Citizen media

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 (Local advertisers, he points out, remain stuck on the outdated idea that print is significant while online is still experimental, so their money is easier to get for print.)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?

This week I was one of the speakers in a webinar, “Hometown Paper In A Digital World: Serving Local Audiences As Well As Advertisers Through Search And Community,” produced by Nielsen and sponsored by Editor & Publisher. (I write a column for E&P Online.)

Audience members had the opportunity to send in questions for the speakers to answer, but there wasn’t time to answer but a couple during the webinar. I’m going to answer the questions here on my blog, because they were good questions and perhaps you will find the answers useful.

I spent my 10 minutes of the webinar discussing community and external content — in other words, the need for newspapers to step up to the plate in terms of creating online communities, and going “outside of the box” when it comes to the type of content newspapers offer online.

Here are the unanwsered questions:

Why isn’t the content that local newspapers already have, enough?

One of my messages during the webinar was that newspaper websites need to “stop being islands.” The thing with the web is: there’s a wealth of content — news and information — being produced that covers your local community. Local bloggers cover your community, independent of any organization. Public officials blog. Governments and community groups produce new information. There are online discussions going on that are of interest to some members of your audience. Schools produce news and information that goes onto their websites or out in newsletters. And so on.

In short, there’s a huge flow of information about your community that’s happening every day. It’s difficult to keep track of that, and to know when there are bits of this flow that are relevant to you — because it’s something about your neighborhood, or your kids’ school, or your church, etc. Websites like Outside.in and Yourstreet.com are early attempts at tapping into and capturing and filtering this flow of news and information.

So the first part of my answer to this question is that this is a great opportunity to provide a valuable service to a newspaper’s readers — it fulfills a need (that others will quickly fill if you don’t move quickly). Indeed, I would suggest that by not offering this (external) news and information, you’re not fully serving your community.

The second part of my answer is that news consumption habits are changing quickly online. We all know that it’s a simple matter to sample many different news and information sources with a few clicks. Online, there’s not the brand loyalty that news companies enjoyed in the pre-digital era. News aggregators like Google News, Yahoo! News and others increasingly are the way into news — especially for the younger generation who don’t have loyalty to old news brands. New aggregators like Outside.in and Yourstreet.com are entering the picture.

A local news organization is more likely to remain relevant by broadening the information it can provide to its community, becoming a news aggregator itself as a way to stem the need for people in your community to look to other aggregators to get the full picture of what’s happening.

The final part of my answer is that newspapers increasingly are cutting back on staff and newshole. My local paper in Boulder, Colorado, is getting steadily slimmer and slimmer. Its Sunday editions now resemble the old weekday editions. Industrywide, editorial staffs are getting trimmed. The product that newspapers offer is less than it used to be. Tapping all of the freely available news and information sources about your community is a smart way to do more under these trying circumstances.

Adding in bloggers and outside information, volunteer researchers, etc. — how do newspaper editors make sure of credibility? Editing all that content?

It depends on how you use outside information. If you’re accepting submissions of citizen photos from a news event, or eyewitness accounts, to add to staff reporting, it’s smart to do some verification. (You’ve got editors capable of that.) If you’ve got a page that links to independent bloggers from your community, verification is not something you need to do; but you will want to identify the blogger as independent so as not to confuse your online users, and alert them that you cannot verify the accuracy or credibility of the blogger. If the blogger is “featured” by you on an ongoing basis, that implies a relationship, so you will want to have an editor keep an eye out.

If a reporter is utilizing the “crowd sourcing” technique on a reporting project, some verification is going to be part of the reporter’s job.

“Editing all that content” isn’t something you should be doing. Your role is bringing alternative sources of information and news to the community’s attention, verifying that it’s worthy of their attention. I don’t think that you have any business, for example, editing the city mayor’s blog that he/she publishes independently or on the city website.

A lot of this has to do with labeling. Let your readers know which content is from your staff, and which is beyond your control but you are pointing readers to as a service to them (e.g., the independent blogs of soldiers from your community serving in Afghanistan).

It’s easy to ask volunteer bloggers or citizen reporters to help out, but I find that most bloggers claim to be experts but really they’re not. What they say is often libelous and lacks integrity. It seems like it would be a huge task to weed out the riff-raff and come up with content you can use.

I sense in this question (actually, it’s a statement) an attitude of “we (newspapers) know best,” which is not an attitude that will serve you well in the new media environment where “everybody’s a publisher.”

