Can grassroots media be commercial?

Rich Skrenta, Co-founder & CEO of Topix.net, this week offered a smackdown of highly publicized "citizen journalism" initiatives, inspired by his visit to the API Media Center's recent We Media conference:

"The problem is that the hopes that Dan Gillmor raised for the media industry in his book -- which kicked off this whole business -- have largely failed."

He supports this claim, in part, with a link to Tom Grubisich's work on OJR. (Which, FWIW, is the way I found Skrenta's piece. Always check your referrals, through Google Analytics, Technorati or even your log files, to find the conversations where your site's work is playing a part.)

I don't agree with such a blanket dismissal, but it's Skrenta's next assertion that set me off:

"By implicit definition, participatory media is non-commercial. If it's commercial, someone owns it, and it's not 'we' anymore."

Sorry, but I can't swallow that. Readers do not care how we make the sausage. If they find smart, fresh, engaging information on a website, they hang around. And where readers gather, advertisers want in.

Readers participate in a website because they want the value from content that a website with thousands of correspondents can provide. Sure, if readers think a publication is out just to sell ads, and not serve them, those readers eventually go elsewhere. But that's true for staff-written publications as well.

Ultimately, the decisive issue is not a site's commercial status. It is whether readers feel like they are getting more from the website than they are giving to it.

When a community is really clicking, participants will not only accept its commercial status, they will embrace it. They will want to see its owners succeed, because that's the best insurance that the site will remain alive for the community. And they, in turn, will support the advertisers who support their gathering place. From huge sites like Slashdot to smaller ones like my wife's violin site, I have read many websites built on reader-contributed content which have made money for their publishers.

Why have so many of the communities that Skrenta cited failed to attract readers and money? Again, readers don't care how we make the sausage. They are looking for a place to express their passion about a particular topic or community. They don't care to be the lab rats in our experiments on story reporting technique.

But that hasn't stopped news publishers from putting the medium before the message. How many newspapers have started lame blogs, podcasts or video features simply because some higher-up thought they needed blogs, podcasts or videos on their website? Same goes for "citizen journalism" sites. Readers smell this stink and click instead to genuine websites, built by people out of passion -- not fashion.

As one of my grad students said, "No one cared about a printing press until someone put a Bible on it."

Skrenta also wrote:

"Businesses aren't about ideology, they're about getting a job done and earning revenue to keep the thing going. Even wild success tends to leave ideology behind. Ideology is the realm of nonprofits and failures."

Now, we're getting closer to agreement. Publishers need to quit fussing over the ideological purity of their reporting process ("CitJ is our savior!" "CitJ is a threat!") and instead recommit to demonstrating a passion for their readers' interests, and committing to the most appropriate methods to gather and publish the information that those readers need.

Do that, and your readers truly will not mind if you make a buck in the process. Heck, they'll probably be rooting for you to.

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