If you’re a Seattle media company, you should be paying close attention to Neighborlogs.
In a community where there are dozens of passionate, skilled citizens who are actively building their own news following online, what’s the best move you as a legacy news institution can make? I’ll give you a hint: “compete with them” is not the right answer.
Embrace and extend.
Offer complimentary services so that you both win. Bring them into the fold. Neighborlogs provides technology infrastructure for individuals who want to start a neighborhood blog, and it just takes a little off the top. Good model.
Why not offer technology or network advantages to good neighborhood blogs in exchange for a revenue sharing agreement?
We’re past the point where blogging is a novelty, where good writing happens for free (trust me, even free blogs make money now). The benefit to a publisher in the new market is that you don’t have to promise a salary, you can promise a cut of the winnings.
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
This is why I still don’t get seattlepi.com’s call to volunteer neighborhood bloggers (though I think we all get it, in the sense that Hearst = Old Media, old thinking). They’re looking for neighborhood bloggers? Seattle already has arguably the best network of neighborhood bloggers in the country.
Thanks, Jason. We’re just part of the crowd. So many moves by the biggies treat the crowd with hostility. What happened to I Hug You!? There are some conversations that are more friendly and leaders like Outside.in are showing the way for the new and or future biggies to act.
BTW, we’re always looking for more people to join the crowd so please consider Neighborlogs for your community news blogging needs.
Paul – In the case of the PI, I don’t think it’s entirely misguided. Long term, they’re going to have to pay/share revenue with their community writers, but in the short term at least they offer some significant advantages through their platform; the PI brand name carries some weight, and their posts make it into Google News, which many neighborhood bloggers’ do not.
That said, I don’t think the mindset of people in the Seattle area is necessarily attuned to that. But then again, if that were true, Neighborlogs wouldn’t work either, so go figure…
I disagree with the concept of there necessarily being an advantage to being associated with some larger media entity. For one, even though we do not have even remotely the most interesting-looking site, we and our counterparts have CONTROL – the P-I look (sorry, I love you people dearly, I am sure you’re working on a killer redesign) is boring and you can’t just write a great post with lots of BIG pix, embedded video, etc. – or maybe you can and nobody knows how? or is taking the time to bother? Also, at least these days, the barrier to get into Google News is SHOCKINGLY low. I wasn’t even going to submit the little site we help with on the side till I saw an example of a site updated maybe once weekly and seldom with original news that suddenly turned up on G-News, and realized, oh for God’s sake, if that’s all it takes, then our little site was more than qualified. (WSB was one of the earlier neighborhood-news sites around here to be indexed in G-News.) Take a look sometime at what’s in there.
Jason - Maybe in the long run things even out. But short term, P-I is spending all this time, effort and money on infastructure when it’s already in place. Besides that, if there are bloggers out there with the chops to compete with the likes of my distinguished fellow commenters, where are they now and why wouldn’t they start their own sites? Besides that, doesn’t the P-I already link out to the ‘hood blogs on a regular basis? Doesn’t seem like a huge leap to start sharing revenue.
Paul – Honestly I’m not sure how many of the Seattle neighborhood blogs would (at this point) be interested in such a deal. Note Tracy’s reluctance above…
But yes, I’m not saying the PI is doing a better thing by soliciting free content from locals, but they aren’t doing a flat out dumb thing, either.