Bakotopia.com relaunches with new look, new platform

Five-year-old Bakotopia.com has just relaunched with a long-overdue redesign that emphasizes the site's strengths in blogging and social interaction around local entertainment and whacks dead wood that built up over the years.

Some of the highlights:

• A greater emphasis on what you want to read. We pruned some of the stuff that just wasn't getting traffic and put more focus on the things people were using.
• A livelier logo.
• Dozens of different wallpapers that change regularly with each new page. Our long-term goal is to let our readers and artists in the community design future wallpapers. 
• A widget that pulls in entertainment stories from bakersfield.com.The new design pulls in a PDF of The Californian's Thursday Eye on Entertainment section We know Bakotopia is something of an alternative to The Californian, but we also know The Californian delivers local entertainment news Bakotopia readers are interested in.
• More promotion for the weekly Bakotopia Radio show on KRAB 106.1 FM, which features local music and exclusive live performances.

We're publishing the site with the open-source Drupal publishing system.

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Remembering George Lynch

The Bakersfield Californian was one of the leaders in embracing so-called "citizen journalism," in which everyday people are given space in our pages and websites.

The concept was a recognition that our readers often know more than we do, particularly when it comes to niche topics. As paid professionals, journalists certainly bring expertise to the equation, but we can't be experts at everything.

Inviting readers to the table makes so much sense. But the newspaper business can be an insular world, and early on in the experiment, fellow journalists would ask me at conferences in the U.S. and Europe, "Aren't you worried about bad writing or mistakes? Who's checking this stuff to make sure it's good? Do you really believe anyone reads this stuff?"

Valid questions, but you could ask the same of paid journalists, some of whom were churning out boring, thinly sourced stories written for narrow audiences, and refusing to come out from behind their lecturns and mingle with the masses.

George LynchSo, when asked questions like, "Is there really any citizen journalism that's good?" I often referred to stories submitted by local amateur historian George Lynch.

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Social media marketing is muted without traditional-media base

Here’s the “Traditional Media and New Media Working Together" presentation I gave at Monday’s wOOt conference.

Presentation I gave at the wOOt social-media conferenceThe topic is not one I normally would present (it was assigned to me by conference organizers, given my position at a newspaper company overseeing digital media), but in diving into the preparation I was reminded at how much strength traditional media has in these turbulent times.

My daily life is consumed by so-called new media, whether in practice or in theory, so it’s easy for me to get all caught up in trends. Sure, we’re heading toward a digital dominance in media but for the near- and short-term, traditional media (print newspapers, TV, radio) still brings home the bacon in local markets.

As I note in my presentation, smart business people see social media as an opportunity -- not a threat. Based on very reliable local data released late in 2009, using social media to market your business will add, generally, 10 percentage points of net audience potential/reach when combined with other media.

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