Though similar claims have been made about Occupy Wall Street -- including attempts to tie it to conservative bogeyman George Soros -- its reputation as a leaderless movement has mostly remained untarnished. People tend to look down on political organizations that are little more than astroturf, and Occupy Wall Street is effectively able to wear the banner of populist outrage.

One Big Obstacle: Winter

But though the decentralized structure of OWS has helped its public perception, its sluggish decision-making has made it ill-prepared for one major obstacle: winter. As the protests stretch on into December, many of the northern locations will be plunged into below-freezing temperatures. NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already predicted OWS will peter out with winter, and unless the protesters adequately prepare for the next few months, the cold will likely pose a significant challenge. Yet because of an inefficient mass-voting system, it's difficult for any particular encampment to make the kind of executive decisions needed to purchase the expensive supplies that would shield protesters from the chill.

Jane Hamsher initially addressed this problem by purchasing supplies out of her own pocket. Hamsher, founder of the popular progressive blog Firedoglake, had been attending Occupy DC protests when she realized that the protesters didn't seem to have a contingency plan in place.

"We were asking them, 'What do you need? Are you prepared to weatherize? Are you really going to get through the winter?'" she told me in a recent phone interview. "Because we don't want to see this die, and nobody was asking how these people are going to get through the next three to four months. So we just started to do it ourselves."

Hamsher's Firedoglake has been a longtime fixture in the progressive blogosphere, and along with other left-of-center blogs has been a significant source in supporting and promoting OWS. Often referred to as the netroots, a term coined by MyDD founder Jerome Armstrong for websites that engage in political activism, these bloggers have sought to influence elections and political causes since before 2004, when Daily Kos raised $500,000 for 15 Democratic congressional candidates. They played a large role in electing Ned Lamont in the 2006 Massachusetts Democratic primary and, more recently, netroots bloggers were a major force behind the Wisconsin collective bargaining protests, helping to organize the subsequent recall elections. Unsurprisingly, many of them have latched onto OWS, promoting specific protest locations and actively fundraising for the movement.

Centralized Effort for Gear

Hamsher wanted to scale her efforts to purchase winter gear for the protesters. Kevin Gosztola, another Firedoglake blogger, had been covering OWS since almost the beginning and was embarking on a nationwide trip to cover the movement in various cities.

"I thought as long as we're sending Kevin on this tour, let's see if we can raise money for him to buy things," she said. "Everywhere we went, there were people who needed all kinds of supplies, not just warm clothes, but if they're going to get through this thing, they needed serious polar gear. And we realized that we could do this on a centralized basis more efficiently than we could do retail one at a time."

So on October 21, Firedoglake introduced the #OccupySupply Fund. Readers were encouraged to donate, and the bloggers would use those donations to first purchase and then deliver gear to the various cities. On November 3, Hamsher announced that the first shipment -- "500 pairs of UFCW union-made socks made to withstand -40 degree weather" -- would be sent out. To date, more than $83,000 has been raised, and Hamsher told me most of it came from small donors. All of the materials, she said, were U.S.A. union-made, no small feat given how many textile mills have been shut down. The average price for an article of clothing? $8.40.

I asked Hamsher why it was better for the bloggers to organize the purchase of winter gear rather than the protesters themselves.

"When you're sitting in front of a computer all day long there are things you can do much faster than people who are on the ground," she replied. "Everybody has their job, and that's one thing we can do in addition to covering them that I think can be really valuable."

Keeping the Story Alive

Chris Bowers, co-founder of the netroots blog Open Left and current campaign director for Daily Kos, told me that his work around OWS has mainly focused on driving people to the locations.

"We had over 300,000 page views on a list of Occupy Wall Street events, and over 25,000 pledges of people pledging to attend events," he said in a phone interview. "I'm sure the number of people who went to the events who used our list are much larger than that. It's entirely possible that it's the largest source driving people to events of any website around."

Daily Kos is known, in part, for its active diarists' community, and Bowers estimated that several hundred diarists have contributed on-the-ground reporting from various OWS locations. So far, there are about 6,000 posts that use the OWS tag, several of which have gone viral. One such post, an open letter to an OWS opponent, has received 144,000 Likes on Facebook. Bowers said it was one of Daily Kos' most viral posts ever.

I asked Bowers to assess how much the netroots blogosphere is influencing OWS.

"It has largely helped keep the story alive in addition to driving it in the first place," he replied. "It's made the content viral, which helped get coverage in the mainstream media."

Hamsher, on the other hand, wasn't so sure the progressive blogosphere was influencing the movement at all.

"I think we're probably more influenced by them," she said, laughing. "The liberal blogosphere isn't really cohesive anymore, and it's been really tied at the hips with the Democratic party too -- afraid to oppose very non-progressive agendas coming out of the administration, and I think Occupy Wall Street has given them the courage to do that in many cases."

Simon Owens is Director of Editorial & Outreach at JESS3, a creative agency in Washington, DC. You can read his blog, follow him on Twitter, or email him at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

Tim Pratt was confident enough that his publisher would print a fifth novel in his urban fantasy series that he ended the fourth one on a cliffhanger.

"Not a complete cliff hanger," he told me in a phone interview. "I essentially tied up the story in the novel. But I left a number of questions unanswered that I wanted to answer later in the series."

The fourth book, "Spell Games," was published in Spring 2009, however, right after "this little economic apocalypse," as Pratt put it -- one that led to massive layoffs in the New York publishing industry. His editor, who had been with him since the first Marla Mason book had been published in 2007, did not escape the chopping block, and Pratt found his work reassigned to another editor who "was good, but not particularly interested in my series." Though his books always had decent sales, he remained firmly in the mid-list, and Random House decided not to renew his contract.

"It was understandable," Pratt said. "Those were dark times. A lot of people were not getting contracts picked up again. A lot of series were never finished. A lot of people who had books bought were at the copyediting stage when they had their contracts cancelled, whose books weren't published at all. My feelings weren't particularly hurt, though it was a difficult financial situation at the time. However, the feelings of my fans were extremely hurt."

It's not surprising that after thousands of people had paid money and invested hours of reading to follow the travails of Pratt's characters that it would result in at least some desire for closure in the series. In the months following the publication of his fourth book, Pratt began receiving letters and emails from increasingly disgruntled fans wondering if another publisher would pick it up. But given the industrywide contraction in the book world, few publishers would have been interested in signing on in the middle of a series, much less one that only had moderate sales. Pratt was left with a fan base and seemingly no way to serve them, and he likely would have just moved on to other projects if his wife hadn't been laid off from her job.

Eventually, Pratt worked out a way to connect with his fan base and get funding directly from them, with donations and a Kickstarter campaign that kept his series alive.

The Public Radio 'Premium' Model

I've been intermittently following Pratt's career since I first read a reprint of one of his short stories in college. The writer has never been shy about sharing stories of his financial troubles on his blog, and there have been several incidents over the last few years in which his economic situation has been dire. Not long ago, Pratt and his wife had a child, and the layoff came as they were facing mounting bills due to their son's chronic medical conditions. The novelist had been kicking around an idea for a prequel novella to his Marla Mason series, and after unsuccessfully shopping it around to a few small presses, decided to serialize it for free online.

The model was simple: Pratt would put up a new chapter each week, asking his readers to chip in what they could in donations. Friends in the writing community rallied around him and he ended up raising about $4,000, which is likely more than he would have received from a small press for the novella.

"When people started asking me if I'd write a fifth book in the series and pick up where that cliffhanger left off, it occurred to me that I could try to do the same thing," Pratt told me. "So in 2010 I thought it'd be a good idea, but this time I decided to offer fundraiser prizes, a kind of NPR model; if you give this amount, you'll be able to get this cool thing -- chapbooks, bookmarks, signed copies. For a few hundred dollars you could get the name of your choice included as a character in the book."

This time, Pratt brought in around $13,000 in donations. What's more, after he finished serializing the book, he not only put it up on the Kindle store and began selling it for $4.99, but he also sold the audio rights to Audible. Altogether, he said, the book ended up bringing in more money than it would have with his traditional publisher.

Enter Kickstarter

But though the experiment was successful, Pratt acknowledged he'd taken on a substantial amount of risk. Once he started serializing the novel, he would have been obligated to finish writing it even if the donations had petered out. With a project as large as a novel, that's a lot of work to do for potentially little pay. And so as he began to mull over writing a sixth book in the series, he turned to Kickstarter as a possible solution to this dilemma.

"The advantage with Kickstarter is that it's an advance," he said. "You get everything at once, rather than waiting for it to trickle in. And you can tell in advance whether it's worthwhile. You can put it out there and say if the fans are interested enough to pay me to do it, then I know it's worthwhile -- whereas if I just put it out there there's a chance people won't care anymore, that it'll have been too long, that the fans will have moved on, or whatever."

And so in August of this year, Pratt uploaded his project onto Kickstarter with video and text explaining his goal. Like before, he offered a series of prizes: For $5 you could get your name in the acknowledgments; for $10, a bookmark; for $50, "a signed limited-edition chapbook featuring a new Marla Mason story"; for $75, "a signed trade paperback" of the novel; all the way up to $2,000, which would result in Pratt writing a "Marla Mason short story just for you, featuring any supporting character of your choice, to be produced in a signed chapbook limited edition of a single copy."

By this point, Pratt had already serialized two Marla Mason books and had received a fair amount of fan mail for the first four books. Altogether, he had collected several hundred email addresses from fans in the series, and so when he announced the Kickstarter project he sent out a note promoting it to this group. Kickstarter also pushed the project to its front page and tweeted it out to its followers, resulting in donations from people who weren't even fans of the series. In only 13 hours, he'd met his fundraising goal of $6,000, and by the time the project closed, it was up to over $11,000.

Because the serialization doesn't start until January 2012, he plans to have the novel finished before sending out the first weekly chapter. This means he could start selling the e-book on the Kindle and Nook stores on day one. "I might put it up for sale early and say, 'If you want to read it for free, it's here, it's serialized. A new chapter will come out every Monday. But if you're just dying to go and read it now, just give me $5 and get it on the Kindle." And because he's already made $11,000 from Kickstarter, whatever sales come from the e-book will be an added bonus from day one.

Yes, But

But lest you assume Pratt has figured out a way to shrug off the mores of the traditional publishing industry, consider this: The $11,000 he raised came from only 182 people. That's a fairly small number of fans to trust your career to. (Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly, who famously posited that any artist only needs a thousand true fans to flourish, would disagree.) Pratt also told me that he likely wouldn't have received all those donations if Random House hadn't built up that fan base for the series. When he tried to serialize a kids novel he'd written, Pratt didn't even break four figures.

"I know with this series there are people who want to see it going," he said. "I would wonder if I wrote an entirely new standalone fantasy if I would get this kind of response. And that's OK, because I want to do 10 or 15 books in this series. I'm happy to still be writing it. I would have been thrilled if Random House had kept doing it, but if I had to go entirely the self-publishing route, I would hesitate to find the time to write something not in this series and try to serialize it."

In other words, even though authors like Amanda Hocking and J. A. Konrath are receiving press for selling thousands of e-books a month without the help of New York publishers, Pratt isn't ready to abandon traditional publishing just yet.

"A lot of people think that if they start writing their first novel and no publishers are interested then they're just going to put it on the Kindle for 99 cents and become millionaires. The people who are becoming millionaires are outliers," Pratt said. "If I were starting from nowhere and I didn't have a big publisher grow my audience, I don't think anyone would care. I don't think my Kickstarter would have done that well. So I can see where they're coming from and understand the frustration; a few years ago I was trying desperately to get any publisher to look at my novels too. But I worry that reality is not going to conform to their wishes."

