Steve McNally – Parade.com

Posted on 10. Mar, 2008 by in Social Networking, Where Are They Now?

We’ve been working in earnest to put several Networked Journalism ideas into effect; foremost has been getting our “Parade Partner News” pipeline off the ground.

Parade’s print pub is distributed by more than 400 newspapers nationwide. We’re working to deepen those partnerships online, as well. “Parade Partner News” is a chance for us to promote our partners’ reportage
and brands, help us better surround our stories on parade.com, and give our readers a deeper, localized well to draw from.

Our first foray was with our All-America High School Football coverage: Parade’s been picking and promoting top high school athletes for 45 years. In addition to our own coverage of these players, we invited our papers to share their local stories about our All-America players, coaches or program.

We then let our readers read, vote on and comment on those stories using tools from our sister site at reddit.com.

This “pipeline” is exclusive to our partners; that allows us to get them more attention then they might otherwise in the general Reddit, Mixx, or Digg story queues.

The next editorial features for which we’ll request partner input on are “What America Eats” (inviting partners to provide links to their healthy recipes or other features regarding healthy diets [or desserts, if
Janice K. decides to go that way, instead, with her in-book story], and “What People Earn” (inviting partners to provide links to their features re the job market in their area, career advice, etc.).

It¹s very much a process: we’re working closely with our Newspaper Relations Group, finding the appropriate contacts within our partners’ organizations, and addressing issues and inertia as we find them. In my mind, this is Win-Win-Win for our partners, our readers, and ourselves, so we’ll keep on working at it and getting better with each iteration.

We’ve got other distributed tools for the ProAm set in the works ­ and in Production ­ as well. I’ll be happy to share more if you’re interested in hearing about it.

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