A pioneer in this format, The Gotham Gazette has featured games about New York City policy issues that are an effective and entertaining way for users to weigh decisions and deal with consequences.

Online Journalism Review spoke to Gotham Gazette Editor-in-Chief Gail Robinson about what makes a successful game and why they work well for journalistic sites. Proving good games can be built on a modest budget, Robinson discussed why simplicity works but dumbing down doesn’t.

Online Journalism Review: How did you first become interested in utilizing games at the Gotham Gazette?

Robinson: In 2002 there were a lot of discussions about what to do with the World Trade Center site, so we created a game [Ground Zero Planner] to let people try to envision what they wanted the site to look like, and we got quite a good response.

We’re very focused on New York City policy, and we try to make the material accessible and interesting to people, not just to policy wonks or people who work for city government or bureaus. So our games [become] almost a story set to a game.

OJR: How do you actually conceptualize and build these games?

Robinson: As the editor-in-chief, I’ll be involved and we have a technical director and a design director. We don’t have an illustrator on staff and we’ll probably get [a freelancer] to do the technical work. But probably the writing and content will all be done in house.

OJR: How involved are the journalists on staff in the creative process?

Robinson: In the past we were very involved. [For example] The Budget Game sort of jumped out at us. The city was having a lot of problems after 9/11, so we thought it would be good to dramatize that by letting people make choices with the caveat that because the city was legally required to balance the budget, you couldn’t play the game unless you balanced it.

There were other similar games, so we did a lot of research and played a lot of other games. And then we came up with assignments and writers were assigned to various aspects. I’ve written a lot about education so [I researched] how much would it cost for x number of teachers.

OJR: What kind of content works well when it’s incorporated in this game format?

Robinson: Almost anything can work with a game if you have an intelligent way of flushing it out– I think it’s important to not be too complicated. That doesn’t mean you can’t have people making lots of choices, or you can’t have graphics and animation. But I look at some games where I feel like they’re asking me to do too many things, to play too many roles.

OJR: You do have a consistent thread of simplicity that runs throughout your games.

Robinson: What we tried to do was create something simple that would show people the story but would still be fun to play. I think you get a lot of that enjoyment partly through the animation and the way you present material.

The infrastructure game called Breakdown is basically a glorified quiz. But we had a wonderful clip of animation showing ways that New York was going to crumble under it’s own weight. And my son who was then 11 (who I don’t think has a lot of interest in New York City infrastructure) loved that animation and played the game several times and then he showed it to his friends. I think that indicates how you can build something straightforward and still make it a lot of fun.

OJR: Can games stand alone as a good storytelling technique or are they best purposed as part of a package?

Robinson: I think they can stand alone. For example, someone can make a decision about something like how to build an affordable housing project in New York. Just by playing the game, the user would probably learn about some of the tradeoffs and then could click on things for more information.

In our case the story is sort of behind the game, and it can be incorporated into the game itself or it could [stem from] a separate article. We’ve actually done both here. The Judges Game [was inspired by] the big probe of whether the bench is basically bought and sold. It had actually started out as an article and then we built the game.

OJR: The games on your site are effective because they help users to understand the consequences of their decisions.

Robinson: Right, that’s what we’re hoping for. That was a big thing with the budget game. People say I don’t have a cop on my corner and why is my child is in a class with 20 students and why are my taxes so high? And this is a really good way [to illustrate that] because you see the money go up or down. You see what things cost to make it clear that you couldn’t have both really low taxes and pay for really tiny classes.

OJR: Do users expect to win when they play games? What kind of reward do they expect aside from obtaining information?

Robinson: We haven’t had winning in these games. For example there’s obviously not a right way to plan Ground Zero, and if there is one the city still hasn’t discovered it. As for winners and losers, my sense is we would like to try both models and determine what people prefer. Part of the Knight project (in general) is to get information out there that other people can use.

On games where people don’t win we hope we’re offering an educational tool. We’re also hoping to get answers back from the readers that we will share with decision makers in the city and [incorporate the responses] into articles.

OJR: From your standpoint what are the technical challenges of building a news game?

Robinson: Knight wants everything to be open source here and that’s probably our biggest challenge. Most games are done in Flash and we can’t use Flash.

OJR: What are some of the games you’re considering now?

Robinson: All the games are pretty tentative at this point because we’ve always let the news dictate the games to some extent. We’ve always had a news peg on the games.

One of the games we’re considering is related to garbage in New York. It’s an endless issue here and it’s one of those situations where there’s no ideal wonderful solution.

In the course of this grant there will be two important political campaigns, one being the presidential and congressional race. Then as the grant ends in 2009 we’ll be right in the middle of electing a mayor, so we imagine we’d somehow want to address that.

OJR: Have you learned anything about what doesn’t work with these games?

Robinson: I think they do have to be clear. I think we have one game that didn’t work–The NYC Preservation Game–although I’m not sure all my colleagues agree with me. I think we could never really decide what exactly we wanted to do with it. We could never figure out if it was a quiz where you’re trying to decide what makes a building a landmark or if you’re playing landmark commissioner.

So it just seems to be that the game has to be well designed and have a clear purpose, whether you’re playing a role or making decisions.

OJR: How do you strike the balance between entertaining and the balance of delivering the news?

Robinson: I think you can do both [if] you keep information very solid. Don’t talk down to someone just because it’s a game. You can put people in interesting, genuinely challenging situations.

Also I think the visuals on these games are enormously important. You’re not debasing the information if you have really clever animation. You’re just engaging people in another way. If you put a really ripping, entertaining lead on a news feature you’re going to pull people into the news feature who might not normally want to read about that subject, and it certainly doesn’t downgrade or dumb down the information that follows.

OJR: How can indie web publishers add a game element to their site if they lack the budget and have technical constraints?

Robinson: That’s one thing I think that Knight is hoping we’ll come up with ways to do. [All the grant winners] are going to be writing, blogging and sharing ideas with each other about that. I assume the plan is to make those ideas available to people. I hope people can learn from what we did right and also learn from our mistakes.

Describing itself as a national foundation with local roots, the Knight Foundation has pledged an additional $5 million for the next four years to continue to award such community-based digital innovations.

OJR talked with Gary Kebbel, journalism program officer for the Knight Foundation, to find out what distinguished the winners, the implications for the future of digital media and why, if you have an idea or project and 20 minutes to complete an application, you could be among the next series of winners.

Online Journalism Review: How did this News Challenge come about?

Gary Kebbel:It came about because the president of the foundation, Alberto Ibargüen, is the former publisher of the Miami Herald, and in that role, he tried to put the paper on the Web. He analogizes that to trying to make a movie out of a book. Unless you’re native and taking full advantage of what the medium has to offer, trying to transfer information from one medium to another doesn’t always work.

He also thought that declining circulation and advertising in newspapers carried implications far beyond just lack of readership. Newspapers helped to identify what it meant to be a Miamian or a Philadelphian, and they helped identify problems and brought the community together. So [how] can this community organizing be done in cyberspace?

OJR:How is the amount of each grant determined?

