Category Archives: Citizen Journalism
Flavorpill distills cool for half-million hipsters
The Economist (7/28/2007) writes about Flavorpill and it’s European equivalent, le cool. Flavorpill publishes “free, weekly e-mails that narrow the torrent [of hundreds of cultural events] down to the two dozen [of the] very best.
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Mr Lewis started Flavorpill informally in the wake of the failure, in 2000, of a dotcom start-up. It has since accumulated 560,000 subscribers across 11 weekly publications, including editions in six cities. New York, at 85,000, is the largest. For its part, le cool was founded in 2003 after Ren© L¶nngren, who was working in advertising at the time, encountered Flavorpill on a trip to New York. Based in Barcelona, it now reaches 110,000 readers in eight cities. For now, the two overlap only in London.
Such people are highly attuned to the inauthenticity of culture manufactured in the pursuit of sales, so both Flavorpill and le cool say they are careful to separate advertising from editorial material, and to avoid promotional events. “Our readers can smell PR,” says Ms Hix. But Mr Lewis says that by selecting events that conform to the ineffable tastes of his audience, he has been able to aggregate this elusive group in a form that is attractive to advertisers. Advertisements from the likes of Budweiser, JetBlue and Nokia provide the bulk of Flavorpill’s revenues.
With low overheads, limited marginal costs and eager advertisers, both companies have been able to expand without significant outside investment. Le cool’s Spanish revenues could support the entire company, says Andrew Losowsky, le cool’s editorial director, and advance advertising sales meant the London list was profitable months before it launched at the start of this year. Mr Lewis expects Flavorpill’s revenues to be $4.2m in this, its fourth profitable year. Both companies plan editions in more cities soon.
Some crude math here… $4.2m/560,000 = $7.50/subscriber in annual revenue. Similar to Seven Days NOW, except 7D uses their staff to do the reviews instead of volunteers. All three of these services use email with web back up… that’s Front Porch Forum‘s current distribution model too.
Hyperlocal yada yada… it’s about connecting
Interesting discussion led by Jeff Jarvis about local news online this week… does hyper local matter to 18-35 year olds or not? And, if not, then let’s just declare it dead and move on. Jeff goes the other way and says that hyperlocal is just very hard to pull off and that everyone is interested in it, regardless of age.
Yelvington.com jumps in today and really nails it…
One camp agrees hyperlocal is important. The other thinks local is dead and it’s all about hyper-me. Me, me, me.
Here’s the thing. For most people, there is no difference between hyperlocal and hyper-me, because most real people live very local lives.
I do not. Lately I’m acutely aware of how little I actually live where I live. I have a well-stamped passport, gold status on Skymiles, friends scattered around the planet. I dare not assume that other people are having the same 21st century virtual experience that I’m having with my wifi connections and my global-roaming text messages.
I get the point about hyper-me, I really do, but I also know that most people live locally. And for them, hyper-me and hyperlocal largely overlap.
Human beings need connections. We’re hardwired that way. But modern life gets in the way. TV and the automobile sell us connections but deliver isolation. Stand at a street corner and count the cars with drivers talking on their cellphones. They’re fighting back.
I’m looking at some proprietary research from one city where fully 38 percent of women who were interviewed reported that connecting was their biggest personal challenge.
Virtual connections through a social networking platform are better than no connections at all, but the real opportunity, I think, is in virtual connections that are combined with real connections. Physical-world connections. Hyperlocal space.
That’s what Front Porch Forum is all about. And I don’t doubt the research about women feeling challenged by connecting with other people in this day and age. Check out the unsolicited remarks from FPF members… it all boils down to developing lasting connections with real people… in FPF’s case, with nearby neighbors.
And, good for him for recognizing that he’s not Joe Average. I know of several (if not most) “local” efforts that are designed by national-focused people with little experience of living in community with neighbors, serving on school committees, running a fundraiser for the volunteer fire dept., etc. And they feel that way.
Many of these “local” online services are built for a national collection of locals, thus losing a degree of authenticity. Just like eating at McDonalds among strangers is a fundamentally different experience than bellying up to the counter of a local diner and talking about the Little League playoffs.
Gannett morphing newspapers toward web
Jeff Howe has an upbeat piece in Wired magazine (7/24/2007) about Gannett’s big changes to bring their newspapers into the internet age.
