The idea behind Your Voices

Below is the response I got from Rhonda Prast, the Star Tribune editor in charge of the Your Voices blog. To see the questions I asked her, click here.

"Your Voices started as an idea pitched by the managing editor, Rene Sanchez. The goal is to broaden the sampling of commentary and opinions on [our] site from more members of the Twin Cities community. We modeled it after other blogs from other media sites: Huffington Post, NJ Voices at the Star Ledger and Comment is Free in the U.K.

All the bloggers have been invited to join the group. I went after notable folks in the community, leaders, people with a certain level of accomplishment, other local bloggers. I am still continuing to add people. The blog went up just before Christmas last year. I think we have around 33 bloggers now. Traffic is growing monthly.

The posts are not edited, but I do go in and occasionally fix a misspelled name or word that stands out - like a misspelling in a headline. None of our blog posts are edited here at the Strib, staff or non-staff.

We do moderate comments - we agreed to do this before the blog started because we did not want to subject our bloggers to nasty and vicious comments. That does not mean I censor comments that strongly disagree with a blogger's point of view, but we don't want to let anonymous comments about a person's appearance go through, or name-calling etc. We moderate the comments Monday through Friday mostly.

Commenting is not allowed on certain stories on the site: crime, a few columnists, distressed local companies, stories about racial communities or topics.

Comments not appropriate: gratuitous name-calling, racial slurs, profanity, sexist comments, personal attacks, often things not on point to the topic.

The more interaction we have with the community, the better. This blog builds on that interaction and I think we host some voices and opinions on a regular basis that we would not hear from otherwise. We've tried hard to recruit more conservative voices especially. Minnesota has a strong liberal bent and we want to be balanced with our commentary.

Most of the people who have declined to join the blog have done so for time reasons. Too busy."

(photo courtesy Star Tribune)