N.C. paper aims for ‘revolutionary change’ by turning news site into a ‘public square’

The Greensboro News & Record is looking to make a “transformative, revolutionary change” by turning its Web site into “more of an online community or public square” starting Jan. 3….

The Greensboro News & Record is looking to make a “transformative, revolutionary change” by turning its Web site into “more of an online community or public square,” writer Lex Alexander tells PressThink’s Jay Rosen.

He says the plan is to start making changes Jan. 3. The site won’t get any more resources to do so, but editor and blogger John Robinson told Alexander he’s willing to divert resources to make it happen.

“At a minimum, such a presence would include a deep and rich variety of links and RSS feeds, some form of aggregation, expanded online presence for N&R staffers (including more blogs) and ways in which members of the community can contribute directly to the content. In short, we plan to take some large steps, soon, toward building an open-source, online community,” Alexander says on his blog on News-Record.com.

Alexander already took an important first step in this direction, inviting readers to tell the paper what THEY think the site should do, and there’s an interesting discussion here.

Greensboro already has a very active local blogging community — and even its own blog aggregator site, Greensboro101.com — so it’d be a natural step to figure out a smart way to tap into that.

On PressThink, Jay Rosen offers some good advice to News-Record.com and other papers exploring similar ideas:

• “Put a discussion forum after every article that might warrant it, and make the writer of the story check in with the forum, because his piece isn’t done until it’s been discussed by readers (new definition of done…)”
• Change policy from “never link out in news stories” to “always link out.”
• Change archives from paid to free.
• “Create one or two blogs, the main purpose of which is not to project the author’s knowledge (or opinion) ‘out there,’ but to draw knowledge from its dispersed location around town and around the Web….A simple example would be a drug pricing blog.”
• “Create a home (bio) page and stable url for every journalist on staff, with a goal for having 100 percent of your bylines linked to live bio pages, updated by the staffers themselves.”
• “Keep a running list on the front of your site with the twelve most important, vital, involving and humanly real stories in the Greensboro area, and if some of them are problems that remain on the list for years, so be it?.”