Jenny Preece wrote about developing online communities in “Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability.” She provided a working definition of online community, with four elements: people, purpose, policies and computer systems. The first three deal with encouraging sociability, while the last contributes to a website’s usability. Below each element is investigated as it relates to the blogs at the News & Record.

Purpose:
Robinson wrote on Dec. 22: “We aren’t looking to change the world. We simply want to get better. I wrote about it Dec. 1 when I paraphrased Mark Glaser in stating the sort of newspaper we strive to be: “Creating new content. Serving the public and allowing the public to serve journalism. Building a new way of doing smart, citizen journalism. More transparency. News as a conversation.”

He clearly states the mission of the newspaper’s blogs, but it isn’t located prominently enough for visitors to see it. The sentiments above could be condensed and placed somewhere on the blog where all visitors can read it. As it is, I had to delve into the archives to find it. And, like most news stories, it cannot be assumed that readers have been there from the beginning.

People:
In the interview for Poynter, Robinson said, “I started blogging about the newspaper about five months ago and discovered that, not only was it not difficult, but that it connected with an audience that I just wasn’t reaching in the newspaper.”

A core group of people became regular participants in the conversation, many of whom were already active in the Greensboro blogging scene. Examples include Ed Cone, David Hoggard, Billy the Blogging Poet and David Wharton. All of these bloggers appear on Greensboro101 and are on Robinson’s blog roll. Virtually anyone who has commented on Robinson’s blog who has a blog themselves is linked to through his site. In some ways, it has turned into an “in-group” thing.

One spirited discussion (47 comments) occurred on Robinson’s January 15 post, an online posting of his weekly column. In it one person commented that he was skeptical of the newspaper’s ability to hold a wide-open forum. There was some argument that followed, after which the poster concluded that he was right all along – his voice would be excluded. In response, Ed Cone wrote this comment:

Jasper and Phred,

You are missing the way this new medium changes the game.

You’re still waiting for someone to say what you want them to say, you’re grousing that your views aren’t being expressed. But that’s the old paradigm.

Now you don’t need to wait for anyone to say what you want them to — you can start your own blogs, you can create your own online voices and communities — your posts will be pushed into the public eye by aggregators, and if you have something interesting to say, people will pay attention to it, and it will get linked and read.

Jim Wilson’s reduction of the local blog scene to an echo chamber is demonstrably inaccurate, but to the extent that people feel that way, it’s in their power to do something about it.

To complain that the N&R’s voice sounds the same in this new forum is to miss the point — the idea here is that more voices — YOUR VOICES — are now added to the mix.

Posted by: ed cone at January 17, 2005 12:29 PM

Policies:

The policies for the News & Record blogs appear in their Terms of Service, which users can link to from the comments pages. Most interesting is the “Take-Down Policy,” which frees the newspaper from a lot of responsibility.

Robinson has said that comments on the Letters to the Editor blog were so abusive, that the site began requiring registration. Robinson blogged about this http://blog.news-record.com/staff/jrblog/archives/2005/09/registration_fo.html#comments> decision. As soon as users navigate to this page, they can read the guidelines at the top of the page: “Feel free to comment; that’s why this blog exists. It’s fine to disagree with one another’s opinions, but please attack ideas, not people. Personal attacks have no place here. Also, please present factual information and cite sources where appropriate. For more information, please read our terms of service.”

Usability:
Preece also wrote that “Online community developers are responsible for building or selecting software that encourage a thriving community.” In the News & Record blogs, users had problems with the program at first, and the developers tweaked it to create a more hospitable environment. Writers started using permalinks and the programming was changed to allow trackbacks. They also added a content filter to keep porn and ads off the comments pages.