Kebbel: Every individual determines what they feel their project would need. As the process went farther along, we would ask more specific questions and eventually the [finalists] created a line item budget.

We didn’t think it was necessary to make people go through that in the early stages. We wanted it to be easy to apply. If you know what idea you’re proposing, the application process takes about 20 minutes.

OJR: The main winner, the Center for Future Civic Media, was awarded $5 million. Their goal seems to be broader than any of the others, so what will be the tangible result of their project?

Kebbel: The MIT Media Lab will come together with the studies of sociology, psychology, political and cultural science to develop new processes [for gathering community news] and [assess] what mediums and technologies they can bring to solve those problems.

OJR: So it’s basically trying to catch up these communities with new technology?

Kebbel: Yes, to bring new technology to the community or old technology to the community in ways that people hadn’t thought about before. They’re going to be working with all the communities individually to find out what issues they should be solving.

The [Center for Future Civic Media] will also be hosting all of the other News Challenge winners at MIT for education, discussion and conferences that everyone will attend.

OJR: So these winners will be checking in with each other throughout the course of their project development?

Kebbel: Yes, that’s very important to us–that these winners develop a community of their own. Just because they’re experts doesn’t mean they’re only experts in their particular fields. They’re all experts in digital media so if one of them has a problem in one area, they’ll be able to talk to four others who might have a solution.

OJR:Adrian Holovaty won $1.1 million for his open-source software idea. What stood out about his project?

Kebbel: First of all, it’s an extension of his current ChicagoCrime.org, but it’s Chicagocrime.org on steroids. It’s going to take every possible public database that makes sense–whether that’s global or regional or national–and combine it in a way where you type in your address and you find out everything going on on your street or in your neighborhood. You can find out where there’s a new school proposal, or where a restaurant is going to be shut down, or if the city has decided to change trash pickup regulations.

OJR: Like Holovaty, the winners already have some momentum behind their projects. Is it crucial for the winners to have already established themselves in some way?

Kebbel: The competition had various categories. One category was for ideas and those are represented in the blog entries. They didn’t have projects underway but they had a great idea that might get underway someday.

OJR: What about these blog entries stood out?

Kebbel: These winners … wanted to share and educate in a particular area, and to create a sense of community in a specific geographic area. The project had to have these elements and anything that was developed as a result of that project had to be open source. That’s one reason why we probably did not have applications from newspapers.

OJR: Rich Gordon (Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University) has created a project designed to teach students both technology and journalism. Why is it important for the next wave of journalists to be technologically proficient?

Kebbel: We’re not saying that every graduating journalism student should also be an expert in programming. What we are saying is that it would benefit that any organization, and in particular computer scientists who love and understand journalism.

So if an online newspaper wants to create a product, a lot of times they have a great idea, but they don’t have the technical expertise to carry it out. What we’re thinking is that if there were more people with both the journalistic knowledge to understand what makes a good story and the expertise to carry it out then [news] organizations would benefit.

OJR: MTV’s project won $700,000 to fund cub reporters [Knight Digital Youth Journalists] who will cover the election with video spots designed specifically for distribution on cell phones. Is packaging what made this project stand out?

Kebbel: Actually, what made it stand out is that you have this organization that traditionally knows how to reach the youth audience and …with packaging including cell phones, we want them to create a story for themselves and by themselves centered around issues that are important during an election year. I think the project will be enormously important in defining what is of interest to [this audience] and how best to reach them. So one of our goals for them is to learn a lot about the production and how to package stories on mobile phones and media.

OJR: Other projects, including Geoff Doughtery’s ChiTownDailyNews.org, are designed specifically to advance citizen journalism.

Kebbel: With the ChiTownDailyNews, one of the things that’s important is adding to the recruitment and training of journalists. It’s interesting because we haven’t seen that sort of blanket application focused on [so many specific communities].

OJR: Are there any other winning projects that stand out to you?

Kebbel: Yes, one area is games. Three different grants [Gail Robinson/Gotham Gazette, Paul Grabowicz/UC Berkeley and Nora Paul/University of Minnesota] will approach storytelling through games in different ways.

Another is the “incubator centers” [created by Dianne Lynch] based out of Ithaca College and includes six other academic institutions working together to try to solve journalists’ problems in digital newsrooms. It will bring together [a cross-section that includes] engineering, marketing and journalism students to try to solve a real problem [occurring in a digital newsroom].

OJR: Is there anything missing from this year’s winners that you’d like to see next year?

Kebbel: Our goal for next year is to have more quality applications from young people. And as a result, we setting aside $500,000 for a special category to award ideas and projects created by young people.

Our other goal is we hope for more international applications, and as such we are advertising the News Challenge in nine different languages this year.

OJR: Will anything change about the application process?

Kebbel: The application process will be much more open in the coming year. Applicants will have the opportunity to choose to go the open route or a closed route.

If you go the open route, you post your application on the Web and anyone can post comments about your project, and they can rate it. Let’s say your application gets 27 comments, and you decide some are good ideas and incorporate something that would strengthen your application. You can then resubmit an application that incorporates those comments.

Kelly’s column notes that the contractor wanted to sue Angie’s List, but that his lawyer told him it was protected. The statute most likely being referenced is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which essentially protects Web publishers from comments posted by users on their sites.

But the negative impact for review sites as a result of this sort of incident is exactly what concerns Bob Nicholson, vice president of marketing and business development for Ratingz.net, a company whose umbrella of review and ratings sites includes RateMyProfessors.com, RateMDs.com and RealEstateRatingz.com.

Nicholson says the company’s sites continually receive threatening phone calls and letters in reaction to the negative reviews garnered by its members.

Armed with marketing budget and media contacts, Nicholson says professionals can take an aggressive stance against review and ratings sites. That’s why he’s spearheading an effort to organize these sites by forming a trade association for ratings and reviews websites.

OJR spoke to Nicholson about the legal issues and cases brought against the publishers of these sites, the need for codes of conduct and why ratings sites deserve a positive spin in the press.

Online Journalism Review: Comments and ratings posted on review sites are usually anonymous. Is that crucial to a successful review site?

Bob Nicholson: People are hesitant to share their opinions precisely because of retributions, so I think it’s important for people to share their opinions with some confidence that they’re not going to be sued for what they say.

OJR: To play devil’s advocate, if people are saying that something that’s true, then why be afraid to put a name behind it?

Nicholson: In our system of justice, you can be accused of anything. Even if your defense in court is the truth, being sued can still cost thousands of dollars in legal defense, even if you ultimately win the case. Many people don’t want to deal with that.

So we’d see a real chilling effect if people are afraid to post their opinions. If RateMyProfessor.com hadn’t allowed anonymous postings, students certainly wouldn’t have shared opinions about professors because of fear of retribution.

OJR: Have any lawsuits been filed against your company?

Nicholson: None of the [sites] has actually been sued. We regularly get threatening letters and phone calls. But we have quite strong legal protection in the form of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which basically says that we are immune from the liability for content posted by third parties on our website.

