billso.com

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.