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A few months back, AOL dropped a 58-page handbook on its Patch editors entitled “The AOL Way”. After some introductory remarks on how the operations of its local sites should be organized–bolstered by more arrows and flags than an NFL playbook–the document got down to brass tacks. “The AOL Way” laid out exactly what each site–or “town” in AOL local news parlance–needed to do to goose pageviews and bring in more revenues. Which was, of course, exactly the opposite of what you really would need to do to grow the business if you were an authentically local site.
Look folks, it’s pretty easy to gin up traffic to a Web site. Get a list of the keywords du jour, and write to them. Hundreds of spam farms all around the globe do that every day. There are alphabetized list of of top tags so if I wanted to, I could write a sentence like “While blogging with Justin Bieber about Bin Laden, I watched the royal wedding on my Apple iPad and the horror that is Donald Trump in election 2012”.
As I read it, the “AOL Way” would have editors generate keyword-driven content. They are supposed to start their day identifying “high-demand topics” and assign topics on them.
Trouble is, Justin Bieber doesn’t live in my town, nor, thankfully, does Donald Trump.
As an authentically local site, I need to write about my own, local celebrities and there’s no shortage of them. A well-known stunt man lives in Verona and we count a major movie script writer among our expats. One of the stars of “Jerseylicious” runs a business in Verona, and we have three nationally recognized chefs: Floyd Cardoz, Ariane Duarte and Carmen Quagliata. We’ve had an Olympic gold medal winner (Tokyo, 1964), whose achievements inspired Verona to build an Olympic-sized community pool that we enjoy to this day.
We also have plenty of celebrities who aren’t in the national spotlight, and may never be: The kids who win academic competitions and break wrestling records, the stars of the middle school play, the businesswoman who almost single-handedly built the town’s central business district.
This doesn’t mean that MyVeronaNJ.com ignores global events. When Bin Laden was killed, we took a moment to remember the three Verona lives lost on 9/11. Since “Three Cups of Tea” is on the assigned reading list at our middle school, we wrote about the recent assertions that the book is more fiction than non-fiction. One of our high school writers (we have both high school and middle school kids writing for us), penned a story last year about what “Toy Story” meant to his generation.
When an authentically local site writes about what’s closest to the hearts of its local audience, it gets the clicks. Lots of clicks. More clicks than if its writers followed some corporate handbook.
–Virginia Citrano, MyVeronaNJ
