In addition to the fees necessary to attend the damn things, there are consultants who set up booths selling their services as consultants. For a fee — sometimes THOUSANDS of dollars — these con artists promise to attract readers to their blogs. Or to help them gets “followers” in Twitter or “friends” on Facebook.

I’ve been known to do consulting, basically to help folks set up their blogs. My fee is no where near thousands of dollars and I don’t promise to lure hundreds of thousands of readers to your site. But i do have some advice on how to attract readers who keep coming back. It applies blogs and social networking sites:

1. Your content must be of interest. I cannot do this for you.
2. Learn to write well. How to learn to write well? Write a lot.
3. Post regularly. There are sites like FARK and TMZ that I visit many times a day because they UPDATE ALL THE TIME.
4. Don’t talk to your readers like you are trying to get them to sign up for a vacation time share.
5. Post links to your posts on Facebook and Twitter. Remember, FB and Twitter might be tomorrow’s Technorati. Or worse, USENET.
6. Moderate your comments with a gentle hand. But then it comes time to delete, ban and block, do it ruthlessly.
7. Blog mostly about your site’s chosen subject matter. Occasionally post a funny story about your cat, or how bad traffic is. OCCASIONALLY.
8. Send condolences. Send congratulations. If you are not a sociopath, you should already be doing this.
9. You can make money from blogging. But unless you post pics of pantie-less starlets, you won’t make a lot, But you will keep you dignity.
10. If a commenter disagrees with you, you really ought to entertain the possibility, however slight, that it might be YOU who is wrong. In other words, try to be humble, no matter how smart you think you are.
11. Do NOT plagiarize.
12. Before USENET (aka “newsgroups”) was taken over by spammers, it was a place to give & receive help. Make your site like USENET used to be.
13. But down the Doritos and Mountain Dew Red and go outside and go for a walk once in a while.
14. Talk to a pretty girl once in a while with no ulterior motive other than it will put a smile on your face.
15. Numbers 13 and 14 have NOTHING to do with blogging or social networks, by the way.

• Focus on just one or two blogs.
• Speak to CRITICAL needs of your audience.
• Create a team, not just a blog.
• Content of the highest quality is content that HELPS.
• Create a schedule and content types.
• Create a marketing plan.
• Involve your audience.
• Set goals and measure your performance.
• Have a strategy.

These tips seemed geared toward journalists and j-bloggers, but some of the thinking and attitude can be applied for the citizen-journalists/pundit blogger who WANT to attract large audiences and affect change.

Community newspapers will fold in 2009 as owners are no longer able to turn a profit, or sustain losses any longer. The killer will be costs: even a small town newspaper could have a staff of 6 or 10 or more (usually more, but I’ve worked with papers in the past that often have 2 local reporters, with the rest of the paper filled by syndicated content from the company network). Millions a year to run, with no hope in sight of a turnaround in advertising fortunes. The model is dying. Some may switch to online only, a trend that will accelerate this year, but the bloat logic problem still remains: high overhead costs for reporters and editors in small markets.

This is where hyperlocal websites step in. Communities still want local news, and left without a community newspaper they will still seek that news elsewhere, and the internet is the place they’ll have to turn. Radio is often not local through networks like Clear Channel, and television news may offer some local news, but mostly news higher up the news scale (city, state, nation, world).

The article mentions several funding strategies, too.

Meanwhile, here are two new citizen journalism sites: The Ann Arbor Chronicle and Minority Report.

Hat tip: Chase.

• Here is Windy Citizen, a group blog site based in Chicago.
• Media Mouse, based in Grand Rapids, Mich.
• MinnPost, a well known online news organization.
• The Citizen Media Law Project is dedicated to preserving the rights of CitJo’s.
• Chi-Town Daily News is another online news org with a heavy blog emphasis.
• St. Louis Beacon looks like any newspaper Website.
• Voice of SanDiego is about SanDiego.

More coming.

And while I have my issues with Jay Rosen, I found his definition of citizen journalism to be on-target and useful:

When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.

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After a decade, the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication has decided to cease publication of OJR.org. The archives will remain online, but there will be no new articles.

One of OJR’s goals over the years has been to help mid-career journalists make a successful transition from other media to online reporting and production. I’m pleased to say that USC Annenberg will continue to provide support in that area, through the Knight Digital Media Center. I encourage OJR readers to click over to http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org and its blogs, if you are not already a regular reader there.

The decision to close OJR means that I have left the University of Southern California. But I am not going offline. I will continue to write, daily, about new media and journalism at my new website, http://www.sensibletalk.com . I hope that many of you will click over and visit me there.

Finally, on behalf of OJR, I want to thank you. Thank you for your readership, tips, corrections, kind words and support. And I want to wish you success as you work to build engaging, informative and sustainable websites, to better serve your audiences.

This is of concern to Peoria media because it could affect Peoria’s bloggers. I’ll let Jeff Jarvis (one of my inspirations) tell the story:

That, you see, is the AP way: the mill. That is not our way: the ethic of the quote and link. The AP is still trying to preserve its way. But, as I often say, protection is no strategy for the future. In the story – which, note, I’m only summarizing here, without the quotes from the AP that might better state its stance (ahem) – the agency comes off like a policy ping-pong game, going back and forth: We want to threaten but not to sue, we want to be reasonable but we’re still going to demand that Cadenhead take down excerpts, we don’t know what the hell to do. Maybe back off, AP. Because we won’t.

Exactly. Jarvis points out that the Associated Press way — taking the work of it’s members, rewriting it to make it shorter, and then passing it off to readers as somehow original — is itself disingenuous. The “blogger way” is more ethical. We clip a few paragraphs, identify the source and link to the source. It’s transparent. The AP way is not. The true origin is hidden from public view.

In my career, I recall two stories picked up by the Associated Press.Both ran without any attribution to me. And at least once, they screwed it up and made the subject of the article — in this case, country music singer Garth Brooks, look like a jerk when he visited Jacksonville, Ill., when he was anything but.

My advice to Blog Peoria members: Go ahead and quote AP articles if your want and link to the source.

Ten innovative citizen media projects have been selected as this year’s New Voices grant winners and will each receive up to $17,000 in start-up funding.

Many of this year’s winners focus on special-interest communities as well as geographic locales. One grantee will create a new model for regional news coverage in Ohio and Indiana. Others will start news and social networking sites for war veterans, families of prisoners, aviation buffs, immigrant and Native American communities and the eco-conscious.

I like running Blog Peoria, although I don’t have nearly enough time to devote to it as I should. I’m going to be upgrading soon, and after the fine folks at BuddyPress are done working out the kinks, I’ll be making this site more of a social site. If it all works out, I’ll be moving Peoria Pundit posts over here, and pointing the PeoriaPundit.com domain here. It’s gotta take less energy running one WordPress installation instead of one.