This week, Alex Midyette was granted a change of venue for his trial, due to the intense publicity surrounding the case. Just as with the fabled Jonbenet Ramsey case (Boulder’s most notorious criminal mystery), it’s just about impossible to find anyone in Boulder without knowledge of the Midyette case — and probably an opinion about Alex’s guilt, given his wife’s conviction.

Daily Camera commenters haven’t been reticent in expressing their opinions

What’s interesting about this change of venue is that the court cited Internet comments on local news websites (mostly the Boulder Daily Camera) and blogs as a primary reason for moving proceedings out of Boulder County, along with traditional media coverage. This may be the first time a court has relied so heavily on online comments to news stories in such a decision; it certainly won’t be the last.

The Camera’s Zak Brown covered the issue in this story, which includes a short quote from me.

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“I just wanted to update you on our Twitter coverage at WCNC. We did it for the primary yesterday, and it was incredibly successful. It was the 3rd most-viewed page on our site, right behind the complete election results and the top story on Obama’s win. The reporters, anchors and producers really got into it, and they were all excited when it succeeded.”

Excellent! Check it our here.

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Related to the move, I’ve also shut down GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com, an advice website that I thought better of seeing through. There were quite a few posts from the couple months I experimented with that site, and they’ve now been incorporated into the content of SteveOuting.com. If you typed in a GrowingYourNewsWebsite.com URL, you ended up here (so all external links to items from that site should redirect to the proper content).

There are a few little things still to be worked out on the new blog. Please let me know if you spot any glitches. Thanks!

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The concept is a simple one that we’ve seen before, though I think this is a nicely done implementation that’s worth a look. Alltop’s sites simply list the top 5 entries of a bunch of blogs on a particular topic. Mouse over a headline to see a short excerpt. And of course click through to the original blog entry.

Where this is worth a daily tip is the recommendation for news sites to develop something similar for their markets. Imagine creating a bunch of local blog aggregators for various segments of your local market. Local sports bloggers. Blogs about local pro or college sports teams. Blogs by local moms. Blogs by local politicos. … You get the idea.

Of course, this is content that’s out of your control, so you have a couple choices. 1) Search for relevant bloggers to a niche and add their RSS feeds to the page. (That’s what Alltop has done; I was pleased to find my personal blog on the Alltop Journalism page, but they didn’t seek my permission.) 2) Have local bloggers apply to be included on the page.

A key point is that you’re in control of who’s on and off the blog aggregator. While you can’t control what these bloggers write (nor should you even wish to), you do control the on-off switch.

Also, you might exert some editorial control in how the blogs are ordered. Instead of alphabetical order, I’d suggest doing a ranking. Put the blogs you think are best up top, and the dogs at the bottom. That’s a useful editorial service for readers. Or rank them in order of traffic. Or let your uses rate them and use the results for ranking-order.

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“Post news, events and photos. Blog, create your own groups, set up RSS feeds, and build your own communities and web spaces. It’s up to you to provide the nitty-gritty details that make your community special. No news is too small — from Little League to college scholarships, professional accolades to pie-baking contests, volunteer opportunities to neighborhood watch programs.”

That’s fine, but I think any local news organization is going to have trouble trying to get community members to drop what they’re doing and start doing reporting on “hyperlocal” happenings (for free, of course). Some people will do it, but probably very few. Largely, such initiatives will attract those local businesses and community organizations wanting to post press releases or announcements (ZZZZZZ).

Here’s a better strategy to add to the more common one described above: Look for people within the community that are already producing hyperlocal or community-group news.

For example, most schools in your city probably get scant coverage from the local newspaper. When something significant happens, it makes headlines, but the large quantity of more mundane news goes unreported. But it’s not actually unreported. Each school has a newsletter for parents, produced by a parent volunteer, a teacher, administrative assistant, and/or principal. Ditto for many community groups.

As the recent Newspaper Next 2.0 report suggests, newspapers need to evolve into local information and connection utilities. To serve that task (on top of being traditional news providers), newspapers should start dealing with stuff like news and information coming out of local schools and organizations.

Picking up this information shouldn’t be too hard. Some schools (to stick with using them as an example) will already publish RSS feeds for their newsletters; simply pick up the feed and add it to an expanded local-education section of your website. Others may need to be coaxed into sending you their weekly newsletter, which you’ll need to process and publish.

