Dakota Midday Notes: Seth Tupper on Blogging for the Mitchell Republic

SDPB's Dakota Midday featured the SD blogosphere this noon. First up: Seth Tupper, reporter for the Mitchell Daily Republic and author of the paper's blog, the Republic Insider:

Tupper says he gets more reader response from simple reporting/factual articles rather than his occasional forays into commentary. He says he prefers to simple act as a "facilitator" for discussion. It's hard to predict which topics will draw comments, but the more local the stories on the Republic Insider, the more comments. He's very eager to see how much blog activity the local elections will draw. Just today, Tupper noticed that one local candidate posted his e-mail address in the comments section and invited readers to contact him to talk politics, so there's at least one candidate who's ready to put the Internet to use.

Tupper sees readers offering a great deal of service to him and the blog. He gets some good story ideas from his readers. He also appreciates the fact that blog readers themselves "police" the comments: if someone gets out of line, making unsubstantiated charges, getting personal, whatever, other readers will call that commenter to task.

Does the blog draw a new demographic? "We hope so," says Tupper, but he also notes that a lot of the people reading blogs are already big newspaper readers, already dedicated to following the news in their community and beyond.

No scoop on the credit card company that's balking at coming to Mitchell if it can't get free land. I would love to learn just which company this is....

Listen to the Cory Klumper's interview with Seth Tupper at the SDPB archive.