Archive for July, 2006

Backfence.com, a citizen media company, has announced plans for a major expansion in the number of local community news sites it publishes — from 7 to 22. Last year the company, founded by Mark Potts and Susan DeFife, landed $3 million in venture capital money, so this expansion was to be expected.

Since my company, the Enthusiast Group, also is based on a foundation of citizen media, I’m watching Backfence with more than casual interest. Then again, applying it to hyperlocal news as Backfence does is way different than applying it to niche topics like adventure and participant sports, as we do.

It’s funny, because the Backfence folks (several of whom I know) seem to think that they’ve got an easier task in getting local community members to become active contributors of content and conversation than my company does in getting far-flung people who share passion for a particular sport to do the same. I think my company has the easier task — as is starting to be demonstrated on our first site, YourMTB.com — because of the passion factor. (Backfence has about a year’s head start on the Enthusiast Group.)

This will be interesting to watch.

My wife and I saw Who Killed the Electric Car? tonight. Please go see it — and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, too. I feel like with both of these films, it’s a moral imperative to see them and educate yourself about our society’s most pressing problem — our dependence on an energy source that is choking the planet, and a corporate and government system that protects the status quo no matter how obvious and urgent the need to change becomes.

Watching Who Killed the Electric Car?, I was struck by some similarities between the auto industry and the newspaper industry (the latter where I’ve spent much of my career, either working in it or advising it). This quote, used in promoting the Gore film, applies to both of those industries:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” –Upton Sinclair

Frankly, what GM and auto industry executives did with the electric car borders, in my mind at least, on evil. GM sunk money into developing an electric car that worked and that people liked because the state of California required it to. But at the same time, GM filed lawsuits against the state and succeeded in getting California regulators to back off requirements to have a percentage of its fleet be zero-emission. After that “success,” it then scrapped the electric car program and destroyed all the cars it had produced. (The EV1’s were leased to drivers, so they had no choice but to give them back to GM.)

That short-sighted decision made sure that no alternatives to internal combustion engine cars would be available to the public anytime soon. Rather than embrace a new type of car and turn that into the company’s main revenue stream in the future, GM squashed the threat to its old way of doing business — to the detriment of our planet and its inhabitants.

I find nothing so sinister with the newspaper industry, of course, but I do think that newspaper executives over the last decade have had blinders on about the need to change their industry to adapt to obvious changes in the media environment brought about by the Internet. Oh, sure, newspapers have done lots of good things and made significant progress in figuring out how to publish and do business on the Internet. There are plenty of smart people working at newspapers who understand where things are going. (Hint: Young people don’t read printed newspapers.)

But it’s obvious with hindsight that newspaper executives suffered from what Sinclair so eloquently described. It’s the Googles and Yahoo!’s that benefited and built multi-billion-dollar businesses, because the jobs of their executives depended on them figuring out how to succeed on the Internet. Newspaper executives remained too focused on protecting the old way, so they never had a chance to reach Google/Yahoo! heights online.

Who Killed the Electric Car? made me pessimistic, to tell you the truth, about the future of the newspaper industry. It’s human nature, unfortunately, to protect what you’ve got and resist radical change. Newspapers will probably limp along, and maybe some will prosper with their Internet and digital initiatives. But they won’t hit it big online. Human nature will see to that.

Is that too pessimistic?

Oh, well. At least newspaper executives’ resistance to change doesn’t threaten the planet on the scale that GM’s does.

You knew it had to happen: Pornotube.com. (Definitely not an office-safe link.)

I guess we should call this “citizen porn.”

The only thing surprising is that the porn industry didn’t beat Youtube.com to the idea; usually the sex merchants are ahead of the mainstream when it comes to deploying new Internet ideas. Perhaps Pornotube will figure out a profitable business model before Youtube does!

My July column for Editor & Publisher Online has been published: “Online-News: Have We Come Far Enough?”

