Why Newspapers Are Betting on Audience Participation

The New York Times

Why Newspapers Are Betting on Audience Participation
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

GREENSBORO, N.C. - "Get me rewrite!"

For years those words evoked the romanticism of the newspaper business, back when swashbuckling reporters landed scoops with derring-do. Today they mean something else entirely, at least here where the people at The News & Record, the local daily, are toiling to reinvent their newspaper.

In this world, "Get me rewrite" will in effect be a menu option, a way for unhappy readers to go online and offer their own versions of articles they do not like. Their hope is to convert the paper, through its Web site, www.news-record.com, into a virtual town square, where citizens have a say in the news and where every reader is a reporter.

This feature, part of a planned overhaul of The News & Record's Web site that is to begin next week, is a potent symbol of a transformation taking place across the country, where top-down, voice-of-God journalism is being challenged by what is called participatory journalism, or civic or citizen journalism.

Under this model, readers contribute to the newspaper. And they are doing so in many forms, including blogs, photos, audio, video and podcasts.

Whether such efforts can revive revenue for newspaper publishers is an open question. But with gloomy financial forecasts and declines in circulation, some papers are starting to see participatory journalism as their hope for reconnecting with their audiences.

In some cases, like Backfence.com, in suburban Virginia, citizens are the only contributors, and the "newspaper" is an unedited Web site. In Bluffton, S.C., Blufftontoday.com is made up largely of reader contributions, but some of the content is also published in a colorful tabloid newspaper and distributed free to residents. In Colorado, The Rocky Mountain News is creating 39 local Web sites under the umbrella of YourHub.com, with most of the material intended to come from readers.

The Commercial Appeal in Memphis has community sections on its Web site written by readers but edited by the newspaper. The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., has set up a blog for readers to hash over the paper's daily coverage.

Recently, The Los Angeles Times briefly opened its editorial page so readers could go online and insert their own thoughts in editorials. The approach was patterned after Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia made up of contributions from anyone with something to say. But as the newspaper discovered, there are perils in being so open. Its experiment lasted only two days, before obscene pictures were posted on the Web site, prompting the paper to shut it down.


Nearly all newspapers have been troubled by a range of substantially similar worries: the loss of 18-to-34-year-old readers; the loss of trust in conventional news media; and the emergence of technology, especially blogs, that make it easy for ordinary people to barge into the old media's one-way conversation.

Lex Alexander, an investigative reporter and editor who is overseeing The News & Record's transition, said all the long-term trends for the newspaper were troubling unless it did something different.

The paper, with a circulation around 100,000 that has not increased significantly for almost two decades, has been open about its audience-participation plans, discussing them with readers and seeking direction from them along the way.

Greensboro, a city of 229,000 in the gently rolling hills of central North Carolina with seven colleges nearby, was fertile territory for the town square idea. "Greensboro had a pretty strong blogosphere before we came on the scene, and we were trying to understand it and fit in," said John Robinson, the paper's 52-year-old editor, who has been the engine behind the transformation here.

"They were commenting on civic affairs and what the city council did and all the dumb things The News & Record did, and that annoyed me because they were misinformed," he said. "But they were scooping us. They knew things that were going on that we didn't, in the schools and other places. There was power in what they were doing."

The city has always had its subversive aspects. It was a stop on the Underground Railroad in the 1800's, and it is where black students in 1960 staged the first sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter to protest segregation, a movement that spread across the South.

Now, a popular site called www.Greensboro101.com provides residents with what it calls an alternative media hub. Mr. Robinson is considering joining forces with Greensboro101 to pursue an investigation on local water quality that the Web site has begun.

Yet there is fierce competition with bloggers. Several local politicians blog, including Sandy Carmany, a member of the City Council, who blogs in near-real time, and who scooped The News & Record recently on the city budget. Last week, when a News & Record reporter called Tom Phillips, another councilman, for comment on the paper's exclusive information that Wal-Mart was coming to town, Mr. Phillips turned around and broke the news on his own blog.

Greensboro is also home to Ed Cone, a well-known blogger (www.EdCone.com) who writes a column for The News & Record and who is widely credited with encouraging Mr. Robinson to join in the fun.

"They link off-site to other bloggers and they recognize amateurs and independents," Mr. Cone said. "That's the fascinating thing they're doing - they're participating on the Web rather than just using the Web."

