Honolulu Advertiser blogs need more content and authority

The Hon­olulu Adver­tiser, like other Gan­nett news­pa­pers, has spent a con­sid­er­able amount of time and effort to set up a hyper­local blog net­work at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com. The Advertiser’s web site is lit­tered with small graph­i­cal ads that pro­mote indi­vid­ual blogs with the same cookie-cutter approach: the blog’s name, along with the author’s name and pic­ture, with an unin­spired tagline such as “A blog by…” or “Blog with…”

Adver­tiser Edi­tor Mark Platte wrote a progress report in this Hon­olulu Adver­tiser op-ed arti­cle called Blogs a hit, and we’d love more. One sec­tion of this arti­cle is interesting:

I’m always on the look­out for new blogs, specif­i­cally in areas that aren’t already cov­ered, and I am always ask­ing staffers and those out­side the staff if they are inter­ested in blog­ging. Some have started blogs and decided the time com­mit­ment is more than they bar­gained for, so they drop out. But blog­ging is about exper­i­ment­ing, and if a blog doesn’t work, there’s no prob­lem replac­ing it with another authored by some­one with a fresh perspective.

This Poinog­ra­phy arti­cle from the same day, 15 June 2008, called Edi­tor wants more hits and ad rev­enue, er, blog­gers exam­ined the same sec­tion with a cyn­i­cal view.It’s true that print and broa­cast adver­tis­ing rev­enues have been on the decline for years, as adver­tis­ers make more online media buys. The title of this TechCrunch arti­cle is a good start­ing point: Top 100 Adver­tis­ers Shifted $1 Bil­lion To the Web Last Year At The Expense Of TV And News­pa­pers.

As Adver­tis­ing Age notes, the econ­omy has some­thing to do with this trend: Top 100’s Ad-Spend Growth Grinds to Halt.

The Adver­tiser has been involved in a long-running labor dis­pute with its writ­ing staff. The blog net­work is one way to recruit new, non-union writ­ers who could pro­vide online con­tent dur­ing a strike or walkout.

Many of the Advertiser’s blog­gers are already union jour­nal­ists for the news­pa­per, but the major­ity of the neigh­bor­hood blog­gers are new recruits to the Advertiser.

Author­ity and timeliness

A newspaper’s blogs should be as author­i­ta­tive and reli­able as the print and online edi­tions. I enjoy read­ing the New York Times’ blogs, espe­cially Bits and The Lede. The blogs pro­vide Some of the Times’ blog arti­cles are a draft or pre­view of a longer arti­cle that appears a few hours later in the print and online edi­tions of the news­pa­per itself.

A few of the Advertiser’s 36 blog­gers need assis­tance in learn­ing how to blog. Kim Fassler, in an arti­cle called Fri­day Tid­bits in her Quar­ter­life Cafe blog, men­tioned that she has prob­lems find­ing top­ics for her blog posts:

I sup­pose Quar­ter­life Cafe would prob­a­bly fall into the cat­e­gory of “mean­ing­less fluff” designed to entice the twenty-something crowd into read­ing the news­pa­per. But, hey, if I can get just one more apa­thetic twenty-something to read just one more arti­cle and learn just one more impor­tant aspect of some Hawaii issue, then I’ll write all the mean­ing­less fluff I can muster.

That post had five sub­head­ings in it, with Kim’s com­ments on Iran, teenage preg­nancy, and cloning. I would have split that sin­gle post into 4 arti­cles posted through­out the day.

Some of the com­ments on Kim’s story were excel­lent. One per­son noted that the Advertiser’s blog soft­ware seems slow, for exam­ple. Their pages do resolve at a lazy pace, but that’s some a good server-side cache could fix.

Tomor­row I’ll post an announce­ment about a new direc­tion for my blog.

Tagged as: authority, blogging, Hawaii, Honolulu, media, new-york, newspaper, Oahu, research, seo, union