At first glance, New West looks like a lot of other nascent citizen media efforts, with its blog-like format and calls for reader submissions. But beneath the surface, New West is a breathtaking contrast in styles and thought. Journalistically, the site combines reporting, local media aggregation, insightful commentary and blogging. Politically, the site’s contributors often take anti-development, pro-environmental stands, putting it at odds with the broader populace that votes solidly GOP.
And though New West was launched a mere nine months ago, it has the audacity to proclaim itself as “The Voice of the Rocky Mountains,” while also bagging two 2005 Online Journalism Awards — one for enterprise reporting and another for general excellence for a small site.
New West might be a rookie website, but the people who run it are far from being rookies. Jonathan Weber, the site’s founder and editor-in-chief, has years of experience as an editor at the Los Angeles Times and Industry Standard magazine; and New West managing editor Courtney Lowery was a writer and editor at Lee Newspapers and the Associated Press. (Full disclosure: Weber was my editor at the LA Times and Standard, when I freelanced for those publications.)
While the site’s masthead includes bios of 17 people, only two of them — Weber and Lowery — are full-time staff at the moment. But together, these folks have mined the untold stories of the Rocky Mountain West, focusing on the political and social ramifications of migration and commercial growth, without losing their humor. Recent posts with the most comments include a discussion on meth use among Native Americans, an explanation of how a mountain lion and house cat were electrocuted recently, and a rant against “neocon bushwads” who espouse an Ayn Rand philosophy.
Weber told me his motivation for starting the site was the “dramatic change” he found going on in the Rocky Mountain region when he moved to Missoula, Mont., in 2002. He was surprised by the lack of media coverage on the subject.
“The initial impetus [for New West] came from my own curiosity about the large story of change in the Rocky Mountain West,” Weber said. “And I thought maybe there’s room for a publication that addresses that. At the same time, I’ve been following the world of online media since its inception. And in 2003, 2004, it was becoming increasingly clear that we were coming to a tipping point in the evolution of media and that online journalism was coming into its own.”
Robert Hoskins, who has contributed citizen journalism pieces for New West, lives in Crowheart, Wyo., as “a conservationist, naturalist, wilderness guide, horse wrangler, horse packer, part-time writer, and anything else I can do to make a living.” Hoskins liked the freewheeling nature of New West, and the chance to publish more controversial pieces he couldn’t sell to other outlets.
“After spending some time wandering around [New West], it seemed both eclectic and at the same time highly inclusive of everything that’s going on in the Rocky Mountain West,” Hoskins said via e-mail. “I’m finding out things that I never see in the stodgy print press, particularly regarding the cultural turbulence and diversity in the West. Living where I live and doing what I do, I’ve often doubted that there really was such a thing as a ‘New West’; it’s often seemed to me to be a buzz word. However, New West has proven to me that there really is a ‘New West.’ ”
Compensation to site contributors varies: unedited citizen journalists are not paid; regular city and regional editors receive small payments; and more substantial payments go to writers for investigative pieces. According to Weber and Lowery, good editorial is what drives traffic. So far, the site’s traffic has gone up each month, most recently hitting 42,000 unique visitors in October and 500,000 page views that month.
The most trafficked story at New West is also the one that garnered an award in enterprise journalism, “Sex, Money and Meth Addiction: Inside the World of the Dasen Girls,” by Hal Herring. The harrowing six-part story details the ugly underbelly of the methamphetamine scene in Kalispell, Mont., focusing on local businessman Dick Dasen’s arrest on prostitution charges.
But is it a viable business?
While New West has an eye-catching design and deftly blends old-school reporting with a bloggish tone — Weber calls the site’s “conversational style” its biggest stylistic innovation — the question remains whether the publication can catch fire as a business. Weber says the site has hit its financial goals so far, but is not profitable yet.
“We’re not profitable, for sure,” Weber said. “We’re generating well into the thousands of dollars per month in advertising thus far. We’re about where we thought we’d be on the revenue side, but we have a ways to go before we’re profitable, that’s for sure. Especially in the first few months, we didn’t focus on ad sales at all — because before we had traffic, we had nothing to sell at all. You have to have upfront capital to build an audience before you have something to sell. There is a lot of demand among small and medium businesses for more efficient advertising than the local papers. People are beginning to see the power of the Internet from a marketing standpoint.”
