Citizen media

My recent Editor & Publisher Online column about hyper-local news websites contained a call for a new model, one that relies on professional journalists working closer with “citizen” (non-journalist) experts more so than being just open to submissions from non-paid community members (aka, “citizen journalists”). I followed that up with a blog item here suggesting that to succeed, a hyper-local strategy needs to have a way to target specialized news and information to people who care about it (since it’s “boring” to everyone else) and good personalization technology.

Mark Potts, one of the founders of Backfence.com, a defunct network of citizen-journalism websites, objected to my reasoning, and suggested that the quality of content on Backfence sites had nothing to do with the company’s demise. You can read his response in a guest column on E&P Online.

Here’s my response to Potts. I’ll start with a few excerpts from his critique of my column:

“On a hyperlocal site, the end result may be something that really can’t be defined as ‘journalism,’ but that is intensely interesting and important to the people who visit and contribute to the site.” …

“It’s also unfair to suggest that hyperlocal content is ‘of low quality and boring,’ as Steve does in his column. Low quality? To a professional editor, maybe, but the fact is that most participants in user-generated sites can communicate very well. It may not be ‘journalism,’ but it’s still quite readable and interesting.”

“And ‘boring’ is in the eye of the beholder. To an outsider, any hyperlocal information is probably boring. It may be to a transient resident, too. But to someone with a stake in the community, kids in the schools, paying taxes, dealing with community services, patronizing local merchants, etc., those arcane town council meetings, zoning disputes, tips on finding good pizza and kids’ sports scores are incredibly important — more so than just about anything a lot of us think of as journalism.”

“Let’s not go making flat statements about what doesn’t work, or what’s ‘boring’ about hyperlocal sites. It’s way too early in the game to even begin to know what the successful formula will be. Let’s celebrate those of us who are working hard, inside and outside newspapers, to crack the code.”

Let’s address the “boring” issue. What I wrote and believe is that hyper-local content, most often written by community members, is often “boring” to people who don’t care about the topic. BUT, when targeted to the right person (and this is where personalization technology comes in), it’s incredibly powerful and important. Ergo, sites that present a citizen-powered collection of news items (which inevitably include lots of press releases from community groups and others) need an overhaul.

For example, here’s a list of the “Featured” stories on July 2, 2008, from the Boulder, Colorado, section of Yourhub.com, a citizen journalism site operated by E.W. Scripps and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. (Boulder is where I live, and I do care about local news and information. I’ve lived in Boulder for about 13 years, and I lived here once before in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Ergo, I’m pretty well rooted in this community.) Presumably, since these are included in the Featured block on the home page, these are the best submitted stories covering Boulder. By Potts’ reasoning, I should be interested in these stories.

1. Hop on the biodiesel bus, don’t forget your bike. A 1-paragraph press release report about how Bike to Work day was a success; published 2 weeks ago.
2. Annual festival ‘a circus’. 1-paragraph press release about a Boulder juggling festival, including a bunch of photos of the jugglers; published 16 days ago.
3. A Little Light Music. An event description (press release) for a musical theater production at the University of Colorado; published 9 days ago.
4. Boulder Creek Festival Kick-Off Concert! Press release about the Boulder Creek Festival, which was held over Memorial Day; published over a month ago.
5. Congratulations to Boulder-area graduates. Yourhub.com staff put this together; it’s a compilation of links to lists of Boulder County high school graduates. Published over a month ago.

