Our evolving local media

There are quite a number of interesting things happening in the Ventura County media, led primarily by the Ventura County Star. Last week Dan Gillmor mentioned that the Star gets the message in response to the following message at Poynter Online.

Our online editor, Alicia Hoffman, will be adding the role of citizen journalism/user-content specialist to her duties.

We see blogs, forums, photo blogs and other forms of citizen journalism as a significant part of the online news world. Our readers want to be part of the process of sharing the news and shaping the news. Technology is giving them the tools to do it, and as Dan Gillmor has pointed out, our readers often know more than we do. They can also be more places than we can. And, they also know what interests them and what news they want in ways that traditional, top-down journalism might miss. We need to give appropriate attention to this growing facet of our business.

Alicia's primary duties as online editor do not change, but the focus of her job will be different. She will pay close attention to how we're interacting with our readers and the content and business opportunities that emerge, and help to shape our evolving strategy. She will guide us in the world of "journalism as a conversation" as we develop VenturaCountyStar.com as the online community center for Ventura County. Our current plan is to grow organically in this area rather than push any one big initiative. We have blogs, forums and photo blogs now. We will work to grow these and help promote citizen journalism in Ventura County.

HOWARD OWENS
Director of New Media
Ventura County Star / E.W. Scripps Co.

In addition to other changes at the Ventura County Star, they've now added comment and trackback links on selected articles. It was pointed out over the weekend (see the comments) by Owens that adding comments (but probably not trackback) to every bylined story is somewhat experimental for now, and that they intend to roll this out on all articles sometime during the year.

It's interesting to see Howard Owens wandering the net, picking up on every mention of Ventura County Star and following up on it. That's not quite his job, but he's doing a pretty good job of being a sort of online ombudsman. And he's finally added a feed (not quite RSS, but it works) to his site. In the process he wonders why he's being asked for a feed more often now that he's returned from a hiatus, even though his traffic numbers are lower. Having also recently begun diving into RSS feeds himself using FeedDemon, I think the reason people want feeds for sites will become quite a bit more clear over the coming days and weeks. Once you get used to it, the desire to have other data from non static sources arrive in a similar way is quite powerful.

Cheers and best wishes to Howard and the Ventura County Star for pushing forward. It'll be very interesting to see how the whole citizen journalism initiative works out.