June 27, 2007

The New Nashville City Blogs

The Nashville Scene reports on the coming makeover of the online presence of Nashville's The City Paper, a makeover I'm proud to say I have been involved with. My involvement, via my Mesh Media Strategies, has been designing and building The City Paper's new blog platform, NashvilleCityBlogs.com, and the initial four new blogs focusing on politics, sports, fashion and music.

Here's what the Scene had to say today...

Gone will be the static, blue-and-white template that readers have grown accustomed to, and in its place will be a new home page that directs readers to top stories, to four blogs and to an e-paper driven by the software Olive Active Paper, which is used by publications such as The Chattanooga Times Free Press and The Denver Post.

"What you'll see the first week or two in July is the first step, it's not the last step," says City Paper editor Clint Brewer, adding that he's also researching a video project for the website. "Really, we're not relaunching a website. We're really launching, arguably, six websites." The home page, e-paper and each of the four blogs all will have separate URLs.

"We've got a pretty healthy online readership," Brewer says, "particularly when you consider we've never promoted [the website] and it looks five or six years out of date...and we just need to serve them better."

...

Readers can expect to see two "team" blogs when the sites launch in July: a sports blog called "Nashville Ballers" and a political blog called "Political Animals." Writer (and former Rage editor) Libby Callaway will author a fashion blog called "The Style Arbiter," and music writer Ron Wynn will author a pop culture blog called "Giant Steps" (so named for the John Coltrane album).

At least one CP staffer won't be reading."What is it that [Wall Street Journal writer] Walter Mossberg said about citizen journalism?" [City Paper publisher Albie] Del Favero says. "Kind of like citizen surgery. That's how I feel about blogs. But I'm 53 years old..."

My involvement with the Nashville City Blogs project isn't limited to building the sites. I am also to be involved in helping The City Paper's journalists - who are already good at what they do - to also become good at using the blog medium as well.

I've done journalism in Nashville for nearly 20 years, and I've been a successful blogger for more than five. No media outlet in this city has yet maximized blogs and fully leveraged the power of blog-journalism and the blogosphere. I'm hoping to help The City Paper be the first.

Update. Working with The City Paper on the Nashville City Blogs project is coming full-circle for me - I started my first blog at the end of November 2001 as an adjunct to a weekly column I was writing for The City Paper. You can find a list of links to all my City Paper columns here. I'm hoping their archives survive the transition to the new website.