Personal story:

When I worked at The Standard newspaper in Hong Kong, I wrote several letters to Mark Clifford, who was then-executive editor of the newspaper, advising him of ways to increase digital traffic to the site. Among my ideas were ideas for RSS feeds, using Technorati to guage reader interest, blogs and the creation of live reporting.

The above link takes you to an email sent to one of Rebecca MacKinnon's BJ students from a South China Morning Post staffer about its upcoming site design changes. We hope that includes making it free for anyone to read, as has been hinted at in previous stories.

I say this by way of telling a story. When I wrote those few letters to Clifford, I was approached by another editor, also of considerable title, who told me to stop writing those letters to Clifford because the digital changes and the blogging "would make more work for everyone", apparently because Clifford was not allocating new staff to the pages of the newspaper.

Of course, that editor ended up traveling to a blogging conference in America. When he returned, he had been converted. The Standard eventually teamed up with the Journalism and Media Studies Center in Hong Kong University. See Curbside at WTO, started by Andrew Lih, he who is writing the definitive book on Wikipedia.

It's hard to change mentalities in the newspaper business, I think. Hopefully, the recent stories about the "digital revolution" in Asian newspapers will prompt people to allocate more staffing to online, and start them reaching out to the bloggers that already exist and who are driving incredible traffic on their own.

Will the SCMP site redesign prove competition for bloggers? No, I think not. I think they will enhance traffic to blogs. What readers want most is context. What is missing in most stories in newspapers is deeper context.

 

rion
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