Great piece on crowdsourcing. We have a full time staff of three in Charlotte NC and depend on readers to be our eyes and ears. This has traditionally been known as “source-building” but nowadays with social media and emails, you have have much more of a connection with your audience -- more of a two-way street than just pushing information to them. While you can crowdsource on social media, I would also say that there is a large chunk of people who do not use social media, and if you can tap into those folks you can really have original content -- in Charlotte, if something blows up on IG or X/Twitter, one of the TV stations or someone else will have it. We prime our readers to email us what they are seeing and it has allowed us to really offer non-commoditized, differentiated news and information. Our best-converting articles are almost always the result of reader tips, not attending the same press conferences or rewriting the same press releases as everyone else.
Great piece on crowdsourcing. We have a full time staff of three in Charlotte NC and depend on readers to be our eyes and ears. This has traditionally been known as “source-building” but nowadays with social media and emails, you have have much more of a connection with your audience -- more of a two-way street than just pushing information to them. While you can crowdsource on social media, I would also say that there is a large chunk of people who do not use social media, and if you can tap into those folks you can really have original content -- in Charlotte, if something blows up on IG or X/Twitter, one of the TV stations or someone else will have it. We prime our readers to email us what they are seeing and it has allowed us to really offer non-commoditized, differentiated news and information. Our best-converting articles are almost always the result of reader tips, not attending the same press conferences or rewriting the same press releases as everyone else.
Extremely cheering take on how this new trend could revitalize local news.