By on February 21, 2007

We Need Your Blogging Advice for a Local NBC Affiliate

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Earlier this week, I had the chance to join a group of bloggers for lunch at the studios of NBC 17. They were kind enough to invite us out, feed us and provide a tour, in exchange for our thoughts and feedback on blogging and consumer generated media.

They’re still trying to figure out how consumer media could help them strengthen their #3 position in the local market (they’re behind the local CBS and ABC news affiliate), and so were open to all suggestions.

Of course, it’s hard to make recommendations, when the station itself is not sure of their end goal, but here are a few things I suggested:

  • They asked how they could encourage more bloggers to link to their content. I suggested being one of the few local affiliate web sites to implement trackbacks on their stories. If a blogger has a choice of where to link to a story, they’re more apt to link to a page that might send trackback traffic.
  • Tagging their news stories for news themes, categories and local areas. For example, every time they mentioned the Duke Lacrosse case, they could tag the item and let those interested subscribe to a feed on that topic. Likewise, someone interested in news for specific town in the Raleigh viewing area, could subscribe to news for just that area.
  • I suggested, as did some others, providing longer versions of stories as streamed videos, which could be embedded on blogs. Often, NBC 17 might record more than ten minutes for an interview, but only a few seconds appear during the newscast. They could offer that extra content to online viewers.
  • Not suggested at the time, but get rid of the pop-ups!

So, I thought I’d open it up to you. What ideas do you think they could experiment with? What would you like to see a network affiliate include on their site? What is your local affiliate doing well?

Leave your ideas in the comments and we’ll send them over to the station. I’ll also pick the best idea and place it on this post, with a link back to your site. :-)


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4 comments on “We Need Your Blogging Advice for a Local NBC Affiliate”

  1. graywolf Says:

    February 21st, 2007 at 11:42 pm

    stroke the egos of the higher profile blogers featuring them on the site. I’m pretty sure they’d start getting waaay more links after a few blogger of the month pieces.

  2. Andy Beard Says:

    February 22nd, 2007 at 7:36 am

    Have their own widgets for video (with live/followable link to transcripts)

    It is hard to say how much of their content is duplicate. If a news story is exclusive, they might want to make it easy to recognise, and maybe even available as a separate feed with different usage rights

    RSS Auto-discovery

    All this personal non commerical use just needs to disappear. If they allow things like their podcasts to be shared on commercial sites with accreditation, they might get more subscribers.

    Their podcasts are on an AP domain
    http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/fronts/PODCAST?SITE=WNCNTV&SECTION=PO DCAST

    Surely there must be a way to use a redirect so that it is their content, and not showing as AP content.

    I want all their edu and wikipedia links, but they are doing something massively wrong on gaining subscribers – only 9 on bloglines, and they probably work for the station.

    There total links on yahoo suggests they are not syndicating content effectively, and my 3 month old blog has more total backlinks. Maybe they are limited by AP content and syndication, but plenty of services use AP and syndicate snippets.

  3. Todd Mintz Says:

    February 22nd, 2007 at 1:19 pm

    I would even do more than Graywolf suggested…I would let “qualified people” host their blogs on the station website which will, over time, generate linkable content. They might want to follow the lead of Oregonlive.com which does an excellent job at creating a local blogging community under their “corporate” umbrella:

    http://www.oregonlive.com/blogs/

  4. Jason Says:

    February 22nd, 2007 at 6:54 pm

    These are exactly the ideas that we want to hear about. I continue to monitor a large number of blogs in an effort to learn more and more about the blogosphere. Keep the comments coming.

    Wish to reach me directly?
    My email is: JClough@wncn.com