Enthusiast Group

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.

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.

Company portrait: Enthusiast Group LLC, Boulder, Colorado (Neal, Liz, me, Ben, Derek, Yann)

My business partner noted an item in Keith Huang’s Blog Watch column of the Wall Street Journal on Monday that talked about one of my company’s bloggers, Katie Brown, and her blog on YourClimbing.com. He saw it in the print edition.

So I wanted to put a link to the column on YourClimbing.com, but of course I couldn’t, because Blog Watch is behind WSJ.com’s paid-subscription wall. That’s problem No. 1.

Problem No. 2: When I went to the WSJ.com version of the column, I discovered the full text of what Huang had written. The print edition had only about half of what he wrote. If I hadn’t looked it up online, I would have missed the main point of the short item. Print editors — no doubt trimming to fit Huang’s prose into the space available around the ads — trimmed the item about Katie so much that it reads like a teaser. Online, you get the full effect.

I’m old enough to remember working at newspapers and being in the “back shop” working with the compositors at fitting stories in the space available. Copy editors in those old days estimated the space needed for a story and scribbled instructions on a layout sheet. But estimates were often off, so you had to go out back and tell a compositor with an Xacto knife what to cut to make it fit.

That this is still being done (albeit, without the “cold type“) feels amazingly archaic to me. Why anyone still reads the print edition of the Journal instead of paying for a (cheaper and more complete) online subscription is beyond my comprehension. (Note: We only get the print edition because the previous tenant of our current office hasn’t cancelled his subscription, so we receive it every morning.)

For reference, here’s the online version of Huang’s column item:

Professional climber Katie Brown, 26, has been scaling rock faces since she was a teenager, making an early name for herself by winning titles in the U.S. and in Europe. She says her blog helps readers “get an idea of who I am as a person, rather than just an image.”

Along those lines, she discussed a recent vacation from climbing, writing that “realistically, climbing for a living, and all that comes with it, in addition to everything else that goes on in life, can be tiring, and I think it’s okay to want to get away from it for a bit, even something as fun as climbing.”

In addition to her writing, she posts video clips, perhaps the most notable a nail-biter in which she falls about 40 feet before an anchored rope stops her. In another post, she accentuates the positives despite failing to reach the summit of El Capitan, a famous 3,000-foot vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park: “When I got to the ground I had the immense pleasure of telling, essentially, the whole world about our lack of success.” Ms. Brown led the ascent most of the way, “something which, a year ago, I would have been far too intimidated to do,” she writes, adding: “best of all, I got to sleep on a wall.” Other entries by Ms. Brown include accounts of climbing trips to Chile and Greece.

And here’s the trimmed print version.:

Professional climber Katie Brown, 26, has been scaling rock faces since she was a teenager, making an early name for herself by winning titles in the U.S. and in Europe. She says her blog helps readers “get an idea of who I am as a person, rather than just an image.”

In addition to her writing, she posts video clips, perhaps the most notable a nail-biter in which she falls about 40 feet before an anchored rope stops her.

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.

Today is a personally significant one. You see, I’m moving out of my home office into a real office for the first time since December 1993! That was when I left my last “traditional” office job (at the San Francisco Chronicle). The only other time I spent in an actual office was on my several-time-a-year, week-long trips to Florida during the several years that I worked for the Poynter Institute. (Poynter let me work mostly from my home in Colorado.)

But today my company, the Enthusiast Group, moves into some sublease space just off Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall (and across the street from another office building I worked in many years ago, that of the Boulder Daily Camera).

While EG remains a small enterprise, we have graduated to the founders needing more time together in the same place. Home offices are great, but sometimes even today’s technology isn’t enough to keep the lines of communication open enough to grow a company properly.

Yeah, I’ll miss my 50-foot commute, for sure. On the other hand, our new digs feature lots of cool restaurants just out the door, plus a spectacular view of Boulder’s Flatirons and the mountains. It’ll be OK.

During my blogging hiatus I failed to mention that my company, the Enthusiast Group, has debuted its second website: YourClimbing.com.

