Today the Daily Telegraph newspaper launched My Telegraph, a free service that enables readers to set up their own blog.
An interesting move – a first by a national UK newspaper? – which is a good example of how a mainstream medium can use social media as a means of connecting its readership with the paper and vice versa. Maybe it will even develop where reader blogs become news sources for the paper. Look at Le Monde in France as an example.
I’ve signed up. I’ve not done that from any political leaning (the Telegraph traditionally is a Conservative paper) but to see how it works, and because it was dead easy to do. I’d do the same if The Guardian (traditionally a Labour newspaper) had such an offering.
More to come soon, according to Shane Richmond, the online Telegraph’s communities editor:
[…] The finished My Telegraph is just a piece of a larger site but I can’t tell you any more about that at the moment.
My Telegraph is just in time for plenty of political chit-chat in the coming months following today’s hot news across all media about Tony Blair’s resignation next month.
I bet we see a similar offering from another national newspaper soon.
6 responses to “Daily Telegraph starts reader blogs”
Daily Telegraph (UK) starts reader blogs…
NevilleHobson.com. Today the Daily Telegraph newspaper launched My Telegraph, a free service that enables readers to set up their own blog. An interesting move – a first by a national UK newspaper? – which is a good example of how a mainstream medium c…
[…] Daily Telegraph starts reader blogs “Today the Daily Telegraph newspaper launched My Telegraph, a free service that enables readers to set up their own blog.” […]
Hmm.
The Daily Telegraph (no idea, but I’m guessing about 800,000 copies sold each day) launches blogs.
Compare with Virgin Radio (2.4 million listeners each week), which launched blogs in December last year (and now has a fully-fledged social networking system – virginradio.co.uk/interact ).
Obviously, when the newspapers do it, it gets pretty impressive; but I wonder how large the market is for this type of stuff?
I think it’s all about community, James, not raw numbers.
Telegraph blogs will appeal primarily to Telegraph readers, some of whom no doubt are also Virgin Radio listeners. They may even have a Virgin blog which they might use to engage with fellow Virgin bloggers. At the least, they’d likely post on topics there relevant to that Virgin community; by the same token, ditto on their Telegraph blogs relevant to the Telegaph community.
I’m pretty sure what you see now on the Telegraph site as far as blogs are concerned is just a start. Interesting to see what comes next as they do what every mainstream medium needs to do in a radically changing and highly disruptive climate – enage with and build community with their readers/viewers/listeners.
The Telegraph is already a video content and radio producer…
Indeed, and I don’t disagree with your thoughts (only the odd amount of publicity the Telegraph is getting for arriving late to the party!)
But I wonder how many social networks the average user will join? I’m on Facebook, Media UK, and Virgin Radio. Do I have the time to join The Guardian’s, too?
j
That’s going to be a dilemma for many people – which community do you give your attention to?
Like you, I’m signed up with Facebook. And on MySpace. And with communities in my professional space (MyRagan. com, for instance). Communities surrounding my blog and podcast, too. Plus micro-blogging communities such as Twitter and Jaiku. Massive overlap amongst all these, so everyone else is also part of multiple communities.
It’s an awful lot to give attention to. So another community that’s competing for attention has to offer something I’d regard as compelling for me to spend time with, ie, give attention to, maybe at the expense of other communities.
The first thing would be to see how many of my friends and other people I might know or have heard of are using a given service. I’d get a sense of what they think about it. Then I’d see if the service offered something I felt I’d couldn’t do without (or at least, would like to have).
Like so much else going on these days, it’s a great time to be a consumer with so much choice. Which is a dilemma! (Actually, isn’t ‘consumer’ a bit of a redundant word now?)
But maybe that justs represents traditional, generational thinking. Maybe the generation coming out of schools and universities now (the so-called ‘Generation @’) are quite comfortable with the multitude of choices and will use any and all services that catch their fleeting fancy.
I think we’ll see more fleeting behaviour, ie, people dipping in to anything that comes along (like early adopters do today). That’s part of overall behaviour changes going on in how people want to connect with others.
So a service that’s about community has its work cut out to grab more than just fleeting interest.