So those are the Featured stories for Boulder on Yourhub.com on July 2, the day I’m writing this. I also clicked on the list of all stories submitted to Yourhub under the Boulder category. For July 2, there are 7 stories in the list:

1. Poorly written essay by Boulder guy about he and his buddies skiing all 28 California resorts.
2. Press release for community theater of nearby town (Louisville).
3. Press release about traveling presidential memorabilia visiting Denver. (No Boulder connection.)
4. Story about the second anniversary of the Colorado Clean Indoor Air Act. (I think this is a press release from the Smoke Free Colorado organization; no Boulder connection.)
5. Story (or maybe it’s a press release; I can’t really tell) about teens raising money for Alzheimer’s Disease research. (No Boulder connection that I could discern.)
6. An Arvada resident reminisces about an old Denver-area restaurant chain, The Drumstick. (No Boulder connection.)
7. Girl Scout press release about a promotion with Dairy Queen. (No Boulder connection.)

OK, I dare anyone to convince me that that collection of content is “interesting.” I’m a devoted, long-time Boulderite, and the only thing I found remotely of interest is the Yourhub staff compilation of high school graduates; I can look to see if any of my friends’ kids graduated. I sure have no desire to come back to check out the Boulder stuff on Yourhub after this exercise.

I chose to examine Yourhub Boulder, of course, to see if Potts is right that if you’re committed to a community, you do care about the kind of stuff that goes on sites like Yourhub, and that was carried by Backfence.com sites when they were still running. I can’t begin to describe how dull this collection of content is to me.

Now, I again will emphasize that I am not a critic of the concept of “citizen journalism.” To the contrary, I’m a believer in hyper-local! I just don’t think we’re doing it right yet.

Here’s what I’d suggest for a remodel of Yourhub, and what I think (in hindsight) that Backfence should have done. The user interface would look like this:

A user should be able to select from a list of topics, interests, organizations, etc. that he is interested in. This would generate a local-focused content stream of stuff over time that matches his interests. For example, I might select as my interests: mountain biking; cycling; running; “green”/environmental news; Boulder Open Space Department; trails news; Summit Middle School; University of Colorado School of Journalism; mosquito control; dogs; traffic delays/road construction; the Internet scene; venture capital community/investors; Boulder media; and news about my small neighborhood.

How would a hyper-local site serve up all that stuff? It would comb through various sources of news, events, and information that match those choices: newspaper staff; citizen contributors; local blogs (mostly external, but perhaps newspaper bloggers, too); websites and newsletters of community groups, schools, and government agencies; discussion lists (aka, listservs) and forums devoted to various topics (e.g., local mountain biking group) and run by various local organizations; local databases (police department, health department, Realtors’ groups). It would intelligently parse through a growing list of news, data, and information sources and deliver to me what I care most about. The hyper-local site ideally would become the place I look first for what I care about or need to know locally; Google serves that purpose now.

This gets close to what the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next 2.0 report suggests: the newspaper as “local information and connection utility.”

I’m standing by my criticism of much (NOT ALL!) hyper-local content as “boring.” I’ll stop saying that Yourhub Boulder’s content is boring when it starts including content from the school my daughter goes to, and when it also brings me news about my nearby neighbors, and so on.

What about other local news? Am I suggesting that I don’t care about that? Not at all. That’s what my traditional local newspaper website is for. Here in Boulder we have lots of fascinating stuff going on, from adverse possession controversies to naked bicyclists getting a pass while a naked jogging priest gets arrested. The newspaper site is great for that, and I’m devoted to reading it day-in and day-out. It’s the hyper-local sites covering Boulder with their dull content about minor local events and happenings that don’t interest me that I can live without (please).

Just give me the good hyper-local stuff! Then I’ll be happy, and the hyper-local publishers (be they newspapers or independents) will have a business.

This is a complex subject, and I’m glossing over some other possible solutions. For example, I think that having a strong and attractive personality at the center of a hyper-local website can be tremendously effective in gaining an audience and creating a strong community of users. And I think that some of the weaknesses of non-professional content can be dealt with by some professional editorial oversight or help (a pro-am approach). I also think it makes sense for newspapers playing in the hyper-local space to integrate that into the main news website, instead of putting it “over there” in a silo for the “non-professional” stuff. But this has gone on too long already, so I’ll leave those discussions for other days.

