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.
Jun 21st, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Came across a fascinating local news site in Wisconsin called Storybridge.tv, which was started by a couple of local TV journalists — a cameraman and an on-air reporter — along with several other staffers who handle the technical and operational side of the business. The site is extremely well-designed, I think, with a front page that has several major video pieces displayed, most of which will play right in the page without requiring you to click to another page.
The pieces in question aren’t exactly earth-shattering in terms of their news value — one recent feature was an interview with a local hot-dog vendor — but there are several pieces that I thought were excellent, including a feature on a woman who has decided to live virtually without any possessions so that she can spend six months hiking the 2,000-mile Pacific Crest Trail. Watching her describe how this took shape after her father died was quite affecting, and proves how effective video can be.
There’s a story about the site in the Madison Capital Times newspaper, and the founders of the site discuss their startup here.
Jun 4th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
As the Wall Street Journal and others reported on the weekend, YouTube has struck a deal with a regional U.S. TV network to run the network’s local content on YouTube and share any advertising revenue with the company — although the exact terms of the arrangement aren’t clear.
While not a huge deal either for the TV industry or for YouTube — which is probably more concerned about the $1-billion lawsuit it is facing from Viacom for hosting unlicensed material — the arrangement with Hearst-Argyle Television is interesting because it is the first revenue-sharing deal with a local TV network.
YouTube will carry news, weather and entertainment video content from five of the company’s TV stations. Hearst-Argyle has 29 stations, including outlets in Boston, New Hampshire, Sacramento, Pittsburgh and Baltimore. They are affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox. Hearst has about an 18 per cent share of the U.S. market, according to the company.
The big question — or one of the big questions — is whether anyone other than local audiences will choose to watch Hearst’s local content (the other big question is whether anyone will advertise on it when it is posted to YouTube). The network said that it expects some viewers might see the appeal — for example, parents of college-age students in another city might watch the local weather or news from their son or daughter’s city.
Daisy Whitney makes a good point on her TVWeek blog: how would someone — who didn’t already know the network content was there — find the Hearst content? It’s one thing to put it up on YouTube, but how do you make sure that your intended audience finds out about it?
Apr 2nd, 2007 | Citizen Media, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Topix, the local news aggregator that is owned by several big U.S. newspaper chains (Gannett, The Tribune and McClatchy), is doing what amounts to a relaunch of the site and adding “citizen journalism” or social media to the mix, as well as moving to a dot-com domain (it used to be dot-net). Founder and CEO Rich Skrenta — who describes on his personal blog how this came out of an attempt to “de-suckify” the site — has a blog post at Topix about the changes, and says:
“We’re now inviting members from our hyperlocal communities to take over the controls and help us edit the news.”
Topix (which recently raised $15-million) has been a bit of a wallflower at the social-media dance — perhaps in part because local news isn’t quite as sexy as national or international news — but as Skrenta’s post points out, the service has been growing fairly rapidly, and contributions from readers (in the form of posting in story-related forums) have also been increasing dramatically:
“We went from zero to 1 million users posting in our forums, and now have over 1,000 active local forums (5 posts/day or more). The traffic is growing 10-20% per month — and now accounts for nearly half of our total traffic.”
Skrenta says that Topix is getting about 37,000 posts a day, and the site was looking for a way of featuring the top 1 to 5 per cent of those contributions that actually add something to the story. Now, anyone can submit a story, or facts about a story, or an opinion, or cellphone photos, and they will be handled by what amounts to an editor.
In some cases, editors will be drawn from the pool of active contributors, in the same way that Wikipedia.org does — but in some cases, stories or tips or opinions will be handled by an editor from one of Topix’s member papers. It will be interesting to see how Topix fares with a model that is also being pursued by Newsvine and (to a lesser extent) Daylife.
Greg Sterling has some thoughts on the relaunch at Search Engine Land, and so does Jason Chervokas at the Social Media Club. Ross Mayfield thinks that there could be some old media-new media acquisitions coming as more media entities realize the benefits of the local community model.
P.S. On a completely unrelated note, Rich Skrenta created the first computer virus when he was 15.
Jan 16th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
Interesting move by a local TV station called KZSW in Temecula, California (yeah, I’ve never heard of it either — look it up on Google Maps if you want). Marshall Kirkpatrick, who was briefly with TechCrunch and is now with Splashcast, says that the station there has started uploading its video to YouTube. And why not? If it’s good enough for NBC and clips like “My ** in a Box” from Saturday Night Live, then why not the local traffic report or cat-in-a-tree report from downtown Temecula?
Marshall links to a story from the local newspaper that discusses the station’s decision. The story says that since December 4, the station has posted about 50 local news and sports segments to YouTube, and nine segments have gotten more than 100 views, including “a ride-along with police in Menifee, snowboarding in Wrightwood and the opening of the new Temecula library.”
Okay, it’s no Lonelygirl15 or Numa Numa dance, but hey — what does KZSW care? They get more viewership for their video virtually free of charge. It’s a no-brainer. As a couple of people have mentioned, both on the PaidContent post about it and the post by Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine, it’s difficult to see how this helps any advertisers the station might have, or brings in any extra money for KZSW.
But so what? Maybe it will drive viewers to the station — and if it doesn’t, no harm no foul. As Edward Fink, chairman of Cal State Fullerton’s Radio-TV-Film department, told the local paper: “YouTube is there and it’s free. If you’re trying to find an audience, why not use it?” Meanwhile, Tom Evslin says broadcast content will move to the web, and we’ll use broadcast towers for Internet access.
