November 28, 2007
Lessons from Steve Outing's Enthusiast Group
By Robert Niles
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The news hit close to home for me. First, I've known Outing for more than a decade. He's a long-time resident of Boulder, Colo., just up the road from Denver, where I spent the latter part of the 1990s running the editorial side of the Rocky Mountain News' website. Outing's "Stop the Presses" column on Editor & Publisher's website ran daily then, and the near-by Denver newspaper dot-coms provided much material for that column. The News and Denver Post were locked in a bitter circulation war as Denver was producing more than its share of international news, from Columbine to Super Bowl championships to the JonBenet Ramsey tabloid tragedy. On each story, Outing was there to knock or praise our website's efforts, and his comments always were well-deserved.
Second, he and I have fallen into somewhat similar gigs. We both write for high-profile industry publications (Outing for Editor & Publisher, me for OJR) while maintaining our own user-driven niche website publishing businesses.
So forgive me if I root openly for industry columnists who run their own websites on the side. ;-)
Outing's Enthusiast Group relied on user-genered content to provide the bulk of its coverage of several outdoor recreational sports, including climbing and mountain biking. To that end, his sites succeeded. As Outing noted in his Editor & Publisher column reporting the group's demise, "on our YourClimbing.com site, where the editor, Katie Brown, is a well-known professional climber and a former world champion, the site generated so much user content that I'd guess only about 1-2% came from Brown."
But, apparently, that reader-supplied content wasn't enough to drive traffic to the point where it could generate enough ad revenue to make the books work. "Our growth in traffic was slow and steady, but unremarkable, and not enough to sustain a business," Outing wrote.
Outing suggested that the sites' mix of user-generated and staff-written content could not compete with the quality of traditional hiking or climbing magazine. "In my view -- and based in part on my experience with the Enthusiast Group project -- user content when it stands on its own is weak. But it's powerful when appropriately combined with professional content, and properly targeted," Outing wrote.
I concur with Outing about the viability of sites composed entirely of UGC. In my personal experience, reported articles that I or my wife (who has a B.A. and M.A. in journalism) write for our websites spike traffic compared with typical blog entries from other community members. It's unrealistic to assume that unpaid, untrained readers routinely will craft articles with the thorough reporting that professional journalists have been trained to provide. That's why, as sites such as Backfence and YourHub have found and Outing noted, community-written news sites end up with so many of their submissions from people who have been trained and paid to produce content -- PR reps.
I do share Outing's enthusiasm for grassroots reporting, but wish that the industry would move its focus away from creating reader-written hyperlocal websites that look and read like a neighborhood version of the New York Times and instead redirect its energy toward facilitating crowdsourcing -- providing readers with opportunities to report first-person accounts in granular form, saving them the burden or collecting information from other sources and writing complete articles. Empower readers to be sources and fact-checkers. Let the journalist/programmers in the newsroom aggregate and analyze those reports to create fresh narratives, powered by grassroots reporting.
That said, I don't think that individual journalist entrepreneurs should dismiss the commercial viability of news websites built with a large helping of more traditional user generated content, such as discussion boards and blogs. They can earn well, just not well enough (at least initially) to pay the salaries of writers, editors and managers.
As Outing found, as I have found, and as multiple threads on sites such as Webmasterworld.com will tell you, discussion forums and blogs typically earn a far lower amount per thousand impressions than professionally-written, well-targetted copy. Sites such as YourClimbing.com can become profitable for their creators when they are the work of a single writer who takes the time to optimize his or her site for search engine traffic and maximum ad revenue, as well as providing reported news stories and guiding a discussion community. Every community needs a leader, and I've written that journalists are well suited to provide the guidance that an informative online community requires.
Yes, that's an immense amount of work. But if you pick the right topic, the reward is a website that can generate a five-to-low-six-figure income, as well as ownership of an asset that could be worth much more, if the potential audience is large enough to support hiring full-time ad sales people as well as other writers. (And I'd suggest you do so in that order.)
Want examples? Look at how Markos Moulitsas built DailyKos into a multi-site publishing business. Or how Josh Marshall built his Talking Points Memo blog into TPM Media. In each case, one journalist (yes, Kos has a j-school degree) started with one site, then bootstrapped it into a business, adding other sites and staff only when traffic -- and income -- could support them.
Outside funding and multiple hires put much pressure on start-ups to deliver ad income at a level that a developing community usually cannot support. In his E&P piece, Outing offered the lessons he learned about grassroots media from working with the Enthusiast Group. To those, allow me to respectfully add one more: grassroots websites work best when they spring from, well, grassroots.
I'd love to hear what other journalist/entrepreneurs have to say. Please feel welcomed to jump in with a comment.