Take a look! Enthusiast-in-chief Katie Brown (one of the world’s best climbers and former competitive climbing world champion) has already published some very cool content, including a great blog, Katie Brown’s Rock Talk.

We’re looking forward to reading and hearing more from Katie. Her climbing buddies are some of the best climbers in the world, and reading about her adventures is fascinating even to non-climbers like me. Katie will be climbing Yosemite’s El Capitan in September, and she’s planning to use her cell phone to call in blog items and (if the reception is decent) podcasts from the wall.

The model for YourClimbing.com is the same as for our first site, YourMTB.com. While Katie provides some nice professional content to anchor the site, YourClimbing.com is primarily about being a place for climbing enthusiasts and athletes to share their adventures, photos and videos.

If climbing and mountain biking aren’t your things, maybe running is? YourRunning.com will debut in September, and you can sign up now to get on the announcement list.

Whoa! That was a long time between blog posts. Y’know, sometimes you get so busy that it’s hard to keep the old blog going. … OK, I’m back at it. (Not that I’m any less busy, but I really do miss blogging when I take a too-busy-to-blog break.) Anyway, here’s something interesting from my company’s YourMTB.com site.

It’s fascinating, in a citizen media based site like YourMTB.com, to watch how people use it. After all, as publisher of the site, I don’t really have control over how it’s used — other than to reject stuff that crosses over a line (that is, violates our terms of service).

So, one of YourMTB’s users, Fugie, has used the Buy & Sell forum on the site to post notices about coupon codes that he’s run across that can be used by fellow mountain bikers. Here’s an example, where Fugie alerts fellow bikers that they can shop at Nashbar.com (a major online biking retailer) and use a code to get free shipping.

Cool! I hadn’t thought of or expected that sort of use for the site’s forums, but that’s great. I’m sure other users appreciate Fugie’s thoughtfulness in sharing that information.

Something I’ve thought ever since this project’s inception was that I want the users of our websites to guide future development. Sometimes that will be in the form of direct feedback sent to us (“Why don’t you add this feature?”); other times it will be in observation by us of how our members use the site (as in this case). Perhaps we should add a Forum area specifically for this kind of coupon information sharing.

In my company (the Enthusiast Group, publisher of a network of citizen-media-based online communities revolving around adventure and participant sports), I get to work with some very cool people — many of them athletes, of course.

There’s Walker Thompson, who is enthusiast-in-chief of our YourMTB.com site. He’s a semi-pro bike racer and all-around fun and creative guy.

There’s Katie Brown, enthusiast-in-chief of YourClimbing.com (which we’re about to unveil, I hope on Wednesday), a professional climber and former world competitive climbing champion.

And there’s Brad Feld, lead investor in our little enterprise. Brad’s a venture capitalist, but he’s also an avid marathoner whose goal is to run 50 marathons in 50 states, and a marathon on every continent, by the time he’s 50. Today, we learned that Brad is going to run in the North Pole Marathon next April. Yeah, you heard right, there’s going to be a marathon at the North Pole. Wow. Brad blogged about it today.

Lots of folks squawked about Galker Stalker, the celebrity sightings on a Google Map feature from Nick Denton’s Gawker blog. Next comes something considerably more benign from Microsoft: Celebfavorites.com, which identifies celebrities’ favorite hangouts and adds them to Microsoft’s new mapping website, Windows Live Local. No real-time celeb spotting, just a list of places where they like to hang out.

As the Washington Post reports, the celebs are in on the game; they agree to list their favorite haunts in exchange for a donation by Microsoft to their favorite charities. It’s not quite as edgy as Gawker Stalker, to be sure. But it does seem to indicate a trend.

My company, in a more modest way, is tapping the trend. With our YourMTB.com site, we’ve created a map showing where enthusiast-in-chief Walker Thompson is riding: Where in the world is Walker MTBing? It uses the service Platial.com for the mapping.

I don’t think anyone will be stalking Walker on his rides with this, but perhaps a few mountain bikers will know to watch for him and say hi when he’s on their favorite trail.