By March 2006, the pieces were in place. The Web was to become the primary vehicle for news, with frequent, round-the-clock updates. The newsroom would be rechristened the Information Center, while traditional departments like Metro and Business would give way to the Digital and Community Conversation desks. Photographers would be trained to shoot video, which would be posted online. Investigations would no longer be conducted by a coven of professionals working in secret. Instead, they’d be crowdsourced — farmed out to readers who’d join in the detective work. Gannett papers would also become repositories of local information, spilling over with data about everything from potholes to public officials’ salaries. “We must mix our content with professional journalism and amateur contributions,” read one of the PowerPoint slides prepared by Gannett execs. “The future is pro-am.”
Howe goes on to look at several of the new features… mom-focused online social networking, public info databases, “Get Published” areas, etc. At least one of Gannett’s 85 dailies is finding success with one piece…
When cincyMOMS [the Cincinnati Enquirer‘s mom’s social networking site] launched in late January, Mitchell was responsible for seeding its discussion areas with posts and moderating forums. After 12 weeks, the site — a blend of forums and user-generated photos — was receiving 40,000 pageviews a day, and demand for ad space was outstripping supply. Initially, cincyMOMS was projected to bring in $200,000 its first year; it made $386,000 in half that time.
Gannett hopes the popularity of cincyMOMS is a sign that a long-lost demographic is coming back to the fold. Only 27 percent of young women read a daily newspaper, and the proportion in Cincinnati who read the Enquirer is even more anemic. Visitors to cincyMOMS may not be more inclined to pick up the print edition of the paper, but as they flock to the Web, advertisers are happy to follow. And more than half of the cincyMOMS advertisers are new to the Enquirer.
The long Wired article offers some interesting insights into our local Gannett outpost, the Burlington Free Press. Its rate of change has been nothing short of remarkable over the last year given its reputation. It’ll be interesting to see which, if any, of these new offerings survive and thrive.
Of the thousands of messages coursing through Front Porch Forum locally, occasionally someone will reference a conventional Free Press article, perhaps with a weblink… that’s great. Besides that, the only other mentions I can recall are when Free Press employees have plugged the paper’s new web features to their neighbors… oh, and some traditional customers are calling for some kind of neighborhood action to protest lousy delivery service lately. And some comments about a recent cost-cutting dust-up about eliminating free parking for the paper’s well-regarded reporting staff…
“While people are angry,” said one veteran journalist at Vermont’s largest daily newspaper, this week “the prevailing mood is one of disgust.”
Times are changing.
Old Media Concern gobbles New One
Pegasus News, a local media site covering the Dallas area, was recently acquired. This is one of the most touted “new media” sites… citizen journalism meets alternative weekly meets web 2.0 gadgets. From its blog…
We’ve just sold Pegasus News to Fisher Communications (NASDAQ: FSCI), a publicly-traded TV and radio broadcasting company based in Seattle. While sales of companies are sometimes viewed as endings, this should be looked upon as a beginning — hopefully the beginning of a lot of cool things for you and for us.
Some call it a first of many such acquisitions… old, established and moneyed companies buying young cash-strapped ones with new ideas and fresh audience.
What if 90% of people blogged?
Cathy Resmer writes about a couple failed local citizen journalism sites today, the Winooski Eagle and…
iBurlington — “Burlington Vermont’s Blog” — a local citizen journalism site, launched in 2005.
Creator Brian Brown had high hopes for the project, which he modeled after the successful CJ community iBrattleboro. In March of 2005, Brown told Seven Days he expected to sign up more contributors and get more traffic than iBrat, if only because Burlington’s a bigger city.
But it didn’t happen that way.
She adds…
Front Porch Forum founder Michael Wood-Lewis was also at the [local bloggers] BBQ. FPF is a neighborhood email newsletter, not really a web-based tool, but it’s definitely succeeding in some respects where iBurlington failed. That just occurred to me as I was writing this post, and it’s definitely something to think about.
Thanks Cathy. I agree. Front Porch Forum seems to defy pigeon-holing… it’s not a blog, not a wiki, not a mail list… what is it?!?! I guess we should come up with some technical term for FPF… but it’s really just something new and different… and successful. While email is our primary distribution method currently, that’s not really what FPF is about… just a vehicle we’re using now.
In a way, FPF is hosting 130 group-written blogs, each focused on a neighborhood and written by a host of contributors/neighbors. Our most active neighborhood forums have 90% of the households on board.
