A Citizen Journalism Breakthrough
It's the Buffton Today site and newspaper, in South Carolina -- user generated material from the get-go, including free classifieds. It comes from an established media company, and the site looks terrific.
"We flip the newspaper site model upside down," says Steve Yelvington on his blog. He notes:
• Everyone gets a blog. Not just staffers, but everyone in the community. LeMonde (France) and the Mail and Guardian (South Africa) are doing this, too. I don't know of others but would appreciate pointers.
• Everyone gets a photo gallery.
• Everyone can contribute events to a shared public community calendar.
• Everyone can contribute recipes to a community cookbook.
This is big news, folks.
I notice they're using drupal.org to power it, i've been banging on about how great drupal is for a year or two now, it's what my site runs on and ideally suited to that type of project.
Nice implementation...
Posted by: Nick W | April 03, 2005 at 01:01 PM
I like it! Thousands of "reporters" are available, people who would contribute just to get their name in the lights.
It's a nice complement to TOPIX local news (which is generally items from big media) and seems a particularly great way to get/share local news, stuff too mundane or low-keyed for the big media newspapers to cover or that get's buried way down on page xx in section Z. I can see versions for each neighborhood, town, zip code, region.
Should be an opportunity for a lot of local advertising also.
Posted by: jojo | April 03, 2005 at 02:22 PM
Drupal is terrific, and does more than blogging. "Giving everybody a blog" does not truly empower readers, it's a cheap trick. Do Salon's reader blogs truly empower Salon readers? I don't believe the case has really been made yet.
There are great things newspapers should be doing, but they should be going beyond blogging. One of them could be tip management, using something like the proposed Tipster Network.
Posted by: Jon Garfunkel | April 03, 2005 at 07:37 PM
The site does look good. I don't see the "free classifieds" that you see, Dan.
So, established media are placing a bet that the people who've had no interest in reading them will be willing to write for them. I think the smart money will take the other side of that bet.
Posted by: Joe Zekas | April 03, 2005 at 09:45 PM
I have posted a blog on Bluffton at http://blogmania.web-log.nl/log/2227820. I will also inform my friends at the traditional media what is happening in Bluffton. What about all the other Bluffton's in the US. Can they participate?
Greetings Bertrand
Posted by: Bertrand | April 04, 2005 at 02:57 AM
Nicely done :) I need to get some pointers from them on certain things they are trying there.
Posted by: Karl | April 04, 2005 at 04:03 AM
I should note that while most Drupal sites have these capabilities (and in my case nowhere near as nicely implemented :)) what I find fascinating is that they are 'reverse publishing' back to a newspaper to be delivered to people's homes! Awesome - and about time someone did this.
Posted by: Karl | April 04, 2005 at 04:09 AM
Joe Zekas,
I am with you on this one - I just do not see it.
Sideline note (those of us with vested interests see things the way we want (need) to - as much as I try I need to classify myself with this problem.
bob
Posted by: Robert Leonard | April 04, 2005 at 07:08 AM
As one of the developers, let me add some notes here:
The classifieds are still in testing, but you can see them here:
http://www.blufftontoday.com/classifieds/
Still working out a few kinks on some of the technology integration.
We went with Drupal because it offered about 80% of the pieces we needed "out of the box."
And I'd agree, the blogs are not the core -- but they are important and they really helped our executives understand the concept.
One of the features that we may turn on shortly is Drupal's blog aggregator. Simply put, Drupal can pull any RSS feed and display it within our framework. We're doing this now for State and National news (via the AP and the Savannah Morning News), but the technique will be the same for blogs.
We've put a lot of emphasis on Photos (using an alpha of Gallery 2), and on trying to make it easy for people to participate. I think the calendar will be vital.
In fact, the biggest hole in Drupal, to me eyes right now, is the inability to create groups on-the-fly. This is something that will shake out over the next year or so.
More to come in the future for certain.
And to address Joe's point: we're trying to erase the walls between "us" and "them" as much as we can. Whether or not we can do that will largely depend on how the local staff interacts with the community.
We do think that there is a niche for geo-targeted services like this. Blogger, Flickr, et. al. are great, but sometimes I just want to stay in my back yard with the neighbors.
Posted by: Ken Rickard | April 05, 2005 at 11:10 AM
BTW: For those of you in the area, I'll be in Charleston SC this Saturday (April 9th) to speak at the regional meeting of the SPJ.
Posted by: Ken Rickard | April 05, 2005 at 11:20 AM
See also Tim Porter Don't Reflect the Community, Be the Community
Posted by: Ken Rickard | April 05, 2005 at 11:36 AM
I live in Bluffton. And I wondered what this new newspaper was doing in my driveway each morning. At first, I didn't pay it much attention, but as I gradually started looking more carefully and examing the new site, I was (and am) blown away that something this big is going on right under my nose in small town South Carolina. Who knew?
Posted by: David Burn | April 24, 2005 at 11:17 AM