Another idea is to recruit people from each school (and community group, etc.) to take what they already do and move it up a notch by posting it to the local newspaper website. Offer an incentive: perhaps a free subscription to the print edition; a split of ad revenues generated by the school-news page; or even a small “stringer” fee. It could be as simple as letting these people assign their own Google AdSense account to their page on the newspaper site and keep the resulting ad revenue.

The idea here fits with the Newspaper Next 2 recommendations. A local newspaper needs to be the place where people first think to go to get information that’s important to them. Right now, when I want news about my daughter’s elementary school, I don’t go to the local newspaper website; I go to the school’s website.

By reaching out to providers of broader and deeper local information who are already producing it, a newspaper can move toward being more of a “utility” (that is, more of a local Google) than just a “newspaper.”

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Niles urges reporters to promote their content to people most likely to value it. As an example, a beat reporter covering higher education might keep a mailing list of bloggers covering the topic, and e-mail them alerts about new articles he’s published.

That’s excellent advice for the individual. I’d also suggest that it’s good for the company, so much so that company leaders should require that (or at least strongly encourage it) from reporters.

In today’s media-crowded world, no newspaper or TV news show can exist as an island, hoping online users come for a visit. It’s important for journalists at mainstream news organizations to reach out in order to get picked up elsewhere online.

Niles explains:

“Most established news organizations remain clueless about how to promote their work in the social medium of the Internet. Make it your personal responsibility to do better with your work. … Build a list of readers and sources to message whenever you publish a new piece. Facebook and other social networks provide an easy way to start with this. Just create a page and invite readers and sources to become your ‘friends.’

“Give readers easy-to-use tools to forward and share your work. Link to other sources and politely invite other writers and sites that cover your beat to link to you, from time to time.

“When I worked at the Los Angeles Times, a few fellow online editors would hit Google to find discussion boards and fan sites covering people and movies the entertainment section was featuring the next day. We’d e-mail those webmasters links to our stories even before they’d hit the front page of latimes.com. And we often found that those sites sent those stories more traffic than other pages on the Times’ website did.”

Excellent advice. A social media strategy can bring in significant traffic to your website.

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Universal Hub is an independent website run by Adam Gaffin, who trolls all the blogs having to do with Boston and picks out the best items each day to highlight. (Here’s a story about Gaffin and his increasingly popular site: “Master of Hub Hits.”)

The significant thing here is that Gaffin doesn’t just pull in RSS feeds of blogs; he’s using his personal judgment and considerable effort to find the most interesting stuff out there, then he writes a short item about the blog item, with a link to the original.

He also spends time searching for new sources, since new blogs show up all the time. He is, in effect, acting as a beat reporter where the beat is Boston-area bloggers.

What news publishers often do with non-affiliated local blogs is simply set up automated feeds for blogs that they think might be relevant to their audience. Some hand-pick local bloggers to be included on the news website.

I think where those models can be improved on is in bringing in a human editor to bring out the best of local blogs. Readers of a vetted summary of local blogs can be assured of reading something interesting — and saving the time of tracking local blogs themselves. It’s a great service in that it helps readers who may be interested in what Boston bloggers have to say avoid the dreck and just see the good stuff.

An interesting angle with Universal Hub is that it is open for others to post blog items, but few do (other than post comments, which many people do); the site is primarily a platform for Gaffin, who has become a local news commentator and media critic.

So here’s my tip for the day: Assign someone in your news organization to the “blogger beat.” Gaffin is an excellent role model. While it might be nice to hire someone to do this, let’s be realistic; most news companies today will want to use existing staff. Considering that the person assigned to this task will be significantly enhancing the local coverage of your news website, it shouldn’t be too hard to argue for a sole reporter to make the move.

If you remember the San Francisco Chronicle’s Herb Caen, you may catch the similarity between this kind of job and what the “three-dot columnist” did so well for so many years. Where Caen published based on tips sent and called in by readers, Gaffin is serving a similar role on the web with blogs as the sources.

Caen was, I think it’s fair to say, the most popular thing about the San Francisco Chronicle. Perhaps a Gaffin-like blog “columnist” today might fare as well.

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