New West will soon have a full-time sales and marketing director, says Weber, noting that links from the blogosphere have helped push up New West stories in Google search results. The current lack of an offline component for promotion may be hurting the site’s prospects, but New West plans to launch a print magazine in fall 2006.
John Temple, editor, publisher and president of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, told me he liked what he’d seen of New West, but wasn’t sure how it would survive in a competitive media landscape.
“I think New West will have a huge challenge breaking into the market because it has no name ID and no ability to market itself except on the Web,” Temple said via e-mail. “We have our own citizen journalism initiative. YourHub.com is getting hundreds of events and postings every week. [New West] feels more like a magazine to me, or an alternative weekly. … Looking at it from the perspective of a metro daily in the West, we face a lot of competitors. And I wouldn’t put New West at the top of the list, ahead of Craigslist and Google and Yahoo. I’ve got more than 50 weeklies in this metro area and those people are all my competitors.”
Temple said he didn’t understand the underlying vision of the site — and it’s true that New West is trying to cover a lot of territory, both geographically and editorially. And because many of its writers and editors are passionate about issues such as sustainable growth and maintaining local character in the face of chain stores, conservative critics of the site have sometimes called it New Left.
Dave Budge is a conservative blogger and stockbroker in Montana who has written for New West, but cut back on his submissions because he feels the site’s editorial mission runs contrary to his own views.
“It’s more cultural than anything,” Budge told me. “I look at this publication, and there’s a lot of environmentalism in it, and it’s a fairly left of center political dialogue about the candidates in the West. And this whole region — from Canada to Mexico — is very much right of center and libertarian in its mindset. This is not a progressive part of the world. But maybe they’ll make it. I hope not [laughs].”
Lowery told me that she didn’t screen writers for their political views, and Weber said the site has tried but failed to get conservative voices to contribute regularly. The old saw about media bias is very white and black (conservative vs. liberal) and might not apply to the many shades of gray in the issues New West is trying to address. But the more voices New West brings in, the more chance that diversity of thought will flourish.
Weber says it’s a mainstream media trap to try to show both sides of all issues. He considers his own politics as being “common sense” and not necessarily right or left.
“It’s fair to say that I believe that growth should be managed, that conservation is important, and that separation of church and state is a core value of this country that should be defended,” Weber said. “That’s my point of view, that is one that is shared by most (though not necessarily all) of the regular contributors, that is reflected in many stories on New West and we don’t make any bones about that. How people want to label it is up to them. But I don’t think that makes us political partisans per se. … The fact that mainstream media insists on denying that reporters and editors have such opinions and are somehow ‘objective’ is one of the things that’s undermining the credibility of mainstream media.”
The unfiltered factor
So far, New West has had more luck getting consistent editorial submissions from paid contributors than from unpaid citizen journalists. Weber says that there’s a huge difference between paying someone very, very little and paying them nothing at all. Plus, getting people to send in photos is much easier than getting them to write stories for free.
“One of the things we’ve found as far as getting people involved with the site is that this is not a case of ‘if you build it, they will come,’ ” he said. “Just because you have a way to let people write stories and comments doesn’t mean people are going to spontaneously do that. The development of contributors and community involvement takes a lot of work. … We found that there are a lot of people who are interested in contributing for various reasons — they like to write, they want to get their name out there, they have a cause they want to promote, they have different motivations for wanting to contribute.”
Editorial oversight is generally minimal for both paid contributors and unpaid ones. The Unfiltered section, which only has three posts over the past three weeks, allows any registered user to post without an editorial check beforehand. However, Lowery does read everything that is posted, and libelous, illegal or scurrilous personal attacks are not allowed. So far, only one of these Unfiltered posts has been removed, Lowery said.
Even the paid contributors largely post to the site without any prior editing. New West relies on upfront training by Lowery for each contributor, who is apprised of what the editors expect on a regular basis. Then they are set loose to post a set number of items each month. Right now, the site runs an average of 12 to 15 new posts per day.
