The Bee's blogroll
The Sacramento Bee on Monday launched Sacramento Connect, a network of local sites and blogs that connects its users to a collection of “great blogs” and other news providers in the region.
The network links the sites and blogs to each other — and to The Bee’s online readers.
The Bee has been working on the concept for about a year. Editors and multimedia managers collected and reviewed sites, ranking them based on quality of content and frequency of posts.
So far, more than a dozen sites met The Bee’s criteria to be included in the network, from a blog about food, wine and art out of Grass Valley to local news sites such as Rancho Cordova Post.
Not long ago there was debate over whether aggregators — which summarize content that lives on other sites — drive traffic to, or from, established sites. Now there’s a movement toward connecting fragmented sites.
“It’s the way of the Web,” said Sean McMahon, The Bee’s digital product development manager, who admits the idea was met with some “initial resistance.”
“We see that that’s the direction that the Web is going and we really want to be a part of that,” McMahon said. “We have a trusted position in the area and we thought it was time to embrace all these independent voices and bring them in and try to promote them.”
The thinking is traffic to all the sites would improve.
At least two other McClatchy Co. newspapers, The Miami Herald and Charlotte Observer, also are creating blog networks.
Lingospot.com provides technology for Sacramento Connect that allows users to click on “Stories” to find stories that readers of a particular story might also be interested in, or to click "Search" to view stories in the network on a particular topic. Users can share stories through Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.
“From my view, Sacramento Connect is a contemporary way to carry out some familiar aims of a newspaper: Pointing readers to interesting and useful information and connecting people to community life,” Bee editor Melanie Sill wrote in a column Sunday.
The site is heavy on Sacramento Bee posts at the moment, though McMahon said he expects that to balance out over time as the network grows.