Citizen media

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.

(Oops. Messed up in the original version of this. It’s been rewritten to indicate that this is not a Washington Post project.)

Here’s a great example of how the power of the crowd can enhance journalism: Citizen Journalists, Start Your Engines!

The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin, writing on NewAssignment.net in his role as deputy editor of NiemanWatchdog.org, is looking for volunteers willing to pore over transcripts of recent Congressional oversight hearings. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has begun posting preliminary transcripts of many hearings on its website — a new and welcome development. It means that instead of a 6-month delay for transcripts, the information will become public very quickly, while it’s still live news.

Alas, that’s a lot of words to plow through, so Froomkin is seeing if bloggers and other “citizen journalists” are willing to do some of the work — and find news that traditional news organizations have missed.

Froomkin says:

This is a great opportunity for citizen journalists to become Washington reporters. If you find some overlooked news in these or other transcripts, e-mail me your blog posts or your findings, and I’ll try to make sure that they aren’t overlooked as well.”

This is a great idea.

Travis Henry, editor of Colorado YourHub.com, probably won’t be inviting me out for a beer after work anytime soon. He got pissed off a couple years ago about some stuff I wrote in the early days of “citizen journalism” regarding YourHub. Now he’s back critizing me again after I mentioned YourHub in my latest Editor & Publisher Online column.

What I said in my column is that I think “citizen” or “grassroots” community news websites don’t work well as destination sites, because overall the experience of quality is lacking with grassroots content; ergo, don’t rely too heavily on it without applying good editing and/or combining it with “professional” content. With so much competition from quality content sources on the web, I don’t think a site with a preponderance of average content will make it. That doesn’t mean I think that grassroots media is dead or dying; in fact, I suggested otherwise.

My primary recommendations to those who continue to experiment in the space are to:

• Bring professional content and grassroots content together, so that for a destination site, the overall quality experience is enough to attract and keep a significant audience.
• Do a better job of pulling out and leveraging the very best of grassroots content, and positioning it alongside professional content.
• Figure out how to disseminate the hyperlocal citizen content (the stuff that’s boring to the vast majority of a site’s audience) to just the people who really care about it and for whom it’s important information. That means looking beyond just the core destination site and also focusing on widgets, social networks, map mashups, etc., where targeting is possible.
• Utilize the grassroots contributors in joint projects with professional journalists — aka, crowdsourcing.

I expressed my opinions, based on my experience, and Henry is of course free to disagree. And perhaps he’ll prove me wrong if YourHub becomes a significant destination site for local news and information with the model it’s got.

Part of Henry’s ire, I think, is based on the writings of other media bloggers and critics who followed up on my E&P column. Some of those people twisted what I was saying in order to suggest that the Backfence and Enthusiast Group failures prove “citizen journalism is dead.” I said the opposite, but suggested that some tweaking is in order to turn it into a business.

So I feel unfairly spat upon by Henry’s churlish posting on YourHub. Nowhere did I say that either citizen journalism or YourHub are dead. Let’s set the record straight on that.

Since writing my recent Editor & Publisher Online column on the lessons learned about grassroots media from the demise of my company, the Enthusiast Group, a number of commentators seem to have seized on that to suggest that “citizen journalism is dying.” Combined with the demise earlier this year of hyperlocal grassroots news network Backfence.com and other failures in this realm, we now have a new wave of media people professing that this proves the concept is a failure.

Good grief. My company’s experience proves no such thing. As is clear to anyone who read my column, I suggested that grassroots media is a mega-trend that won’t abate, but I believe that what user content needs to succeed as a business is professional editors to be the ones to sift through it all to find the stuff that people will care about, and technology to identify and distribute content that matters to very small groups of people (e.g., everyone who lives in your neighborhood).

And there’s great potential for news companies to combine user content and user effort in crowdsourcing (aka, pro-am journalism). That will enhance the news product of existing media companies, and perhaps drive new ones.

Also, as the many older “web 1.0″ niche discussion forums demonstrate, unadulterated user content and conversation can drive large online communities. I can think of several in the niche sports space that have been around for years and have developed large and thriving communities. But such forum websites don’t tend to grow into large businesses or attract a lot in the way of advertising; the participants have to be willing to put up with sorting through a lot of crap to find the good stuff, or willing to search for what they want or need. (Good example: Letsrun.com, the premier online community for runners.)

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’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.