Simon Owens is the director of PR at JESS3, a creative agency in Washington, D.C. You can read his blog, follow him on Twitter, or email him at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

And it was mere weeks -- if not days -- after its debut when media critics began declaring it a failure, often pointing to a sense of wandering malleability as The Daily's staff grappled with the dilemma of where a news app fits in a world of near-instantaneous news. Gawker readers guffawed at a leaked memo from editor in chief Jesse Angelo instructing his staff that they were to find, among other things, the "oldest dog in America, or the richest man in South Dakota." Hilarious comments like these reveal an oft-repeated lack of vision that nearly always plagues the first pioneers of a new medium.

In its early days, the radio industry remained a meandering platform thought to be utterly useless to advertisers and entertainers until Albert Lasker, considered by many the founder of modern advertising, discovered comedic actors like Bob Hope and used them to promote Palmolive soap, Pepsodent toothpaste, and Lucky Strike cigarettes to millions of listeners. With mobile and tablet apps, content producers must weigh their offerings in print and on the web and determine what more, if anything, they have to furnish on an app.

Despite such still-lingering questions, Conde Nast has thrown its hat into the ring, launching iPad apps for several magazine titles. It led with an app for the venerable New Yorker and a much-touted, widely praised one for Wired, and it began expanding into the app sphere even more when Apple launched magazine subscriptions on its tablet device.

Though it's still too early to be considered a "veteran" of the mobile app, Golf Digest wasn't exactly a novice to the medium when it joined its sister publications with a new subscription offering. It had already been publishing a mobile phone app and, earlier this year, had spun off one of the magazine's annual features -- the Hot List -- into its own iPad app. The monthly iPad magazine subscription, Conde Nast announced, would be $1.99 per issue or $19.99 per year.

So how did Golf Digest determine what kind of content would be ideal for not only driving its print and web readers to the app, but new users as well?

The rule is to read the reader

Bob Carney, the magazine's brand editor, is someone who grappled with this question in the months leading up to the subscription's launch.

"For Golf Digest, I think at the very beginning we thought we'd add every kind of bell and whistle we can," he told me in a phone interview. "And we found out that not only is that costly, but really for someone coming to Golf Digest, what they want is more of what they get in the magazine. So for the magazine, instruction and service information about the equipment are the most important things, and the iPad app ought to take that and extend it, not go somewhere else."

Case in point: the publication's swing sequences. Flip through any issue and you're apt to come across them -- the arc of a golfer's swing spread out across several images. The digital editor's natural inclination is to dispel of the still images completely and upgrade to video, perhaps even making it embeddable for wider distribution. Carney and his team, when making the iPad app, opted for an even more granular level. Taking advantage of the tablet's high-resolution screen and interactive features, they designed the swing sequences so the user can control every facet of the swing, jumping forward and back, pausing at the moment of impact. By handing over this control to the user, Carney said, it allows him to learn at his own pace.

This isn't to say video doesn't have its place within the iPad. Sometimes, the magazine will take a swing sequence by, say, Adam Scott, whose swing Carney characterized as "beautiful," and then shoot video of other golfers offering audio commentary, analyzing the minute details of Scott's technique in a way that sheds light on the methodology of a truly superior golfer.

"What we learned is to not try to reinvent the wheel," Carney said. "You try to take what you have and move it to the next level so that the user gets more information and control and you're using all the audio, video, and other tools available. The web is nice, but the web is usually 'lean forward,' where somebody says, 'You should see the Adam Scott swing sequence,' and you have two minutes before your next call and you look at it and you think it's cool and a great swing and now you're back to work. When you're playing on the iPad and you have the time to listen to those guys and move that swing back and forth, it's a different experience, and it's very cool."

Like the web, an iPad app is devoid of the distribution costs that hinder print, allowing the editorial team to vastly expand on something that might take up only a few pages in the print magazine. But of course most of the stuff that ends up in the app must be directly correlated with that month's print issue, necessitating constant overlap between the print and digital teams as the magazine is put together. Carney estimated that it takes three weeks to compile the print issue and three weeks for the app, with a two-week overlap in between. "We have a wall where every page is put out, and I noticed recently they have a layout of the July issue for every iPad screen as well."

Expanding the Hot List

Like other publications, Golf Digest is experimenting with rolling out individual apps and products centered around its annual lists. Its Hot List, a yearly ranking of the best golf equipment, was spun off into an iPad app before the magazine itself was even offered on the device.

Craig Bestrom, the magazine's editorial development director, told me in a phone interview that the app allowed his team to expand the list beyond the realms previously employed in the print product.

"The equipment portion of the magazine that was devoted to the Hot List was probably 60 pages," he said. "And this app had close to a thousand screens. That's probably the greatest comparison that you can make, that suddenly we're able to devote a lot more photographs and information. This is a far more comprehensive guide compared to what you get in the magazine. It's not only drivers, but all the new sets of irons, all the new wedges, all the new putters. It's all the club gear for 2011."

In the print version of the Hot List, for instance, the magazine featured about 14 drivers, and each driver was assigned a quarter of a page. But with the iPad app, Bestrom said, you get "multiple images of the driver, you get the sound the driver makes at impact, you have the ability to share on Facebook or on Twitter to your friends about a particular club or clubs that you liked and why you liked them."

The opportunity for e-commerce

The app allows for an e-commerce opportunity as well, enabling its designers to offer the clubs featured in the list up for sale with a simple click. Through a program called Golf Digest Rewards, a user is able to sort through the best prices for a club and purchase it via the app. Bestrom didn't have ready sales figures for me, but the e-commerce component indicated an opportunity for a diversification of revenue that may be necessary as print advertising revenues decline.

Ultimately, it seems the iPad app fits in between the stodgy formality of a print product and the open flexibility of the web. For Carney, it's the removal from the immediacy of the Internet that allows the magazine to flourish within this new medium.

"It works much more like a magazine, in that you really have to make it an experience in itself," he said.

And according to a recent survey, the consumers most coveted by high-end advertisers may agree. As Business Insider's Noah Davis put it, "The average user is roughly $60,000 richer and eight years younger than the typical Golf Digest reader, with an annual household income of $279,600."

Perhaps Golf Digest, the magazine for a sport thought to be played mainly by the affluent, is the perfect publication for a device often associated with that same demographic.

Simon Owens is the director of PR at JESS3, a design agency in Washington, D.C. You can read his blog or follow him on Twitter

Like Orlean, White had decided to leave the frantic mania of New York City life for a much quieter one in the country, moving to rural Maine in 1938 (Orlean would move to Columbia County, New York, almost 70 years later). Both writers also continued to write for the magazine after their departure.

In his wonderful forward to "The Elements of Style," Roger Angell, White's stepson, described what it was like to watch his stepfather write commentary for the New Yorker every week from their Maine home: "The sounds of his typewriter from his room came in hesitant bursts, with long silences in between," Angell wrote. "Hours went by. Summoned at last for lunch, he was silent and preoccupied, and soon excused himself to get back to the job."

But though White seemed to enjoy the quiet solitude of his rural surroundings (he turned down several New York City editor and writer gigs while there), the move was much harder on his wife, Katharine, who had served as the New Yorker's fiction editor.

"The part-time work she did on the farm in Maine was not nearly as satisfying to her as the first 12 years of full-time work in her New York office," Scott Elledge wrote in his biography of E.B. White. White later admitted that he regretted the move to Maine precisely because of the hardship it placed on Katharine.

Twitter Keeps Orlean Connected

But unlike the Whites, who were mainly isolated from their readerships and forced to correspond with their editors via snail mail, Orlean has found a means to solicit immediate feedback and engage in the back-and-forth conversations she was accustomed to during her city days --Twitter. In fact, she said that if she had decided to stay in NYC, she likely wouldn't be using the micro-blogging tool quite as often.

Orlean set up her account @susanorlean in early 2008 and at first didn't understand the medium.

"When I started on Twitter, it was never with the express notion that this would be a way to talk to readers," she told me in a phone interview. "I was encouraged to open an account by my assistant, and in the beginning I just didn't get it. I didn't understand what purpose it would serve or could serve. It took awhile before I could even figure out how you found people, who you'd want to follow, and why you'd want to follow them."

It wasn't long, however, before she was able to grasp what Twitter could provide in terms of reader feedback; to understand this radical change, consider the fact that when she became a staff writer for the New Yorker in the early '90s, the magazine didn't even have a Letters to the Editor page (it now has one called simply "The Mail").

"I've always gone fairly long between stories, and during that time it really is like you fall off the face of the Earth, especially in a magazine like the New Yorker that doesn't even have a masthead," she said. "This has happened to me a million times, where I just haven't had a story published for months and people would say to me, 'Are you still writing for the New Yorker?' Because they don't have a masthead, when you're not in an issue of the magazine, it's like you don't exist."

Discussion with Followers

While it's now common practice for reporters to use Twitter in the newsroom, Orlean is part of the small breed of journalists who goes months -- or sometimes longer if she's on book leave -- in between articles. I can't remember when I started following her -- likely shortly after she joined -- but when I did she had around 5,000 followers; these days she has over 100,000.

Unlike many major authors who use Twitter as a one-way broadcasting tool, she engages in back-and-forth discussion with her followers (compare the number of @ replies she publishes to the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof, who rarely replies directly to anyone on Twitter).

"I've always liked writing short pieces, and I've also always liked meeting readers," she said. "I've always done a lot of public stuff -- readings, doing Q&As -- so once I figured out Twitter, the transition was pretty natural for me. It was almost like doing an ongoing book tour basically, or an ongoing Q&A session with readers. It suddenly made this new relationship that before had only existed kind of in real life, so to speak."

But does this instant feedback distract her from her writing or inspire her to write more? Many writers complain that when writing a long work like a book it can be difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel, miring one in the malaise of what some would call writer's block.

"I used [Twitter] as a cheerleading squad as I was struggling to finish my book and people would be interested in watching me slog through by my postings of how many words I've written," Orlean said. "And it became really interesting seeing people saying, 'C'mon hang in there, you can do it.' I found that fascinating. I never would have expected that."

Balancing Promotional Tweets

With more than 100,000 followers, her Twitter feed obviously serves as a vehicle for promotion, both for her articles and her books. Not everyone is going to be interested in shelling out $30 for a book, and she recognizes that she has to be judicious in balancing her promotional tweets from those about, say, her home life.

"It certainly gives you a pre-selected group of people who have for one reason or another decided they're interested in what you have to say," she said. "It's like having a mailing list, and that's enormously valuable, especially as we're moving toward a world in which who knows whether we'll eventually shift the model to people self-publishing, and then you're really going to need that mailing list."

The New Yorker has always held a reputation as being a tightly guarded fortress, especially when it was under the editorship of the reclusive William Shawn. Given its rigorous adherence to fact-checking and drawn-out editing process, I wondered how open the magazine would be to the immediacy of Twitter, a tool that has been known to get journalists in trouble. It was just the other day that a Toronto newspaper released guidelines placing tight restrictions on what its reporters could tweet.

Orlean said that though members of the magazine staff took the time to get all the writers' accounts verified, there hasn't been any official discussion over how a writer should use the medium.

"I would be surprised if they came to me and said we don't approve of your account," Orlean said. "I think they would probably go on the assumption that if you work for them, by your very nature you probably would only be writing things that seem appropriate...I can't imagine that I would ever want to write something the New Yorker wouldn't want me to write. My interests and their interests are pretty seamless, and there's nothing I would want to write under my own name that the New Yorker wouldn't approve of because protection of my privacy and reputation is probably even stronger than theirs is."

