Jul 10 2007
Community Journalism inside out
No-one expected Backfence to fail. It was well financed ($3million in venture capital) and staffed by new-media experts led my Mark Potts, who helped found washingtonpost.com and the @home network.
The Backfence staff were totally unencumbered by restrictive notions of journalism as a higher calling: “this is a business, we claim only that. We want no part of journalism as a noble profession because we intend to be market-driven, user-based, advertiser-friendly.” Mark Potts quoted on pressthink.
Back at its launch in May 2005 it’s success seemed assured - well financed professionals set out to exploit the brave new world of hyperlocal journalism, and return with dazzling riches.
But Backfence failed fast.
Many insightful posts examine the reasons for Backfence’s demise. I have no inside knowledge about Backfence, and nothing to add to that discussion. But start-ups that fail tend to do so for essentially the same reason: they run out of money before they learn the lessons that can put them on the path to profitability.
So what lesson might the folks at Bacfence haved learned to put them on that path a little faster? I believe it is a very simple one - “It is very difficult to create a community from the outside”.
Many pundits contrast the failure of Backfence to the success of Baristanet. According to Businessweek baristanet.com is so successful that it is likely to put the local newspaper out of business.
Baristanet was founded by ex-NYTimes columnist Debra Galant. She is very much an insider within the community Baristanet serves: “About half of the New York Times staff lives within my coverage area.” pressthink
So Debra Galant shares a very important characteristic with the founders of YouTube, MySpace and FaceBook - she is a part of the community that she sets out to profit from.
[UPDATE 07/19] In a post mortem at mediashift Mark Potts acknowledges that working from the outside without inside help was probably a mistake “It’s very, very difficult to start from scratch in a community and get to critical mass without help”.
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True, and I’d say, a community I want to profit with. In addition to local journalist, part of what I’ve become over the last three years is an expert on local business, marketing and advertising, and a conduit for business people meeting each other.
Debbie - yes you are correct, “profit with” rather than “profit from” more accurately reflects the role of the journalist as community insider.
Congratulations on your success.
Starting from the needs of the community rather than the needs of the media institutions does create a more promising gestalt. But it does sideline the $64K question. How to create a hyperlocal model that generates profit?
“Back at its launch in May 2005 it’s success seemed assured - well financed professionals set out to exploit the brave new world of hyperlocal journalism, and return with dazzling riches.”
I don’t think that’s true. Certainly the founders did not think their success “assured.” I don’t know who did. If you had said, “it seemed like a good bet,” then yes. But you didn’t.
In November of 2005 Liz George was asking some of the critical questions. She’s an editor with Debbie at Baristanet.com and she wrote her review at PressThink.
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/11/30/lz_bcfc.html
I disagree that “No-one expected Backfence to fail.” I did, even though I didn’t want to seem like a doom-and-gloomer and say so at the time. The basic reason I was skeptical: It was all shell and no heart, no guts. As Jarvis recently said, so simply: “Local is people.” That is why Craigslist works, with its ridiculously minimalistic interface.
Yes I think the old adage”if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all” is in large part the reason for the absence of doubt expressed about the Backfence model
Liz George’s review was actually what prompted my “backfence failed fast” assertion. The tone of the review was “Seven months in and Backfence is not working”.
The betting/horse racing analogy is appropriate. No owner can ever really feel that the victory of his horse is assured, whatever they may say. But in this case the “good bet” fell flat on it’s face straight out of the starting gate. Only VC funding allowed it to limp round the track a couple of times.
Last week lostremote under the headline “Zillow expands into hyperlocal news” offers the “big announcement” that real estate site Zillow is “creating community web pages for 6,500 neighborhoods in 130 U.S. cities“.
Big announcement? Or an overly ambitious press release?
Lost Remote is not alone in its enthusiasm for this venture, but do they really believe that there is even the remotest chance of Zillow fulfilling the potential they claim for it? I predict Zillow’s venture into hyperlocal news will implode even faster than Backfence, and for essentially the same reason.
Isn’t “all shell and no heart” precisely what “scalable models” are about?