Jul 5th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
The local “citizen journalism” entity Backfence is closing the doors on its network of 13 sites, according to a post at PaidContent. Backfence CEO Mark Potts told PaidContent’s Rafat Ali in an e-mail that the investors are “continuing to talk to potential buyers or new investors, but have decided for business and operational reasons to shut down the sites rather than operate them without sufficient support.”
PaidContent also links to a long piece in the American Journalism Review about local online journalism and Backfence, which has a troubled history. I last wrote about it in this post entitled “Backfence around a ghost town.” Peter Krasilovsky at The Kelsey Group has some thoughts about the closure, and so does my pal Kent Newsome. And Ashkan at HipMojo wonders whether it wouldn’t be better if newspapers took a stab at some citizen journalism themselves — but admits that would be a difficult mix of cultures (and I would have a tendency to agree).
Pete Cashmore says Backfence marks the death of citizen journalism, but gets taken to task in the comments section of his post. And one of those commenters — a former employee at Backfence — puts forward an interesting idea: what if Craigslist.org started adding some aspects of “citizen journalism” to its local sites? A very interesting idea indeed. Any comment on that, Mr. Newmark? And Jeff Jarvis makes some good points in this post.
Jul 4th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Rory O’Connor of Alternet has a good summary of a recent international gathering of “citizen journalists” organized by OhMyNews.com, the pioneering Korean open-source journalism effort. As O’Connor puts it:
In the wake of such recent citizen-mediated news events as the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, the London train bombings, Senator George Allen’s political suicide, the Virginia Tech massacre, et al, the real question is why anyone would still wonder about the possibility, much less the efficacy, of so-called ‘citizen journalism.’
In addition to Dan Gillmor — whose own attempt at local citizen journalism, Bayosphere, didn’t quite work out and eventually had to be shut down — Vancouver’s own Michael Tippett of NowPublic.com spoke at the conference (O’Connor misspells Michael’s name as Tippit). And the founder of OhMyNews.com said in his opening address:
“The question looming large is increasingly less about ‘digital opportunity’ and more about how we can best manage the abundance of content, Web platforms and user participation”
Indeed.
Mar 27th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | 2 Comments
The Knight Foundation has launched a website aimed at helping “citizen journalism” or community media operations find resources and best practices. Called the Knight Citizen News Network, it’s managed by J-Lab — the Institute for Interactive Journalism — with content created in part by Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media and by Amy Gahran of I, Reporter (as well as Right Conversations and the Poynter Institute’s E-Media Tidbits).
There’s a press release with more info here. The resources at KCNN.org include:
And (gratuitous Canadian reference) the site was designed by Hop Studios out of Vancouver.
Feb 16th, 2007 | Citizen Media | No Comments
From the OUT-LAW blog comes news that Scoopt — the site that takes cellphone snapshots and other “citizen media” and tries to commercialize them — decided to pass on some home videos of the British Royal Family that somehow came into its possession. The company apparently decided that publishing the video would have represented an invasion of privacy that wasn’t justified by any “news value,” and also that it might face legal issues.
Kyle MacRae of Scoopt told the legal issues blog: “Essentially it was private pictures and videos of the Royal Family taken for a particular event that through some bizarre sequence of events ended up with somebody who sent it to us.” He said his initial instinct was that the video could be “pretty valuable,” but on further reflection he decided against trying to market it.
“We don’t own the copyright nor do we have any legitimate licence to that copyright, nor does the Scoopt member who sent it to us. Do we have an over-riding public interest story? Is it worth it?”
“In this case it was just completely harmless, it was innocuous, it was nice [so] we weighed all that up and 24 hours later we just decided we weren’t going to handle this.”
Scoopt acts as a broker for people who have cellphone photos or videos, and tries to sell them to newspapers, magazines, websites and other media. The service was set up about 18 months ago, and splits any revenue 50/50 with the owner, who keeps the copyright to the content. One of its successes was the sale of a photo of the airplane that baseball star Cory Liddle crashed into the side of a New York skyscraper last year.
Jan 6th, 2007 | Citizen Media, Social Media | 4 Comments
I wish I could say I was surprised that all is not well at Backfence, the local “citizen journalism” site, where the second of the co-founders, CEO Susan DeFife, just left (the first, Mark Potts, left a few months ago) and about a dozen employees — out of a total of 18 — are being let go, according to a post by Peter Krasilovsky.
Potts is to act as interim CEO while the company tries to restructure itself, according to the post at Local Onliner. DeFife says that “Ultimately, we did not share the same strategic vision for the company as the board of directors.” The company got $3-million in financing in 2005 from a group of venture capital funds, including the Omidyar Network. Apparently, Backfence’s backers didn’t think things were going well, and pulled the trigger.
I don’t live in the areas covered by Backfence, which has 13 sites in three metropolitan areas (Washington, Chicago and the Bay Area), but I have taken a look at it from time to time because I’m interested in local citizen journalism efforts — and spent a bit of time looking at Backfence after it absorbed Dan Gillmor’s failed local CitJ experiment, Bayosphere, which I wrote about here. And it certainly never seemed like a thriving entity to me.
Like Frank Barnako, who has written about it here and who also wrote skeptically about it about a year ago, it just seemed stale and unappealing to me, not to mention a little bit like a ghost-town. I would agree with Frank that in order to draw people in, a local site has to live and breathe the area it covers, and have lively personalities and content. And maybe giving citizen journalists some financial incentive might help too.
How all that happens exactly, I don’t know, but it is possible to do local journalism — SunValleyOnline.com seems to be doing well, and so does Baristanet.com. And the Fresno Bee, owned by McClatchy, just finished acquiring a couple of local sites that seemed quite successful: ModestoFamous and FresnoFamous. Did the founders sell because it wasn’t a viable business, or did McClatchy want them because they had something the chain needed? Perhaps a combination of both.
In any case, I will leave it to others to decide whether Backfence failed because it took the wrong approach, or because local online journalism doesn’t work. My bet is on the former rather than the latter. Howard Owens has also written about the recent news, as have the gang over at PaidContent.
Update:
Tish Grier, who comments below, has written a post about local content and monetization here, and Fred “A VC” Wilson has written one as well talking about how he believes it isn’t about trying to attract a community but about aggregating posts from a community that already effectively exists — and I believe he is right. Someone is going to do that, either the local paper or a startup (or both put together, as the FresnoFamous case illustrates).
Update 2:
More on the saga here at Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment, and at Citizen Media Watch, where blogger Lotta Holmstrom got an email from Mark Potts about the restructuring of the site, and later did a short email interview with him. Greg Sterling also talked with Potts about the restructuring and some of the strategic changes he wants to make, and wrote about it here. And Robert Niles has a great look at building communities online at the Online Journalism Review, entitled “Fake grassroots don’t grow.”
Update 3:
The New York Times had a piece about a network of local “citizen journalism” sites called American Towns, but not everyone was impressed. Tish Grier, for example, said that American Towns is more like “citizen shovelware.” Good one, Tish. And according to a story in the Washington Post, Backfence appears to be headed down the tubes: One angel investor said that arguments between backers and founders has “destroyed the company” and that it has “downsized to a modest team of people and they’re out of money.”