Perhaps Orlean's most salient advice for journalists on Twitter came in a Gawker piece she wrote in response to Dan Baum, a former New Yorker writer who used the micro-blogging service to detail his firing from the magazine:

I have never met Dan Baum, and I wish him well. He hasn't asked for my advice, but here it is, anyway: 1. Don't be fooled by the one-way mirror quality of Twitter; it's a peculiar medium that is more invasive than it might feel. 2. If I ever hire someone, please call and remind me to have him or her sign a "No tweeting when I get fired" clause. 3. If you decide to publish in a very public forum details of something that is somewhat personal, don't complain when people respond in a somewhat personal manner. 4. When you are objecting to something written by a woman, using the word "twat" (as in, "[Orlean] launched a series of twit-for-twat responses...") is not usually advisable.

Simon Owens is the director of PR at JESS3, a creative agency in Washington, DC. He is a former editor of PBS MediaShift. You can read his blog or follow him on Twitter.

"It's a great contrast [with today], because back then you had to wait weeks for information, and the only way you got it was through newspapers and scientific journals, and now of course we have instant dissemination of everything," Racaniello said. "I'm amazed at the difference because now you're getting the information in real time."

Racaniello runs the Virology Blog, which aims "to teach you about viruses and viral disease." Though the site is ostensibly focused on all virus news, Racaniello said he's reacted to the growing demand for flu news and is constantly posting about H1N1. He's one of many H1N1-focused bloggers that are providing up-to-date information and analysis, and trying to process the mass of news reports emanating out of the U.S. and other countries about flu infections and vaccines.

A casual glance through flu news trends reveals a wide range of subjects being addressed, from people reporting on new outbreaks and deaths, to anti-vaccine activists trying to warn people that the H1N1 vaccine will cause pregnant women to have a miscarriage. This smorgasbord of headlines, obviously, wasn't available in 1968.

"[Today] you have official government agencies releasing information, and then you have all the journals releasing their papers way ahead of when they would ever appear in papers in the old days -- weeks and weeks ahead of when they'd normally post them," Racaniello said. "And then you have bloggers and podcasters putting their two cents in. It's like an echo chamber; one blogger picks something up, and others repeat it."

Misinformation Spreading Freely

This means misinformation can spread rapidly. Recent surveys show that a large percentage of people in Britain and the U.S. are not seeking out the H1N1 vaccine. Many people believe the vaccine is dangerous, or that the pandemic isn't really that serious. (For the record, I haven't received the vaccine, though that's more a result of apathy than anything else.)

This, Racaniello argued, is the double-edged sword of such instant dissemination and easy access: The Internet has given voice to a wide range of less qualified yet loudly vocal outlets. Take, for instance, the articles and blog posts based entirely on anecdotal message board posts claiming that women are miscarrying after receiving the vaccine, a story that has spread far and wide on blogs.

"It's great because you can get information really quickly," Racaniello said. "You can get it from many sources, like a lot of academics and research types online, but the bad part is that you don't know who's good and who's not in terms of information. You don't know who to believe. So I'm trying to tell people, 'I've been working on viruses all these years, and I'm trying to tell you what I think is right.' It's an incredible contrast between 1968 and 2009, but there are negative aspects of this rapid communication, and not everyone knows how to deal with it."

Impact of Flu Bloggers

It can be difficult to determine the effects of the web on the dissemination of flu pandemic news, but nearly all the flu bloggers I spoke to reported a drastic increase in their readership in recent months. It is often in the wake of a crisis or major news event that bloggers within a related niche gain traction. We saw it happen with economics bloggers during the financial crisis, for example, and with the real estate bubble bloggers before that.

The question is whether these flu bloggers are reaching the public at large and are having an impact on the discussion. One can perhaps determine this based on those who visit, comment, or send in emails to the sites. Racaniello told me he's regularly visited by high school and college students conducting research, but he and others also note that their servers were logging hits from hospitals and other research facilities.

"I get a lot of correspondence myself from a lot of different countries," he said. "At the beginning of the pandemic I was getting a lot of emails from Mexico...I got emails from Egypt when they decided to kill pigs some time ago, and now there are some rumors about them wanting to kill cats because cats have gotten influenza. I've got a number of requests from Ukraine, asking me to help sort out what's going on there. So it's global, it's not just the U.S., and it's nice to see that people have access all over the place, although I've heard virtually nothing from Africa...so not everyone is online."

Mike Coston, who runs the Avian Flu Diary, said he receives between 1,000 and 2,000 visitors a day. Coston said his visitors are "mostly government agencies and hospitals and research centers. And I think people are using my blog as a one-stop shopping place for headlines in the news, as far as the flu is concerned."

Though Coston recognized that he and others are fighting a vocal pseudo-scientific minority, he doesn't blame the platform (i.e. the Internet).

"I don't think I can demonize the Internet here," he said. "It's like demonizing telephones just because telemarketers use it. If you add up the pluses and minuses, obviously the Internet is a plus. I certainly could not do what I'm doing now [without it]. I couldn't talk to other bloggers, journalists, doctors, and scientists. I have access to people around the world because of the Internet."

Blogging Helps Flu Experts

Unlike some flu bloggers, Crawford Kilian does not have a degree, or claim any particular expertise with flu or viruses. Yet his H5N1 blog is a popular destination for pandemic-related news. He said he started the blog mainly as an educational resource for himself, though it's also for the benefit of his audience.

In fact, even the blogging flu experts said their online work forces them to stay abreast of new research in the field. Racaniello said that blogging led him to consult primary literature he otherwise might not bother with. He also said that keeping attuned to flu news has helped his grant writing, teaching, and the creation of an updated edition of the textbook he wrote.

Killian said he does his best to seek out the most accurate information.

"All I would be wished to be judged by is the quality of people I link to," said Kilian. "I'm trying to find the most reliable, scientifically minded people that I can, possibly the most reliable journalists who also understand what the heck is going on, and present at least the highlights of what these people are turning up."

Like many bloggers, he closely monitors where his readers originate, and is disappointed that many of them only come from North America. He recognizes that his blog might not be very accessible to non-English speaking countries, but that still leaves a wide swath of potential readers.

"I would be happy if I were getting more visitors from some of the hot zones," Kilian explained. "China sometimes erratically shuts down access to TypePad blogs, so I get essentially low visits from China, despite the keen interest in the subject, unless they're coming in from some kind of anonymizer and they're sneaking in through the Great Firewall. I also realize that there aren't many people who read fluent English and have computer access in places like Vietnam or Ecuador, so I don't always expect them to be checking in."

On the subject of the pseudo-science that spreads quickly on the web, Kilian said he often ignores it. But sometimes a news meme is persistent enough to require attention.

"Every once in a while, I'll run up against something that is so silly, but maybe so plausible that it might be harmful," he said, "and I'll run a series called 'Annals of Viral Paranoia,' where I drag out samples from some of these folks and try to point out why they are wrong, and I even ask myself, 'what if they're right?'"

Unfortunately, discerning truth from fiction can be hard in countries like Ukraine, where flu pandemic information has been clouded by confusing and outlandish news reports, such as claims of a "super flu," or some kind of black plague. The anti-vaccination crowd has been using every suspicious death following a vaccination as a smoking gun, feeding on the power of the anecdote in the absence of actual scientific evidence.

"People who are anti-vaccine are very vocal," said Racaniello. "They're online, they're blogging, they're communicating, and then your average person reads one of these blogs and gets scared, because they don't know how to interpret the situation. A lot of people put up false information, non-scientific stuff, but people who read them don't know. I get tons of emails saying, 'I heard this guy say this vaccine has stuff in it that's going to do bad things.' Thirty years ago they wouldn't know any of this, all the false stuff would not be out there, and so in this regard I think in some ways we're going backwards."

Simon Owens is a social media consultant and associate editor for MediaShift. For more about him read his blog or contact him at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

Back in 2000, Stephen King became one of the first major authors to offer a book online using an "honor system" to solicit donations. The book was called "The Plant," and was based on a series of chapbooks King had sent around to his friends in the '80s. He placed the first chapter in various downloadable formats on his website, and downloaders were expected to donate $1 by mail or credit card. King said that as long as 75 percent of readers donated, he would continue to post new chapters.

According to news reports, the first few chapters either reached or nearly reached that 75 percent threshold, though the second chapter fell as low as 70 percent. Eventually, King raised the price to $2 per chapter. To compensate for this increase, he published more pages at a time. I was among the King fans who dutifully mailed in money each time I downloaded a new chapter.

But King's system was flawed in several ways. First, 75 percent is a fairly high threshold to meet. Plus, he counted every single download, so if someone downloaded the PDF but then had to switch to the plain text version, King counted these as two separate downloads. He wanted his $2 (or $4 for later chapters.)

Eventually, the donation rate fell below 50 percent and King abandoned the project, promising to return to it at a later date. He hasn't. Compared to the sales of most mid-list authors, the experiment was a huge success -- at one point King wrote on his site that it had generated several hundred thousand dollars -- but a piece in the New York Times inferred that it was a failure. Still, it garnered huge press attention because of its novelty. The question remains: could this be a viable business model for future works?

Success With Speculative Fiction

In early 1999, author John Scalzi (of the popular Whatever blog) released his book, "Agent to the Stars," as a "shareware novel."

"People could read it, and if they liked it, they could send me a dollar, or whatever sum they liked (even if that sum was zero)," Scalzi wrote of the experiment. "If they didn't like it, well, clearly, they wouldn't have to send me anything. It was a no-risk proposition for the reader. I didn't expect to see a dime from it, but as it turns out, over five years I made about $4,000."

Author Tim Pratt recently turned to the donation model after unsuccessfully shopping around a novella to small press publishers. The large publisher Bantam Spectra publishes his Marla Mason series, and Pratt developed an idea for a smaller work set within that same universe. The work wasn't a full novel, yet it was also too long for short fiction magazines. After the small presses passed, Pratt put off the project -- until his wife was laid off from her job.

"When I saw that [author Catherynne Valente] was trying [the donation model], I thought that I would, and the obvious thing was to write this thing that I already had," he said. "If I knew what the story was going to be, I knew functionally it was just a piping exercise really."

Pratt began publishing the chapters on his blog without any preconditions as to how much money had to be donated before subsequent chapters would be released.

"I would say that most the people reading it are fans of my series," he explained. "But, certainly, some of the donors in the first couple of weeks were people who just felt for my situation, people who saw an opportunity to help us out. It's sort of a good excuse to let people give you charity."

Pratt didn't provide exact figures for how many people have donated, but said he's made more than he would have if one of the small publishers had picked it up. Some of the people gave one large donation, while others donated in small bits as new chapters were released. For the first few weeks, he had four or five new donors a day. Now, several chapters into it, he gets perhaps four or five new donors a week. I asked him if he viewed this as a sustainable business model for established authors who have built-in fan bases.

"It's hard for me to say because I don't know how much of the response to this has been based solely on its novelty," Pratt replied. "It's usually not that common of a thing, especially with books in existing universes that have come out from other publishers...I think going directly to your fans is something that writers should be open to -- an increasing number of musicians are doing it -- but with this particular project, I don't know if it's something I'd necessarily repeat."

'I Can't Do Without My Chapter'

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller went a slightly different -- and perhaps more business savvy -- route when they began releasing one of their works in late 2006. The writing team has been collaborating on projects for years, and in December of that year they began having difficulties with one of their publishers.

