Telegraph gives readers their own blogs
I must have missed this somehow, but the Telegraph in the UK has taken an unprecedented step (at least as far as I know) and given three of the top commenters on its website their own blogs on the Telegraph’s blog hub, according to a post from the Telegraph’s “communities editor” Shane Richmond. He says:
“Every now and again one of you reads a comment left by a fellow reader and says “give this person a blog”. Some of our readers attract such comments quite regularly, so we decided to take your advice and offer them the chance to join the site.”
Shane describes how in the early days of the Telegraph’s website “we didn’t even allow freelance writers to blog - everyone had to be staff.” But as it has evolved, the paper has increased the amount of participation — and he says that the reader blogs are just the first step towards “a much grander scheme coming later in the year.” The three new bloggers are Simon Coulter, David Llewellyn and Phil Slocombe.
Of the first new addition, Shane says:
“In late 2003, before we had the facility to add comment boxes to our articles, we created our first ‘your views’ and Simon would email us his thoughts. He’s been a fixture on the site ever since, so much so that other readers ask where he is when he hasn’t commented for a while.”
That’s called building a community. It will be interesting to see what new features the Telegraph is working on.
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