IlliniPundit 3.0 launches, thoughts on community & the news business
IlliniPundit went through a lot of changes, and it’s only been around less than two years. Still, its owner, Gordy Hulten, has taken the blog to the next step.
Everyone knows that IlliniPundit has been partisan to the conservative/Republican perspective, and the owner doesn’t shy from that fact. Despite this, it’s been a relative success as far as a localized blog goes. The readership has grown, the comment threads are almost always busy with activity and a few other contributors have come on board.
However, IlliniPundit is taking a step in a new direction. While I’ve always thought that the site has been pretty tolerant of opposing viewpoints, I am pleasantly surprised to watch as it has expanded to allow ANYONE to become a member of the IlliniPundit contributor team.
If you register with IlliniPundit as a commentor, you are automatically given your own blog hosted on IlliniPundit’s site (and a sizable, built-in audience). If you write a post that enough people like, it can be promoted up to the front page for a wider audience, or a moderator can promote your post upward, too. But the important thing to note here is that YOU will have your OWN BLOG — unregulated.
This essentially means that IlliniPundit has the potential to become a Web site that’s no longer limiting it’s audience or participation to just “red staters” anymore. The floor can open up, but the catch is if people are going to step forward and participate.
I sincerely hope that it takes off and that all sorts of viewpoints end up making the front page everyday. Can you imagine reading a post from the Prairie Greens followed up by the Young Republicans and then the College Democrats?
How many other Web sites are there like this? I really can’t think of many, especially ones that are specifically hyperlocal, cross-political, community driven and have participatory democracy on front page promotion. This is rare and absolutely incredible, which is why I hope as many people get involved as possible.
Of course, the blogging doesn’t have to just revolve around politics. Community groups can use it as a resource to solicit help or promote activities. Ordinary citizens can become first-hand journalists on breaking news or local governmental bodies. Instead of being just consumers of news, anyone can be involved in witnessing and reporting it.
This is really exciting.
I tested out IlliniPundit’s new interface and wrote a sample post encouraging others to start blogging. (Don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging right here at Nerdlusus.) I hope others see this as an opportunity to maybe try something new and perhaps be encouraged by the thought of having an audience for their thoughts.
COMMUNITY & THE NEWS
I’ve always envisioned this sort of thing happening eventually with media companies, especially newspapers looking to diversify and expand their reach onto the Internet. Provide the community with a place to gather. Become the destination that people want to visit to discuss what is important to them.
Imagine for a moment if The Daily Illini or The News-Gazette had provided an opportunity like this before IlliniPundit (I don’t see this as a smear toward them, just using them as an example). That’s a lot of site traffic, plus the benefit of having an established brand name locally that people visit on the Web. I think that if more newspapers recognized they have enormous potential to become a destination as a social networking hub for the communties they serve, it could potentially help them recover whatever losses they might feel they are having because of the Internet.
I remember back to election season this past November and reading an Associated Press article about why people don’t vote. One portion of the article mentioned a theory that citizens in a community don’t feel ties to the community they live in as a possible reason for not hitting the polls.
Maybe this is perhaps part of the reason why newspaper circulation is declining. It’s not that citizens don’t want to be informed — I firmly believe that they do — but rather that the newspaper is a relic of the idea of a physical community. If we feel detached from that idea of “the neighborhood” and more removed from the place we live in, we become less likely to subscribe to its premier, daily publication.
Now, combine this with the advent of the Internet and how it allows for the rise of the individual. The Internet feeds on the idea of remaining an individual that’s disconnected from the physical location of one’s residence. Our town isn’t “us” anymore. We’re in the process of casting aside the “real” community for these “fake” ones. You know, like MySpace and Facebook. Instead of the local newscast, we’re watching YouTube. Instead of glancing at headlines about the world’s news in our paper, we’re refreshing Drudge Report.
We can complain about how the Internet has made us secluded from our “real” neighbors, but to loathe constantly will not help the news business. Instead, we’ve got to adapt. If people don’t feel connected or compelled to buy into this old idea of community, then we’ve got to create new ones they will want to be a part of.
Social networks aren’t new, compiling them into a database is. News organizations should become that hub that binds people together, because that’s the basic business they are in: information.
The news business used to be just collecting and relaying information. Now, it’s about that and much more. We have to help others communicate their information with others, even the trivial stuff we don’t particularly care about. The good news about this is that there’s actually a potential to make money doing this. If MySpace was worth $580 million to News Corp., then isn’t a hyperlocal social network worth at least a few million?
The best part, however, isn’t the possibility of making money, but rather that this increases the ability to do good journalism. If you’re at the center of this nexus, then you stand a better chance of finding the more obscure but interesting stories that makes for great journalism. And you’ll be in a position to help that story find a larger audience.
The old idea of a community is dying in an online society and with it goes the old news business. This doesn’t mean that the business of journalism has to die, it just has to change. And, with any luck, people will start to care about their “real” communities again, get involved, get informed, vote and become involved in the political process somehow.
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