If you’re talking about featuring some selected outside bloggers on your site, then certainly vet those people before you add them to your content package online. And you can choose not to link to some outside sources because you recognize that they’re not credible. (That’s part of the service you provide — linking to the good stuff that’s online about your community.)

I think you paint with too broad a brush when you say “What they say is often libelous.” If you find community bloggers who you think fit that description, by all means don’t link to them. But there’s much of value being published online about your community. You’d be foolish to ignore that (because alternative-media competitors will do it).

Don’t forget, too, that the audience can (and should) be editors, too. There’s a lot of crap on Youtube, for example, but through user rankings, the best videos rise to the top — and it’s become a wildly popular website with traffic that even the largest news sites can only envy. Your audience can report abusive or false content submissions from other users. Verification and rating doesn’t have to rely solely on your newspaper’s editors; it shouldn’t.

How does crowd-sourcing affect journalistic credibility?

Crowd sourcing generally means that a trained journalist is at the center of the project, but utilizes new techniques to tap the knowledge or volunteer work of a crowd of relevant people or experts. As long as the reporter manages the process ethically and operates with accuracy and verification in mind, I don’t see an ethical issue with it.

The Internet and social networks make it possible to reach out, communicate with, and leverage a larger group of people and experts than was possible before, when journalists had limited bandwidth and tools to reach out to sources, or staff assistance with research or sub-reporting tasks.

Ethics are required for both the journalist at the center and for the participants. The journalist may need to educate participants on what is ethical behavior by those in his/her “crowd” who are helping out — and be on the lookout for unethical behavior by those who purport to be helping him/her.

Crowd sourcing and such techniques as social networks for beat reporters are pretty new developments in the reporting field. I’m sure ethical issues will arise as we see more of this.

Can you incorporate YourStreet.com into your site easily?

Here’s the answer from YourStreet.com CEO James Nicholson:

“For news organizations we are planning to offer a white label version of YourStreet. We will create and host a news mapping application with the look and feel of the news organization which could include just that organization’s content or other organizations’ content as well – the feeds can be customized. So news organizations could have the full functionality of the YourStreet site without any of the technical hassles. We are in initial discussions with a few media companies and expect to announce the white label service and the first partnerships in Q1 ‘08.”

The company also is working on a widget that will be aimed mostly at individual bloggers or website owners who want to display a news map with limited functionality on their site, according to Nicholson.

Is pure play online only?

When I used that term during the webinar, I meant media companies that are purely online, as opposed to traditional media companies that have a legacy business to sustain while at the same time are developing online operations.

I’ve always been a believer in transparency when it comes to journalism and to doing business. So I’m going to be open and transparent about what’s going on with me.

This week, we (my business partner, our board and me) decided to close my start-up company, the Enthusiast Group, at the end of November.

We tried to pioneer using a combination of grassroots media (aka, consumer generated content) and social networking as applied to niche sports, creating narrow communities of enthusiasts who we believed wanted a place to connect with each other. The idea worked to the extent of creating that at a nice level of activity on a couple of sites (less so on some of the newer ones), and we have lots of users who love what we do and are deeply loyal to the sites. Alas, we couldn’t grow them fast enough to turn into sustainable businesses before we ran out of money.

(We did also develop a new business model as social media platform provider, but when revenues from that grew too slowly as well — well, 2 strikes and you’re out in this game.)

I don’t think our initial concept is unworkable. Rather, I think that if a media (or brand) company with a sizable targeted audience of enthusiasts takes over our sites and uses them to complement their legacy business, they’ll succeed where we as a small start-up failed.

So if you know of a company that would be a good fit to acquire any of the sites — www.yourclimbing.com, www.yourmtb.com, www.yourrunning.com, www.yourcycling.com and www.yourhorsesports.com — I’d appreciate a referral.

On a personal note, this means a transition for me. I’m looking for the next cool thing to get involved in.

I’m pretty excited about what’s going on in the media business these days, so although I’m definitely bummed about the Enthusiast Group expiring, I’m looking forward to the next thing. I’m just not sure what that is yet.

Also, the Enthusiast Group experience has taught me a lot about social media/grassroots media. (I used to call it “citizen journalism” but stopped using that term.) As I get the time, I’ll be writing about that. I think I have some things to share that will benefit others playing in the social media space.

I did something this afternoon on a couple of my company’s websites that’s probably unusual: I admitted that they’re having a hard time, and asked users of the sites to help out if they’d like to see the sites survive.

