Lessions From My Online News Association Panel on Citizen Media: Urban Vancouver

Posted by Richard on Thursday, 25 October 2007

This is part 1 of the wrap-up for the Online News Association workshop on Citizen Media I spoke at last week in Toronto. See the introductory post for more information and links.

This will necessarily be a combination of what I said at the workshop and what I wanted to say. The principle lesson learned over the three years plus at Urban Vancouver is that we found it hard to convince people to post to Urban Vancouver if they already have their own blog. Some do it, like Dave Olson, Stewart Marshall, Roland, myself, and others (yes, I'm aware of the poetry and real estate posts), but for the most part, people figure if they already have a blog, then there's no point in publishing it elsewhere. We syndicate most Vancouver-based blogs anyway using their RSS feeds, so it doesn't matter too much. The other lesson from Urban Vancouver is that editing is a full-time job for at least one person done currently by 4 people who already have full-time jobs. The duties of Urban Vancouver include moderating comments and posts according to the terms of service; gardening the aggregator (adding, removing, updating feeds), responding to the emails we get, mostly mistakenly; and encouraging people to participate on the site. We've been happy with the high search engine ranking Urban Vancouver enjoys, and discussed SEO briefly during my session at the workshop. I suggested that writing for people, enabling comments, and having an RSS feed will get people to link to you (or even syndicate you) and therefore drive up your ranking.

An audience member suggested headlines as a determining factor: it's one thing to have a savvy and witty headline, but being briefly descriptive instead helps people get an immediate sense for the individual story's topic and helps people who are looking for such a thing in Google. I could have, but didn't, mention tags. At my session and as a follow-up to a comment in someone else's session, I tried to work in Urban Vancouver's aggregtor effectively being a new type of newswire (at least one blogger uses Urban Vancouver's RSS feed to end all RSS feeds as fodder for a regular column), but couldn't fit it in. I mentioned that it was okay to promote your wares (or others') on Urban Vancouver as long as it wasn't press release style, i.e. more conversational and less like a pitch. Also, copyright owned by the original author both encourages people to post their stuff and limits the work we have to do: since we can't sublicense any of the works, we don't.

Along with Lisa, I don't think Urban Vancouver competes with sites like Metroblogging Vancouver, Beyond Robson, and neighbourhood-specific blogs like Kitsilano and Carrall Street, since we syndicate and directly link to their sites often. An audience member suggested that we don't "compete" because Urban Vancouver doesn't sell advertising—at least not yet—and therefore doesn't compete for the pool of ad dollars.

See also: "What If You Created A Community Site and Nobody Came?", my November 2006 article in which I talk about Urban Vancouver and community sites in general.

Comments

Micah Sittig (not verified)

Sun, 2007-10-28 12:33

I can't speak with much authority, since I'm just a lowly and infrequent contributer, but from what I hear we have a lot of the same issues with Shanghaiist.com. A couple notes:
  • Cross-posting can solve some of the issues between people blogging for their own sites vs blogging for a community site. This is a plausible solution for us because we don't have a community RSS feed thing where you could end up with dupes. We've also assigned topic editors: Music Editor, Food Editor... to motivate people to post.
  • We love it when one of our articles makes it to the Digg front page, as it drives up traffic tenfold.
  • The charge regarding competing for dollars has some substance to it. Things can get snarky when real money is at stake.
Submitted by Micah Sittig on Sun, 2007-10-28 12:33

Richard

Sun, 2007-10-28 19:11

We sort of had subject editors for Urban Vancouver, in our featured stories section. It worked for a while until ... well, I'm not sure what happened to all of our featured contributors except that they moved on to just updating their own blogs. One of the reasons we don't see MV, BR and the neighbourhood blogs as competition is that we (Lisa and I) think that there's so much more room for people writing about local issues. Another reason is that we have people coming to us asking what our rates are, when we don't even say we're advertising. So I'm running under the assumption that there's more supply of ad dollars than there are sites to collect that cash. At some point we'll reach "saturation", where the "market" runs out of "room", and then we end up "competing". Until that happens, and hopefully after that, I'll continue pointing people to those sites and articles produced by people who don't work for or participate directly in Urban Vancouver.
Submitted by Richard on Sun, 2007-10-28 19:11

Jeffery Simpson (not verified)

Sun, 2007-12-02 11:37

Late to the comment party as always... I've had similiar thoughts after two years over at Metroblogging Vancouver, in fact I pretty much agree with everything across the board. It's hard to attract writers when there's no money involved, and when most regular bloggers are trying to make a go of it on their own. That means the bloggers we do get tend to save their best stuff for their own site. We don't really moderate comments unless they're obviously spam like our recent run in with Matchstick, or in theory if someone crossed the line and went from being combative to being truely threatening. but being briefly descriptive instead helps people get an immediate sense for the individual story's topic and helps people who are looking for such a thing in Google. That's the way to do it. Daringfireball has a good post about that ( http://daringfireball.net/2004/05/writing_for_google ) but it's absolutelty true and something that I forget all the time, just being to the point is better than being clever for Google. As for competing I don't think we're competing with anyone really, though that view isn't held across the board locally. Urban Vancouver doesn't take ads, Metroblogging's ad scheme is so much larger than just Vancouver that what happens locally is a drop in the bucket (they seem to be going for more cross network promotions with Federated Media or like their deal with Amazon and the Kindle or Helio for cell phones in the US) and it's only really Beyond Robson that's out there competing hard for ad dollars locally. Which probably explains why they're the most agressive in recruiting other site's authors. I'd be happy if Metroblogging made tons of money, but it doesn't affect me at all, so I'm not going to go around acting like a crazy person just so we get more readers. At the end of the day I've just had to decide that all I can do is invite people to come post, and post as well as I can and hopefully the quality of the site will attract both new bloggers and new readers. The only disagreement I might have, and it's more of a personal opinion than objective truth, and that's I'd hardly call what any of the sites you mentioned do journalism. At best we're sort of like the "Good News" portion of the evening news where the anchors all sit around and joke about a video of a puppy who snuck into Stanley Park and fell into the dolphin tank but was okay in the end. Linking to the CBC and making snarky comments isn't journalism any more than doing the same thing while sitting in Tim Horton's is journalism. Few little actually news gathering is done by any of the local sites, and when it is it's mostly done in the arts and entertainment or gossip side. The Tyee is really the only local site that I'd consider doing real journalism. Of course that's just me coming from a university journalism background. I'm secretly an old old man, one that even still gets upset about things like seperation of editorial and advertising departments. Maybe it's why I never get invited to parties.
Submitted by Jeffery Simpson on Sun, 2007-12-02 11:37

Jeffery Simpson (not verified)

Mon, 2007-12-03 22:58

Speaking of which I came across this site (link below) and it seems that people are trying to build industries off a local blog feed list. http://www.vancouveriam.com/
Submitted by Jeffery Simpson on Mon, 2007-12-03 22:58