If someone wants to sue the person who posted the content, they have to go through a two-step process. First, they have to get information from our company about who posted the content, and really all we can give them is an IP address and time of posting because that’s all we have. And they need to get a court order in order to have us divulge that information, which we have done on a couple of occasions. Then they need to get another court order to go to the Internet service provider and find out who was using that IP address at that time.

Sometimes a person who posts a negative review will post enough information in the review that it’s kind of self-identifying, and there’s a reasonable cause of action. In that case, the party who objects to the review can bypass all of these steps and file a John Doe lawsuit claiming that they believe this person is responsible for these postings.

OJR: How should reviews be monitored?

Nicholson: We tend to air on the side of letting posts go through. We do remove posts that have derogatory racial or sexual comments. We also remove posts that include personal identifying information about the poster or third party.

If a post includes specific allegations of illegal actions, we delete that too. Our position there is if you have knowledge of specific legal actions, a ratings and review site is not the place to post that information.

For example, if someone posts something that says, ‘this auto mechanic says that he fixed my carburetor and he didn’t fix it at all. He didn’t do what he said he was going to do,’ that’s a complaint about service. On the other hand, if he posts something that says, ‘this auto mechanic gave me a written quote and then before he would give me my car, he gave me a bill for another item which does not match the quote,’ that’s an illegal action.

OJR: But as a reader of review sites, boy, would I want to know about that mechanic before I took my car there. So do you allow some of those posts or how does it work?

Nicholson: We do and it’s subjective and difficult because we have moderators and we provide guidelines for them, but sometimes the moderator may interpret the rule differently in a particular case than I would interpret the rule. So we have guidelines that we try to apply on the sites that we manage, and it’s by no means universal and other sites have different guidelines or standards.

OJR: How would a trade organization unite ratings sites?

Nicholson: One of the things that we want to do is provide a source of information the press can turn to for the other side of the story, which is that individuals really need a voice. They need a place to share their opinion, and where they can hear about what other people have experienced. They need to have something that balances the marketing power of professional associations by giving individual consumers the ability to express themselves and learn from other consumers.

OJR:What would a professional code of conduct for ratings sites include?

Nicholson: That’s really premature to talk about. I think one of the things we need to do is as we build the organization is to get the various companies involved in deciding that.

OJR: How do you draw guidelines for posts?

Nicholson: Well that comes down to the individual company and site philosophy, and I do think that it’s important that sites be open and public about what their standards are so you can understand how posts are being filtered.

In our case we’re very careful about deleting things because we don’t want to bias the ratings with our feelings. People express themselves differently. We see a very different review and type of language on our nightclub site than on our camp ratings site. If we try to apply our biases, I might filter out a lot of the ratings on our nightclub ratings site because of the language, but for that audience it’s valid discourse–

OJR: So you don’t want to disrupt the culture of whatever the product or the service is–

Nicholson: Yes. We also put a lot of faith in people as readers. When you’re reading reviews that people have posted, their language will influence you and you’ll interpret what they’re saying partly based on how they’re saying it. Do they seem like they’re crazy and vindictive or do they seem reasonable and are giving a balanced review?

We don’t prefilter the content because you can form your opinions just as well as a moderator will make any decision as to what to let you say.

OJR: How does a user trust that reviews are legit?

Nicholson: Through a combination of software filters and instructions to our human moderators, we do try to filter out that type of abuse. We give our moderators instructions to look for patterns that computer software would have a difficult time seeing. For example, do I see the same phrases being used? Do I see the same language used over and over again? Do I see reviews submitted for five different Realtors within the same geographical region that uses very similar language to say this Realtor’s terrible? Then the suspicion is that maybe a realtor in that area is systematically slamming his competitors.

We also have faith in the site visitor to look at the reviews and say, you know all these reviews are just too glowing, or they’re all just too awful and I don’t really believe them. We also emphasize this is just one source of information and if it’s an important decision, it certainly shouldn’t be your only source of information.

To contact Bob Nicholson about his proposed trade association, e-mail bob [at] ratingz.net.

“When I was driving to meet this guy, I realized I was going to interview him and during the same conversation, I’d be telling him about advertising on my site.”

As an independent Web publisher, Niles [wife of OJR's editor - Ed.] wears all the hats: owner, editor, sales rep and reporter.

She rhetorically asked OJR 2007 attendees, “Is this a huge breach of ethics?”

The majority response was no, although journalists who are learning Web publishing skills on the fly do need to strike the balance between brand promotion and editorial integrity.

“One of the things about a journalist as opposed to a business person is that journalists will always err on the side of caution,” says Paidcontent.org founder Rafat Ali. “The reality is that advertising is part of the conversation and the editor draws the line about how much it encroaches [the site].”

For Eric Ulken, managing editor for news at latimes.com, the line at larger, established news organizations is clear and distinct.

“To give you an example, I don’t know a single ad sales person for latimes.com,” Ulken says.

Attendees agree that indie publishers can also deliver good reporting and pay the bills.

“When you become a truly professional website you do sell ads, whether you’re doing it all yourself, 19th-century local publisher style, or you have sales reps doing it for you,” says OSTG editor-in-chief Robin Miller.

A plethora of resources are available for novice Web publishers who want to earn revenue. User-friendly ad services include Blog Ads, Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network (Overture). Publishers also can use commission-based affiliate programs such as LinkShare, Amazon Associates and Commission Junction.

Niche sites often attract a highly targeted, coveted audience, so another way to earn revenue is to sell to advertisers directly. But you need to do some research first.

“Find out what you can about the demographics of the readers because you’re selling access to the readers,” says OJR.org editor Robert Niles. “That helps to take care of some of the ethical qualms, too. The advertiser doesn’t care what you have to say; they just want you to deliver some eyeballs to them.”

Indie publishers can gather this data through user surveys and free tools such Quantcast and Google Analytics — sites that will record who visits your site and how they get there.

As novice publishers sell advertising, knowing the site’s readership and gauging their tolerance level is crucial.

Laurie Niles says Violinist.com users let her know when a blinking banner interfered with her site’s usability, and she consequently removed the in-house ad marketing Violinist.com t-shirts. She also struck a compromise with an advertiser who requested a bold-colored blinking ad: she accepted the color, rejected the blink.

“You can be transparent in your advertising as much as you’re transparent in your editorializing,” she says.

OJR participants debated anonymous versus sourced reader comments, as well as ways to engage users into joining an online community of readers.

Ask an interesting, or better yet, proactive question and you’re likely to introduce interesting user-generated content. But how do you keep your comments above board and free from spam infiltration?

In the session, moderated by dot-com journalist and author Janine Warner, participants debated whether readers posting content to websites should be required to do so under their real names.

When veteran journalist Mack Reed launched LAVoice.org, he required names to post stories but left comments open. “It helped to keep people honest if they were posting under their real name,” he says. “The ones that ignored the rule are the ones who came there to cause trouble.”

OJR editor Robert Niles introduced an important distinction in the degrees of anonymity, especially to guard against impersonation.

