Could print have saved Backfence and The Enthusiast Group?
I've been an early proponent of both citizen media and social networking for newspapers. For that reason, I have very unintentionally ended up with the label of "expert" on these topics.
While that's flattering, the truth is that everyone in the social media space is playing a game of intelligent darts, and we all have a litany of success and failures that can more accurately be referred to as "knowledge" and "wisdom" -- often with associated scars. There are no silver bullets when you're working on the edge, and nobody -- not even Google -- knows the future. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
I have a lot of respect for anyone who has the guts to try to do things in new ways, so I was personally saddened this year when two separate individuals with newspaper backgrounds were forced to shut down their social media businesses: Mark Potts' Backfence.com, and Steve Outing's Enthusiast Group. The demise of the Enthusiasts hits home especially hard, as I know Outing, who lives about 15 miles west of me in Boulder, Colorado. You can read his insights about his experience via his personal blog, and most recently his column in Editor and Publisher.
A lot of people have been asking me for my thoughts about these events. Implicit in that is whether it changes how I feel about what we're doing in Bakersfield, and I'm sure some of them want to know if we're next (that whole "celebrity death watch" journalist's mentality).
The answer to that is an emphatic "no." Our social media initiatives in Bakersfield continue to do well, and next year we plan to add more interest-focused brands to our current repertoire of nine. And we also continue to bring what we learn with the new brands into our core newspaper brand. The most recent example of that is Snap! high school football photos, which quickly paid for itself for the season through lucrative local sponsorships.
While it's an uphill climb (always the case when building something from scratch), audience and revenue continue to increase for most of our initiatives. And for those that aren't, dedicated people continue to try new things until they find what works. We have a multiple-brand, audience-based strategy, and what works for one audience doesn't automatically work for another. From a network level, all indications point to continued growth, engagement and advertising.
I don't know if this explains everything, but there is one major difference between our approach, and that of the Enthusiasts and Backfence. We don't have a pure-play Internet-only strategy, and print is still a big part of what we do. That's especially true on the revenue side.
The vast majority of revenue for our social networking brands comes from associated print publications that roll up the best user-contributed content, augmented by some top-notch staff content. The content isn't just "shoveled" into print, either. It's edited by a real person who often goes back and forth with the contributor, helping him or her get ideas across more succinctly. While there's a lot of activity on the Web sites, core contributors cherish that interaction with the editor and they get a kick out of seeing their story on the cover in print. That "psychic income" has a lot to do with why they contribute a second, third or fourth time or get all giddy when Matt Munoz posts something on their guestbook.
But that kind of back-and-forth could happen even without print (and maybe it did with Enthusiast and Backfence sites -- I don't know), so let's talk brass tacks about the business side.
Last Spring, Bakotopia -- which began as a free Classifieds provider and evolved into a local music social networking hub -- started producing a magazine (download a few in PDF form here). It comes out every two weeks, and they're now on to Issue #15. The magazine debuted more than two years after Bakotopia started, partly in response to the site's hip users, who have been craving a downtown-scene magazine for years. But more importantly, it was at the request of advertisers.
In an irony that I will never fully understand, even the clubs that used Bakotopia profiles on a daily basis to promote gigs and interact with customers said they really wanted a printed magazine. You could talk to them until they were blue in the face about buying an ad on the home page, and some of them did, but once a magazine was available the dynamics changed and they all had to be in it. They'd see their competitor down the street in there and they couldn't resist.
What is it about print that makes local advertisers salivate? And what does this mean for the supposedly missing business model for social media? What does it mean about how we meet the needs of niche audiences and communities?
I have thought about this a lot, and here are my conclusions so far. I reserve the right to change my mind over time, because that's the nature of innovation.
First, I think so much emphasis has been placed on the mechanics of social media -- for example, using social networking and web forms and comments to solicit stories -- that people have forgotten about what we're trying to accomplish. The whole reason we started developing and deploying social networking tools was to engage audiences that weren't gravitating toward the newspaper brand, and in a way that is scalable. At a high level, The Northwest Voice isn't about so-called "citizen journalism." It's about listening to readers of a specific geographical part of town and giving them a voice. Bakotopia was about turning control over to a distrusting community and finally giving them the spotlight they deserved.
