Archive for November, 2007

It’s been an odd week for me. After my business partner and I decided to shut down our small company, the Enthusiast Group, I decided to be open and transparent about what happened. Following the lead of Judy’s Book founder Andy Sacks, I’ve blogged and written a column about what we learned about grassroots and social media from the humbling experience of presiding over a failed company trying to succeed in that space.

The Editor & Publisher Online column got a lot of attention; I’m pretty sure it’s seen more write-ups and blog mentions than any other column I’ve written.

For the most part, I’m glad to be sharing what we learned. I did it because I felt strongly that we learned some lessons that others in the media business needed to hear. Perhaps I’ve caused some business plans involving grassroots and social media to be tweaked to avoid the problems we encountered.

Most of the folks who blogged about my column seemed to get my message, though there were some that I disagreed with. Then there was this oddball one by Tom Abate, comparing me to Dilbert creator Scott Adams…

Abate makes some interesting points, but I didn’t “fail at blogging”; the Enthusiast Group was a niche grassroots content and social networking play. I blog here and occasionally on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits. Neither of those efforts make me money, but I don’t think I’m a failed blogger.

But that word, “failure,” is what makes the week “odd,” or maybe disconcerting is a better word. Many of the posts about me this week were supportive of our efforts at the Enthusiast Group. Some particularly good write-ups can be found by Robert Niles for Online Journalism Review, Dan Pacheco and Jeremy Wagstaff.

Some of the headlines, I must admit, were a bit hard to take:

• Steve Outing: Learning from Failure
• He failed, so you don’t have to!
• More Lessons from a Citizen Media Failure

Ouch. Well, I suspect in the long run that talking about this publicly will be a good thing.

I really like the concept behind Facebook’s Beacon program, which sends information about your purchases to the people in your Facebook friends network. That is, I like it as long as I as an online shopper am in control.

Having online shoppers opt in to having purchase information broadcast to their friends is, of course, the way this program should have been set up in the first place. Instead, Facebook tried to make the program opt-out — and then was surprised (d’uh!) to face a massive public backlash and even a MoveOn.org campaign aimed at getting them to scrap or change the program.

So yesterday, Facebook relented and made the program opt-in. I’m glad company executives listened to reason. How a company as smart as Facebook could misread privacy concerns so badly is hard to comprehend.

Now that it’s settled, though, Facebook has a great program that pushes the envelope for online advertising.

I’ve been watching initiatives like Outside.in and Yourstreet.com with much interest. Both of those services seek out neighborhood news and information from many sources (including mainstream local news websites), giving online users a way to identify content that’s being published on the web pertinent to where they live. Both started as online pure-play destination sites, but with the intention of providing feeds (for a fee) to other local media sites.

Outside.in has taken a first step in offering feeds of neighborhood news to 1010 WINS, a 24-hour news station in New York. It’s providing local news for the five boroughs; here’s an example for the Bronx.

Here’s a quote from Outside.in co-founder Steven Berlin Johnson: “From the beginning we’ve imagined Outside.in’s hyperlocal coverage as something which would complement traditional media sites, and we’re delighted to have such a prominent news organization as one of our initial partners. These deals illustrate our understanding of local markets, and the ability to package this information in a way that can bring value to other media partners.”

For a news organization, whether you develop the technology to do this yourself, or partner with Outside.in or Yourstreet.com, I’d suggest that it’s super important to be gathering and filtering the web content that’s being produced outside your walls by all manner of community members. What the Outside.in and Yourstreet.com approaches represent is a way to geo-tag this content so that it can be targeted to those who care about it.

This is a point that I addressed in my latest Editor & Publisher Online column. The model of sucking up all the local community content that’s being produced online will turn up a lot of garbage along with the gems. But as the cliche goes, one man’s garbage is another’s treasure. So through targeting properly, this community-produced content can be valuable to segments of your audience.

Backfence co-founder Mark Potts (also ex-Washinton Post and various other new media ventures) has found a chance to put his money where his mouth is, so to speak. He’s accepted a 3-month assignment at Philly.com as acting vice president-editorial. Philly.com is the website for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News.

Potts talks about the gig on his blog, Recovering Journalist — and notes that “I think it means the Recovering Journalist has technically fallen off the wagon.” He’s been using his blog and other writings for some time to tell the news industry what it’s doing wrong and what should be done. Now he’s got 3 months to get a bunch of his ideas implemented or at least started.

Three months?! Sounds awfully ambitious for that short period of time. Good luck, Mark!

Good news for Newstrust, a cool web news rating service that I wrote up for Editor & Publisher Online a few months ago. (Sorry, can’t link to that column; it’s behind a pay wall now.) It has won a multi-year grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Executive director Fabrice Florin says the $450,000 funding will allow his site to expand its “web 2.0″ news review services.