“There’s a difference between anonymity to your reader and anonymity to you as the publisher,” he says.

“One of the things I always want to make sure I’m doing on my sites if someone has a real reason to be anonymous, I want to give them a way to contact me. As publishers, I want to make real sure we’re guarding against impersonation.”

Niles urges publishers to allow users to create their own publishing space on news websites, instead of limiting readers to commenting on staff-produced stories.

“I hate to use an old buzzword bingo term, but when you let readers initiate content on your website through blogs and discussion boards, instead of reacting to it through comments, you make the site far more sticky, and elicit much more loyalty to your site.”

“My experience is if you make a mistake the first year, chances are the IRS will forgive you. The second year they won’t tolerate it,” Ali says.

Many novice indie Web publishers still need to work a day job, and Ali and conference attendees agree that being upfront with employers about your blog is key. It’s easier to present your “side project/hobby” to an employer while it’s not making any money, provided it doesn’t compete with the industry you’re involved with during the day. Once your blog starts to earn revenue, then you’ve earned it with your employer’s blessing.

Anticipate this revenue when you’re designing a blog, making sure to leave potential space for ads to run once you’ve gained the readership. Fortunately, you don’t need to spend much to get started as an indie Web publisher. Blogging tools such as WordPress and Blogger.com will set it up for you.

But seasoned bloggers at OJR 2007 say you do need to spend to get the right top-level-domain extension, namely .com or .org. Topix.net CEO Rich Skrenta says his popular site just spent $1 million to buy Topix.com.

Once you set up the logistics, stay focused on your topic and publish frequently. OSTG editor-in-chief Robin ‘Roblimo’ Miller urges attendees to publish multiple times a day to drive traffic to their sites.

One mistake rookie bloggers make, says OJR.org editor Robert Niles, is to wait until a story is completely flushed out before posting it. “Don’t be afraid to dramatically lower your definition of what constitutes newsworthiness … one little fact, vignette or nugget can be a post,” he says.

Deliver that information in multiple ways, adds Ali. Namely, don’t discount the power of an e-newsletter. Paidcontent.org delivers posts via e-mail to its readers daily. “It’s brand reminder for them to keep coming back to the site. Our readers don’t have time [to visit the site] so they read [posts] in their inbox or on their Blackberry.”

Above all else, know who that audience is. Niles adds that successful blogs cater to a smaller audience who isn’t finding its needs met in the mass media. “It’s really great for a journalist because this is your opportunity to go follow your passion and go work that beat you’ve always wanted to work. You’ve got to love what you do because the first couple of years are going to be lean.”

MacLean credits this online community with both enabling her to increase her opportunities in print and for creating a built-in audience for her new book, “Red, White and Drunk All Over.” With the fresh perspective of her recent excursions on a book tour, MacLean chatted with OJR about the ways the Web has created a synergy that expands the voice of this successful, independent wine critic.

Online Journalism Review: Like many independent online journalists, you started your career in the print world. How did the Web become an important medium to expand your audience and distribute your work?

Natalie MacLean: When I was [exclusively] a print journalist and many of my articles appeared in city-based magazines, friends and colleagues who didn’t live in the that particular city couldn’t read the article or buy the magazine on the stand. I retain the copyrights to my work, so I started by e-mailing about 25 folks the articles, which they would forward. Soon there were 200-300 people who were getting these articles, just through text-based e-mail.

OJR:So what point did you realize you needed to maintain your own website?

MacLean: About a year out, when people who joined [the e-mail list] started asking how can they could get all of my previous e-mails. So every time someone joined, I’d be sending 30 e-mails, to pass along all the back issues, so to speak. I thought this is getting silly; I better archive these somewhere, so that’s the birth of the website.

OJR: Do you have any technical knowledge, and did you design the site yourself?

MacLean:Yeah, at first I was doing it because I used to work for Silicon Graphics in California and my focus was the Internet. I loved HTML but I’m no wizard and my skills quickly became very rudimentary compared with where websites were going. It wasn’t long before I hired a webmaster, then things just kept evolving. The newsletter kept growing, the website’s content and functionality kept growing, and I started using forms to sign up for the newsletter.

OJR: Why do you think that niche topics such as yours do so well online?

MacLean: That’s [a reference to] the long-tail theory from Wired Magazine. I just love that theory. There are probably millions of wine lovers out there from all around the world and the brilliant thing is that we find each other on the Internet. So I get stories from wine lovers everywhere, from the night nurse at the emergency ward in Saskatoon to the water reservoir manager in Tulsa. [I’ve heard from] someone in Afghanistan who is making wine in his basement- I think it’s illegal! The Internet is efficient, and it’s also–I put this in quotes–cheap. It’s not cheap to make a good-looking website and to have forms that work and links that don’t go dead, but still I could never reach all of these people in print, cost-wise or time-wise.

OJR: You have a distinct, humorous tone to your writing that makes something as daunting as wine selection more accessible to those of us who aren’t sommeliers. Does your writing voice change online? Can you adopt an even more casual or conversational tone?

MacLean: Yeah I think so, although I know 78 people whom I call “Wine Lovers for Better Grammar.” They e-mail me every time there’s a misplaced comma. It’s like this giant editorial board. So it’s that contradictory thing of being relaxed and at the same time having an obsessive level of attention to detail, which is fascinating and helps me clean up my work in print.

OJR: You both write and edit your work, so how do you ensure accuracy when you source and cite information? You’re saying your readers call you out, and not just on grammatical mistakes–

MacLean: But on other things too, yes. They’ll correct anything. I once wrote an article about kir royale—a drink where you infuse any champagne or sparkling wine with the liquor Cassis–that has a black currant flavor. The black currants are famous around the Dijon area of France in Burgundy and I had misspelled a street name. Someone from Dijon contacted me and said that street is close to where I live, and it’s spelled this way.
I get far more corrections online so the feedback has been far more powerful than the print feedback.

OJR: What tool do you use to distribute the newsletter and what does it tell you about who your audience is and how to engage them?

MacLean: It’s called GotCompany.com. It’s a front-end tool and a back-end tool. I think the interface, the aesthetics look beautiful, but really the power is in the database and the reporting tool. It will tell me how many people have opened my newsletter and I can also see who has clicked on what link.

OJR: Can you tell anything about the user demographic?

MacLean: I can tell what topics are most interesting to people by the open rate and which links are most interesting to people. I stay pretty high level, but it’s only because of the time I have to devote to this sort of thing because I have a full-time journalism slate of jobs for print and then I’m just coming off the book.

I do find it synergistic. Every column I write in print, at the bottom there’s a tag that says for Natalie’s free newsletter, visit nataliemaclean.com. Then, of course, I use the newsletter to help sell the book, then point the book to the website, so I make sure that they’re all linked all the time. These days–especially if you’re trying to sell a book–you have to bring the audience, your readership, with you. [Book] publishers [tend to] spend very little on marketing, so you’re the one who has to develop your readership and then keep communicating with them. If I can’t pump out a book every year or two, at least I’ve been communicating with my readers [online] every two weeks in the interim and I hope they’re around the next time a book comes out.