All of our separate brands have their unique value propositions. Because their brand identities were established so early, the brands have legs and can move between mediums and form factors. Bakotopia is the most recent example of that. And I'm not saying that we should have just created a magazine instead of a Web site, either. It's the interactive nature of the Web site that created a brand that could extend into print in the first place. If you took the Web site away, Bakotopia as a brand would falter. If you stopped the magazine, its revenue would falter. The two are married at the hip.
Second, we have a tendency in the newspaper industry to read too much into the troubles of our core products. Print circulation is falling at most daily newspapers around the world, and I think a lot of industry people assume that this means print is disappearing. But if you look at things from a higher level, even in your own life, this isn't necessarily true.
More and more stuff is crammed into my U.S. Postal Service mailbox every day, and I see more little magazines and newsletters and flyers around town than I did in the past (and increasingly, also in my mailbox!) Most of that content is full of paid ads, but it differs from newspaper advertising in significant ways. It's more targeted, and thus less expensive for the advertiser (although more expensive per target reader, which shows they're willing to pay more for targeting). And it's more focused and relevant to specific interests or needs -- for example, buying a house, finding a car or getting deals at nearby establishments.
Sometimes I think those of us in the "new media" realm tend to get caught up in our own manifestos about what people want, and in the process of doing that we miss the bigger picture. Our experience in Bakersfield suggests that people don't necessarily want more web and less print. They want more relevance, convenience and control in every aspect of media, which includes both print, online, mobile and who knows what else in the future.
With small local advertisers there is a bit of a disconnect. Right now, they primarily want to see their messages out on the street where they do business, and print is still the best vehicle for that. Do they also want online? Some of them do, but they also seem to be hesitant for reasons that I'm not sure are fully grounded in reality. If an online ad fits their budget and it reaches the right people, they buy, but they expect immediate results that aren't as easy to track as when someone walks in the door with a clipped coupon. So maybe we have some work to do around online ad trackability. I also think there are some opportunities to make local self-serve easier and more effective at reaching local audiences than Google AdWords (let's face it -- a donut shop is never going to sell 100 more donuts to locals by placing an AdWord).
Would Backfence and The Enthusiast Group have succeeded with print publications? I don't know for sure, but I think it would have helped. It also would have cost a heck of a lot more, which is difficult for any startup.
So my final thought is that there are still some significant advantages that existing media companies have over startups. They have more resources and capacity and -- assuming their publishers are as forward-looking as ours is -- time than a typical venture-backed company. The question is whether they focus those resources more on innovation, especially as the economy appears to be on the verge of recession.
I have faith in the Californian to do that, but I'm not convinced about the rest of the industry. I'm really looking forward to having others prove me wrong there.
LATER: Steve Outing responded to this post. You can read his response here. And Mark Potts has some comments below this post.
I can appreciate the concerns around cost. Even for an exsiting media company like the Californian that has its own presses, the startup costs for printing and distributing a new printed product -- even one with 10,000 - 20,000 copies that comes out every two weeks -- is daunting. Those costs require a longer "runway" than most small startups probably have. Don't assume that you need your own printing presses to do this, though. Many of the niche publications I mention that are managed by Mercado Nuevo are now printed outside of the Californian because it's cheaper for them, based on the number of copies and type of print stock that they require.
I have thought for some time that there must be a way to let anyone publish a printed publication using online content, starting with PDFs and then moving to home printers, Kinko's and -- for the right type of content -- a larger press run. We submitted a concept to the Knight News Challenge for this, and have been invited to gointo the next round. If we win (a longshot given the number of entries), maybe the next citizen media startup will have more options when it comes to print. And if we don't, I think this idea is so compelling that we'll keep looking for a way to make it happen. I think the only reason it hasn't happened yet at a local level is that nobody has tried. All of the technology to create instant print publications exists, muchof it open source.
