A regional daily has launched a Big Brother-style competition in which eight bloggers compete to be chosen as a columnist.
The Barrow-based North West Evening Mail has used the popular TV show, which has now been axed by Channel 4, as inspiration for its ‘Big Blogger’ contest.
It has selected eight local writers whose blogs go up against each other every week and the one with the fewest unique users reading it is booted out of the competition.
The winner of the contest, which is being led by CN Group head of digital content Nick Turner and Evening Mail deputy editor James Higgins, will become a columnist for the newspaper as well as being given a laptop.
Nick said: “Big Blogger has injected some fun and excitement into our promotion of our new blogging software. We had nearly 30 people register to take part before we selected our eight finalists and over 3,000 people have logged on to read the blogs.
“As we move towards our final winner, I expect the bloggers will be pulling out all the stops to boost their readership.”
The finalists include a 13-year-old writing about horse-riding, a young mum writing about TV, a Barrovian living in Italy and a blogger writing about Cumbrian wildflowers, who was the first to be evicted.
They have been using social media to promote their blogs and excerpts from the blogs are being published in the Evening Mail each week.
James said: “The standard is extremely high and that is reflected in the closeness of the competition with four of the blogs all close to the top spot so far.
“As a multimedia company, the Mail embraces all contributors and appreciate there are many voices out there just waiting to be heard.
“We already have a number of community bloggers on our hyperlocal sites and hopefully Big Blogger will provide the Evening Mail with a great new columnist.”
The blogs can be viewed by visiting nwemail.co.uk/bigblogger.
Sign up for our free daily email bulletin
Follow HTFP on Twitter
Got a story? Email the Editor at
omg
Report this comment
Oh, from the headline I thought it meant that the staff get chucked out one by one. Might as well make a series of it, it happens anyway.
Report this comment
Lurker, Nearly right, the staff don’t get chucked out one by one, it’s usually in job lots so it won’t make much of series, one episode only and it’s all over
Report this comment
almost as fascinating as the royal (yawn) wedding . does this make money or just boost egos?
Report this comment
Don’t knock the royal wedding. Sure, it’s as boring as hell and involved two priveleged people who are utter strangers to most of us. But everyone is going to make a few extra copies out of all the “whose getting married in April?” and “what’s the dress going to lool like” crap and suchlike so milk it and don’t knock it. I wish em both luck as I would any couple. They will need it once the honeymoon with the national media is over.
Report this comment