OJR: Your site offers a modest selection of streaming audio and video. How do these multimedia elements advance the functionality of your site?

MacLean: I think people love to watch TV clips and listen to radio interviews, and people [who visit my site] are clicking on them. It’s an expensive form of information because I have to pay for extra bandwidth for no real monetary return. But now I’m starting to post video and audio clips that are interviews about the book.

OJR: So it also becomes a marketing tool–

MacLean: Yes, absolutely. To me it’s part of a multimedia-rich site, and that’s what I want to provide to the best of my budget and the best of my ability.

OJR: You actively encourage user feedback throughout the site. How do you deal with the volume of response and maintain this intimate relationship with your readers?

MacLean: Well, I get a couple of hundred e-mails a day, but a lot of them are questions that I get over and over again, so I’ll refer people to my FAQ. I think it will get to the point where I can’t [respond to everyone] because I have to earn a living and write my columns, but I like the feedback. I encourage it and welcome it and it’s helpful so I try my best to respond to people.

OJR: How do you select which articles you feature on your website or include in the newsletter?

MacLean: I’m more global in my approach. Now I think about which topics will I take on in print that can be repurposed, so it affects what I choose to write about in print and get paid for. In the past, I selected topics such as best restaurants in Ottawa that are really only relevant to people who live in Ottawa. Now I’m more likely to choose a topic like how to choose from a restaurant wine list that everybody can relate to, no matter where they live.

OJR: You run some Google ads, but otherwise ads aren’t featured prominently on your website.

MacLean: It [earns] three bucks a day for Google ads. That won’t even buy cheap wine! I’m going to look at adding advertising in the next year for related products and services that I think are reputable. I won’t be personally endorsing them. It will be clear that they’re ads and I’ll have someone else handle the booking, payment and invoicing so if a winery wants to advertise, I’m not the one negotiating ad rates while they’re also sending me bottles to review.

OJR: Finally, can you recommend some ways to choose a great holiday wine?

MacLean: Sure! All of my wine picks are on my website. It’s also a matter of your budget and whether you like wines that are full-bodied, medium or light. Develop a relationship with a knowledgeable person at your local wine store and ask what they’re excited about. Also, you can buy a mixed case of 12 within your budget and experiment. Try a new one each time you want to crack open a bottle and I’m sure you’ll find at least two or three that you really like.

Utilizing the Web for small business solutions is an obvious resource, but a basic, unguided search can yield an overwhelming and extraneous amount of information. A recently launched website called Work.com aims to focus those results by publishing and updating how-to guides that illustrate tangible and practical solutions. An offshoot of the successful search engine business.com, Work.com is both an internally-rich content site and a search directory, continually updated and ranked accordingly. The current offering—around 1100 guides–covers topics on everything ranging from developing a business plan and establishing a business account to obtaining a business license and tax id number.

We asked Work.com content editor and syndicated business columnist Daniel Kehrer to take OJR on a basic tour through the site, and explain some of ways that it can help independent web journalists who need a crash course in business management.

Online Journalism Review: Who’s writing the Work.com guides?

Daniel Kehrer: When it first [began], we launched a huge effort to create a thousand of these things, so we hired 70 or 80 freelance writers all over the country to work simultaneously at a rapid pace. Now we’ve toned it down, so we still have a small core of freelance writers working on a paid basis. We also have people showing up on the site because they want to share their expertise by writing guides. Then we also have experts in various fields writing specific guides.

OJR: For the users who are writing guides, how do you ensure that information is factually accurate?

Kehrer: People come in and write the guides and we do an initial rating, and then [the work.com community] will also rate people, so the guides that are bad will fall out the ones that are good will rise to the top. But initially everything gets read by the [editorial department].

OJR: Before it goes live?

Kehrer: It actually goes live but we look at it really fast and so if something is just not up to par, we may e-mail someone and say, hey we looked at your guide and we think you can get a much better rating if you do this, that and the other–so we may in fact offer advice. Right now it’s easier now because of the volume, but it might just have to be the user ratings eventually. That’s the way the system works- the highest rated guides would show up first and the lowest ratings might not show up at all. So it creates a self-policing mechanism.

OJR: How can Work.com help independent Web journalists in ways that conducting a basic search can’t?

Kehrer: It will provide a much more focused approach if it has anything to do with operating a business as a journalist and an entrepreneur. The site has information on all the things that go into establishing the business side of setting up a website: managing the money, establishing a credit card, paying people, opening a business account. They can find precise recommended solutions in a much more focused way.

OJR: The site features broad topics- everything from hiring employees, government resources, website design- how do you plan to stay current on such a broad range of topics? Isn’t there a danger of oversimplifying or missing relevant information?

Kehrer: It’s just the opposite–we’re so focused that we may have 15 different guides on one narrow topic. The system allows everyone to comment- and we encourage this- if there’s something missing or out of date, users can post a comment and the guide writer will hopefully update the guide. If a particular guide doesn’t have [the latest information], that guide will disappear and something else will take its place. So there’s a built-in mechanism for keeping things, fresh, up to date and ever-expanding.

OJR: How do you think journalists can maintain ethical integrity if they’re managing both editorial content and advertising on their websites?

Kehrer: You could ask the publisher of The New York Times the same thing- it’s the same issue for everybody who’s involved in [journalism]. You always have to have to ultimately decide that ethics comes first. If your information doesn’t have credibility, and you don’t have credibility, then you’ve got nothing.

OJR: You’re the author of “100 Best Resources for Small Business.” Are any of those resources applicable to journalists who want to become online publishers?

Kehrer: Sure, and a lot of those resources are now on business.com. A lot of it deals with general business start up information. Certainly if you’re a journalist/entrepreneur who wants to start your own website, you need to do some of the same things as anyone who’s starting a business. You need to write a business plan; you might want to take some training classes on business management; you might want to know where to seek free counseling.

You can incorporate quickly with an online service. You can go to various places to get your website set up as one big package, and you can find places that will help you with a marketing plan of some kind. Also, if you’re a sole-practitioner, even if you don’t employ anybody, you still have to get a tax ID number.

OJR: Various business laws and tax laws are complex and vary state by state. How familiar does a journalist/entrepreneur need to become with these issues before launching or trying to earn a profit online?

Kehrer: You can get bogged down in this stuff and that’s kind of the danger. You don’t need to know the intricacies of all the tax laws. You need to know that you have to file a tax return as a business and if you don’t do that you’re in big trouble. If you hire someone else to do some writing for you and pay an independent contractor you’ve got to report the income on a 1099 to the IRS.

There are guides on Work.com that have answers to all of those things in the taxes section. There is a long list on licensing on finding an accountant, on getting tax software, and finding local, state and regional tax requirements.

OJR: If you were to publish a guide for journalists who want to launch profitable websites what you would include?

Kehrer: Packaging does count. Hiring a Web designer is going to cost a lot of money, but there are various hosting packages that include [customizable] software.

OJR: Say you aren’t a techie–do you recommend being able to access all aspects of the site and update it yourself?