I write this with all due respect for my friend Mark Potts, who I’ve known for many years. I’m having a hard time remembering when we last disagreed on an issue. But we’ll have to disagree on this one.

I want to see hyper-local succeed. Who knows if I’m right in my thinking on this; we’ll see as hyper-local plays out. Lots of people are trying to make it work and “crack the code.” What I presented in my E&P column and in my earlier blog item is my attempt at that, and nothing more.

OK, I think I get it now. I feel like I understand what newspapers need to do. I wrote up some of this in my latest Editor & Publisher Online column, but subsequent to that I also ran across a significant blog entry from Dudernet: “Newspapers and why I’ve tired of reading (most of) them.” That blog is by “tball”; I have no idea who that is, but he/she works at a Tribune Co. newspaper and appears to blog anonymously.

The blog item discusses something that’s been bugging me for a while. Most newspapers are focusing on local news, since national and international coverage is a commodity online and they need to focus on what they can do best, and that’s local coverage. But the trouble is, for many people, local news is boring and not relevant to them. And hyper-local (aka, local-local) is even more so.

This is especially so for people who don’t have strong ties to the community in which they live. The U.S., especially, is a transitory society; people move around a lot for jobs, school, and other reasons, and they don’t always feel strongly attached to where they live. Lots of folks are more interested in niche topics and national events than local politics and local news headlines, or they want local news from where they’re from originally. These people are especially unimpressed by coverage of city council meetings and other mundane local happenings in the town or city where they live. It’s the people who don’t move around — who still live in the town where they grew up — that are appreciative of good local coverage.

Here’s a great excerpt from someone (”mccxxiii”) who commented on tball’s post. (This is good stuff.)

“I am fairly young, single, no kids, and no extended family in the large city where I live. I rent because I could never afford to buy here, and I’ll leave in the next couple of years because of it.

“I am concerned with exactly two items of ‘local news’ … when is the dog park in my neighborhood opening, and are there any train delays this morning. I get both of those things more quickly and efficiently from a source other than my local paper. (Dog park project listserv and text message alerts from the train people.)

“It pains me to say that, because I was a newspaper reporter for nearly a decade, and I like nothing more than to settle in for a good read with a bagel and juice in the morning. But pages upon pages of city council minutiae and youth baseball coverage say nothing to me except goodbye. Everything I read about ‘how to save newspapers’ includes the idea of hyper-local, but I can’t think of a better way to turn me OFF.”

Brilliant! This person is pointing you to the way to make hyper-local relevant.

If it’s not obvious to you, the local newspaper serving this individual should be the one serving up the information from the dog park listserv. And the train delays. That it’s not doing that, and is leaving it to others, is major oversight.

To see what newspapers must do to do hyper-local right, look to Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock.com, which digs out and filters real estate listings, crime, government data, news articles, blog entries, and a bunch of other stuff down to the city-block level. That’s stuff that reaches people at a personal level: the crime that happened 2 blocks from my house; the house that sold down the street, and for how much; the bus route change that affects the bus stop I use; etc.

Local newspapers need to figure out how to find the data and information like train delays and dog-park news, then deliver it to the people who care about it. That is the “hyper-local news” that will allow newspapers to renew themselves as important in people’s lives. Right now if you want to find out about train delays, you probably go directly to the train operator’s website; if you don’t know about that site, you go to Google and Google points you to the train schedule page. Local newspapers need to become known as the place to go for the hyper-local information and news that YOU want.

