My area of focus was collaboration for my group's legacy/tech fusion site.
I suggest we recruit bloggers to address certain areas of legislation, or to focus on certain state agencies. We could structure the bloggers the same way government is structured, so in the legislative branch, one blogger might focus on a certain committee in the general assembly. In the executive branch, we could have each blogger follow a certain agency.
For example, perhaps we could recruit this blogger to write about the Department of Transporation. Or perhaps this blogger might be enticed to write about the General Assembly Judiciary Committee. The first job would be to find bloggers who are writing about topics related to state agencies or committees.
The state does put a large amount of material online, so this could be fertile ground for bloggers.
The bloggers could then continue their lives as normal, just with a little more of a focus. Our publication could then take recruited bloggers posts and link to them and/or run them on our site. (Perhaps some sort of arrangement where we run the first several paragraphs of a story on our site, then provide a link to a full post on their site?) In keeping with our "professional" ethos, we would exercise editorial control over anything appearing on our site, although I could imagine a Wikipedia model, where an instant ad-hoc committee of editors makes choices like this. If a blogger goes bad, we might have to remove their affiliation, and stop accepting material from them.
Our publication would get a much larger staff, by bringing in bloggers. This would give us better content, and hopefully more interesting stories for our audience. Our publication would have to give some of our time to manage and train the bloggers. This would involve a much greater time commitment than simply putting up comment boxes, but if we could find an efficient way to use the bloggers, I think it would be worth it.
The bloggers would get several things out of this...
If people realize our web site is a nerve center for the bloggers, our site may get good traffic, and some of that traffic can be allowed to flow to the bloggers' sites. Either way, the bloggers' work gets more attention.
Some of them may not realize that following a specific agency or committee will give them interesting, original things to write about. Beginning students in journalism classes I have taken over the years are often reluctant to get specific in their story ideas. Bloggers without training may also fail to realize that stories are about the specifics, not generalities. Working with our publication could open up this idea to them. We could provide them with some training on the basics of journalism (maybe something along these lines?), and advice from our professional reporters on how to get info and stories in Connecticut. This would probably involve some face time with the bloggers, perhaps in occasional classes, or awards?
Our publication would also give the bloggers some legitimacy, which might give them the confidence to leave home, and perhaps go to the capitol or a state agency headquarters from time-to-time... Or maybe even to venture into the world to see how the agency's work is turning out.
Affiliating with the publication might also give the bloggers an easy way to explain who they are, when the security guard at the front desk of a state agency questions their presence.
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