"We announced ... that we were going to write this side book, and put it out on the Internet," said Lee. "And the rules were that the first chapter went up for free, anyone could read it. The second chapter would depend on it earning $300, and people could donate as much or as little as they wanted. They could donate 50 cents, or the sky is the limit. And when it got to $300, we'd turn it out into the wild and anyone could read it again. By the time we started releasing the book on the Internet, it was January 2007 and we had five chapters already written. The book was well paid for before we were halfway through [publishing] the book."

Donors who gave a minimum of $25 were guaranteed a free print edition of the book, if one was ever released. They said approximately 1,066 donors reached this threshold.

"About the fifth week, we had an occasion to be a little late [in releasing a chapter], and people began to worry that we weren't going to post," said Miller. "And pretty soon people were setting their clocks in Australia at the right time to get it when the chapter was supposed to come out, and we were getting notes from people saying 'I can't do without my chapter this week.' "

As former newspaper reporters, the duo said that this is the kind of project for someone who is adept at writing on deadlines; otherwise, the author risks falling behind or becoming disheartened by a lack of results. Though Lee felt this could be a good business model for authors with established fan bases, she said it probably wouldn't be viable for amateur authors trying to build a following.

Cory Doctorow's Experiment

Though many writers are just starting to experiment with this new format, there's at least one notable author who's ready to compare its effectiveness to traditional publishing. Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and co-editor of the popular Boing Boing blog, has released several books under Creative Commons licenses. He believed that the free publicity resulting from this strategy would lead to higher print sales. Recently, he announced plans to bypass traditional publishing completely, and then publish his results for all to see.

"Here's the pitch: the book is called 'With a Little Help,'" he wrote in Publisher's Weekly. "It's a short story collection, and like my last two collections, it's a book of reprints from various magazines and other places (with one exception, more about which later). Like my other collections, it will be available for free on the day it is released. And like my last collection, 'Overclocked,' it won't have a traditional publisher."

The book will be put out through a variety of self-published formats -- ranging from e-book, to audiobook, to print -- and Doctorow will record all the income that it generates, whether it's from donations, speaking gigs, or even the money paid for his Publisher's Weekly column on the experiment.

"There's plenty more details, of course -- how I'm going to use Twitter, what I'm going to do to get this into bookstores, the marketing and publicity plan," Doctorow wrote. "But I'm out of space for this month -- and many of those details will fill a column on their own. One thing I need to mention, though: I'm seriously considering writing a book about the experiment, no matter how it turns out, selling it to a traditional publisher and adding the advance to the balance sheet."

Simon Owens is a social media consultant and associate editor for MediaShift. For more about him read his blog or contact him at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

The fact that Munroe considers traditional brick-and-mortar book stores to be an afterthought sheds light on the entrepreneurial nature of online web comics creators. (Munroe did not respond to an interview request for this article). According to a list compiled on Wikipedia, there are at least 40 self-sufficient web comics that are "known to produce the primary income of their artists and/or writers."

Back in June, political cartoonist Daryl Cagle published a blog post about the annual Association of American Editorial Cartoonists (AAEC) convention.

"In recent years, the convention has had the flavor of a wake, as cartoonists mourn the loss of full-time newspaper positions," he wrote. "Many newspapers used to cover the cost of their employee/cartoonists attending the long, four-day AAEC convention and now cartoonists have to find a way to cover the cost on their own."

Cagle noted that many newspapers are shedding their full-time cartoonists, forcing many of these artists to become freelancers. With the industry in decline, what can newspaper cartoonists learn from these entrepreneurial web cartoonists? How are these self-sustaining artists making a living and why are they choosing to forgo traditional publishing outlets to deliver content to fans?

Comics for free, merchandise for sale

Richard Stevens created the web comic Diesel Sweeties in 2000. Depicting a world where humans and robots co-exist -- often romantically -- the individual strips are largely self-contained and have a number of recurring characters. The comic was picked up for newspaper syndication in early 2007, but in 2008 Stevens went back to the web-only version. He told me that today his site receives about 30,000 readers a day. Of those, he said, he really only needs to find about one or two percent of his fan base to support him financially.

"I know in mass media terms our numbers aren't that big, but because we're so close to the ground we have a closer relationship to [our audience]," he said. "So I think if you're in my bracket up to Randall [Munroe's] bracket [in terms of readership], I would say one or two percent are really going to support you."

Like others I interviewed for this piece, Stevens makes most his money through selling merchandise, most notably T-shirts. He operates his business out of his home, purchasing the shirts in bulk and selling them on his website. In that sense, the web comic is a kind of loss leader (though one person I spoke to disliked that term) for the print product. It gathers fans that can be turned into paying customers.

Surprisingly, however, many web comic artists don't simply transfer their comics to the T-shirt. Though classic strips like The Far Side have done well in T-shirt form, several web artists create special, separate content for their merchandise.

"I might do a comic of eight panels of people digressing," Stevens said. "It wouldn't work on a shirt very well...Sometimes, if I get a lot of reader responses, I'll try to transfer a line from the comic into a shirt, but mostly I make the T-shirts for myself. And gleaning evidence from the message boards, from Facebook, from having conversations 24/7 with my fans, I can get a sense of what will sell."

From middle management to we cartoonist

Howard Tayler was making a six-figure salary as a middle marketing manager when he decided to quit his job to work on his web comic, Schlock Mercenary, full time. The move came when the comic was losing money, leaving him in a sink-or-swim situation.

"So I quit the day job and then frantically and desperately over the period of the next 15 months applied everything I knew about business and marketing and the Internet, all that stuff, to finding a way to monetize what I had," he told me. "And what I had was a captive audience."

Tayler differs from many web cartoonists because he makes most of his money selling book collections of his comics. Since 2006 he's released five books -- with a sixth on the way -- and he said that his family takes in about $30,000 per book. He orders print runs of about 5,000 titles; he says that at this print run he can get them for almost the same price as a major New York publisher, ensuring a high profit margin even if he sells them wholesale. His wife helps with the business side, taking care of invoices and shipping.

Though most of his money comes from books, he also has gone the more traditional merchandising route by selling T-shirts, buttons, and even digital-only PDFs of his work. (Sometimes he uses these products to help raise money for charitable causes). He also sells special edition books that include original sketches, an idea that turned out to be a particularly profitable moment of inspiration. But would he forgo all this for a traditional publisher if one came along?

"If I had the opportunity to sell my books to a large publisher, I'd probably jump on it," he said. "The way we're doing it, the business is kind of taking over the whole house. My wife is the production manager, she's our chief of operations; when we ship out books for a pre-order, she spends a month collating receipts, invoices, sorting postage. We printed $40,000 worth of postage this year, and all that's a lot of work. I'd much rather just be a cartoonist, and if that opportunity presented itself, if a publisher came to me and said, 'Hey we'll sell your books, and we'll sell 250,000 of them,' then I'm still making a living so I won't complain."

I asked Tayler about newspaper woes and whether his breed of content monetization would be a viable model for comic strip artists. He said that before he quit his day job he studied "disruptive technologies," where profitable businesses meet new models that slowly chip away at their profit margins until suddenly they upend the entire model.

"You'll see it's happened with everything from sailing ships versus steam ships, automobile versus horse and buggy," he said. "It happened five times with the disk drive alone, where new technologies have undercut the old technologies. I look at that pattern and I look at what's happening now, and I know two things. One, newspapers and comics syndicates are definitely the old technology, the old business model. They were at their most profitable 15 years ago, and they're dying. They're going to be replaced by something.

"The other thing I know," he continued, "is the thing that replaces them, whatever it is now, is not meeting the needs of the current newspaper customers. They're going to look at what comes next and say this isn't what I wanted, I long for the good old days. But 20 years from now, we'll all be better off, and whatever comes along to replace newspapers will finally have been able to do whatever the newspapers do and then some. Whether that's me, guys doing what I do, or someone who replaces me in the interim, I don't know... Newspapers are dying, and the syndication model is dying, and something better is going to come along to replace it."

Simon Owens is a social media consultant and associate editor for MediaShift. For more about him read his blog or contact him at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

Testa doesn't work for a health department, nor is he an investigative reporter. He and Joanne Kenen write the New Health Dialogue Blog for the New America Foundation, a think tank.

"I think part of it, with the blogs, is that there is a much more targeted audience," he told me. "You have people who come in expecting health policy coverage, so you expect a certain level of knowledge that [is different] than you would get if you were dealing with broader print journalism with a focus on the kind of eye grabbing protests, rather than the policy coverage."

In August, the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll found that 53 percent of the public "believes that tackling health reform is more important than ever," a decline of almost 10 percent from the year before. Some have suggested that anti-health care reform advertisements and the media's fixation on town hall events played a major factor in this erosion. In fact, one survey found that the majority of recent mainstream news coverage of health care reform focused solely on the politics and protests of the debate, rather than specific policy. A survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that more than 70 percent of respondents thought that media had done either a poor or "only fair" job of explaining the current proposals making their way through Congress.

Moving from the sidelines to the blogosphere

Back in the 90s, the last time the Democrats tried to push through health reform, health care professionals were forced to wait on the sidelines, or until a traditional news reporter called them for a quote. But during this current round of debate, many of them are running popular and vibrant blogs that dive deep into policy issues. The question is how much impact are they having on the national discourse, and is their coverage cutting through the horse race politics dominating cable news shows?

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn is a health economist and has been a health care consultant to the industry for over 20 years. She launched her blog, Health Populi, almost two years ago. Thanks to increased interest in the health care debate, she now receives as many as 2,000 unique visitors a day. Sarasohn-Kahn focuses on health economics, policy, and technology; over the last decade, she has examined the role the Web in playing in helping patients take control of their own health care.

"My goal is to cover one data point every day that comes across my news stream through foundations, research papers, whatever," she told me during a phone interview. "I read everything in health and health care, because my range is broad, and my umbrella is broad. I decide either the night before or early -- like 5:30 in the morning -- 'what do I want my readers to know about today?' And I create a PowerPoint, a chart, or excerpt something ... I present the point, fair and balanced right up front, and then at the bottom I drive home the 'hot points,' which is through my lens as a health economist."

Like all the bloggers I interviewed for this piece, Sarasohn-Kahn agreed that health blogs offer more in-depth, thoughtful analysis than your typical cable news outlet. But she said there is still some "heavy lifting" to be done by the readers themselves.

"The fact of the matter is that most people blog to state their opinions up front, which is fine," she said. "What I think is really useful about the blogs is that all of us try to do what I do -- know a lot about a little piece of health care. So when you want to know how unemployment morphs to uninsurance, you go to my blog. And when you really want to get into some high powered wonkiness, you'll go to Matthew Holt's blog. If you want to know about health privacy, you better turn to Bob Coffield's Health Care Law Blog, because that's his schtick. We all have our specialties and our niches."

Getting beyond horse race coverage

Testa and Kenen of the New Health Dialogue Blog told me that health care coverage in the blogosphere is mixed, and that the range of blogs makes it easy for readers to only coalesce around blogs that promote their own particular point of view.

"I think it's mixed," Kenen said. "I think some of the blogs also do horse race and politics, and some are worse than the mainstream press because some of them are people who have never reported or worked in Washington. And some of the health care blogs are doing the same thing that the press is doing, and not necessarily as well. And to be fair, some of the reporters are not just doing horse race. Some of the reporters are doing very high quality work on what is our health care system, and getting beyond the town halls and politics."

