Snapshots from the Edge: Knoxville Network Links Local Bloggers

Call it a case of great minds thinking alike.

Dave Mastio, a longtime “newspaper guy,” launched a blog aggregator and search engine called BlogNetNews. Mastio, who heard about innovative projects from The Knoxville News Sentinel and was looking for partnership opportunities with newspapers, reached out.

Jack Lail, managing editor of multimedia at the Knoxville newspaper, happened to be looking for just such a product when Mastio called.

In September, The Knoxville News Sentinel launched its partnership project with BlogNetNews.com. The Knoxville blog network, at blognetwork.knoxnews.com, provides bloggers in Eastern Tennessee a central online gathering place on the newspaper’s Web site.

Mastio’s site is a localized blog service that aggregates blogs based on location and pulls out top news headlines based on the stories local bloggers are linking to, a search engine for that area’s blogs and a guide to the most active blogs and hottest comments. BlogNetNews.com has also worked with RedState.com and Eagle Publishing to launch RightyBlogs.com.

Lail said a popular blog aggregator service in Eastern Tennessee called Rocky Top Brigade closed in 2006. “We looked at rejuvenating that, and this proposal came along, and it seemed like a way to help bloggers get a wider audience and open the tent to the newspaper without having to rebuild the code.”

BlogNetNews.com operates in all but a handful of states in the country, and The Knoxville News Sentinel is one of the company’s first mainstream media partnerships to launch.

Mastio’s business model is based on getting a portion of revenue from the mainstream media Web site partner.

“It is our intention to build local sites in 200 to 300 of the top markets in the United States,” Mastio said in an e-mail to NAA. “By partnering with existing local media, we can tap into their readership and ability to sell ads to local advertisers. We take on the expense of building and maintaining the site for our partners while promoting the site through blogs and our own network of Web sites and then we get a cut of the revenue the site generates. In short, we only make money if the site makes money for our partners.”

Mastio, who started BlogNetNews.com with money from his retirement savings in 2006, had years of newspaper experience. He worked at USA Today, The Washington Examiner, The Detroit News and, most recently, The Virginian-Pilot. By August 2007, traffic to BlogNetNews partner sites had grown to a point where Mastio was able to quit his job.

“BNN is all about using my newspaper experience to serve a new audience. First, the hyper-opinionated blog world isn't so weird to me because I have almost always worked for the opinion section of newspapers,” Mastio said. “BNN also appeals to my basic journalism instincts. The value of a newspaper whether it is online or in print is in providing a window into the world for readers. BNN does exactly that with the blogosphere. If Knoxville readers come to the News-Sentinel to find out what happened in HS sports or at the city council meeting, why shouldn't the come to the paper to find out what is happening in the local blogosphere?”

Local newspaper Web sites are Mastio’s first choice for partnerships, he said, but he is not opposed to partnering with a local television station, radio station or alternative news publication.

Since it launched this fall, the Knoxville Blog Network has approximately 200 member blogs based in the greater Knoxville area. Bloggers include real estate agents, mothers, sports fans and movie buffs. “We certainly cannot write about everything bloggers in East Tennessee are writing about,” Lail said. “But we can be useful to our readers and bloggers in helping find each other. And being useful is good.”

The Knoxville Blog Network page on Knoxnews.com automatically displays the first sentence or two from member blog posts in reverse chronological order. The page also provides direct links to the blogs, and that list can be sorted by more than 30 topic areas. The BlogNetNews software also allows readers to look at the most linked to, most clicked and highest rated blog posts. Bloggers can also place a Knoxville blog search or a feed of the most recent posts from the network on his or her own blog. The partnership also has the potential to build traffic directly through blog links and by helping raise the site's visibility in search engines.

Lail said he does not see the Knoxville Blog Network on Knoxnews.com becoming a search engine. “But we are trying to be someplace where people come to find the information they’re looking for,” he said. “I see us playing a larger role in filtering, organizing and highlighting information. We point to Knoxville YouTube videos. We could point to photos on Flickr that were tagged so we could find them. The possibilities are endless.”

Later this fall, Mastio said, BlogNetNews.com “will make the Knoxville blogosphere available on mobile devices and mesh that with our blog search engine so that people with a particular interest can get an alert when that topic comes up, whether the topic is the mayor, a particular city councilman, development plans near a popular park or the activities of a local Boy Scout troop.”

So far, however, the blog network has not really increased traffic to Knoxnews.com. Part of the reason for that is the low-key marketing approach the News Sentinel has employed. Lail said the newspaper has sent e-mails to bloggers, and placed promotions on the Knoxnews.com site. Also, the newspaper is sending hats to bloggers who place a permanent link to the network on his or her blog. The paper is working to build traffic to the blog network virally to keep marketing dollars focused on more revenue generating areas, such as classifieds.

Lail said he thinks “aggregating or organizing content has value and that outbound linking will – in a counter-intuitive way – result in heavier use by your users. We cannot produce all the information we need to provide, and all user-generated content need not reside on our site.”

'Snapshots' focus on new projects and initiatives on the digital side of newspaper publishing. If your company is launching a new feature or site, please let us know – we may feature your project in an upcoming article.