I met yesterday with Tomas Bella, Europe’s Rob Curley and chief-of-web at the Slovak daily SME. Benefiting from an online presence since 1993, bosses committed to the web and a young staff that knows how to use a computer, Tomas developed dozens of innovative web solutions, so that SME.sk is now the leading news site in Slovakia and one of the only profitable ones.

Below are some of the projects he worked on we discussed.

CitJ that works

In October 2004, SME.sk opened blogs to some selected readers. The aim was to have 100 blogging correspondents that would act as citizen journalists, reporting from places the daily did not cover.

Success was overwhelming. The blog engine was opened for anyone to register 6 months after its launch, so that it now comprises 11,000 bloggers. Quality is maintained through an anti-anonymity policy. All bloggers have to register under their own names, providing contact details such as their phone number (in case something happens and the newsroom needs to call a local correspondent). According to Tomas, very few people try to game the system with false information, and none succeeded.

In the days after the London bombings, SME had a handful of blog correspondents in the city, including a girl in the bombed train, who could report from the scene. Their blog posts were then given a full page in the print edition.

Digg for the community

SME’s parent company bought a local copycat of social recommendation engine Digg. Tomas integrated it on the front page of SME.sk, at Vybrali.sme.sk (vybrali means ’selected’). The fear of sending users away didn’t last long.

Instead, operating a digg-like within a newspaper audience helps strengthening the community, as the demographics of a newspaper website are way more specific in their tastes that those of a normal start-up. SME, for instance, is a critical, right-of-center brand. It makes a lot of sense for SME readers to congregate on sme.sk to share links.

Finally, this digg-like boosted SME’s reputation in the blogosphere. Getting a link from SME’s homepage gives a few thousand hits to any blogger. That probably translates into more backlinks for sme.sk.

In-house online library project

SME’s in the process of digitizing Slovak books that fell in the public domain. 600 have been done and 60 are added every month. The National Library should be doing it, but its commitment to serving readers remains to be proven.

The project actually revolves around 1 part-time organizer who overlooks 100 volunteers. He assigns books to be scanned to a volunteer, the books being then proofread by 2 other volunteers. These people get coupons from a bookshop that partners with SME on this project.

This experience shows that SME digital operations are not directed at profits, but that the paper actually wants to help its readers. Google is less and less seen as organizing information for the benefit of users – online newspapers could take this role. Their experience in community management (what Google always sucked at) means that they could use crowdsourcing and limit their infrastructure costs.

Going hyperlocal – smartly

Petit Presse, SME’s parent company, owns a large network of regional weeklies. Tomas wants to integrate their online footprint so as to offer readers all across Slovakia a place to discuss what’s happening around them.

Similarly to what Paul Bradshaw was writing, Tomas is convinced that “events get interesting if you start talking about them”. In other words, value’s in the conversation, not content.

The aim is to make a local version of Holovaty’s Everyblock combined with a strong social component. Something between Facebook, Backfence and Everyblock. Stay tuned!