Despite all this, she said that "the health care blogosphere does fill a gap."

"Health care is extremely complicated," Kenen said. "It's very technical and there is an amazing number of interconnected pieces. We try to be a bridge between the public and the wonk stuff. We're a think tank that blogs, we're not a think tank that's writing impenetrable economic analysis. We try to communicate policy in a political context. We're not grenade throwers. We don't think people come to us to watch us rant. We think people come to us to have things explained."

I asked Testa about the more shallow coverage of town hall events and whether this makes it difficult for Americans to understand what's in the proposals making their way through Congress.

"Being able to say what's in the bill is kind of important," he said. "Town halls are car wrecks and you can't take your eyes off of them. But the people who care about the policy and the issues, at the end of the day they've still got these unresolved questions and so we sort of tackle that. Issues like, 'well how do we cover all Americans?' What's important is that the conversation continues on even while there are all these political fireworks."

Who's winning the information war?

Maggie Mahar spent years as an economics reporter writing for news outlets like Barron's before she got a chance to write a book on health care, "Money-Driven Medicine." It aimed to tell "the real reason health care costs so much." The book was published in 2006, and she said it didn't get much traction because there wasn't a meaningful push for health reform at the time. The book was recently made into a documentary and the current debate has helped it receive favorable news coverage. In 2007, she received a call from the Century Foundation asking her to become a health care fellow. Not long after accepting the position, she began a blog, Healthbeatblog.org.

"At Barron's I had always written these relatively long, researched stories, and here I decided to write relatively long researched posts," Mahar told me. "I started to attract a real audience. The people who read it are quite knowledgeable, and they'll sometimes argue with each other. I comment too, and they'll just keep the discussion going, like a graduate seminar. I love that about it. But I will say that I'm not reaching the people out there who read the New York Times and know very little about health care, and I'm not being told much by the New York Times, and that drives me nuts."

Many of the health care bloggers I spoke to said they receive calls from reporters asking for quotes on health care reform, which indicates that their blogs are acting as gateways for wider coverage. Mahar was recently asked to join a health care panel at the Washington Post, and every week she fields questions on the issue from Post readers.

I pointed out recent polls show that support for health care reform is waning and asked whether this meant that health care reform opponents were winning the information war. Given that Mahar is pro health care reform, does that mean blogs like hers are failing to insert themselves into the dialog?

"It's easy to scare people about health care," she said. "It's very personal and people feel very vulnerable. If you tell them that they might not get as much as they've gotten in the past, they get very uptight. And we're also a nation that's terrified of death. You add all that together and it's incredibly hard to combat misinformation. We're not good at discussing ideas, we don't talk about ideas. We talk about personalities and politics, and that hurts. Because this is a very complicated subject and you have to dig in and contemplate the issue to understand it, and so much of it is counterintuitive."

Simon Owens is a social media consultant and an associate editor for MediaShift. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

Not all bloggers link to news in this way, and it's a source of friction between news organizations, bloggers and news aggregators. Earlier this month, Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira wrote a story detailing his displeasure with the way Gawker had taken material from one of his articles.

Also this month, media consultant Arnon Mishkin argued in a Paid Content op-ed, "The Fallacy of the Link Economy," that news aggregators often effectively trap traffic within their own sites while sending out minimal traffic of their own.

"Even in an absolute best-case scenario for producers of original content, the aggregators get at least as much traffic on linked stories as the creators of those stories because anyone who clicks on the link does so from the aggregator's site (so each site gets a page view)," Mishkin argued.

His piece was criticized for its lack of concrete data, but Mishkin's argument highlights the different methods that websites utilize when giving attribution to other sources. Many heavily summarize or block quote headlines and ledes. Some bury their links at the bottom of a post, and a few neglect to include any link at all. In other words, not all links are created equal. As a result, news outlets are paying more attention to how their content is being linked. (For a look at the various ways bloggers use content, check out this story by Mark Glaser about using a "Steal-O-Meter.")

Back in July I shared my own story of having a prominent link to my site placed on the front page of Huffington Post. Though I'd previously been linked by Huffington Post, the URLs were usually buried within long blog posts. A few hundred readers came to my blog via each of these links. In contrast, I received nearly 40,000 visitors over the course of a weekend after having a headline link prominently displayed on the front page of the site. It was obvious that because my blog was linked in the headline itself, readers were much more enticed to read the underlying content.

The reality is that website owners often have little say in how Huffington Post and other blogs and aggregators link to their content. But if given a voice, what would they say? What do newspapers feel is the best way for a blogger to link to their content? And what do they do when they feel that a website has stolen a story?

To answer these questions, I spoke to several web editors at major newspapers.

Problems with Smaller Sites

Jane Elizabeth, an online editor for the Virginian-Pilot, said that she's mostly satisfied with how big players like Google News and Yahoo package links to her paper's site. She explained that their approach of using a headline and brief sentence or two is just enough to get readers engaged and clicking, adding that internal metrics show the Pilot gets a good amount of traffic from these portals. Most of the problems come from much smaller sites.

"I think aggregators and bloggers, we have different problems with them," Elizabeth told me. "I think when we do have problems, it is with blogs or with small organizational website -- some kind of club or industry website that really doesn't know how to do it right, and that's my sense of it. They're just not that sure what they should be doing or how they should be linking out, or they've never really thought about it before."

If, for example, the Virginian-Pilot writes about an organization or business, the subject of the story will often copy and paste the entire piece to their website, sometimes even without a link. In those instances, Elizabeth or another editor will send a polite email explaining why this isn't permissible.

She said that there are no hard and fast rules for linking to Virginian-Pilot articles, and that in most instances common sense prevails.

"As long as they're providing a link to us, and in their analysis they're not stealing our ideas and quotes from the stories, then that's fine with us," she said. "Obviously we like to be mentioned as much as we can. I'm certainly not going to complain about that."

Staff members will contact website owners when they feel their copyright is being infringed upon, but they don't have the time or manpower to police it heavily. A sizable amount of infringement falls through the cracks.

Fostering Relationships with Bloggers

Meredith Artley, an online managing editor for the Los Angeles Times, estimated that bloggers and news aggregators link to the newspaper correctly 90 percent of the time. Like Elizabeth, Artley considers it fine when a blogger pulls a sentence or two -- or even an entire paragraph -- with a link attached. It's when they begin quoting three or four paragraphs when the water gets murky.

"Even if they are linking to us in multiple places, we're not really a fan of that," she said.

Like the other editors I spoke to, the Los Angeles Times will contact a blogger or website owner if he or she has crossed the often-ambiguous line. Artley said that when the newspaper contacts a blogger about linking practices, the person almost always changes the post to a more agreeable format.

"I think those bloggers understand why we need to do that," Artley said. "It's not this bureaucratic voice of the Los Angeles Times saying you should stop. It's more like, 'Listen, if you're appreciating the work we're doing, then we need you to support it by not stealing it.' So we regularly send out emails. If we have a personal relationship with the bloggers, sometimes I'll just drop a casual note saying, 'Hey, I notice that you're doing this, cut it out.' And other times if we don't know the blogger and we don't have a connection, or if it's a bigger blog where we don't know the individual people, we'll send a more formal letter."

Some major news organizations have complained about the role blogs and news aggregators play in sucking away traffic and advertising dollars, but Artley was generally positive about the benefits blogs provide in exposing Times content to new readers. For her, the power of the link is much more enticing than a closed system.

"The more we reach out, the more we tell people about our coverage, the more we get our stories covered on other sites, and [by] new technologies, the more we spread the word," she said. "The idea is that's better for us in the long run, as opposed to clamping down and saying don't link to us...The idea is to be open to experiment and see what works."

Giving Proper Credit

Audrey Cooper, metro editor for the San Fransisco Chronicle, told me that the problem of improper attribution stems from the overall failure of the entire industry to convince the public of the importance of newspapers. She said that just about every major news story that is written about by blogs or talked about on radio and TV comes from the work of a newspaper reporter.

"We're in a position that if newspapers don't do a good enough job explaining how they're important, and how that history of information is processed, it's not going to just be the Chronicle that doesn't survive, or the Rocky Mountain News that doesn't survive, it's going to be a huge amount of newsgathering that's going to be eliminated," she said.

Cooper views a link to an article to be the bare minimum a blogger can offer, and she said that ideally the person would put in a greater effort to give credit to the Chronicle. For example, she prefers it when a blogger mentions the newspaper's name when using any of its reporting.

"Even with a short blog post, not everyone is going to scroll all the way down to see where you got all this information," she said. "And beyond that, maybe a lot of people won't care, but if you say, 'As you may have seen on the Chronicle's website on Thursday,' and then have a link embedded to that, that's a lot more transparent for everybody involved. And what's the harm in saying that? There's no reason not to."

Unlike some of the other editors I spoke to, Cooper said the Chronicle doesn't put much effort into policing what it perceives to be copyright infringement, mainly because many of the blogs that do it are so small. Still, she said that as a whole these blogs can hurt the newspaper by causing "death by a thousand paper cuts."

The question, she said, is which blog will provide the thousandth, fatal cut?

Image of chain links via Mathew Ingram.

Simon Owens is a social media consultant and associate editor for MediaShift. For more about him read his blog or contact him at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

With the prevalence of micro-blogging and character limits on posts, the URL shortener field has quickly expanded into a vibrant marketplace, with big players and individual sites creating their own shorteners. The industry has even faced controversy recently when Digg's Diggbar, what many had considered a URL shortener, began redirecting users to Digg's front page. Though this wasn't the first time the issue was brought up, it left many questioning the permanence of such links. Would a shortened link you created still exist in its original form a year after you posted it?

Lasting links

Andrew Cohen, general manager of bit.ly, stressed that users should be aware of all these things when they're choosing which shortener to use.

"A lot of the players in this space have been one or two person companies, very small players," he told me. "What we wanted to do was set a very high standard for reliability. So it was really important to us that our short URLs always redirect, and so we engineered multiple layers of redundancy...so even if there was a disaster, the bit.ly short URLs would still redirect."

Cohen explained that shortened URLs often mask the real web address, so there's a need for underlying transparency. Because of bit.ly's API, certain Twitter applications allow users to see the real URL when they hover over the link, and the service has also incorporated spam protection to try to warn users when they've clicked on a suspect link.

"Another important thing is permanence," he said. "So we never recycle a URL. I believe that a couple other small URL shorteners reuse the hashes they generate. We don't believe in that for a couple reasons. We feel the full credit for the link goes to the publisher of the underlying content, so we can only use one redirect. We also don't want to allow any kind of bait and switch scheme, for instance someone who has fabulous content on the first click and then switches out to malware so when you return it'll take you to that."

Of course, what bit.ly is most well known for is its real-time metrics, something that Cohen said is much more difficult to maintain than the URL shortener itself. Not only are individual users able to track how many people click on their links, but the company counts the clicks on all its links in a given week. Back in May, it was averaging around 100 million clicks a week; now it's up to 230 million.

Framing

One of the things bit.ly purposely avoided was so-called framing -- when a URL takes you to a page that contains a bar at the top from a website other than the one containing the content. The DiggBar caught a lot of heat for this, with critics saying that it punished the original content creators by masking their URLs. But Ryan Holmes, the CEO of Invoke, the company that owns the URL shortener ow.ly, said that he decided to use framing because it enhances the user experience.