Mr. Alexander has proposed several ways for the paper to become interactive, including blogs for all staff members; blogs of daily meetings where articles are planned for the next day's paper; venues for readers to participate, from writing articles to adding comments to obituaries; links from news stories to original sources; letters to the editor online to enable reader discussion about them; and a permanent free archive.

"We're being friendly as opposed to bureaucratic," said Dick Barron, 48, a business reporter.

At this stage, though, enthusiasm in the newsroom for the town square initiative has outstripped the online reality. Charles Stafford, the strategic development manager, said developing the Web site turned out to be a bigger job than the editors had imagined. And management has not yet thrown in more money or staff members.

The unveiling of the new site was bumped back throughout the spring and is now planned on July 11. The site's participatory aspects will not be available until a few months later.

Robin Saul, president and publisher of The News & Record, said the paper was waiting for more marks of success before putting money into the online project and was likely to put it into the sales staff first. "You don't invest resources until you're sure there will be a return," he said. Ann Morris, the managing editor, acknowledged that the business model is "what we lose sleep over."

"Advertisers are very conservative," Ms. Morris said. "And the idea that we're going to be able to bridge this gap from traditional department store retail advertising to all sorts of different ways of generating revenue online - through e-mail, through selling databases, through things we haven't even thought of yet - that's a big bridge."

Steve Outing, who has chronicled the online news industry for Editor & Publisher and is a senior editor at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said he was not troubled by what he called the Greensboro paper's "unimpressive" start.

"I don't think we're anywhere near figuring this citizen journalism/grass-roots media thing out," he said in an e-mail message. "I do think that if news organizations think that they're going to have everybody be amateur (nonpaid) 'journalists,' they need to think again."

He said people were generally intimidated by the idea of writing news articles but, as the reaction to the Asian tsunami demonstrated, they were comfortable sharing their experiences, particularly photographs.

"I think when we figure out a better way to entice people, to make it worth their while to contribute, then citizen media will start to show promise," he said. "And I think we'll eventually see some business models come out of this that work."

In the Greensboro newsroom, more than a dozen reporters and editors are writing blogs, and many others are participating in video and audio feeds. Jennifer Fernandez and Bruce Buchanan, the two education reporters, began one of the first blogs, called Chalkboard. They said they got so many requests for information that the task of keeping the blog current sometimes meant they did not write articles they might otherwise produce for the paper.

Mr. Buchanan said he was positive about the blog. "It's gotten people excited about the paper and made them feel they have a stake in it."

In May, the blogs received more than 332,000 page views, up from 295,000 in April. But reader comments are still sparse. More lively is the paper's online message board, where readers, who can post items anonymously, offer short spurts of unedited opinion on local topics ranging from jobs with Federal Express to treatment for crack addicts.

While the reader contribution section of the Web site is not yet in full operation, readers can make submissions under a "sneak peek" preview section - even if few have yet.

One, T. W. Caudle, who wrote about his grandson's grand slam home run at a local baseball game, had submitted his article to the print newspaper, but it ran only online. His wife, Shelby, said the family was disappointed that the story did not appear in print because more people might have read it.

"I didn't even know you could see the paper on the computer," Mrs. Caudle said. She said she subscribed to the paper because she liked reading the obituaries and editorials.

Many submissions are oriented toward community service, like a recent announcement seeking families to play host to students from abroad. The announcement was submitted by Virgil Renfroe, who teaches writing to college students and who, at 28, is in the demographic heart of the paper's target audience. When the announcement ran in the print paper, he did not get any responses. Then he put it online and got five replies.

"So there are people online who are looking," he said, but added that he was not one of them. Nor, ominously for The News & Record, does he read the print version either, explaining, "I'm not that interested in local stuff."

While the outreach to readers raises questions about the fundamental role of newspapers, and whether they should be leading readers or following them, Mr. Alexander, who is overseeing the online project, said The News & Record was by no means ceding control. "If we came across a story that needed to be done but would make a lot of people unhappy, we'd still do it," he said. "And we'd still take the heat."

Mr. Cone, the blogger, said that a paper's authority came from "accuracy, authenticity and trust," not from how it was produced. "They haven't given up authority," he said of The News & Record. "They've gained it."