Russ Steele
Online mall debuts: KNCO has be advertising their new online mall NevadaCountyMall.com
Will this come the go to place for local online shopping? I hear the Ad Department down at the Union is concerned. The Mall is mostly empty now, but once it fills up, you can do most of your shopping on line. Now if a local taxi service were to offer low cost home delivery serviced, we could have our own local Amazon. I have a suggestion for KNCO's mall developer, include the local business web address, a link to the business web site for some detailed online shopping. When the shopper closes the page, they are returned to the Nevada County Call for even more shopping. Links to advertisers web pages is a value added service that the Union provides to their advertisers.
Speaking of missing value added: Have you never noticed the lack of external links in The Union online stories. Reporters research a story and summarize the finding for the reader, but only rarely do they provide likes to their resource material. Some times the Union puts a link to County and City Documents in the right hand margin, but they could add more value for the reader by increasing the number of links embedded in a story. This would help those readers who want more information by providing link to the information source. However, it does open the door for more rigorous fact checking by online readers. Publishing2.0 has some thoughts on the value added link issue.
From the Suburban Blogosphere: The New York Times has an interesting article on hyperlocal blogging, or place-blogging that focus on local issues. When blogger first appeared on the scene in 1999 there were questions about the survival local bloggers. Would these lonesome scribes succeed? The New York Times Bob Tedeshi writes:
Nearly a decade later, bloggers in the suburbs are starting to answer those questions. Many have let their sites go untended, but a few have built serious local journalism operations, while others have developed a following on certain topics and bask in the muted limelight of Internet fame. These survivors offer newly minted bloggers a pixilated blueprint for how to rise above the chaos of the blogosphere. For readers, the blogs are providing news in ways unseen in traditional local news media.
The NY Times and Tedeshi provides multiple links to the resources in the story, anding value to the reader.
And, then an angry columnist writes about bloggers: Debra Saunders writes at Town Hall:
The Chronicle is offering buyouts to a large number of workers -- at least 125 people for a paper that employs around 1,680 souls. Other industries have been through this drill, too. Longtime staff members weigh whether they can keep careers in an ailing, perhaps dying, industry.
Then Debra Saunders asks were will bloggers get their stories when the newspapers are gone?
Some believe that if newspapers go under, then the Internet will provide.
In the case of conservatives, they often don't notice that those right-leaning sites, which they visit daily, provide them with fodder by linking to stories reported and written by newspaper reporters. While they are trashing newspapers, they're reading newspaper stories and citing them to bolster their arguments. They may not notice if, over time, as newspapers downsize and even close, websites will be linking to fewer reliable news reports.
This is a question that Jeff Pelline often asks of local bloggers. We might want to take our lead from the New York Times article on hyperlocal reporting. As KNCO refurbishes their web page, they might want to add a hyperlocal blog.
