Building relationships with local bloggers

Most newsrooms these days are working hard to build relationships with local bloggers. There are a lot of good reasons for this: learning more about the communities we cover, pointing readers to good stories and information written and gathered by local bloggers, building trust with people who are passionately interested in local issues, and creating new avenues for collecting information and distributing our reporters’ work. All of these things are important.

But how do you do it?

Here’s one simple way to start: Make the local blogosphere a beat.

That’s what we did in March of last year, when we asked our then-higher education beat reporter, Kelly Heyboer, to spend her time combing local blogs for interesting news and views, building relationships with bloggers across the state and chronicling it all in a blog of her own.

The return on that investment has been huge, both online and in print.

For starters, Kelly does a lot of link posts highlighting the most interesting stuff she finds each day. Each of these posts offers a great snapshot of life around New Jersey.

Each Thursday, Kelly has a column on The Star-Ledger’s op-ed page that gathers commentary from Jersey blogs on a single hot topic. Inevitably, this brings fresh and thoughtful voices to our opinion pages.

Here’s are just a few recent samples:

Denied: No Cash for Wayne Bryant
A $65 Turnpike Toll?: Questioning Corzine’s Toll Hike Plan
Bah Humbug: Is it time for a Buy Nothing Christmas?
New Jersey’s New School Funding Plan: Fair or Rushed?

Every other Friday, meanwhile, Kelly does a Q&A with a blogger, and we run those on the cover of our features section. Like the op-ed columns, they put a spotlight on interesting people with interesting things to say.

A handful of examples:

Celebrity Role Model Blog: Talking with Deborah Ng
Covering Comics: Talking with the Co-Creator of “Variant Edition”
Chasing an Architectural Ghost: James Betelle, Where are You?
Blogging and Cartooning: Meet “Sid in the City”

There have been other benefits, too. Kelly has become extremely knowledgeable about the blogging scene in New Jersey and is, as a result, a wonderful resource for her colleagues in the newsroom. She has become a very effective trainer of other staff bloggers, in part because she can point them toward other blogs in their chosen subject areas. And because of the relationships she has built, we’ve been able to pull off some fun stunts.

But enough of me blathering. I asked Kelly a few questions about the last 10 months, and here’s what she had to say:

Q: What did you do to get started?

A: When I first got this Jersey Blogs assignment, I didn’t know much about blogging at all. I had a passing knowledge of some of the big blogs in New Jersey (Baristanet, PolitickerNJ, RedBankGreen), but I wasn’t a regular reader. So, my first step was reading lots and lots of blogs and introducing myself to the bloggers by phone, in person and through e-mail.

I tried to approach Jersey Blogs as a newspaper beat, like my previous beat (higher education). So, I started by attempting to make a contact list for all the blogs in New Jersey and their authors– just as I had a contact list of all of the 57 colleges in New Jersey and their leaders for my old beat. I quickly learned this was pretty naive. The New Jersey blogosphere was much bigger than I suspected. Blogging was growing exponentially, so keeping track of all the bloggers in the state proved to be impossible. Each time I thought I had a list of all the big blogs in New Jersey, another 50 would pop up.

Q: What kind of reactions did you get from bloggers at first?

A: I was warned by several people to brace myself for skepticism or outright hostility from bloggers. I was told most bloggers didn’t trust the mainstream media — or MSM, as they call us — and would not take kindly to a newspaper entering their world at this late date. It was not unusual for bloggers to slam newspapers and individual newspaper reporters in their blogs. So, I braced myself for the worst.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Minutes after I published my first post on Jersey Blogs I got a kind e-mail from Juan Melli, who blogs at Blue Jersey, one of the state’s larger blogs, welcoming me. (I’m still not sure how Juan even knew my brand-new blog existed, since it had not been publicized yet.) More e-mails and phone calls followed, mostly from bloggers who wanted to let me know about their sites or wanted to say they were glad the newspaper was covering their corner of the Internet. No one was hostile.

Warnings that most bloggers were crazy or on the fringe also proved to be unfounded. The vast majority of the bloggers I met and interviewed were intelligent, articulate, regular people.

Q: Did those reactions change at all after you started the op-ed column and the blogger interviews for the paper?

A: To my surprise, instead of being dismissive of the newspaper, bloggers began to lobby me to include their posts in the Jersey Blogs op-ed column. They thanked me profusely for giving them “ink” when we published excerpts of their blog posts in the paper. They touted their inclusion in The Star-Ledger on their own blogs. They recommended their favorite blogs for the blogger Q&A stories we publish in our features section.

Though bloggers and the new media have a reputation (unwarranted in most cases) for hating old media, it turns out many top bloggers are big newspaper readers. Without exception, all were grateful for the recognition.

Q: What search techniques have you learned to find good local stuff?

A: Unfortunately, there is still no really effective way of searching or tracking what local bloggers are saying about local topics.

I use a combination of Google Blogs search, Ice Rocket and Technorati to do searches on specific topics. I use PlaceBlogger and Outside.in to find blogs in New Jersey. I use Google Reader every day to keep up with dozens of blogs.

But my greatest tool is still other bloggers. They are far better than any search engine or aggregator at finding interesting posts, new blogs and hot topics.

Q: What kinds of blogs are you most drawn to?

A: My background is news. So, I am most drawn to New Jersey political sites, hyper-local sites and local place bloggers writing about their towns and neighborhoods.

But I also love reading Mom blogs, house renovation blogs, television blogs, diary blogs and anything that gives me a glimpse into people’s day-to-day lives. I’m also drawn to the growing number of podcasters and videobloggers, who are adding visual and audio aspects to all of this.

Q: How has your sense of the relationship between the mainstream press and bloggers changed, if at all, since you started this?

A: It’s no longer “us” and “them.” I’m not sure it ever was.

The number one thing New Jersey bloggers link to in their posts is stories from The Star-Ledger and other local papers. When you read a lot of blogs, you realize most bloggers are still driven by topics that originate as newspaper stories.

Now, reporters are blogging. News stories are quoting blogs. Bloggers are getting book deals and appearing as pundits on television news shows. Sooner or later, new media and old media will just be the media.

Q: What’s been the weirdest experience in this job so far?

A: I was sitting at home last spring putting together a post for Jersey Blogs about what local bloggers were saying about the filming of the final scene of “The Sopranos,” which was being shot in a restaurant on my street a few blocks from my house in Bloomfield.

Several bloggers wrote about walking from their houses to watch the filming. Others mentioned in passing what streets they lived on. As I read through the blog posts, I realized several of the bloggers I read regularly actually lived in my neighborhood. One appeared to live around the corner.

That night, at least a half-dozen people were blogging within a five-minute walk of my living room — and none of us knew it.

(NOTE: I’m proud to be participating, along with other bloggers from around the world, in the Carnival of Journalism. The party is being hosted this month by Adrian Monck. Lots of great stuff there; check it out.)