Here are the notes: on YourClimbing.com and on YourMTB.com

The short version of our story is that my company’s original model was to be a publisher of social media websites (in other words, sites based on grassroots media and social networking functionality) serving niche adventure and outdoors sports. While the sites have attracted a decent and loyal member base — YourClimbing.com, for example, has 5,000 members and runs at about 100,000 pageviews a month — the growth has not been fast enough for that to be a sustainable advertising-supported business.

So we’ve decided to sell the sites and transition into serving media and brand companies with our social media publishing platform and services. (The sites really needed a strong partner with a big audience to leverage, so an appropriate acquirer can succeed where my small company did not.)

I have mixed feelings about posting these notes. It’s not a comfortable thing to admit your troubles publicly. But, I think there’s much to be gained from bringing in the users of our sites — to tap their ideas (that we may not have thought of) and their collective contacts within the sports that our sites cover. It’ll be really interesting to see if anything comes from this.

Asking for our users’ help fits in well with our larger mission, which has been to involve everyone who uses our sites. They’re not “readers,” they’re truly “users” or “members” who contribute to the conversation and content of the websites. It feels right to involve them.

As a follow-up to the white paper Enabling the Social Company that I published for the Enthusiast Group recently, I’ve written another (shorter) one focusing on one of the most difficult problems faced by nascent community sites: How the heck do you motivate users to post?!

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I do offer 9 tips. Nos. 10 and beyond I’m hoping will come from the white paper’s readers. So after giving the new Talk, Why Don’t You a read, I invite you to submit your own tips to our Facebook discussion forum devoted to the topic.

I’ve been away from my personal blog for quite a while, but the demise of Backfence.com provides a good excuse to start up again…

Condolences to CEO Mark Potts (who had been trying valiantly to keep things going after the management shake-up that had co-founder and ex-CEO Susan DeFife depart the company) and the rest of the Backfence crew.

Because my own career has a big stake in grassroots media, I’m sad to see Backfence go. My company’s websites (YourClimbing.com, YourMTB.com, et al) share some similarities with Backfence — though where its communities were geographically focused but topic-broad, ours are geographically diverse and topic-narrow.

Lots of folks have been blogging about Backfence since the announcement, and at least with just a few exceptions, it’s not being painted as the “end of citizen journalism.” I don’t believe it is. Rather, it’s one of those inevitable setbacks on the way toward wherever our media future is headed.

One thing I think about a lot in my own business — and in thinking about Backfence — is passion. Our sites are all about bringing together people who are passionate about something specific. I think that for any grassroots media site, the only way it’s going to get significant, quality content submissions from an audience is if those people are truly passionate about … something. And on the other side, the audience needs to be passionate about what those passionate contributors are submitting.

To my view, that’s the problem with Backfence and other community “citJ” sites. They’re asking people in a community to write about things in their community that they’re passionate about. (Why else would anyone post something to a local citJ site — unless it’s just posting a press release for self-serving reasons.) But on the audience side, Backfence didn’t have a bunch of people who shared the poster’s passion.

Physical communities, obviously, are made up of people with wildly divergent interests and passions.

So with many community citJ sites, you have stuff like a flower enthusiast posting photos and a passionate report about a flower show — but the majority of site’s audience couldn’t give a hoot about the topic. So the reader experience is one of a bunch of dull content — except for the rare thing that crosses your personal passions.

I’m not sure what the answer is, though I do think that there’s a future for citizen community journalism. Perhaps (as I’ve seen some other bloggers suggest) it will fall to newspapers to carry the ball. My most recent Editor & Publisher Online column — written before the announcement about Backfence — suggests a big role for newspapers in just this.

The short version: Newspapers are cutting back editorial staffs (no end in site), and thus they can’t hope to ever cover news down to the hyper-local level. So newspapers should think about recruiting a new wave of “citizen stringers” to do that for them, by figuring out effective incentives.

A newspaper website doing this eliminates the “dullness” issue of pure community citJ sites. The grassroots hyper-local content augments and supplements high quality content from the professional journalists on staff. The newspaper online reader comes to the site looking for interesting stuff (including hyper-local content about his/her neighborhood, kid’s school, etc.) and finds a broad range of it. Compare that to the Backfence-like community citJ site that’s full of mostly less-compelling content.