I think this will require several components to pull off:

1. Technology to automate some of the process of combing through public databases and information sources to find all the relevant hyper-local data and news that people within your community might care about. Every newspaper will want to be able to do what Everyblock.com is doing. (Holovaty will release the open-source code to Everyblock when his 2-year Knight Foundation grant period is over.)
2. Staffing at the newspaper that is constantly finding new sources of information, news, and data to feed into the system. These editorial workers should be not only looking for every local source of information to tap, but also finding out from readers and users what they want. “mccxxiii” said he/she wants dog-park news and train-delay schedules. What else do people want and need? Can you get it for them?
3. Personalization features for your website that allow users to specify what they want to know and how to receive it. The default may be news and other stuff that happens within a user-defined radius of a users’ home and/or office address. But the user also should be able to specify custom stuff that they want, such as news alerts about the new dog park. And of course they should be able to choose to receive news and information about topics of interest (e.g., stuff about the local rock climbing scene) that is not tied to a mapped area around their location.
4. Facebook-like features that let a newspaper’s readers what’s going on with their friends, a la Facebook’s Newsfeed. Reinventing Newsfeed-like functionality for a newspaper site may not make much sense, while tapping into Facebook on behalf of your users might.

None of this is meant to suggest that local news isn’t important. It is, and people really do care about significant news that happens in their communities. But when it comes to stuff that’s deeper into the community and of interest only to a small segment, there is a danger with hyper-local of boring your audience. Location, location, location is the Realtor’s mantra; I’m thinking that personalization, personalization, personalization should be local newspaper website editors’ mantra now.

I hope no one reads into this that I am not a believer in hyper-local. To the contrary, I’m a big fan, but I think that for it to gain an appreciative audience — and for it to turn into a business — we need to add the elements that I describe above.

JD Lasica interviewed NYU’s Jay Rosen in the video below, in which Rosen gives an excellent overview of the Mayhill Fowler dual controversies. Fowler was the “citizen journalist” working for Off The Bus who captured Barack Obama’s “bitter about guns and religion” comment and Bill Clinton cursing out an author.

Rosen echoes my own thoughts about how “real” journalists are (over)reacting: The traditional rules of engagement that journalists live by don’t really apply to citizens, who a) don’t care about the rules and b) probably don’t know about them. “Citizens” don’t care about access to public figures in the way that pro journalists do, so they have no motivation to hold back when they experience something worth sharing, as Fowler did on those two occasions.

Citizen reporting threatens the club from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

This is a great quote, by Dan Gillmor (via a Twitter post by Dan Pacheco):

OK, perhaps the second sentence is paraphrased, but I really like it. “‘Dog bites man’ is newsworthy if you know the man, or dog,” so nicely sums up what I’ve been thinking for some time about what many have termed “hyper-local” journalism.

Yes, dog bites man, or 5th-grader hits winning home run, or woman wins teacher of the year award at Smith Elementary are boring items to nearly everyone — but not to the people involved and the people who know them. For the latter group, it’s important stuff.

We now have the technology available online (and for mobile devices) to deliver that boring-to-everyone-but-me stuff to the right people. We don’t need to produce a weekly give-away print product filled with boring dog-bites-man stuff, because we can deliver it to the people for whom it’s important, interesting, and vital — and not bore everyone else.

To critics of hyper-local news or “citizen journalism,” I will argue that it can be powerful stuff when and only when it’s targeted well. I can envision a future — and I look forward to it — when services are available to send me news on my smartphone letting me know that the guy down the street got bit by a dog.

Fascinating story from NY Times today: “For New Journalists, All Bets, but Not Mikes, Are Off.” The short version is that a “citizen journalist” working for Huffington Post’s Off The Bus was talking to Bill Clinton at a campaign rally, and the ex-prez blurted out some unsavory words thinking that he was just talking to an ordinary person, and not expecting his comments to be recorded and broadcast out to the world.

The Times piece has much navel gazing, including journalists bemoaning the “bad form” of a non-professional journalist in “breaking the rules” that reporters have for so long operated under by recording Clinton with a digital recorder without his knowledge. (Though he was in a public place at a public event, so he should have known better.)

Get over it, journalists! In a world where any and everybody can publish what they hear or experience (or record with a camera phone), lots of people are not going to follow old “rules” that they don’t understand or even know about. Bemoaning bad behavior by ordinary folks suddenly thrust into the role of “citizen journalist” shows lack of understanding of what’s happening here.

