We believe we are trying something unique among news organizations with our TBD Community Network.

TBD will not be the first news organization with a blogger network. But we aren’t aware of another organization taking the same approach to community blogs. We believe the TBD Community Network will be a key reason people will turn to us for news of their neighborhoods as well as news of the Washington metro area.

In a series of recent announcements, we have introduced more than 90 local blogs and sites that have agreed to join the network. We expect to top 100 shortly. When you come to TBD’s home page or one of our topical pages, you will see content from across the region from a variety of sources. We will present the biggest stories that we think will be important and interesting to people throughout the metro area. And we will sort news by location, offering you news that’s important to you because it’s close to where you live, work, play or shop. When you click the links, some headlines will take you into the TBD site to content produced by our staff. Other links will take you away to content from our network members or other news sources in the community.

As noted in an earlier post, the network members are an active group, producing newsy and varied content that we believe will give us a lively, informative report about news and community life (and the network has more than doubled in size since that post).

We won’t restrict our network members by traditional journalism standards. Some bloggers practice pretty traditional journalism, maintaining independence from the sources and institutions they write about. Others write about their personal passions and their own communities, openly acknowledging them. We welcome that variety in the network. We probably at some point will provide a place on our site where the bloggers will tell more about themselves. But for now, we think discerning readers and viewers can judge the perspective and expertise that bloggers bring to their work.

We believe we have worked out a mutually beneficial relationship with members of our network, where they will provide valuable content for our audience and we will provide traffic to their blogs and sites, and we all have an opportunity to make some money based on that traffic.

Here’s how the network will work:

• We will provide headlines and links, sending TBD visitors to the network members’ sites if they want to read the full story. The network members will not write or work for TBD. They are fully independent sites and blogs.
• When a network member posts an article, photo, graphic, video or any type of content worthy of top-story play on our home page, we will feature that contribution as a top story, just as we would if a TBD staff member had produced it.
• When network members produce content affecting a particular location in the Washington area, we will feature that in a home-page feed of local news for TBD visitors who have identified that area as one of the locations they care about. (You will be able to enter multiple locations, so you might be able to enter your home and work locations, plus a spouse’s work location, for instance.)
• When network members produce content on topics we will be highlighting, such as dining or sports, we will feature their contributions on those pages.
• We will promote content of network members in social media, such as our main Twitter account, geographic or topical Twitter feeds and our Facebook page.
• For interested network members, TBD sales staff will sell advertising, sharing revenue with them. We are pleased that we have received such a strong response from network members while we have still been working out the advertising details. We expect those to go out to network members and prospective members this week.
• We also are encouraging network members to work with GrowthSpur, another digital startup, which is helping develop and serve local advertising networks. GrowthSpur will provide training and tools for our network members to make more money selling ads on their blogs and on each others’ blogs.
• We will feature all the network members in a directory, where you can search for them by name or category or browse them all.
• We will involve interested network members in other community engagement efforts as well as social events and workshops.

We continue to recruit area blogs and sites to our network. We are interested in blogs and sites that cover the local community. If you blog about your neighborhood in Washington or in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs or if you have a favorite local blog, we would love to hear from you. If you cover specific local topics such as sports, education or business, we would love to hear from you. For instance, local blogger David Rothman correctly noted in three recent posts that the bloggers we have signed up so far don’t provide a lot of education coverage. If you know of some good local blogs and sites that keep an eye on local schools and/or universities (or other areas our network doesn’t cover yet), we would love to hear about them and include them in the network.

We’re not interested in national or international affairs. And, for now at least, we’re not signing up blogs that are mostly personal in nature. But if you’re partly local, let’s talk. Our initial response to D.C. Foreign Policy Beat was that we don’t cover foreign policy, so the blog wouldn’t fit. Blogger Ladan Nekoomaram said she was planning to do more blogging about issues and events in Washington’s local international communities. That sounded like local news to us. So we’ll link to those local stories but pass on the strictly international content. Other blogs and sites, we know, will also overlap with our mission. And some heavily local sites will on occasion veer into national or personal matters. For instance, a Nationals blogger might report on a development with the Cubs or any of the bloggers might write about big developments in their lives. Because TBD staff will be watching these blogs and making editorial decisions, we will highlight the content that is most relevant to our local audience.

We welcome your feedback as our network takes shape. We were always planning a blog post like this, but were spurred to write sooner by questions, such as this one from Twitter:

1. 
   pwthornton @stevebuttry – Do you have a post that explains what the community network is? 07 Jul 2010 from web in reply to stevebuttry

Soon you’ll see our network’s contributions to TBD. We hope you’ll let us know what you think and let us know if you or a favorite blog of yours can add a perspective we’re lacking. To inquire about joining the network, just tell us about your blog in the comments here or email me at sbuttry (at) tbd.com.