Jeff’s List: A job in Jersey
: There’s a project job opening at my day-job company that may interest one or two of you.
First, though a big, honking, neon caveat: I won’t be replying to your emails and applications. So please don’t think I’m rude. Think I’m disorganized, that’s fine. But not rude. I will merely collect the inquiries and put them in the right place. So please don’t email me followups wondering why I have not replied. And don’t think I’m going to get into a discussion in the comments about it. Cuz I won’t. Think of this is a classified ad. Jeff’s List.
Having now made that warm and inviting introduction, let me tell you about the gig:
Advance Internet, which includes NJ.com, MassLive.com, OregonLive.com and other fine local sites, is about to create a half-dozen town blogs in those markets — new, group blogs (using iUpload) to which any neighbor can contribute. These will live alongside the many individuals’ blogs, local forums, newspaper headlines, blogs outside the services (and their RSS feeds), and more. The idea is that — as in GoSkokie.com and NorthwestVoices — people may not want to start their own blog but they have plenty of news to contribute to their communities: opinions, news updates, sports reports, photos, calendar items, and so on. The hope is also that once we have a critical mass of content in a town from all these sources, a critical mass of audience is sure to follow. This means, we hope, that we can target ads down to the town level and automate them, saving the cost of sales and production, and price them in such a way that we can serve local advertisers who heretofore could not afford to market in big papers. That, I emphasize is the hope — untested, unproven. Testing that is the job.
This person would work on a project basis for a year running this from both an edit and a business perspective. This person would recruit uberbloggers for towns and help them beat the bushes to find more bloggers. He or she would supervise them and come up with procedures for how they should work. He or she would work with the ad department to create appropriate avails and set up the production means of accepting ads. And he or she would work with marketing department to find inexpensive and efficient ways to get the message out to audience and advertisers.
Interested? Send a persuasive email with experience to the address on the right — with “hyperlocal project” in the subject line, please — and I’ll pass it on. Thanks.
