Building out the Town Square
We've started linking to other bloggers as they refer to work in the News & Record. Could be a comment on a story or a comment on what we're doing. Yes, criticism of us will be included. The list won't be exhaustive. We'll update it a couple times a day. If there's something you wrote or you read that you think we've overlooked, please e-mail us with the post. (If you're a blogger and don't want us to link to a post of yours, let me know that, too.)
As with everything else, we'll learn and adjust as we go along. The posts we're looking for will focus particularly on those that advance the discussion, either of an issue noted in the paper or how we've reported, written or displayed our work. We'll link to posts with opinion, of course, but if a post is factually untrue, either about us or a story, and we know it, it won't make the cut.
It's another layer in the Town Square initiative, and the idea that the voices of many are better than the voices of a few. (In this case, us!) Other sites have more complete lists of bloggers. This effort is to focus the discussion particularly on civic affairs. Are there bloggers writing about civic issues not in the paper? Of course, and we'll eventually include those as we learn from this small step.
Comments (7)
To report abuse of the comment feature on this site, please use the feedback form at the bottom of any page.
Kust like Magnavox used to be. Smart... very smart.
Posted on June 7, 2006 5:51 PM
That is very cool. One suggestion, if you guys are doing the coding - pull the first couple lines of the post into a Title attribute, for the link - that way just mousing over the link will give more information about its content than just a title like "Come on Tom."
Advantages: Using the Title attribute is low-tech, doesn't require any scripting, doesn't clutter the page...
Disadvantage: none, except that the code would need to strip out the html markup and any double-quotes from the text excerpt.
Syntax as follows (replace square brackets with angled ones):
[a href="http://www.hoggsblog.com/?p=1629" title="Councilman Tom Phillips needs a blog. If he had one he could correct what he believes to be erroneous N&R reporting. But, for now, he’ll have to keep depending on others to get the word out… including the N&R itself…"]Come on Tom[/a]
p.s. Amen.
Posted on June 7, 2006 8:44 PM
you might want to look into an automated setup like how msnbc/newsweek's blogtalk module or WaPo's Who's Blogging module exposes links from bloggers.
i don't know the cost of partnering with technorati, but if it's too much, your tech team should be able to stitch together a module for displaying links into an article.
Posted on June 8, 2006 2:49 AM
We'd love to work with you folks! And I think you'll find that we can work things out so that it actually helps make you more money. Please drop me a line, dsifry AT technorati DOT com. We can get you guys all set up pretty quickly...
Dave
Posted on June 8, 2006 3:12 AM
Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I've made sure the decision makers in our Interactive department have your comments.
Posted on June 8, 2006 6:17 PM
Whoa... Sifry from Technorati. I bow to that guy. heheh.
Posted on June 8, 2006 9:03 PM
This is a great idea. I have a simular feature near the bottom of my blog but it doesn't compare to what you're doing. That said, even a simple public referral log helps increase traffic to all parties involved.
And to get the attention of Silfry... What Ben said.
Posted on June 10, 2006 9:30 AM