I pored through a bunch of discussions going on 10 years ago on the Online-News industry discussion list (which I founded back in 1994 and is now operated by the Poynter Institute). It’s fun to see what were the top issues for the new-media industry back then — and interesting to see that some of the same problems exist today.

In my current role as publisher of a network of citizen-media-based websites (well, only one is live today, but more are coming soon), I really have to curb my editing tendencies. You see, I spent part of my career working as a newspaper copy editor. But in my new job, I have to bite my tongue a lot when content comes in from our users that’s less than perfect in the language and spelling departments.

Here’s an example of a little story that got posted to YourMTB.com today, from a kid who shared a near-death experience when riding with some buddies. It’s riddled with errors. So, do I fix them? Or just let it go in the condition the kid submitted it?

I choose the latter. YourMTB.com is based on the premise that people can tell their own stories, and I don’t want to get in the position of being their editor. (Of course, if something is inappropriate or otherwise violates our terms of service, I’ll unpublish the submission.)

There’s debate in the citizen-media world about editing vs. not editing, with good arguments on both sides. Something I’m thinking about is offering light copy editing as an option. That is, when a user submits an article, there might be a checkbox that says: “Check this box if you’d like our editors to fix spelling and grammatical errors.” The submission could go into a queue and be looked over before it’s published.

I suspect that some people with poor writing skills might appreciate this service. What do you think of this idea?

Interesting. Former “Wonkette” Ana Marie Cox has been named Washington editor of Time.com. Moving from blogging (where, she reports, she was paid modestly by publisher Gawker Media, but gained a wide following and hip reputation) to a mainstream gig is still seen by many people as a positive career step. But in time, I think blogging (at the highest levels) will be seen as a fine place to be in a career — with no further movement necessary to feel good about yourself as a professional and be making enough money.

Well, let’s hope this is the beginning of a media onslaught. … Boulder County Business Report, a local business newspaper here in Boulder, has profiled my fledgling company.

“Spin Your Own Yarn,” by Caitlin McGettigan.

It’s a mostly accurate account of what we’re doing.

Back in 1994, I started an Internet e-mail discussion list called Online-News. It became, I think it’s fair to say, the primary online meeting place for the pioneers in online news media. The list still exists today, hosted by the Poynter Institute (my former employer), though it’s not as active as it used to be.

Howard Owens was curious about the archives of the Online-News discussion from the “early days,” so he hunted around and found some stuff that even I don’t have. In the list’s earliest days (1994-95), it wasn’t archived properly; I have only a piecemeal smattering of list discussion on some old e-mail back-up disks. Poynter’s archive of Online-News goes back only to 2002.

Owens has written a blog post about his research into the Online-News archives. New-media historians might find some of this interesting.

What I remember most from the first year or two of the list was arguments about the pros and cons of news companies hooking up with proprietary online services like Prodigy, America Online, Delphi, Interchange and Compuserve vs. the World Wide Web. Not everyone in 1994 immediately grasped the significance of the Web.

Oh, c’mon NYTimes.com. You’ve got to be kidding! … Its article, “NBC’s Web-Only Episodes Offer ‘The Office,’ a Little at a Time,” contains NO LINK TO THE VIDEO. Writer Alessandra Stanley gets readers intrigued about seeing some Internet-only “webisodes” of the popular TV comedy The Office, but NYTimes.com editors force us to seek out the content on the Web ourselves.

That’s making it harder than it needs to be for the website’s readers. To resurrect an old term, that’s very user unfriendly of NYTimes.com.

Here’s the link to The Office webisodes, so you don’t have to go searching.

Just tried to log in to MySpace:

That was the entire page. Can’t MySpace at least come up with a more elegant error message?

As often as not I see this kind of thing on MySpace — page elements and ads that don’t load, etc. For arguably the most popular site on the Web, wouldn’t you expect Google-like performance? I wonder how MySpace gets by with amateurish stuff like this. Is that part of its charm?