Hyper Local Journalists

Quite a few folks around the blogosphere are pointing to the troubles of Backfence.com as a nasty bellwether for local community journalism. I’ve left my response on PaidContent, but here’s the text of it:

As someone who has studied this space closely (I was the lead business and product person during the first year of New West and currently lead “long tail” publisher strategy for Yahoo! Publisher Network), I would like to point out that “local news, community and citizen journalism ventures as a business” are alive and well.

As anyone who’s successfully built a community-based company will tell you, it’s authentic community cultivation first, features second—and those features should be highly driven by the desires and quirks of the community—and marketing third . There are plenty more features del.icio.us users want, and that Upcoming.org have steadily rolled out, just to name two examples (one of which is highly local), yet these communities were successfully growing from day one.

In the community journalism space specifically, I would point to Metroblogging (http://www.metroblogging.com/) and New West (http://www.newwest.net) as two companies with somewhat different approaches that are both doing swimmingly. Metroblogging is in over 50 cities internationally, Comscore is tracking respectable enterprise traffic growth, their organic search engine ranking is terrific, and they’ve been on the front lines of breaking or monitoring some hugely important stories such as Hurricane Katrina. My own alma mater New West, while I’m admittedly not objective, continues to raise the bar for the quality and comprehensiveness of online-only local journalism (having won several online journalism awards), continues to develop recognition and loyalty as a community hub within its regional footprint, and, though it has not thus far positioned itself as a venture-scale business, is as far as I know tracking handsomely as a business.

As for Backfence, nobody I know is surprised by their failure to take root given their “if you build it, they will come” approach, their tackling of the three needs above in reverse order, and their business decision to take venture capital to franchise and expand a model they had never proved and were ultimately unable to make work even in a single flagship location. Bayosphere’s failure as a business was equally unsurprising given its failure as a community (not to mention horrible name and design); for all Dan Gillmore’s [sic] evangelism of the abstract opportunity, he was never able to deliver any compelling value-added to San Franscisco’s already-quite-robust online life.

I do anticipate new models will continue to evolve, and I hope the right kind of aggregation will be part of that, but it’s hard to imagine aggregation without some form of social curation. My guess is that will come from the most cohesive, engaged, organic local communities - and my hope is that the startup universe and the folks who track it will continue to encourage these.