Kehrer: Yeah, I do actually because I believe in simplicity and control … and the technology has advanced so nicely that there are so many tools available online with a minimal amount of technical knowledge required. Keep it simple and…that will let you focus on the writing.

As founding editor and publisher of Wired magazine and the Industry Standard Magazine, John Battelle has certainly witnessed and experienced enough ebbs and flows in both the new and traditional media business to advise journalists on how to avoid common mistakes when establishing themselves online.

As a veteran technology journalist, Battelle is also highly skilled at engaging and maintaining an online audience on a level esteemed by many of his colleagues. His latest incarnations, Federated Media and Searchblog both appear to be strong examples of how to do it right.

Speaking by telephone from Federated Media headquarters in Sausalito, Calif., Battelle discussed the importance of establishing good conversation, and how his latest publishing venture has evoked a new way to help independent Web journalists get the bills paid.

OJR: What do you find that most journalists are lacking when they attempt to launch websites?

Battelle: The advice I give any journalist friend or colleague is to make the transition from that which I call packaged goods media–a finished television, news or radio report–to the conversational approach to [online] journalism. For most of us journalists who have spent a majority of their careers in the packaged goods area, it’s terrifying to hang it all out there and to admit that you might be wrong and to make mistakes and be corrected. It’s scary to say, I don’t have an editor and I don’t have a title but here’s my opinion and I can’t hide behind a newspaper or magazine masthead.

[Online journalism] is much more like performance art. I would compare the skill set [with that of] a radio talk show host. They talk to each other, they interview people and they take calls, and 50 percent of the callers are regular commentators. We as audience participants love to listen to the conversation. Blogs in particular have that same kind of conversation. On Searchblog, there are three to four times more comments than there are posts from me, and I would say that of the 10,000 comments on the site, probably 50 to 100 people are responsible for 8,000 of them.

OJR: Then how much freedom do you grant to them? Do you restrict usage or do users have to earn the right to comment?

Battelle: No, anyone can comment, but I will delete comments that are off-topic or that are obviously for self-gain. You have to be a moderator of the conversation. Journalists are very good at this, particularly the ones who are good at interviews because they know how to keep things on topic.

OJR: Searchblog is a member of your current publishing venture, Federated Media. Describe the general philosophy behind FM.

Battelle: The general idea is that not all journalists or authors who can draw a community want to be the CEO of a publishing company. They care about getting paid but aren’t very interested in selling ads. They care about making the site look good, but they don’t want to take care of the back end. They don’t want to necessarily hire and manage an accountant and controller, but they certainly care that their check comes on time.

After working on Searchblog for a while, it struck me that the site had gotten to the size of a respectable trade magazine, and I could tell the audience was pretty influential. So as a publisher I was thinking if I had 50,000 influential people reading a publication, it could be a real publication, but I didn’t want to do that again.

Meanwhile, Boing Boing came to me and said our hosting bill is way too high we can’t keep doing this little hobby of ours, so maybe we can figure out a way to turn it into a business. I started working with them on doing that and it struck me that between my site, which was a mini Industry Standard, and Boing Boing, which was more like Wired, there might be something there.

So I started looking for other sites and thought what if we federated all of our inventory? It struck me that the only way to really maintain a high quality of sites was to maintain a reasonably small number of them. These are not $1 or $2 RPM (revenue per thousand page views) sites, these are at least $15 to $20 RPM sites, and they needed to present themselves to advertisers as worthy of that premium. So, we’re now at about 85 or 90 sites and we have federations in various categories, including media and entertainment, tech, parenting and automobile markets.

OJR: So FM sites have already met a certain criteria.

Battelle: Right. They have a validated audience. We’ve done demographic surveys, we’ve joined comScore, we’ve done all the things we do if you’re a real media company. Yet Searchblog is never going to spend $35,000 to join comScore. But FM is going to spend that $35,000 and everyone in our network is now in comScore–that’s the power of federation. And many of the sites that are small cast large shadows. Even though Jeff Jarvis’ site (www.buzzmachine.com) isn’t that big, it’s influential. Marketers like that mix, you get reach and good demographics.

OJR: What do you think the journalism sites on FM have accomplished to get to that point?

Battelle: For the most part the sites that have risen to influence, particularly in the technology sector, are sites that are written by people who are seasoned journalists. I think one of the reasons these sites are so influential is that they’re so read by journalists who have crossed the bridge from the conversational medium back into the packaged goods medium and write second-day, more definitive pieces. You see that a lot in The New York Times, and you know the political writers and tech writers are reading those blogs.

OJR: Especially considering the importance of user participation. The blogger may initiate the conversation, but the important piece of information is the conversation itself, not just the initial posting.

Battelle: Blogs have become archival footage in a way. I’m often referred back to posts I wrote six months ago or a year ago. One of the early examples of a major company breaking news through a blog is when Amazon let me break the news that they were getting into the search game. Later, Amazon announced that they were going to launch [a search site called] A9. Someone wrote me recently and said, remember that post? The A9 thing seems to be going away. I reread the post and 20 comments. When you see it as a whole, it’s really a powerful statement and [sometimes] the comments far outweigh the pure words of the post itself.

OJR: According to a recent post on the FM site, you’re not adding any new authors until you make sure everyone’s happy with what you’ve got.

Battelle: We’ve built momentum … so I had to make a business decision. Some of the FM sites have very ambitious plans. We have a different kind of conversation with them. But for the sites who are doing it on their own for the first time, we help them decide whether they should bring on an editor and how to use financing. There might be a time at which they want to hire their own sales force and fire FM. Frankly I expect that to happen and I expect to lose some sites at some point.

OJR: What if one of your bigger sites starts expanding on a huge scale right away? How do you decide whether FM should grow to accommodate it?

Battelle: That’s a very good question. With some of our sites that are bigger and have significant revenue opportunity like Digg or Boing Boing, we have to make sure that this still a true partnership, and we always have to be asking [whether it's still] making sense. This is not a new model in terms of business, but in terms of the media business, it’s kind of new ground.

OJR: You posted a response on your blog about the Washington Post’s recent attempt to offer to sell ads on blogs and split the revenue with bloggers. Do you think it’s a profitable idea?

Battelle: I believe there’s a place for it. There’s no doubt that traditional media can and will continue, but it has a hard hump to get over. Traditional media is in the business of sort of corralling talent. [As a newspaper reporter], you don’t talk to readers. Your job is to talk to your sources. Institutionally, these organizations have grown up managing reporters, not talent. When I was editing at Wired, my job was to produce writers and manage 50-150 talented, half-crazy freelance writers, and I think it really got me ready to do what I’m doing now. People with influential blogs are talent and they don’t want to be told what to write about.

OJR: So, is the Post trying to copy the Federated Media model?

Battelle: It’s similar, but I don’t think it’s copying any more than I copied the ad rep/book publishing/music label/talent agency model. There’s a lot of great content out there and we all want to figure out a way to get involved in it.