Politicians, especially, have got to understand that in this new broadband world of ours, everything that they say to anyone is potentially on the record. They can’t know if the person they’re chatting with informally at a campaign event has a blog that will get used to share off-the-cuff remarks, or if they’ll post to Twitter and the politician’s remarks get amplified from there.

Traditionalists in politics and the media can bemoan this “unseemly” situation, but it does nothing to change the reality. Everyone in the public eye needs to be more careful about the words they utter all the time, now that everyone else in the room has a digital megaphone.

This bears repeating and spreading around. It’s a quote from Jay Rosen (NYU, Pressthink) that appeared on his Facebook status today:

“News people who wonder why their industry gets creamed by Google and Yahoo are the same news people who dismiss an idea after it fails once.”

He may be referring to the trashing that Rob Curley’s LoudonExtra hyper-local site for the Washington Post is getting from some quarters. (And if he’s not, he could be!) Yes, “hyper-local” journalism hasn’t worked out yet. (Remember Backfence.com?) But considering that local is what most newspapers have to cling to in an era when national and international news is a free and easily found commodity, they best not give up on figuring out how “local-local” can succeed.

This reminds me of my most recent failure, the Enthusiast Group (2006-07), which aimed to build interactive social communities around enthusiast sports. Just this week I learned that Dave Morgan (founder of Real Media, Tacoda), one of the smartest and most successful media people I know, is becoming chairman of a tennis venture that sounds similar to what we were attempting at EG.

I won’t be surprised if Morgan and his new colleagues figure out to turn passionate enthusiast communities into a viable business. He’s a way smart businessman (Tacoda sold to AOL for $275 million) and I’m willing to bet he’ll find the secret sauce that we didn’t. I suspect many traditional media companies will look at EG’s failure and say, “Don’t want to go there!”

News companies, especially, really need to inject some entrepreneurial folks into their operations. Entrepreneurs fail, learn from it, and move on. They don’t give up.

Please take a look at my latest column for Editor & Publisher Online, posted today: “How to Create Killer Niche Web Sites Without Hiring.” I think the two initiatives I’ve profiled are truly significant innovations that can move the news industry forward.

For lack of a better term, Examiner.com’s Examiners program and the Mail & Guardian’s Thought Leader initiative might be described as “Citizen Journalism 2.0.” Thought Leader’s developer also uses the term “By Invitation 2.0.”

The key point is to leverage citizen media and blogging intelligently by integrating it with traditional journalism practices like (what a shock!) editing and gatekeeping. I’d like to hear your opinions on these innovations.

In my last business, I got to know Granny Gear Productions, organizer of a series of 24-hour mountain bike races around the US. With my old YourMTB.com website, we worked with race organizer Laird Knight during 2007 and recruited a bunch of “grassroots reporters” — volunteers who were racing — to cover the events and post to YourMTB.com.

For 2008, Knight is trying a self-driven variation of what we did last year. What he’s got planned looks like a great combination of social marketing and grassroots media.

First there’s Granny’s Groupies, which is a network of people in the various locations where the races are held who are being asked to get the word out and grow the events. This is spot on in terms of marketing trends, where companies try to get their fans to join in the marketing process using online means. Granny has thousands of ex-racers who are fans of the event series, and some will be willing to pitch in and help with promotion.

More interesting from my media-centric perspective is Granny’s Press Corps. According to Knight, the idea is to recruit several grassroots reporters for each event, who will agree to cover the race and the atmosphere of the event.

During the YourMTB program last year, we asked racers to do the same thing, but were pretty lax about what they should produce: photos, video, blog items, whatever they wanted. Knight is going to try to improve the content by giving the grassroots reporters pre-race, in-race and post race assignments. I think that’s a great idea, and I think he’ll get better coverage than his events got last year. By attempting to more closely control what the grassroots reporters produce, he’s more likely to get top-notch content.