“The citizen section, what we call Unfiltered stories, those stories don’t appear on the main pages of the site unless we promote them,” Weber said. “We have a hierarchy, with things coming in at the lower level, and then filtering up from the subcategories from the city and topic pages to the front page. So a story won’t appear on the front page unless [Lowery] or I has read it and feel that it’s a worthy story for the front page.”
New West has mastered the balance of reporting and blogging more than any other citizen media startup, but it still has room to grow as an online-only publication. Its in-depth piece on the “Dasen Girls” is more akin to print journalism, and a serialized novel by Aspen editor Michael Coniff harks back to earlier efforts by Salon.com. But plans for “blogvertorials” (paid posts by advertisers), audio podcasts and eventually video bode well for the site coming into its own as a native of the Internet.
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New West Snapshot
Headquarters: Missoula, Mont.
Launched: February 2005
Technical platform: Expression engine
Traffic: 42,000 unique visitors, 500,000 page views in October 2005 (double the traffic of September 2005)
Employees: 2 full time; about 15 freelance
Initial funding: Low-to-mid six figures
New posts or stories per day: 12 to 15
Source: New West
More Quotes on New West
“What I think of as our big stylistic innovation is the much more direct and conversational style, as opposed to the formulaic approach of traditional newspaper journalism and traditional journalism in general. The conversational style — I’m telling you what’s going on without the sort of apparatus of the inverted pyramid or whatever it might be — is liberating for a lot of writers and for people who like writing in that style. … I think the stylistic innovation of blogging is consistent with having substantial reporting and fairness. You can have a point of view about something and be fair about it, too.”
— Jonathan Weber, founder and editor-in-chief, New West
“I’ve talked to Jonathan [Weber] about balance and he largely ignores me. They have some very experienced journalists on the staff. I think their writing is very good in general, and their reporting is relatively thorough. It’s a mix of blogging and reporting. Sometimes they use someone else’s reporting to make their statements. It’s creative, and they can get a lot of content out in a big way.”
— Dave Budge, conservative blogger and stockbroker
“I have to admit I don’t read New West regularly. I admire it, but I guess I’m such an old geezer that I have trouble reading sustained journalism efforts online, and I don’t have time for much else. I read a few local bloggers, and a handful of national bloggers, but not much beyond that. It’s possible that I’m a little envious, too, and I don’t like feeding my envy. I find it very hard to imagine that a strictly online publication can make it in this area, at least right now. But I’m glad somebody is trying.”
— David Crisp, editor of the weekly Billings (Mont.) Outpost
“If by ‘conservative’ you mean the conspiracy-minded, anti-abortion, keep ’em barefoot and pregnant Christian Right, for example, well then yes, I would agree that you don’t see those views expressed in New West. However, it has been my experience, and I grew up in the rural South during the Civil Rights era, that that kind of ‘conservative’ is deathly afraid of diversity and steers away from it whenever it is encountered, unless no one’s watching and then it’s a kind of pornography. … So perhaps ‘conservatives’ self-censor themselves when confronted by something free-wheeling. Perhaps that’s true of other conservatives as well.”
— Robert Hoskins, Unfiltered contributor to New West
“What I’ve found is that the West is full of writers looking for work, and they’re all people who are really devoted to the subjects they cover, whether it’s energy or the environment or cultural stuff. There’s a limited number of outlets for these writers to publish their work, and I get e-mails all the time saying, ‘Thank God you guys are here, I love your format, I love the style.’ It’s freeform and more fun for them, which is a big draw.”
— Courtney Lowery, managing editor, New West
About Robert Niles
For the record, I did not say (or certainly I did not intend even jokingly) that New West should not “make it” as a viable publication. That quote by me more likely resembles my feelings that I hope the inter-mountain west does not become “progressive” as it is popularly defined.
At any rate, I admire Jonathan Weber and his efforts at New West and hope (as any serious libertarian would) that they are wildly successful in their business if the market so concludes.
Dave,
I know you feel like I misquoted you, but I recorded our conversation and would be happy to play back the part you don