"We kind of looked at what the people's issues were with it, and we addressed all those issues," Holmes said. "The biggest complaint was around search engine optimization. So we addressed a lot of the issues. We give full attribution to the content owners so Google will reward the original content source. It's got a benefit for the person who creates the URL, because their avatar is on the page. In the social bar people can see who originally created it. For the actual content owner there's a great benefit of having the bar on the page, because we see a doubling of URL clicks. We've tried testing with and without the bar, and with the bar you'll see maybe twice as many clicks because of the built-in retweet functionality."

He explained that ow.ly grew as a product to complement Hootsuite, a service described by its website as "the ultimate Twitter toolbox." I asked him how the tool's analytics differ from bit.ly's.

"Bit.ly has some metrics but you have to be careful of bit.ly because all your analytics are exposed to the public, and not a lot of people know about that," he said. "So the risk there is if I'm HP and Dell is using a ton of bit.ly URLs, I can go and look at the Dell shortened urls on bit.ly and see what's getting the best clickthrough, what time of day, what specials resonate well, and learn a ton about my competitor, and that's a big risk of bit.ly."

Custom shorteners

Though most people use these more general URL shorteners, a few sites have created their own custom shorteners to promote their content. If you click on the Twitter link on a Gawker Media blog post, for instance, you'll get a pre-written tweet with the headline and a shortened URL using Gawker's domain. I spoke to Thomas Plunkett, who heads Gawker's engineering, and was surprised that the function wasn't even originally created for micro-blogging, but for email.

"The problem we were facing several years ago is that people were trying to send our links via email, and one of the common problems that URL shorteners try to address is that the URLs would sometimes break, get cut in half," he said. "So what we introduced was switching them around. So effectively we've had the URL, gawker.com-slash-whatever you want to bring up. It has been working for three years now since we first did it."

Gawker didn't introduce the URLs into its tweets until about two months ago, and since doing so Plunkett said he hasn't noticed any direct increase in traffic because of it. But he said there are likely plenty of indirect benefits. For one, it improves Gawker's branding, because its URL is included in the links. It also gives users at least some idea of what they're about to click on, whereas most shortened URLs give no indication.

When Digg introduced its DiggBar, it reportedly saw as much as a 20% increase in traffic to its own site, indicating that there are benefits to creating your own short URLs, especially ones that use framing.

I reached out to Digg for an interview and only got this statement:

The goal of DiggBar and Digg short URLs is to enhance and streamline the Digg experience for our users. If folks are sharing stories via Digg and the DiggBar, we want users to have the ability to view comments and related source content on Digg.

I didn't get a chance to ask about the criticisms Digg has faced about how it redirects its traffic, but the company has made several changes since launching the tool to appease critics.

Monetizing Shorteners

But how do these URL shorteners plan to monetize these tools? For bit.ly, Cohen said that the key to monetization is the click metrics. With all that data, he said, he is able to see news stories gain traction well before the mainstream media begins to cover them. He didn't go into too much detail, but he outlined to me an ad-supported site that would rank stories by rising attention, a kind of Digg-like aggregator.

"We're seeing more than a billion clicks in the course of a month," Cohen told Wired recently. "Looking at that volume of data, we can see the most interesting and the most important content that is being shared across the whole of the real-time web. Sometimes that's humorous stuff -- the other day, the most shared video we saw on the web was William Shatner performing a dramatic reading of Sarah Palin's farewell address."

As for ow.ly, Holmes described it as simply a tool that would help in selling the larger HootSuite package, making the URL shortener a kind of loss leader to bring in more customers.

Of course, sites like Gawker and Digg are already monetizing their sites. For them, creating their own URL shorteners are simply a means to get a bigger piece of the micro-blog traffic pie. As Twitter receives millions of new users every month, it's a tool that web publishers can't ignore.

Simon Owens is a social media consultant and associate editor for MediaShift. For more about him read his blog or contact him at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com

A recent piece in the New York Times detailed how PR agencies in Silicon Valley get their clients' news in front of the key influencers who drive stories within the entire blogosphere. In one scene in the article, a publicist named Brooke Hammerling discusses how she plans to get placements for a particular client:

Instead, she decides that she will 'whisper in the ears' of Silicon Valley's Who's Who -- the entrepreneurs behind tech's hottest startups, including Jay Adelson, the chief executive of Digg; Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter; and Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo.

But how do these PR professionals identify the Who's Who in their clients' niches? And once they've identified them, how do they approach them for coverage? With nearly every major and minor industry spending more money on social media strategies, publicity professionals are scrambling to locate and develop relationships with those who they think will have the most influence in a particular field. But in a world with millions of active blogs, Twitter accounts, and social news users, how do they break through the noise to identify and persuade the key players?

Finding the big names

Jonathan Trenn, a consultant for Abraham Harrison, a digital marketing company in the DC area, said that if he's starting from scratch with a client he'll use free tools like blog search engine Technorati to locate the bloggers he wants to contact. Specifically, he searches for the tags that the bloggers use with their posts, because this is an indicator of whether the person writes regularly on a particular subject.

"It'll give you a list of blogs to look at," he told me. "You basically start clicking through, and it's essential that you read the blog and get to know it a bit, maybe start categorizing it or put it in a database. But essentially you want to get to know what they are about, see if they're updated frequently."

Technorati and other search tools allow him to then rank the blogs by authority. He said he begins with focusing on the most influential blogs. But he hastened to add that this is only a starting point, and that he can then begin clicking through these blogs' blogrolls or even approach the bloggers directly to ask them for more recommendations.

"Late last year I was doing some work with a company called ooVoo," he said. "They're a competitor to Skype, only they use video. They can have six screens at once...We came up with the idea of having a 'political day.' We reached out to prominent political bloggers to essentially hold their own chats for a day, or a series of days. With that I wanted to make it diverse, from political philosophy to demographic, so I reached out to different types of blogs. I asked them who else I should contact. We had 15 to 18 bloggers -- left, center, right, African American, Latino, what have you -- and they each had their own sessions."

Adam Ritchie, who works in brand promotion in Boston, takes a slightly different approach in deciding whom to target. He begins by identifying the competitors and other players in his clients' industries -- meaning people such as CEOs and publicity spokespersons. He then runs their names through news and blog searches to find which journalists and bloggers are already writing about them.

"So what you get from this is a list of outlets and actual articles; the writers who are writing them who are your most relevant targets because they're already engaged in writing about that space," he told me. "And by doing this you've already answered the question, 'Why would you care?' If you're starting a hardware store in DC, you would look at who's writing about Home Depot and Lowe's, because whoever is writing about them is writing about hardware."

When approaching bloggers, he said that he typically starts with blogs run by traditional media outlets, because these are "written by trained, seasoned reporters who usually know how to work the communications path" and who are "paid to produce good content." He then focuses on what he calls the "indie bloggers," whom he rates by quality of writing, frequency of updates, and how entrenched they are in other social media like Twitter and Facebook.

"For me, it's completely qualitative," he explained. "I want to see what they're writing about, rather than which of them has the biggest reach in terms of eyeballs. Which of them would tell the most robust stories about this piece of news? And that's what I care about the most. Because if it's really good, then the bigger ones will pick it up."

The New PR model

Ritchie explained that in the old PR world, the agency would simply place the news in traditional outlets and be done with it. But with the new model, once you've placed the story, you've opened a new phase of work -- and that's when the social media part begins. You then take that news story from a trusted outlet and begin trying to spread it into the blogosphere and social news sites, drawing more eyeballs to it than the publication's typical audience.

But how do they approach these bloggers and social media users? Almost everyone I spoke to for this piece immediately agreed that most bloggers think very differently than traditional journalists; they tend to shy away from the old methods that PR people have in the past used to engage reporters. Ritchie said that he hasn't sent out a press release in years, going so far as to say, "I don't believe in press releases."

"A lot of blogs will pick up a press release, and it's true that press releases have found new life among indie bloggers that are hungry for content," he said. "But quality writers for quality blogs aren't going to regurgitate a press release, and you're not winning in the long run by sending the press release to small and independent bloggers because you're not building personal relationships by carpet bombing them. We want to be on a personal basis with them, and sending them a press release isn't going to accomplish much for the next time you want to approach them."

Ritchie said that he sends a personal note with a "buffet of options" for the blogger -- whether it's a YouTube clip, a mainstream press article, or even an original scoop -- so that he or she can choose how to engage the story.

Christine Perkett, president and founder of PerkettPR, said that bloggers often differ from journalists in that they aren't writing about these subjects as a full-time job, meaning they will approach the story differently than would a reporter.

"I think for a lot of the niche bloggers, it's like a second job for them so they don't have as much time as a reporter would have to dedicate to that kind of approach," she explained. "They don't really regurgitate press releases, and I would say for the most part the consumer bloggers and niche bloggers have been really great; they give their opinion on the news, and that's really what they do. I think they do write up their own take on it, but they don't necessarily need an interview to go along with that, or they're satisfied talking to the PR person."

So while she might try to get an interview with a client's CEO for a regular reporter, many bloggers aren't really interested in that sort of thing. So she said it's better to hand them something that's easy for them to splice into a post, like a link to an already-written article that they can summarize and offer their own take.

One thing that PR professionals have found within social media is a tendency for badly run campaigns to backfire. If a journalist receives a bad pitch or poorly targeted press release, he'll often just ignore it. But it's not uncommon for a blogger to publish the press release or email on his blog, ridiculing the person or agency that sent it to him. But Perkett told me she thinks this is a good thing.

"They've got to be more careful," she said,"but you know what? It's OK, because it's making the PR industry better. Maybe bloggers are beating us into being a better industry, because one of the traditional problems with PR agencies, and especially large PR agencies, is the whole smile-and-dial thing. Not really researching or paying attention to what writers are writing, or what bloggers are blogging, and just using the same pitch over and over. It takes time to do it the right way, and that doesn't make a lot of money for the large firms. That's unfortunate, but we're being forced to change and I think it's making us better."

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate editor for MediaShift. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

A former commercial litigation attorney, Clark is the founder of Copyblogger, a site focused on copywriting and effective use of social media to sell products and services. Earlier this year he published a post stating that he made much more money through direct sales of his services and affiliate marketing programs than he ever did with third party advertising.

So when the AP reported recently that the FTC would begin enforcing disclosure rules on bloggers that were paid to review products, received free products or used affiliate links, Clark wasn't surprised. In fact, one could even say he was delighted. In a post titled How to Turn Affiliate Marketing Disclosure Into a Selling Point, he argued that disclosing your economic incentives to push a product would create more trust with your readers, not less, and in many cases your readers would want you to be compensated for your work.

Rise of Affiliate Marketing

"Affiliate marketing has been going on for 13 years now," Clark told me in a phone interview. "So I'd say it's probably been a long time coming ... The prominence of the number of people trying to make money through various affiliate marketing and paid reviews has gotten to the point where [the FTC] felt like they had to say something about it. They had to make it clear that the law is what it is, and it applies to you whether you're a professional marketer or an amateur trying to make a few bucks from your blog."

I queried the FTC for this story but didn't hear back from them in time for this posting. Rich Cleland, assistant director in the FTC's division of ad practices, told the AP:

If you walk into a department store, you know the (sales) clerk is a clerk. Online, if you think that somebody is providing you with independent advice and...they have an economic motive for what they're saying, that's information a consumer should know."

Clark said the new rules possibly meant that something as small as an Amazon affiliate link could land a blogger in hot water if it isn't disclosed. It is not uncommon for bloggers to receive free products in the mail with the hope they might review them positively; some companies have even gone so far as to pay bloggers to write positive reviews about their products, often leaving it up to the blogger to decide whether to disclose the payment.

