The list of 12 tips for creating an online community produced by the Knight Citizen News Network is a worthwhile read.

It hopes to help anyone struggling to keep their online community civil, constructive and lively. Among the tips is:

The “if you build it, they will come” approach to online community rarely produces good results. Most people don’t want to be the first one to strike up a public conversation. It’s helpful to do some behind-the-scenes recruiting of knowledgeable, reasonable, friendly, interested, and gregarious people to check in with your community regularly.

This was the experience of NewWest, a network of hyperlocal pro-am sites in the Rocky Mountains. At the AEJMC convention last week, managing editor Courtney Lowery provided an insight into the growing pains of NewWest.

Among the key mistakes was a “misguided” assumption that “if you build it, they will come”. This was compounded by an unintuitive structure for contributors and a lack of feedback. Lowery summed it up like this:

You have to give people something to talk about, not just a platform

So NewWest nurtured a small group of regular contributors, who got their own page and URL, plus a small payment. This “seeding strategy” worked for the site, which now has 25 citizen contributors.

The other thing NewWest did right was to reward contributors by promoting their work. Lowery explained that if a story was of high enough quality, it would make it to the front page of the site, regardless whether it was from one of the journalists or one of the contributors.

This is a very different strategy from that taken by most mainstream media, which tend to keep use-generated content separate from professionally produced material.

Lowery had a message for them – “don’t ghettoised citizen journalism.”

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