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From Andrew Schrock on November 29, 2007 at 11:36 AM
Keeping costs low for new startups is one of those rules that many convince themselves to overlook. They may overestimate their ability to monetize content, underestimate the competitiveness of the online marketplace, or believe their niche content will attract more eyeballs than it actually does.User-generated and professional content have a symbiotic relationship. People need some kind of agenda-setting that aligns with their particular interests. I think you're right Robert that there's a good mix, but it's up for discussion as the online advertising is still evolving. My personal feeling is users are accustomed to encountering a lot of content, more than a startup can provide. But a startup may not be able to provide enough of it and stay profitable. And that is, as they say, the rub!
I'm interested in the importance of temporality online. The front-page headline in the morning news is still important; people know when to get their first news of the day and where. Similarly, television shows have episodic content attached to certain days and times. What the web hasn't generally been good at is associating particular content with a particular time. However UGC is excellent at maintaining interest between episodes, or even seasons, if you look at some of the fan groups for shows like Lost.
From Steve Crozier on November 29, 2007 at 11:43 AM
Where to start?First off, having been an entrepreneur for almost 30 years ago, I hate seeing a small business fail because it can't hang in there financially. My hat's off to Outing for trying.
As to reader-generated vs "professional" content--I think the dichotomous thinking is outdated. We (Black White Read online community newspapers, http://blackwhiteread.com) have content written by professional journalists on our payroll, retired corporate writers, students hoping to pursue journalism as a career, former newscasters turned housewives, neighborhood activists, local politicians, and many more. We welcome and groom all comers. We pay them in a way that makes sense. Some we put on our payroll full time, some part time, some are paid on a piece basis. It's not an either-or proposition. Get used to it being messy.
However, while we're on the topic, one *must* have a professional editor. End of story.
As to "crowd-sourcing," hmmmm. Theoretically, it's a grand idea. I've even seen it work great, particularly around a very news-worthy event, such as the California forest fires. As the predominant reporting model on a day-to-day basis, not so much. It's *much* worse on that level even than poorly written user-generated stories.
So, "the industry" should move away from "...creating reader-written hyperlocal websites..."? That's probably true, when put that way. But again, let's not get stuck on the false dichotomy of user-generated vs professional journalism. It doesn't have to be that way.
Since we started publishing in the summer of 2006, we've learned a lot from our readers, our writers, our photographers, and our advertisers. Perhaps because the company founders were *not* professional journalists, we were open to what everyone had to say. We took great ideas from every corner. We've created publications that our readers and advertisers think are "generally interesting, sometimes significant and occasionally indispensable," as Tom Grubisich put it not so long ago on this site.
We're not quite dead yet.
From Steve Crozier on November 29, 2007 at 11:56 AM
Andrew makes a great point about costs. You have to have some staying power to overcome the natural lag time of a new publication, from both a readership and an ad sales perspective.Alexander Muse, who writes the Texas Startup Blog, wrote a post called "Thirteen months of hell!" (http://www.texasstartupblog.com/2006/09/27/thirteen-months-of-hell/) Many inexperienced entrepreneurs are grossly optimistic. Come to think of it, many *experienced* entrepreneurs are the same.
My first business mentor looked at my business plan and said, "Now cut your revenue in half and double your expenses. If you still make money, it's a good plan."
I would add that, at least in our local market experience, it takes time to build critical mass with advertising sales. But it will come. And all the stars are aligned in our direction, folks.
Hang in there.
From Robert Niles on November 29, 2007 at 3:28 PM
Let's be careful with the ellipses, Steve. I wrote that the industry should "move its focus away" (emphasis added) from the hyperlocal UGC sites and instead bring crowdsourcing into the mix in a much larger role. I think that, ultimately, will provide the best ROI for traditional news businesses. I did not say that the industry should abandon hyperlocal UGC.
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From Robert Niles on November 29, 2007 at 10:02 AM
If anyone would like an example of a successful online-only start-up that built on staff-written coverage, I'd point you to Nick Denton's Gawker Media. Again, the key is to maintain very low costs. Gawker started with one site. Its websites employ a small number of writers (one or two per blog) and a small central ad and design team.This is a medium with a business environment that favors individuals with multiple skills sets: journalist/entrepreneurs, journalist/programmers, journalist/designers. Ideally, journalist/entrepreneur/programmer/designers. (I sound like one of those cell phone ads!)
But websites that have to support one only or two people to do all those tasks have a huge financial advantage over websites that need to support four, five or more people to accomplish those same tasks. And unlike pre-Web print, this is a highly competitive publishing medium. You need every advantage available in order to survive.