When a company called PayPerPost launched in 2006, it received heated criticism for not requiring that bloggers within its network disclose their paid posts. PayPerPost succumbed to pressure and began requiring disclosure. Recently, Blogads CEO Henry Copeland announced that gossip blogger Perez Hilton would begin using his popular Twitter account to send out sponsored tweets.

Regulating paid posts

So is Clark's thesis correct that disclosure will improve affiliate marketing, or will bloggers find it much harder to make money through paid posts? So far it's still unclear as to what kind of disclosure would pass muster with the FTC, or even how the FTC would be able to enforce the new regulations.

"Some people think that some kind of site-wide disclosure or disclaimer link at the bottom of your page is enough," Clark said. "Maybe it is, I don't know. The piece I wrote argued that you should disclose in the body of the content itself, and try to make it a positive thing instead of something that you're ashamed of. You can never go wrong with that. Whatever the FTC says you have to do, this method would always be acceptable, because you're addressing the conflicts of interest directly in the content where you're making the recommendation or endorsement."

But unlike other mediums -- newspapers, radio, television -- there are millions of bloggers so it would be impossible to monitor every single one of them. Many of these bloggers don't monetize their blogs at all, and most that do are lucky if they can pull in more than a few dollars in an entire year. How could the FTC ever hope to regulate the medium with any effectiveness?

"I think the Washington Post article on this topic mentioned that the companies that compensate them are liable," Clark said. "It's much easier to go to the big affiliate merchants, and say, 'You're going to have a liability when your downstream affiliates screw up.' But here's what'll also happen: They'll find a few high-profile bloggers and make an example out of them and that will scare the hell out of everyone else. So there are two approaches there."

I asked Clark which blogosphere niches were most likely to engage in the kind of marketing that would be targeted. He said that an entire "make money online" industry has sprouted up over the last few years, a group that is largely monetized through affiliate advertising.

"Affiliate marketing is often pitched as an easy way to make money," he explained. "I think that's not necessarily true. I think if you can make a lot of money selling affiliate products you can make a lot of money selling your own products. For example, for our model, we mainly sell our own products, and only occasionally recommend either affiliate products or affiliate marketing programs."

Bloggers respond

In the discussion about the new FTC guidelines, one group under scrutiny is the "mommy bloggers." Many advertisers and marketers have deemed these blogs to have heavily influential readerships, so it's not uncommon for mommy bloggers to receive free products or to be approached for sponsored posts. Jamie Reeves told me that she's often sent products for review and has even set up a separate blog from her main site, Blonde Mom Blog, to post about them.

Recently, Reeves was approached by Frigidaire for a product promotion and she attended -- along with other mom bloggers -- a promotional event put on by Johnson & Johnson. I asked her why her niche has been targeted so much by advertisers, and she pointed to the influence that moms have over household budgets.

"The vast majority of moms are online," she replied. "They might not have a blog, but they're on Facebook. Moms are very influential because they make a lot of the household purchasing decisions. There are dad bloggers out there, too, but I think the moms are maybe just a little more vocal and a larger demographic. So companies are going to gravitate toward them."

Reeves doesn't write sponsored posts. Like Clark, she said she thinks any conflict of interest -- whether from a free product or otherwise -- should be disclosed, and that most reputable bloggers were offering disclosures well before the FTC indicated that it would begin to crack down on blogs.

"I think that it makes the blog more professional," she said. "Hopefully, everyone I have come in contact with through blogging is up front about it, whether they make it an official statement on their blog or whether they say in their post that 'So and so contacted me, and they sent me a camera, and here's some pictures I took with it and here's what I think of it.'"

Melanie Phung -- who runs a few affiliate marketing sites -- told me via email the effectiveness of the disclosure will depend on how the affiliate marketing is being done.

"Some should be able to do it pretty seamlessly," she said. "But for casual affiliates who just use affiliate tracking on links they would have placed on their blogs anyway (say, to Amazon or iTunes)...for those people, having to put an obvious disclosure notice -- that they might make a dollar every time someone buys from their link -- would definitely be clunky."

She noted that those currently not disclosing any financial ties are already attempting to float under the radar, so in all likelihood these kind of bloggers wouldn't change their modus operandi because of new guidelines. For many blogs, which can be run anonymously through Blogger and Wordpress accounts, it likely wouldn't be easy for regulators to even track them down, much less take legal action against them.

"There are sketchy affiliate marketers out there preying on the gullible," Phung said. "These scammers promise you free government grants for a hefty finders fee, they're the ones who charge your credit card recurring fees for 'magic' diet pills that never get delivered, etc. And if those people 'disclosed' that their claims were total BS, yeah, that would hurt their sales. But it's the fact that they're making false claims in the first place, not that they're affiliates, that's the problem. These people aren't going to follow the rules anyway."

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate editor for MediaShift. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com.

This blog news aggregator is a joint project between the Miami Herald and BlogNetNews, a company founded by David Mastio. For years now, Mastio has been pushing the idea that newspapers should be fostering closer relationships with local bloggers, linking to their content and in effect exposing their readerships to a wider range of media. Lately, he's been meeting with publishers from local newspapers, alt weeklies, and radio and TV stations to set up such networks using his own software.

Mastio's project is part of a trend in recent years of newspapers trying to team up with local bloggers. In 2006, the Washington Post launched a new ad network in which the newspaper's ad reps would sell advertising on local blogs and split the proceeds with the bloggers. I couldn't find any reference to the blogroll on the Post's front page and old permalinks to it no longer work. (I exchanged several emails with Washington Post publicity and advertising representatives, but couldn't get anyone to go on record before deadline.)

More recently, the Chicago Tribune launched a blog aggregator called ChicagoNow, which aggregates "50 blogs and growing." Newspapers and bloggers hope that such efforts could lead to mutually beneficial relationships, but the jury is out on whether those relationships enrich the business of either party.

A reader on-ramp

"What we do is use all the blogging services out there to find as many of the local blogs as we can -- that are somehow identified by geography, no matter what they're writing about," he said. "And then our system checks them every hour and runs excerpts of the latest posts, and makes all those blogs searchable in a narrow local blog search. We [include] a topic cloud that tracks what people are talking about in the last 100 posts. And we keep an archive of those topic clouds based on an entire day's blogging, so you can see what people were talking about yesterday, or six months ago or whatever you want."

Mastio explained that bloggers are linking to their local newspapers every day, so it seems selfish in some sense not to recognize the value in linking back. He said that doing so would provide a service that would be mutually beneficial for both the news organizations aggregating the blogs and the blogs themselves. These blog feeds would, in essence, create more content for the news site while at the same time sending valuable traffic to the blogs. He didn't have precise numbers, but based on some click-through counts for one of the networks he set up in Tennessee, he estimated blogs shown on the newspaper site received 10,000 click-throughs a week.

Monetizing Blogs

But what about monetary benefits? Mastio said that right now the main advantage to creating such a network is increased traffic, though he does have plans for future monetization.

"It's our plan that we're eventually going to use these networks to create local advertising networks so we'll be able to sell an ad that runs on the site and on blogs within its network," he said. "And in turn we would be able to share the revenue with the bloggers, but that's not something we're able to do quite yet."

Tracy Samantha Schmidt, editorial director for ChicagoNow, said that the bloggers on the site will get a share of the revenue based on page views. Unlike other newspaper attempts to monetize or aggregate off-site blogs, the Chicago Tribune actually approached dozens of Chicago bloggers and offered them contracts to blog on the ChicagoNow website non-exclusively.

"If the bloggers say, 'Sure, sign me up,' we pair them up with a community manager," she said. "We have four of them, and one of the managers will work one-on-one with them to get them trained on our system -- we use Movable Type -- and then we give them all sorts of support if they need training in social media. Whether it's training in SEO or building community, our managers will do that with them."

The team rolled out the beta site on May 25 and since then it has amassed over 600,000 page views. Schmidt said they have bloggers in several niches, from sports blogs to a blog about the city's parking tickets. Though many of the blogs are written by already-established bloggers, they've also invited some local celebrities and well-connected business types who have never blogged before.

I asked Schmidt why they didn't simply put the bloggers on the Chicago Tribune site.

"We are run by the Chicago Tribune, but we're calling it a flanker brand, because really what we want to do is be a separate website off the Chicago Tribune and have as little crossover between the Chicago Tribune and ChicagoNow as possible," she said. "Because we really want to reach readers that the Chicago Tribune hasn't been able to reach online. So that's why we're creating the separate brand."

In addition to traditional brand advertisement, Schmidt said the plan is to eventually launch "adverblogs," allowing local businesses -- in a "completely transparent way" -- to blog for the site. They will also create events around their bloggers and allow organizations and companies to sponsor them. At some point they want to open a classifieds section of ChicagoNow as well.

Posts, not blogs

"I think it really matters how good the local blogs are and how well they relate to the content in the newspaper," he told me. "I mean, you can have some really great blogs in your town, but if they're mostly personal or fragmented in their direction, then I don't know how it's going to play on a newspaper site. But if you have a city where you have a whole bunch of people writing about sports or politics or local events, then it would be ideal. As someone who competed with a lot of the local blogs in LA, I would say there's only about three or four that would really fit into a kind of a blogroll if we had that at the LA Times."

Pierce thought that simply creating a scrolling feed of every blog in the area wasn't exactly engaging in the medium. Instead, he thought that newspapers should put more focus on actually reading local blogs and linking to individual posts. For instance, several of the blogs he manages do daily link "round-ups," linking to blog posts within their niche. He often encourages his bloggers to click through their blogrolls and find more obscure content rather than simply linking to the latest Gawker piece.

"For the most part, this whole citizen journalism concept is fine for about three or four people per town, but that's about it," he said. "And most of those people are not journalists for a reason. Either they're crappy writers or they're crazy, which makes for sometimes interesting blog posts, but is that something that a major newspaper would link to? I mean, even my personal blog is certainly nothing I would have expected the LA Times to link to. I was swearing a lot, it was mostly very personal, plus I say on it that it's full of lies."

But if the newspaper didn't feel comfortable linking to all the local content, should it at least try to sell advertising on these sometimes highly specialized blogs, creating an advertising network that benefits everyone?

"It's just that if you have a whole lot of blogs getting 5,000 page views a day, you're going to need a lot of them, a whole lot of them," he said. "And even if you have a whole lot of them, where do you put that ad that it's going to be really valuable? It's a really tricky situation, and I might come across as kind of a snob -- I mean, I love blogs more than any other person -- but I'll be the first to tell you that most of them are crappy. Which isn't to say that individual posts can't be great, and I think that's where newspapers should focus."

Pierce said he thinks blog networks are only the first step toward true engagement. Despite the hype over Web 2.0, not all content deserves to be highlighted for a newspaper's readership. To be truly innovative, he said, editors are going to have to roll up their sleeves and wade through drivel to find the gems.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate editor for MediaShift. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

Over the past several years, it has not been unusual for a Digg user to screenshot a Digg display ad that he found particularly annoying or ironic and submit it to the site itself -- in fact, several such items have made it to the front page. Describing Digg's user base as anti-consumer wouldn't be quite accurate given the daily front page stories of the latest gadget news on Gizmodo and Engadget, but its community has been quick to lash out against corporations seen as having brushes with unethical behavior.

Like all major Internet communities, Digg's hosts a fair number of trolls (though the community itself polices the worst offenders) and the user base has never hesitated to criticize the very site that hosts their comments. Given all this, it's not difficult to be skeptical that advertisers would want to throw their brands right into Digg's news stream, possibly placing them within the cross hairs of an extremely outspoken and acerbic community.