OJR: In your book, “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” (Portfolio, a Penguin imprint), one of the principal theories that you describe is the “database of intentions.” What will the implications of search mechanisms be for online journalists over the next few years?

Battelle: The key thing here is that anything that has existed online will exist online forever and the privacy issues, the citizen versus state issues and the corporation versus reporter issues are profound because now so much exists. I don’t think that culturally we’ve really gotten very far in the discussion of what it all means.

Think about it: Every place you go, everything you do, everything you click on- it’s all meta data. And what really got me excited is that my great-grandchildren can access my searches. That’s an artifact that I want to give them. I’d like to have access to and editing rights to that information, but right now that’s an artifact that I don’t own.

In a fortunate coincidence of timing, Scheer was just about to launch a new joint venture, Truthdig.com. It’s a collaborative effort with publisher Zuade Kaufman, who is an entrepreneur and former reporter for Westside Weekly, a now-defunct Los Angeles Times-operated local paper. While Kaufman focuses on business and design elements, Scheer showcases his editorial sensibility across the site, including his “Ear to the Ground” section.

According to the site, Truthdig is “built around major ‘digs,’ led by authorities in their fields, who will drill down into contemporary topics and assemble packages of content — text, links, audio, video — that will grow richer with time and user participation.” Two experts featured on the site now are leading digs on China and on the relationship between religion and homosexuality.

Over a late night supper at a downtown L.A. brasserie, Scheer and Kaufman talked to OJR about the Truthdig launch, magazine-style writing on the Web, and premortem eulogies.

OJR: In Steve Wasserman’s Truthdig piece, “Chicago Agonistes: The Plight of the L.A. Times,” his lead opens with the following: “Why continue to read newspapers? After all, newspapers are losing circulation at precipitous rates, giving rise to fears that they may not survive long enough to write their own obituaries.” How is your site providing readers with coverage that the established media are not?

Scheer: First of all, we’re not competitive with established media. In fact, we’re using them as a basic resource. In my Ear to the Ground, we’re finding things in The Washington Post, the BBC, The New York Times. There’s a great deal of data out there, but the most reliable sources are the established media and we’re certainly not going to turn our back on it. We’re going to use it, or mine it, if you like. Our goal is to use writers who care about the subject, and know something about it.

I put the Truthdig website up on a projection screen in my [USC] class, and I said, here’s an example, Saddam Hussein is on trial. That’s the news. But he’s on trial for events that happened in 1982. After ’82 the U.S. got involved with Saddam Hussein, and supported him and so forth. We have an uncovered file on Saddam Hussein on our site. In a pre-Internet or pre-computer world you would have had to encourage students to visit a major library to find these documents. We also have a ground link to a CDC report on sexual behavior, which I suspect people find interesting. It just didn’t make much news. More than 50 percent of young people seem to engage in oral sex, and it seems to go both ways so that’s a big change in our society that has not really been noted. We can take an otherwise stale government document, make a link to it to get people interested enough to read it for themselves, and then link to another document. That’s the basic idea of the site.

We’re not pitted against old media. What we are pitted against is the model old media is trapped in. We wanted to stand as an alternative model to what’s going on on the Internet. When you get away from the mainstream media, it’s basically hyperventilated opinion. It’s what I call bar room conversation. Wasserman’s piece is 3100 words and I didn’t in any way try to cut it down, and I didn’t try to chop it into sections. I didn’t ruin it by saying it needed to fit on a specific amount of screens. Hopefully some readers will settle in with it; print out stories to read on their couch, or read them on their laptops at Starbucks. Our current issue is closer to Harpers or the New Yorker.

OJR: What do you think is more to blame for the demise of major newspapers: corporate stake holding or the Internet?

Scheer: I don’t think we know yet whether newspapers are going to drop off. First of all, they make money. They don’t seem to make as much money as some people may have expected when they bought the paper, and they don’t always make as much money as they used to make, but the Los Angeles Times is certainly making money. They had a pretty good profit picture last year, but it’s true they lost readership. So I think [the traditional media] are in a transition period but they’re still the best thing on the Internet.

OJR: In a post on Huffington, you wrote: “The [Los Angeles Times'] publisher, Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote. I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq. Fortunately sixty percent of Americans now get the point but only after tens of thousand of Americans and Iraqis have been killed and maimed as the carnage spirals out of control. My only regret is that my pen was not sharper and my words tougher.”

Scheer: Truthdig’s opening banner says, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” I’ve had a lot of opportunity, I’ve never had any trouble getting printed. When I went to the Los Angeles Times, I went with idea that I would continue to publish elsewhere so I did. I knew that either way I had Truthdig [which was conceived a year and a half ago.] I also knew that other papers would carry my column and magazines would carry my work. In that statement that you read on Huffington Post, I think there were 370 or 390 comments, you don’t get that response from a newspaper column very often.

OJR: Do you think the Los Angeles Times handled your departure fairly?

Scheer: No. The publisher took over the editorial page. I worked for the paper as a reporter for 17 years. I’ve been a contributing editor and columnist for the last almost 13 years. I have a lot of friends in the building. I heard from more than one person, including people I was working with in the op-ed section, that this publisher very deliberately said he wanted the paper to be more conservative, and that he particularly didn’t like my column. I kept asking [Op-Ed Editor] Nick Goldberg if the column was over, and Nick finally did say it was going to end. He told me very clearly that the publisher didn’t like the column. I said look, there’s a polite way to do this and an impolite way. I said there’s a difference between being pushed out the window or escorted to the door. I never heard from [Editorial Page Editor] Andrés Martinez and I never heard from the publisher. And I thought that was unseemly. And so Kevin Roderick from LA Observed. That’s how this whole thing started. He called me and said I hear this [rumor that your column is ending], and I said I hear the same rumors. That’s where it snowballed and [the Los Angeles Times] had to accelerate their timetable.

What offends me, the basic point I’d like to come out of this interview, quite apart from anything about Truthdig: We [in journalism] don’t cover ourselves. And for all the time I was at the Los Angeles Times, the one story there that people knew best and reported least was what was going on in that building. The history of the Los Angeles Times has been very important to this city.

This publisher has wanted to [kill the column] ever since he’s been in that building. And why? Is it pressure from [Tribune Company headquarters in] Chicago? Is it some complaining of the Bush administration which has power over your waiver of the FCC? You would think journalists would ask those questions and they could get answers. But I don’t hear anything.

NOTE: In a note to readers published on Nov. 15, 2005, Martinez defended the paper’s decision to discontinue Sheer’s column by writing, “Some readers have complained that The Times is conspiring to silence liberal voices on the Op-Ed page. Others have gone so far as to suggest that Scheer is being punished for opposing the war in Iraq. But that is hardly a badge of shame around here — the newspaper’s own editorial page opposed the decision to invade Iraq.”

OJR: What is your response to the cancelled subscriptions to protest your leaving the editorial pages?

Scheer: I’m proud of the work I’ve done. Anybody can go and read it on the Internet. And that’s what saved me from the Bill O’Reillys and Rush Limbaughs. They built up a big national audience for me and then people would Google me and find my website. And they can read all my columns, and so my work will stand by itself.

