Digital News Journalist

When community members are first asked to contribute to The Local, they’re always excited by the opportunity to see their work published on the NYTimes.com. Converting that initial enthusiasm to actual submissions, however, is a challenge.

Whether we’re looking for one-offs contributions or trying to develop an ongoing relationship with someone in the community, the overarching reality at the Local (and most hyperlocal projects) is that we don’t pay contributors. The challenge then is to find what will motivate a community member to spend his or her own precious time producing pieces for no pay. The journalist becomes much like a psychologist, probing for clues as to what will make a community member contribute. This really isn’t so different from when reporters have to find the one persuasive argument that will hopefully open up a reluctant source.

Here’s a list of a few motivations we have tapped over the past few months to fill the site with community contributions:

• The Glory – People love to see their name in a byline (especially when it’s on NYTimes.com) and they want to share their posts with family, friends and colleagues. That’s one of the primary motivations. We realized just how important the glory is for people when we tweaked our system by introducing a distinction between CUNY J-School student and community bylines. This small change broke the links to longtime contributors’ work making it harder for them to share. As one contributor reminded us when urging us to fix the coding problem quickly, the byline and all the attention it brings is a crucial incentive when working for free.

• Publicity – Authors, store owners, community groups and others traditionally speak to the press when they want to publicize or advance their interests. The only twist at the hyperlocal level is that we try to engage these people to contribute. Take the case of the Garden Notes posts, which gives the newly established Greene Hill School an opportunity to showcase their programs and offerings.

• Google Juice – Having incoming links from a major site like NYTimes.com to your business or personal web site does wonders for your Google ranking. Myryah Irby produces the Local Locals feature in which she stops and interviews a person in the neighborhood for a Q&A while her husband Kevin snaps a portrait of the subject. When Myryah stopped by one of our classes as a guest she mentioned that her husband’s photography web site has steadily risen in the Google ranking because of growing number of links via NYTimes.com.

While a growth in hyperlocal advertising may at some point raise enough revenues to pay some regular contributors, right now links–and the publicity and glory they bring–remain the fair trade currency of the Web with which to motivate community contributors.