new york times embraces social news
Starting today, the New York Times will include digg, facebook, and newsvine quick-submit buttons on most of the paper’s online stories. These stories could always be submitted manually by social news posters, but as Techcrunch’s Natalia Del Conte writes, “the capability to do it directly from the story means that The Times is paying attention to where its stories are shared, who reads them, and, more importantly, what they are saying about them.” Del Conte also points out that social news site stories also (by and large) receive more comments than those on the Times’ site itself, so the paper will be exposing themselves to much more reader interaction.
(Full disclosure: I’m the online content producer at the St. Cloud Times)
While the NYT may not receive many story comments online, the St. Cloud Times does. The “Story Chat” commenting system, created in the early 2000s by then online director John Yenne, has been wildly popular for St. Cloud online readers. It is not uncommon to see multiple stories hit 100-200 comments every day. Opinion and political pieces garner the most reader input, but local hot-button issues also do well. This is for a community of around 60,000, which proves that people out there are willing to talk about their local community online, if they are given a simple and clean forum to do so.
St. Cloud’s system was so popular that parent company Gannett decided to use it as a model for a larger scale implementation of the system throughout its newspaper network. It’s obvious that reader input is very important (they ARE the people keeping the industry alive, after all), so what better way to reach them than let them uninhibitedly speak about the issues and news that affects them most? I’m sure a good advertising team could put together a package to monetize the whole thing as well.
St. Cloud currently does not offer quick-submit social news buttons like the ones the NYT rolled out, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it offered in the future. The Star Tribune added del.icio.us buttons earlier this year, but I wonder if they wouldn’t be served better by inviting readers to submit to more services. The question for publishers shouldn’t only be “should we be participating in social news,” but also “what social news services (and their audiences) help our paper the most?”