I love grassroots or “citizen” content, but frankly, it can be too dull to retain online users’ interest. Exerting more control and diligent editing can make it as compelling as “professional” content.

One other interesting thing about this is that what Knight is doing is something I believe will happen more and more: Companies will create their own media content, becoming media companies (on top of their core business). We’ve seen that for some time with, for example, pro sports team producing powerful content websites offering coverage that competes with mainstream news organizations’ sports coverage. Granny Gear is doing the same thing.

It makes sense for events like the Granny Gear races, since they don’t often get much media coverage, beyond the standard “there are a bunch of crazy mountain bikers racing for 24 hours this weekend!” stories. For anyone looking for serious coverage of the races, there’s often nothing except what Knight and his crew put on their website. Corporate-sponsored coverage fills the void.

Just got word today that the transaction is complete: My (ex-)business partner and I sold off the websites of our company, the Enthusiast Group, and the money and paperwork came through today. While the company didn’t work out, I’m glad that the websites can live on. Some nice communities formed, so at least we won’t disappoint the people who got hooked on them.

While this wasn’t a financial success for us, I still have some good feelings about what we created. One of the regulars to one of the sites, YourClimbing.com, posted some very kind words a few days ago:

Thanks Steve, Neil, and those at yourclimbing.com

In this season of giving, I would like to give thanks to the visionaries at yourclimbing.com for having the insight to bring such a wide audience of people from many walks of life, age groups, and financial backgrounds together. We are all bound by a love of climbing, that has found an outlet here on these pages. Many of us have found new friends and climbing partners on these pages, we have shared stories of heartbreak, joy, sends, projects, wishes, and areas to climb. However, what we have shared most is a feeling; a feeling of belonging to a community of like-minded people who “get us”. I want Steve and Co. to feel that they haven’t failed with this site, but have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. That have brought us together, and bonded us as a family, and their influence will be felt in many of our lives, for the rest of our lives. There is not anything richer they could have given to us, and while I and most of us are sad to see this site change hands, I’m sure I speak for us who are committed members of this site when I wish them the best in all the rest of their endeavors, and hope they succeed as well as they did with this one. I would love for them to keep in touch through this site, and let us know how they are doing, and hopefully one day I will see them in person, so I can convey my thankfulness for what they achieved in my and many of our lives.”

The deal between MediaNews Corp. and Topix.net, where Topix will host the user comments for web articles on MediaNews’ newspaper websites, is stirring up debate in the blogosphere — especially between Howard Owens and Topix CEO Chris Tolles. (Journalism.co.uk report.)

Owens has gotten heated in his criticism of the deal. I understand where he’s coming from, but my own view isn’t quite as harsh.

First, I’ll point back to an article I wrote for the Poynter Institute several years ago: “The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism.” In that, I outlined the various levels of user interaction that media sites can pick and choose from. User comments were at the absolute bottom of the list; it’s the very least that any website can do to let the audience into the game.

I would argue that while user comments are essential, they can take up substantial resources if you’ve got a lot of traffic and you’re monitoring them closely. So if you’re going to outsource anything on the “social” side of web publishing, user comments would be it.

BUT, working with an outside vendor, there must be good communication with the editorial staff. The vendor can alert the publisher to problems or user comments that require personal attention. And just because a news website is working with a vendor on user comments does not mean that editorial staff members are off the hook. The system should work to alert them to comments on their stories that require interaction with the audience.

I’ll go along with this idea only if the rest of the audience-interaction or social strategy of the news organization is taken seriously — the other things I talked about in that 11 Layers article (and more; that was written in 2005, and much has changed since then).

If any news companies are looking at the Topix offering and thinking, “Great. We can outsource our audience interaction and get back to the news business as usual,” well, that’s nuts. User comments are just one small element of interacting and engaging with your audience.