Another idea that folks have been blogging about is the notion that no one website or news organization can possibly do it all when it comes to recruiting and publishing hyper-local content. Some hyper-local stuff comes from local bloggers and “placebloggers” operating independently. So, the argument goes, sites like Outside.in which attempt to aggregate all this diverse stuff from multiple sources on the web and then feed it out based on a user’s location stand a good chance of figuring out this hyper-local news thing.

I think that newspapers can play this game too. Why leave it to Outside.in to bring together all the local bloggers and other hyper-local content that’s being created about your community? Newspapers can do that within their coverage area, plus create incentive programs to get original hyper-local citizen coverage coming in. (The first part of this equation also could mean partnering with Outside.in to let them bring you all the stuff revolving around your community that’s online.)

The most compelling reason to me why citizen journalism is not dead is that there’s a need for hyper-local news and information — and newspapers’ cutbacks make it unlikely that they’ll figure out how to offer hyper-local without going to the grassroots.

On one of my company’s websites, YourClimbing.com, a 15-year-old from Tennessee is our most avid member. She’s constantly posting photos and blog items, and chiming in on discussion threads. Not a day goes by that her presence isn’t obvious on the site. She’s won prizes on the site, and been our “Member of the Month.” She’s made lots of online buddies, who even do crazy things like make funny Photoshop montages of her. (Don’t worry, it’s innocuous stuff; we’d intervene if anything got disturbingly weird, and not just funny weird.)

I had to laugh the other day when she wrote in her blog that her dad had banned her, at least temporarily, from being on YourClimbing.com. She was probably spending too much time on the site and not enough on homework. Or perhaps he got nervous about all the YourClimbing.com friends she hangs out with online — some of whom are older men.

(It’s interesting how for people with a shared climbing addiction, age differences don’t seem to matter much online.)

Of course, being 15 years old, she apparently doesn’t listen to her dad. Her site appearances dwindled a bit for a while, but now she’s back on as often as ever. That makes her a pretty normal 15-year-old.

Administrators at Virginia Tech are getting questioned (rightfully) about the way they handled yesterday’s shootings. After the first shootings of two people early in the day, university law enforcement did not alert the campus community while police tried to piece together the situation. When the second and larger round of shootings occurred, most people on campus did not know about the earlier shootings — unless they heard about it via e-mails, phone calls or text messages from friends.

As is predictable in a big story like this, students and faculty on campus throughout yesterday’s tragedy used cell phones and the Internet to trade information and rumors. (Media Daily News has a good roundup story of this phenomenon.)

So, once again, the people who are part of the story use modern technology to get vital information from each other, while official institutions (campus police, university administration) fall back on the old way of doing things: Wait till all the information is gathered and analyzed before issuing a public statement.

Frankly, the world has changed. Just as news media must adapt to this demand for instant dissemination of what we know about a story, so too must other institutions. In hindsight, university officials should have shared what they knew almost immediately, so at least everyone on campus could have been hyper alert to potential danger.

The gatekeeping function in today’s wired (and wireless) world doesn’t make as much sense as it once did, when any eyewitness with a cell phone can be a reporter, and those involved have the means to share what they know immediately.

Here’s an interesting excerpt from an ABCNews.com story about today’s horrific Virginia Tech shootings:

Many students were looking online for information about schoolmates. Some of them established a so-called “wall” at Facebook.com to share what they knew; others turned to MySpace.com.

“Many of us are all worried about our friends, so lets do this. If you are okay!,” wrote a person on Facebook who identified himself as Carlos “Mohawk Monday” Fernandez. “Please update your status in facebook to say something like ‘i’m okay.’”

The campus web system was quickly overwhelmed by e-mail traffic, and concerned online visitors, after news of the shootings broke. Students said they could not get on Virginia Tech’s site for information.

“I’ve talked with dozens of students today,” said Jeff Hancock, an Assistant Professor of Communications at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. He said, “Everyone is using … facebook. I’ve been using facebook to book guests … and VT students are using it to spread word quickly, account for friends and provide support for one another.”

While I’m not sure than any news organization serving Blacksburg, Virginia, or the surrounding area could possibly get enough traction to serve the need that Facebook is serving with this story involving a campus community, this does point out one of the major shortcomings of the websites of “old” media.

When traditional media doesn’t serve the needs of the community — in this case, for people involved in the story because they may have friends or family members at the school to learn the fate of those people — then people turn to services that do. In this case, Facebook.

There will be lessons to be learned from this major story.