I.F. Stone wasn’t admired much before he died. His column was killed at every major newspaper and he had to publish his own little newspaper. And I see Truthdig as kind of an I.F. Stone weekly on speed. When the paper killed my column, I got to hear the eulogies before I died. It’s quite a gift. The outpouring of support from people was incredible.

OJR: What will differentiate your site from those such as Huffington Post, which also launched with a built-in fan base?

Scheer: I like her site. I made it my homepage. Her stuff is very newsy and very fast changing. We have much more of a point of view. We’re archival, and she’s in the moment. We’re about digging for the truth, digging through the headlines. So we’ll leave things up a lot longer we’ll go deeper. I think we compliment sites like Huffington’s by trying to develop a more profound documented view of these issues.

Kaufman: We’re looking at it as sort of a cross-pollination, not competition.

OJR: Several blogosphere comments note that Truthdig, unlike Huffington Post, does not read like a blog but like a traditional print publication. What do you envision for the site’s writing style?

Scheer: I don’t want to be intimidated by a notion of what the Web writing should be. In a way, when you see it, you’ll know it. We want good writing.

Kaufman: You can compare our pieces with any of the best magazines or publications out there.

Scheer: That’s an important point. I think what we have on the site right now could stand in the newsstands with Harpers and the New Yorker or anyone else. They’re extremely well-written pieces. And we work them the same way a magazine would. I don’t know how this is going to work out in the long run because it’s pretty damn labor intensive. From an online journalism point of view the real test for us will be to see if people want to settle in with us as a magazine that will not change that quickly.

OJR: Truthdig seems focused on in-depth analysis. Does that mean the site won’t compete as a breaking news source?

Scheer: We’re not indifferent to the news. We see these pieces as kind of evergreens in that they can be refreshed, they can be retopped. Also, our dig leaders are going to blog. We could not afford to invest in this inventory if we thought the inventory was going to be dated.

OJR: LA Observed reported “a young writer has already been sent to the Middle East on a ‘dig.’”

Scheer: We have a writer who has been doing a dig for us on Iraq. He works for another publication that is sending him, so they’re paying part of his trip and we’re piggy-backing on it by picking up some of his expenses.

OJR: Will your funding and ambition continue to allow for this kind of reporting? Do you plan to set up bureaus of sorts?

Scheer: There are two ways to raise money for our site. One is through advertising and sales. We’re also not above going to individuals or foundations to maybe raise some money for specific projects.

OJR: What is the Bazaar page?

Kaufman: We’re going to sell items, including books and videos (DVDs), that we endorse. Also, when writers reference a certain item on our site, then readers will be able to buy those items in our Bazaar they’ll be able to go to our site to get it.

Scheer: We also have a line of Truthdig books coming out with Akashic Books and the first one is one I’ve done on the presidency. And we think these archives will lead themselves to book collections. If you develop a really good archive on something you’re half way to a book.

OJR: How will A/V booth showcase multimedia? What about user participation aside from comments?

Kaufman: We’re going to podcast all the digs. We have text enlargers for people who have a difficult time seeing. And we want to provide audio of the longer digs.

Scheer: Zuade’s feeling is there are a lot of good documentaries out there that no one ever gets to see.

Kaufman: I’ve already commissioned a short one for the site that is an extension of “Off to
War,” which is a 13-part series currently airing on the Discovery Channel. I’ve also been approached to collaborate on a feature length documentary that would have a theatrical release. It would be partially produced by Truthdig. If that goes through, then we’ll show clips on our site and it will have dig elements, such as court documents since it is about a pending legal case. Some of the key participants, including one that is in prison, said they would blog on our site. So you see, the possibilities are endless here. Also, I did a photo essay on Ron Kovic who wrote “Born on the Fourth of July” about living with the wounds [from the Vietnam war].

Scheer: She took pictures of him asking what it means to be in a wheelchair for 35 years, and we got Kovic to do an audio reading the new introduction to his book. Our whole point is here’s a guy wounded in Vietnam in 1969, and the wounds don’t go away.

OJR: How and when was the idea for Truthdig conceived?

Scheer: Zuade was working with me on a local column that I was doing for Our Times [a defunct series of community papers owned and distributed by the Los Angeles Times]. We enjoyed it, and we had a big impact. We probably could have made money with a small paper, or probably still could.

Kaufman: When they closed Our Times, we talked about maybe doing a Westside paper. We did the numbers on that and found that it would have taken seven years to get a return, and it was risky.

Scheer: Local papers can do well but it’s really labor intensive.

OJR: Who is the Truthdig reader? Is your audience national or local? In what ways are you attempting to court the diverse, multicultural audience that critics argue is lost to the LAT?

Scheer: Zuade and I are equally as interested in international and national events.
Of the first 20 or 30 responses we received when we launched, three were from Americans living in Paris. We’re assuming if we can show the reader that something is interesting and important, they will follow our links. We’re not looking to have a million unique visitors. If I can end up with 50,000 or 70,000 people who really find this a useful site then I’m a happy camper. This is not a food fight in a cafeteria. This is an attempt to put out a good solid magazine of substance that has a progressive point of view. I pick people who I think have decent values. They don’t have to agree with me.

OJR: Describe your ad-driven business plan. Why did you launch without ads? Who are your current financial backers?

Scheer: It’s a joint partnership [between Kaufman and Scheer].

Kaufman: We’re not opposed to advertising. We will have ads. We first really want to get across the merit of our content and our page. We’re promoting ourselves right now. [In terms of ads], what you’re talking about are nickels and dimes before you have a readership.

Scheer: We’re not quite sure about this, but we think people have over-promised on the Web. We made a vow to each other not to over-expect for this site. At the end of two years, if we’ve put a good quality product that we’re proud of, and if we’ve sustained x amount of losses and it doesn’t work, we’ll pull the plug on it. Yet, [given the big shift of advertising on the Web], we figure if we develop 75,000 loyal readers we can then legitimately go to people and say this a good way to reach them.

Kaufman: We’re just wanting to produce something worth — with merit that we’re proud of.

Scheer: We don’t see it as a get rich scheme either. We’re pretty realistic about it.

OJR: Considering your other commitments–teaching, a radio show, books, a syndicated column — where does Truthdig fall on your list of priorities? What will your followers find on Truthdig that they won’t get on the other platforms?

Scheer: Truthdig is my mistress. Call it my decadence, whatever you want. It’s what I enjoy. Writing is painful for me. Teaching is the hardest dollar I’ve ever earned. I like getting back to editing, and I like working with writers. It’s a labor of love.

OJR: What will your followers find on Truthdig that they won’t get on the other platforms?

Scheer: Clearly, I have certain social orientations that hopefully some people care about or respect. Hopefully I bring some intelligence a sense of history because that’s what an editor does. I’m not the editor of the other publications. And, now, I have a publisher who meets me for a late night dinner, as opposed to the one at the L.A. Times, who wouldn’t even meet me for a cup of coffee.