Over the past few week, I reached out to several of the site's most powerful users, people who have pushed hundreds of submissions to the coveted front page. All of them spend sometimes hours a day on the site, commenting and Digging their friends' articles. Did they think that the community would welcome sponsored submissions and treat them just like the dozens of other stories, videos and images that flow across the front page every day?

Power Users react

Steve Elliot became an active user of the site in April of last year, pulled in initially by the idea of promoting his own content. But like other power users, he quickly realized the quid pro quo nature of Digg, in which you must push and network other Diggers' content. He told me that he's hopeful that the new ad platform will work, but that he's worried about the "noise" generated with front page submissions.

"I think that it's possibly a workable system, but for it to be workable, they're going to have to find a way to cut through the noise of the automatic knee-jerk negative reaction a lot of people have to any front page story," Elliot said. "For any paid content, there's going to be even more users ready to react negatively to it. So if there is a way to separate that inevitable sizable negative reaction to an ad, then maybe out of the rest you can get enough usable data of up and down votes to see what kind of advertising is most effective."

He explained that if a company feels like an outsider to the community, then they're going to have a different experience of feedback than if they somehow integrate themselves into the community. The question, he said, is whether they can learn and replicate the formula for a popular Digg submission. He believes that it's possible.

"I'm cautiously optimistic," he said. "And when I say I'm optimistic, it goes beyond the baseline optimism that maybe they can pull this off. It goes for me all the way to the level that I'm hopeful that maybe in their attempts to catch the eye of the Digg community...instead of trying the same little tricks of old media, maybe they'll get creative. Maybe they'll break some new ground, and maybe we'll see some exciting ideas and ways of interacting with the community, which to me is what Digg is all about."

Abusing the 'Bury' Button

A Digg power user named Patrick (he didn't want me to use his full name) told me that he thought that the idea was a "brilliant one on Digg's part," because of the potential for massively higher click-through rates than you'd ever see with standard display advertising. And, unlike some, he was confident that the advertisers could create enticing content.

"I'm sure Digg has people who are smart enough to come up with stuff that's eye-catching, and I'm sure that people who work for Digg monitor the site and know what works really well and what doesn't," Patrick told me. "So they know what formula works. They know the algorithm...If I saw [an ad] that caught my eye, I'd click on it just like any other Digg submission. By the time I opened it and checked it out, and if I'm reading it and checked it out that long, I'm going to Digg it because it held my attention."

As for what consumer products would work well under this new system, Patrick said that anything involving mobile phones and tech products already gets a lot of coverage on the site, but pointed out that, with entertaining content, almost anything could work. His only fear would be that a certain percentage of the site's users would automatically bury all sponsored content.

"They should get rid of the bury button, because more often than not it's misused," he said.

Rami Taibah, who has submitted over 700 stories to Digg, over 100 of which made it to the front page, said that the Digg demographics -- and likes and dislikes -- could be somewhat limiting in terms of what advertisers could be successful on the new platform. He noted that companies that have prior histories of perceived unethical behavior will likely have some negative pushback from Digg, no matter what the content.

"Advertisers will have to try to understand the Digg community and what the users like to click," he said. "It's very anti-establishment, and is pro-Apple, pro-Linux, and very anti-Microsoft. If they try to understand the submission culture, then yes they can succeed. There are a lot of social media experts out there that could help such companies to customize articles and content that would sit well with the Digg community."

When I pointed out the sometimes-trollish behavior of some Digg commenters, Taibah said that this is simply the nature of the Internet and that he didn't believe that such a thing should or would deter companies from promoting their brands through the social news site.

Digg Ads

Mike Maser, Digg's chief strategy officer, told me in a phone interview that they first approached a few of the site's advertisers with the idea years ago and were met with enthusiasm. As their ad budgets have continued to contract -- especially in the last year or so -- the companies have been looking more toward performance-based advertising and less toward the traditional branding approach.

"They believed in this model that Digg was leading, which was this user-generated, user-led definition of what's popular content," Maser said. "But they wanted to apply those ideas in some way to their advertising as well. I remember a conversation with Intel, which has been a longtime advertiser with Digg, in late 2007. We came in and said, 'What if we could apply a Digg platform, the Digg model, to advertising?'...And they were absolutely interested in that because they were seeing that consumers were part of that conversation already, whether they like it or not."

Maser explained that a large percentage of Digg's front page stories are already directed toward promoting consumer products, and he doesn't think it will be very difficult for advertisers to sponsor that kind of content. Not only that, but they would have monetary incentive to tailor their submissions to those users.

"So let's say an advertiser comes in and has a $10,000 budget," he said. "We place their advertisement into the system. Let's say it starts a baseline of $1 cost per click. So the ad gets shot out to the Digg audience in the stream of news. If that ad is really resonating, and people are clicking out to see the content...that dollar will come down so every time there's a click maybe they pay 90 cents, or even better 80 cents and so on. So even more people are clicking on that advertisement and it's spending more of their budget, but the incremental cost of that ad is going down."

The flip side is that if people aren't Digging the piece, or if they're actively burying it, the cost-per-click will go up until it hits some pre-set maximum, causing the ad to fall out of the system.

User control

But what if a so-called "bury brigade" forms that automatically buries every sponsored post?

"When we announced this last week, we saw a lot of generally positive reactions from our user base," Maser said. "The notion going into this is that there will be more control over the ad experience, so when Digg is transparent with their users and gives them that control over the site, they've actually really taken it to heart and appreciated that control. So we feel like the users being able to sort of have a more relevant content experience on the site is one way we'll mitigate any sort of backlash."

And then there's the Digg algorithm. For years the site has refined the algorithm to weed out organized attempts to "game" the system, so Maser was sure that they were well equipped to locate any sort of advertisement bury brigade and neutralize its efforts.

The ad platform is still a work in progress and won't be rolled out for a few months. Maser said they announced it early so they can work with advertisers over the coming months, developing the kind of content and ideas that will attract Digg's user base.

"I do think innovation is the name of the game," he said. "I think that sites need to come up with advertising experiences that are more endemic to their own property and their user base. So I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all approach to advertising anymore. Does that mean that display advertising is going away? No, but I do think systems like Digg Ads speak directly to our audience; it has a pricing mechanism that works for advertisers. Being more performance-oriented advertising, it gives them a more innovative option than display advertising."

Of course, Digg's display advertising isn't going away. But with continuous reports that advertisers are getting frustrated with the lack of effectiveness of traditional CPM advertising, it's not unfathomable that they would want to take the risk and inject their brands right into the user base. What the users do with the brand once it's in their hands will likely determine whether Digg has come up with an advertising program that will truly break the mold.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate editor for MediaShift. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.

Photo of Mike Maser by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid.

Because of the increasingly tight budgets at news organizations, newspapers are finding it harder to justify paying for a writer's plane tickets and expensive hotel costs to follow a local team from game to game, especially as they compete with bloggers and online sportswriters who are able to comment on the games in front of their television sets. Assuming that this trend extends outside of baseball writing, what future is there for laid-off beat writers that have spent their careers covering their favorite sports team? After years of having constant access to the coaches and players they've gotten to know so well, would they be able to continue their beats?

A football network in the U.K.

For one possible answer to this dilemma, one would have to travel overseas to Norwich, U.K., where a man named Rick Waghorn has been writing for several years. The journalist spent over a decade covering the Norwich soccer club for the Norwich Evening News, a newspaper that spent money during his employment advertising his face on the back of buses in order to promote his brand.

But back in 2006, Waghorn, like thousands of other newspapers journalists, found himself swept into a redundancy process, and like some other laid-off reporters, he decided to continue on with his beat independently. Waghorn began reporting on Norwich's soccer club and published his content on his own site, with the idea that the brand his former newspaper had spent so much time and money building was still extremely valuable.

"So we literally took the name, the brand that was built up during my beat reporter's job at the Evening Press," Waghorn explained to me. "I'm in year two of this experiment, which started in the summer of 2007, and you kind of look around and say, 'There's one of me, a reporter, on every city paper in the U.K., doing my job, following their particular soccer team around the country. Maybe I need to think about a generic model."

His idea was that rather than beat writers each establishing their own independent sites, they should band together around a common URL and create several sub-publications beneath it. He registered the domain myfootballwriter.com, with the idea of hiring a beat reporter for every single soccer club in the country. Then, once all these beat bloggers are writing about their teams, ad reps could sell both local ads -- to businesses located in the same city as a particular team -- and national ads for the entire domain. This would also make the site's content ideal for syndication from news organizations all across the country.

Since launching his own beat writing career, Waghorn has hired a few journalists to cover neighboring soccer clubs. For his city, Norwich, there are 22,000 season ticket holders. His hub receives about 35,000 unique visitors a month and sees about 350,000 page impressions during that same time period. An ad rep from the Evening News who had been made redundant at the same time as Waghorn signed on with him to sell advertising to local businesses.

"He sells display advertising on a pay-by-month basis to local advertisers who used to be the advertisers in the local newspaper who clearly are making the transition from print to web," he said. "So local advertisers are going to have to make that transition themselves. For the local carpet warehouse who has spent 5,000 bucks building their own website, now the challenge to them is to market their website to their local community."

competing with the clubs

But over the last few years, Waghorn said, the nature of online sportswriting has changed. He argued that in some ways, the sports teams themselves have become major competitors for media coverage.

"Because you're now web only, and you're not beholden to print deadlines, your number one competitor is the football club's own website," he explained. "Each and every one of our sports clubs became a publisher, assuming they opened their own website, and because they own the players, the head coach, etc... they own that particular piece of news. For official news, or whatever, nine times out of 10 the official site will be first. So clearly the rules of the game have changed fundamentally the minute the sports clubs opened their own websites. It's just a matter of realigning ourselves in terms of content and analysis, using your brand and your experience to provide the kind of sticky content that a football fan wants."

Lately, Waghorn has been reading reports about the struggles of U.S. sportswriters, many of whom are losing their jobs. He said that his theory about a network of beat journalists could probably work in the States as well, and that these reporters should bring their brands together to create a national organization, whether it's for baseball, hockey, basketball, football, or any other sport. But he warned that because of the changing media distribution and revenue models, these journalists shouldn't assume they can just continue with the modus operandi they've been following for most their careers.

"If you have an elegant structure and you have all the bases covered, what you could do is rather than being a Tuscon reporter who flies to LA one week and New York the next, instead you can just swap your content with your network partner in that city," he said. "So if you look at the economics of the web and what we could realistically afford to do, can we afford the hotel fees, plane fees, and all those travel expenses? Maybe we should go back to the basics, start afresh with a clean sheet of paper and say, 'How would we do this if we had to start from scratch?' And the thing is we do have to start from scratch, go back to square one again."

In the states, there have been a few instances of online sports networks cropping up. SB Nation, run by Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, has over "200 individual communities, each offering high quality year-round coverage and conversation led by fans who are passionate about their favorite teams, leagues or sports." And ESPN has launched a series of local sites that act as news aggregates.

Though Waghorn has had some success with his own beat writing, he has yet to bring on a reporter for every soccer club in the U.K., so there's no way to tell for sure whether a model like his will work. But given that many reporters are finding themselves laid off in a market with a shrinking number of employment opportunities, such a gamble may be their only hope of staying in the game.

Simon Owens is a former newspaper journalist and an associate editor for MediaShift. You can read more of his writing at his blog or contact him at simon[.]bloggasm [at] gmail.com.