Friday, January 20, 2006

Bloggers in the Houston area are being encouraged to begin blogging for the Houston Chronicle's website, Chron.com. Explains the Chronicle's Dwight Silverman in a post on his blog, "At Chron.com, we want to give you the chance to write about your passions, the things about which you consider yourself an expert, on our site."

This is a concept that I've advocated for some time. It helps expands the coverage of a newspaper website, utilizing non-paid community bloggers to cover micro-niches that the news staff likely would never get to. It turns a newspaper website into more of a community experience and less of a one-way flow of information from the chosen ones (staff and freelance journalists, and a limited number of outsiders).

Silverman says that people who already blog are welcome to blog as well on Chron.com, though he discourages them from repeating content verbatim from their outside blogs on a Chronicle-hosted blog. So far, most of the inquiries have come from people thinking about blogging for the first time.

The key to this is probably that word "passion." He's hearing ideas from people about such topics as ultralights, a recreational activity that's big in the Houston area. Other potential topics include gardening, scrapbooking, cooking, knitting, birding, etc. Those are the types of blogs that would be driven by the "natural energy" of the passionate community blogger.

This is "Phase 2.0" of the website's blogging initiative. Bloggers are not getting compensated, at this point, "other than [we are] providing bloggers a big stage on which to play," Silverman says. "We're providing the software, promotion, and the exposure that comes from being on a site like ours."
E-mail this item | Add/View Feedback (2) | QuickLink this item: A95555



E-Media Tidbits Archive

View items published between:		and
	(MM/DD/YYYY)		(MM/DD/YYYY)

MAIN | Back to Top