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.
January 13th, 2007 01:27
True that. All of it. Glad someone paying closer attention to the state of community-based information sharing then I am.
Not to beat a deceased horse, but I think anyone that think they have a killer community/news site should review the entire Bayosphere story from very beginning to end.
I’ve said it so many times, you can make community web features, but you can’t make anyone use them.
January 13th, 2007 10:52
You can beat a dead horse, Ted, but you can’t make ‘em link!
January 14th, 2007 12:41
Backfence and Local Communities Online…
Everyone involved with any aspect of local blogging has spent much of the last week talking about BackFence, since the chaos going on behind close doors over there seems to have spilled out into the street. Quick background - The company was founded i…
January 20th, 2007 19:43
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something here, but I can’t helpe but strenuously disagree with the concept of marketing coming third.
How does an entity ‘cultivate’ a community without marketing…without reaching out to the targeted area to let them know that they exist?
To me, marketing is essential from the beginning. Now big budget stuff, but grassroots stuff.
It’s not an ‘either-or’ scenario. You cultivate certain targete stakeholder groups (say, parents) by providing them with content they are likely to want or need.
To cultivate, you need to market to them.
What am I missing?
January 21st, 2007 14:07
Thanks for the comment, Jonathan. I think we’re actually on the same page here - I guess it depends on how one interprets what “marketing” is.
I agree with you that you can’t build a community without cultivating your target audience. What I meant in the post is the idea that you can’t effectively do traditional marketing - advertising, promotions, etc. - to attract people to a community if you haven’t first provided a reason for them to come. It would be like advertising a flea market without vendors, hoping customers would start trading among themselves.
If you’re building authentic community around something you know or care passionately about, you shouldn’t have to advertise to get what Caterina Fake calls your “Abrahams” - the seminal community members who will beget many descendents.
January 22nd, 2007 01:52
Greg
Then we are on the same page. In the beginning, it’s necessary to develop low level marketing strategies and tactics to simply let people know the site exits…but it’s necessary to have some sort of stucture that already exists that would allow a community to gel. Then you build on that and give tools to the visitors so they can build it with you.
I had actually interviewed with Backfence for a marketing position last year. I should blog about the markting/community building ideas that I had for them.
Jonathan
May 8th, 2008 03:28
You can beat a dead horse, Ted, but you can’t make ‘em link!
May 16th, 2008 09:34
Hi been surfing the net for Business Opportunity Network Marketing and found your blog reg Hyper Local Journalists. You relly know your stuff! I\’d like to see more posts here. Will definitely bookmark this one and come back.