Blogs are small, independent, decentralized, self-appointed, low-capital, etc, compared to traditional media. Well, FPF takes it another step, giving the masses an online platform to share their thoughts and needs with their neighbors through its neighborhood forums. So while starting a blog is much easier to do than starting a newspaper, it’s still not doable for many, if not most, of the population. On the other hand, anyone who can handle email can participate in Front Porch Forum and add their voice to the online conversation.
Backfence Looking Back
Mark Potts, co-founder of Backfence.com, offers an overview of the experience today…
I thought it would be helpful to discuss some of what we learned from Backfence–and why I’m still very optimistic that a similar model can and will succeed. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen the appearance of a large number of different variations and models for creating and operating user-generated, citizens’ media or hyperlocal sites. Like Backfence, all of these nascent efforts are fascinating laboratories—and also like Backfence, none has yet proven to be a successful, sustainable long-term business model. So it’s difficult at this juncture to say what’s “right” and what’s “wrong.” But based on the Backfence experience, here are are a few things I believe are essential for success of a user-generated hyperlocal site:
- Engage the community. This may be the single most critical element. It’s not about technology, it’s not about journalism, it’s not about whizbang Web 2.0 features. It’s about bringing community members together to share what they know about what’s going on around town. A top-down, “if you build it, they will come” strategy absolutely does not work.
- It’s not journalism—it’s a conversation.
- Hyperlocal content is really mundane.
- Trust the audience.
- Focus on strong, well-defined communities… It’s possible to argue, in fact, that a hyperlocal site ideally should operate at the neighborhood level—that even a town is too big.
- Leverage social networking.
- There is most certainly a robust hyperlocal advertising business.
- Keep costs down.
- Partner with a media company or some other distribution source.
- Hyperlocal works.
- Hyperlocal is really hard.
The full piece is certainly worth a look. Almost all the points made here jibe with what we’ve seen with Front Porch Forum since our beta launch last fall, and since our initial flagship neighborhood forum got underway in 2000. Some additional points from Mark…
- [Content] varied from community to community—McLean was heavy on youth sports; Reston had a lot of discussions about local politics. These reflected the interests in those towns.
- Some of our best content was long, back-and-forth discussions about local issues, where the meat was in the discussions. We also had a number of stories from the community that were picked up a few days later by local media.
- We had a lot of posting of announcements and press releases by local organizations, which generally didn’t foment much discussion, but often received a lot of page views as the community checked to see what was going on around town.
- Least expected: The success of our user-generated event calendar, in all communities. It was deep, it was comprehensive, and it was entirely user-contributed.
Yelvington on Backfence and Front Porch
Steve Yelvington writes about Backfence‘s recent closure…
We still don’t know the right scale for doing this sort of thing, and that scale may actually be shifting as more people sign up for cheap broadband and become comfortable with creating and not just consuming content. Backfence cofounder Mark Potts once speculated in a conversation that the right physical community size is under 50,000. We’ve had great debates about that where I work; one point of view says a local high school district can serve as a useful proxy for defining a natural community, but your mileage may vary.
People settle into community levels… think concentric circles. Maybe 150 friends in the inner circle. More like 2,000 in the neighborhood… the elementary school district. Maybe 50,000 is the next hop… the high school level. And so on. Capital wants to centralize and standardize across as many people as possible… think USAToday. People tend toward decentralization and diversity… think distinct neighborhoods or yore with their own corner stores, clubs, ethnic flavors, etc. Front Porch Forum is designed for the neighborhood level.
A successful community model and a successful business model are not the same thing. The tricky part is going to involve finding the intersection. Something like Front Porch Forum might have a great community model but never be able to make a significant profit, or vice versa. Or the right business model might involve delivery of a print component, something many Web-centric developers might overlook or avoid.
With 20% of our pilot city subscribing in our first half-year via word-of-mouth, I remain optimistic about FPF’s evolving business model. Time will tell!
Everybody underestimates how hard and how expensive it is to build a powerful brand at a geographic community level. If you went down the street in one of Backfence’s markets and knocked on doors, how many people would have a strong, clear, positive notion of what Backfence was all about and why they should use it? This is one place where incumbent, offline media may have a great advantage, although in many cases it can’t deliver the message to the targets of greatest opportunity (nonconsumers).
Good point.
About Blog
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more
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