The Day is the first thing we publish on the blog each morning. It sets the tone for the rest of the day and offers readers a little bit of information and a little bit of entertainment. It’s also a way for us to speak directly to our audience. Having a morning post is way to communicate with readers, to say, “Here we are!” each morning and to establish personality. It’s a great teaching tool for developing a blogger voice, so we’ve liked having students do it. But, on a blog with a strong editorial presence, a person at the helm who is the voice and guiding force behind the blog with a distinct personality, this should really be their domain. Basics The Day should go up no later than 10 a.m. This may mean you need to write it the night before. And it should be ready for us to give a final look at by 9:30. It should be written in a conversational tone — don’t be afraid to push your style a bit here, and be funny or irreverent. Not when your news of the day involves a murder or other heavy news, of course. When appropriate. The basic structure goes: several sentence intro, either introducing the theme of the day or being generally conversational, then three to five links covering neighborhood news. The intro can talk about general interest topics, like city politics, Coney Island, Lindsay Lohan or Paul, the World Cup Octopus. The links should all directly relate to the neighborhood. Set up a google reader or your preferred feed reader system to scan for links. Twitter can also be a great source of stories and links, and a way to keep your finger on the pulse of what...

As with many things on The Local, with comments we have to hew to several guiding principles, the first being New York Times standards, the second being web best practices. In this case they largely overlap. Here is the official New York Time Comment Policy. We follow this very closely — every comment is moderated and we evaluate based a variety of objective and more subjective measures, including language use, general tone and how productive the comment is to the conversation at hand. We DO NOT modify comments in any way. To do so makes us more legally responsible for them, so it’s all or nothing. The bottom line for NYT policy is that comments should move the conversation forward and that is definitely a best practice to keep in mind at all times. On a non-Times blog tho, loosening the restrictions on non-name-calling obscenities could be considered. Also, one place where The Local diverges is in cheerleader-type comments. On The Times, if 100 commenters say “Aw, the CUTEST” to a post about kittens, only the first such comment will be approved — the following comments are not moving the conversation forward. On The Local, we will post every single comment that says “congrats!” to a post about a local student who won a scholarship. It’s a community site and well wishing builds community. We have four basic types of commenters on the blog: happy, upbeat folks who say nice things when they see their neighbors on the Local; super neighbors who like share information and ask questions about what’s going on in the neighborhood (lots of overlap in the first two categories); old school grumpers who read the Local but sort of hate us, and thus point out every mistake no matter how...

Social media is crucial to building a loyal following and is a great way to expand your readership and add voice to your blog. Though there are many different social media tools and strategies, at The Local we’ve focused in on the two biggest, Twitter and Facebook. Twitter: This is a place where we you spread content, reach out to other organizations and media outlet, and readers, and establish our voice. Don’t be afraid to be funny on Twitter and to comment on our content. First off, tweet your first post of the morning; at The Local we start with The Day, the morning link round-up. Make sure the tweet includes as many @’s at the organizations linked to in the post as possible. If there is a question in The Day (example: “what are you doing to stay cool? Tweet at us,” tweet that part of the day)—asking the question in an easy way to get @ replies. If you get a reply, re-tweet it. Schedule out tweets of the links in The Day for half-hour intervals through out the day. Be sure to @ at the relevant organizations. Link to their page directly (the link used in The Day, not The Day link). In order to schedule, download and install TweetDeck (or another app of choice) and create an account. Then add The Local’s twitter. You can also create lists in a Twitter client app, to watch, say food news, or local politicians. Sticking to a schedule for this (11:00, 11:30, 12:30, 13:00 – TweetDeck uses military time) creates a frame that you can tweet around for re-tweets or other oddities. This way the tweets are paced. Example. A story goes up at 12:18. You’ve scheduled links from The Day through 1...