationships with the community, drive traffic and ad revenue, and prepare us for the next round of content wars.
But most importantly it furthers dialogue about the communities in which we live and that is the role that papers should fulfill.
Murdoch also mused on the possibilities of "harnessing bloggers to the corporate news cart", PR Watch mused.
"We need to be the destination for those bloggers," Fox told editors. "We need to encourage readers to think of the web as the place to go to engage our reporters and editors in more extended discussions about the way a particular story was reported or researched or presented."
Well, d'oh, Rupes.
You are like the bloke who rocked up to the Year-12 Ball ("prom" for you Americans) and discovered they were so late they were the first to arrive for the ten-year reunion.
We had a proposal nearly a decade ago for readers to pass threaded-comment at the end of stories, but lawyer-induced timidity has stopped most major publishers from implementing this feature. The fear is that if someone is libelled by a comment that it is the paper that will be sued. There are solutions to mitigate the risk, but try to get those past the crusty layers of senior management.
My latest thinking is that we should invite community influencers -- the cardinal, youth worker, hefty CEO, social demographer, marketer etc -- to blog on our newspapers' websites on issues of importance for them. This builds deeper relationships with people who have important voices that deserve to be heard that will generate news leads while giving readers another reason to read us.
Step two is to have "blog this" links on each story to invite bloggers to pass comment on stories, thereby also driving traffic to the originating news site (ie us). This gives readers a chance to converse on topics that matter to them and provides a reality check for so many out-of-touch journos. But this is likely to meet resistance because lawyers will say bloggers are infringing our copyright.
Finally, bloggers' comments are harvested and run in the news pages after each relevant story. Just a quick grab that would then point to the bloggers column in the op-ed or letters pages. More content, more context.
All of this would cement cracking relationships with the community, drive traffic and ad revenue, and prepare us for the next round of content wars.
But most importantly it furthers dialogue about the communities in which we live and that is the role that papers should fulfill.
Posted: Fri - April 22, 2005 at 08:09 PM
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Published On: Apr 25, 2005 05:03 PM
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Published On: Apr 25, 2005 05:03 PM