Bloggers in the Houston area are being encouraged to begin blogging for the Houston Chronicle‘s website, Chron.com. Explains the Chronicle‘s Dwight Silverman in a post
on his blog, “At Chron.com, we want to give you the chance to write
about your passions, the things about which you consider yourself an
expert, on our site.”
This is a concept that I’ve advocated for some time. It helps expands
the coverage of a newspaper website, utilizing non-paid community
bloggers to cover micro-niches that the news staff likely would never
get to. It turns a newspaper website into more of a community
experience and less of a one-way flow of information from the chosen
ones (staff and freelance journalists, and a limited number of
outsiders).
Silverman says that people who already blog are welcome to blog as well
on Chron.com, though he discourages them from repeating content
verbatim from their outside blogs on a Chronicle-hosted blog. So far,
most of the inquiries have come from people thinking about blogging for
the first time.
The key to this is probably that word “passion.” He’s hearing ideas from people about such topics as ultralights,
a recreational activity that’s big in the Houston area. Other potential
topics include gardening, scrapbooking, cooking, knitting, birding,
etc. Those are the types of blogs that would be driven by the “natural
energy” of the passionate community blogger.
This is “Phase 2.0” of the website’s blogging initiative. Bloggers are
not getting compensated, at this point, “other than [we are] providing bloggers
a big stage on which to play,” Silverman says. “We’re providing the
software, promotion, and the exposure that comes from being on a site
like ours.”
