Seattle Times spokeswoman Jill Mackie, who'd been on vacation, responded to some questions I had about the Times' collaboration with nine Seattle neighborhood blogs (which we reported on yesterday).

Here's what she had to say.

PubliCola: How were the particular blogs chosen? I noticed that some prominent neighborhood blogs (the Central District News, Beacon Hill Blog, etc.) were left out. What were the criteria for being part of this agreement?

The Seattle Times' Jill Mackie: Actually the Central District News WILL be part of the arrangement, because they exist in cooperation with the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, in that similar way that West Seattle is the mother site for White Center, and Ballard for Fremont. In the case of the Central District News, we agree with many people in the city that they are an informative, useful site for their community, so we very much want to collaborate with them too.

It's important to keep in mind that we're not precluding collaborative relationships with other blogs. It's just that the [American University] J-Lab project, and the money that comes with it, can only involve five partners. We certainly hope to work with other established—and trusted—blogs where it makes sense. In fact, taking part in this project will help us build better ways of doing that.

As to the question of what we were looking for in partners, we did indeed have some basic criteria:

• established web site
• active community contributions
• applies basic journalistic principles of accuracy, attribution, independence & ethics

And our observations over the last couple of years fueled our own sense of which blogs made the most sense at this time.

PubliCola: The payments to blogs have been characterized to me as "small checks." Can you be any more specific about how much various blogs received?

Mackie: The grant is from the Knight Foundation which spelled out a formula to encourage the newspapers and blogs to participate in the program.  It is a small incentive both to the newspaper and to the blogs.   From my perspective, it would be more appropriate for the Knight Foundation to speak to this issue rather than us, as it is their program.

PubliCola: Any other details about what the collaboration will look like (e.g., contextualized linking; access to specific Times databases; source-sharing, etc.) would be helpful.

Mackie: Yes to what you have included  Because this partnership is an exploration for us, it might evolve in ways that have not yet been clearly identified. The exploration is about how can we work together in a way that benefits both the blogs and The Times and also increases reporting for local communities?

As one example, the local blogs are very small in most cases, and regularly have to choose between directly attending and reporting on events important to their communities.  The Times is much larger, but we still have to make decisions about what we have the resources to cover.  To the extent we collaborate with these partners, we might be able to cover more news by collaborating - maximizing all of our individual resources in a way that benefits each party as well as the communities we serve.  At this point the collaboration is content related, but in the future, depending on how the partnerships develop, it is possible they could expand in a variety of ways (i.e., perhaps there could be revenue opportunities that help each organization cover costs) . At this point it is not perfectly clear, what we will learn or implement.  The important thing is to try new approaches and learn from them.