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By David Rothman

Earlier I made the wacky suggestion that newspapers let outsiders rewrite and add to news stories for entire reader-customized editions–not just do wikitorials. Doubt that a many-to-many community oriented approach will work? Read on. What follows isn’t conclusive proof, but a strong hint. Not ideology but the community advantage is what interests me in the following item in the Daily Kos, based on writings elsewhere:

Of the twenty-four liberal blogs in the top quintile, Dailykos, TPM Café, Smirking Chimp, Metafilter, BooMan Tribune, MyDD, and Dembloggers are full-fledged community sites where members cannot only comment, but they can also post diaries / articles / polls. By comparison, there are no community sites among the top twenty-four conservative blogs…

…the anti-community nature of right-wing blogs has resulted in a stagnant aristocracy within the conservative blogosphere that prevents the emergence of new voices and, as a result, new reasons for people to visit conservative blogs.

Go read the whole thing if this is the sort of topic that interests you. It boggles the mind to thing that three years ago, the conservative side had about twice the traffic of the liberal side. Nowadays, the liberal side gets about 65 percent more traffic than the conservatives, even though they boast larger numbers of sites.

Again, forget the ideology. A lesson for the media? Of course, I can hear some say, “But the new voices won’t stay on our newspaper site.” Well, them’s the risks. My hunch is that the NVs will if treated well, both editorially and financially (perhaps even with promotion in the paper edition). Beyond that, we’re talking about reader participation in a way that keeps people coming back for more.

 
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