Creating community through hyperlocal blogging, Steve Yelvington, Vice-President of Content and Strategy, Morris Digital Works

Posted by Dominique Lewis Tuohy on June 5, 2006 at 3:24 PM

It is no secret that online journalism has made any information available to anyone at any time and has been cutting into the audience and business models of traditional newspapers. So how are conventional publications going to compete and persist? Steve Yelvington, Vice President of Content and Strategy at Morris Digital Works tried to answer these questions at the 13th World Editors Forum in Moscow.

The fact that “Generation Y” is not picking up the newspaper reading habit is not a “problem with ink on paper,” said Yelvington. “It’s a problem of content and its relationship with the market,” and therefore, repurposing print material for the Web is an insufficient strategy.

Because the world is now bombarded with news from sources all over the world, what’s missing from the pages of newspapers is community or hyperlocal coverage. Yelvington stated that he and his colleagues at Morris Digital Works “believe the consumption of news is directly related to civic engagement,” and that because communities are not getting the coverage they merit, the reasons for people to care about real news is being undermined.

Ironically, the World Wide Web suits this local approach very well.

Yelvington was a key player in turning a small town paper called Bluffton Today into a multimedia newspaper focused on and participated in by its community (add link). The paper furnishes each citizen with their own blog and has a space where they can contribute their own photos.

Although it has been predicted in the past, Yelvington reassured the editors in the Forum hall that citizen journalism was not replacing the work of professionals. But he did show how the two can work symbiotically.

The job of Bluffton Today’s staff of 18 is “interact with the community, through the website as well as through more conventional channels” resulting in a “virtuous circle” in which “Community conversation feeds professional journalism. Journalism feeds conversation. And around, and around.”

With photos of the Bluffton community projected on the screen behind him, Yelvington talked about how the paper’s website has enabled its community to discover things it doesn’t know about itself, organize itself into even smaller niche interests and watchdog local institutions.

By covering the “interests and passions of people in the community,” Yelvington stressed that readers continually come back to the paper, be it in print or on the website, making Bluffton Today more effective than “conventional online newspapers.”

Still, the paper has hit bumps in the road, for example in integrating online advertising and improving local search.

But Yelvington was confident that these problems would soon be worked out. He also announced the launching of a new website done by Morris Digital which will include more multimedia in the news section while maintaining the community emphasis of the Bluffton site.

With all of these innovations in newspapers, Yelvington concluded that “We are finding a new and better way to perform our jobs as journalists.”

More news from the 59th World Newspaper Congress

And our video blog with Robb Montgomery and Visual Editors