Morris Digital Works launched a new newspaper model last week that leans on reader content and so far it’s off to a good start, though it’s still primarily filled with articles written by staff journalists.
Steve Yelvington calls Bluffton Today “a grand experiment in citizen journalism, a complete inversion of the typical ‘online newspaper’ model.
Bluffton Today is a hyperlocal free daily with a staff of about 18 professional journalists that intends to incorporate citizen contributions and commentary into the publication. The idea is the content users create on BlufftonToday.com will help fuel the daily newspaper.
Among the things the site is doing:
• Everyone gets a blog. Not just staffers, but everyone in the community.
• Everyone gets a photo gallery.
• Everyone can contribute events to a shared public community calendar.
• Everyone can contribute recipes to a community cookbook.
So far, Yelvington told CyberJournalist.net this weekend, the paper is including a few pages of user-generated content in each issue. You can see what one of the print pages looks like here.
The entire print publication is put online, but you’ll notice it’s being posted in the very user-unfriendly jpeg format. That’s intentional, Yelvington says, because they want the focus of the Web site to be the user-generated content, rather than the repurposed printed material. Interesting approach.