The promise that Newstrust represents is in providing a well-thought-out and fair rating system for all manner of news content on the web — not just from mainstream news sources, but also from blogs and other alternative sources. You’ll recognize the problem that Newstrust is trying to solve when you encounter an online news source or blog that you know nothing about. Is it credible? If Florin and his crew succeed, you’ll have an answer.

I don’t usually blog gadgets, but as an outdoors and gadget lover, I’ve gotta share this. It’s the Spot Satellite Messenger.

What this thing does is give you a way to be rescued no matter where you are. Press the emergency button and the gizmo sends out a distress call that includes your GPS coordinates. You can also use it to check in with family or friends, so they can see where you are on a long backpacking, mountaineering or bike trip.

As a mountain biker, I appreciate what this thing can do. Of course, it’d be nice if cell phones would do the same thing so you don’t have to carry multiple gadgets. I expect one day they will. Meantime, a phone won’t do you much good when you ride your bike off a cliff 10 miles from the nearest road and out of cell coverage.

Dan Pacheco, who’s a newspaper industry expert on grassroots/citizen media and social networking, has done a thoughtful blog entry about the demise of my company (the Enthusiast Group) and Backfence.com. Since his work for the Bakersfield Californian and its various websites involves some of the same models of grassroots content and social networking that we were playing with (indeed, the Bakersfield social media work predates my company), some folks have been asking Pacheco if his social media ventures are next. (The death watch mentality.)

His answer: emphatically, no! Why? Pacheco says — and I agree — that the big difference with his company’s social media and grassroots neighborhood news ventures is that the online sites are tethered to complementary print properties, which provides a workable revenue model. (Local advertisers, he points out, remain stuck on the outdated idea that print is significant while online is still experimental, so their money is easier to get for print.) Both Backfence and my company were building online pure-play sites, and that’s a tough business.

Pacheco asks if a print strategy to complement the websites could have saved my company. Possibly. It’s something we considered seriously — having print products that featured the best of the content submitted by users and our “enthusiasts-in-chief” to our sites. But we would have had to raise much more money than we did to support a print strategy.

We pondered such ideas as partnering with magazines in our sports niches, which might feature an insert of our content. I still think that was a good idea, but we didn’t get anywhere with publishers, who still seem stuck in the past, not recognizing that the audience (especially the younger segment) is clearly transitioning online.

And we learned the hard way that outdoor companies — the Enthusiast Group’s target advertisers — are, like most local advertisers, still stuck in the past and focused mostly on print.

So don’t cry for Bakersfield. Pacheco and company still have a good shot at figuring out this grassroots media thing.

My November column for Editor & Publisher Online is up, and I’m going to be curious about reaction to it. The topic this month is what I learned about grassroots media from my experience with the Enthusiast Group, a company I founded a year and a half ago, but that is closing down. Here’s the column:

An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media

The short version is that in most cases, I think that grassroots content when presented on its own can’t succeed. (There are exceptions, of course — like Youtube.) That does not mean that my Enthusiast Group experience soured me on grassroots or user-submitted content. Quite the contrary, actually. But I do think that it needs to be appropriately incorporated with quality professional content in order to make a website that will attract a significant audience.

Why don’t you read the column and tell me what you think?

A couple colleagues each passed along word of a great report about social networking, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication: “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” OK, so the title doesn’t make you want to drop everything to read it. But you should!

If you’re in the news business, you owe it to yourself to understand the social networking service (SNS) phenomenon. Consider this required professional reading.

Jack Lail blogs about using Twitter to cover breaking news stories with a series of alerts, riffing off an earlier post by me, and cites an example of a fan “tweeting” a high school football game. That is an excellent example of a news use for Twitter. Just imagine receiving phone text alerts from someone providing Twitter posts throughout a game that you can’t be at or watch (because you’re driving, on a bus, at a concert, at work, etc.).

Lail brought up an interesting side issue, which is that while a fan may be in the clear by posting Twitter alerts during, say, an NCAA basketball game, a reporter would be prohibited by NCAA rules from doing the same thing. As Lail notes, “Journalist aren’t the only ones who need to think in new ways.”

I’ve long been annoyed by the restrictions that some college and professional sports leagues put on working journalists, which prevent them from utilizing new technologies — like Twitter. This is another example of how old organizations continue to live in the past, thinking that they have control over information about them. While they may be able to control the traditional press, there’s nothing they can do — short of confiscating cell phones at the stadium gate or jamming mobile phone reception — to prevent their fans from acting as though they are sports reporters and posting game “coverage.”

Sure, the leagues can adopt rules that prohibit using phones to report on live game action and apply them to journalists and fans. But get real; that would be impossible to police.