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While that's flattering, the truth is that everyone in the social media space is playing a game of intelligent darts, and we all have a litany of success and failures that can more accurately be referred to as "knowledge" and "wisdom" -- often with associated scars. There are no silver bullets when you're working on the edge, and nobody -- not even Google -- knows the future. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
I have a lot of respect for anyone who has the guts to try to do things in new ways, so I was personally saddened this year when two separate individuals with newspaper backgrounds were forced to shut down their social media businesses: Mark Potts' Backfence.com, and Steve Outing's Enthusiast Group. The demise of the Enthusiasts hits home especially hard, as I know Outing, who lives about 15 miles west of me in Boulder, Colorado. You can read his insights about his experience via his personal blog, and most recently his column in Editor and Publisher.
A lot of people have been asking me for my thoughts about these events. Implicit in that is whether it changes how I feel about what we're doing in Bakersfield, and I'm sure some of them want to know if we're next (that whole "celebrity death watch" journalist's mentality).
The answer to that is an emphatic "no." Our social media initiatives in Bakersfield continue to do well, and next year we plan to add more interest-focused brands to our current repertoire of nine. And we also continue to bring what we learn with the new brands into our core newspaper brand. The most recent example of that is Snap! high school football photos, which quickly paid for itself for the season through lucrative local sponsorships.
While it's an uphill climb (always the case when building something from scratch), audience and revenue continue to increase for most of our initiatives. And for those that aren't, dedicated people continue to try new things until they find what works. We have a multiple-brand, audience-based strategy, and what works for one audience doesn't automatically work for another. From a network level, all indications point to continued growth, engagement and advertising.
I don't know if this explains everything, but there is one major difference between our approach, and that of the Enthusiasts and Backfence. We don't have a pure-play Internet-only strategy, and print is still a big part of what we do. That's especially true on the revenue side.
The vast majority of revenue for our social networking brands comes from associated print publications that roll up the best user-contributed content, augmented by some top-notch staff content. The content isn't just "shoveled" into print, either. It's edited by a real person who often goes back and forth with the contributor, helping him or her get ideas across more succinctly. While there's a lot of activity on the Web sites, core contributors cherish that interaction with the editor and they get a kick out of seeing their story on the cover in print. That "psychic income" has a lot to do with why they contribute a second, third or fourth time or get all giddy when Matt Munoz posts something on their guestbook.
But that kind of back-and-forth could happen even without print (and maybe it did with Enthusiast and Backfence sites -- I don't know), so let's talk brass tacks about the business side.
Last Spring, Bakotopia -- which began as a free Classifieds provider and evolved into a local music social networking hub -- started producing a magazine (download a few in PDF form here). It comes out every two weeks, and they're now on to Issue #15. The magazine debuted more than two years after Bakotopia started, partly in response to the site's hip users, who have been craving a downtown-scene magazine for years. But more importantly, it was at the request of advertisers.
In an irony that I will never fully understand, even the clubs that used Bakotopia profiles on a daily basis to promote gigs and interact with customers said they really wanted a printed magazine. You could talk to them until they were blue in the face about buying an ad on the home page, and some of them did, but once a magazine was available the dynamics changed and they all had to be in it. They'd see their competitor down the street in there and they couldn't resist.
What is it about print that makes local advertisers salivate? And what does this mean for the supposedly missing business model for social media? What does it mean about how we meet the needs of niche audiences and communities?
I have thought about this a lot, and here are my conclusions so far. I reserve the right to change my mind over time, because that's the nature of innovation.
First, I think so much emphasis has been placed on the mechanics of social media -- for example, using social networking and web forms and comments to solicit stories -- that people have forgotten about what we're trying to accomplish. The whole reason we started developing and deploying social networking tools was to engage audiences that weren't gravitating toward the newspaper brand, and in a way that is scalable. At a high level, The Northwest Voice isn't about so-called "citizen journalism." It's about listening to readers of a specific geographical part of town and giving them a voice. Bakotopia was about turning control over to a distrusting community and finally giving them the spotlight they deserved.
All of our separate brands have their unique value propositions. Because their brand identities were established so early, the brands have legs and can move between mediums and form factors. Bakotopia is the most recent example of that. And I'm not saying that we should have just created a magazine instead of a Web site, either. It's the interactive nature of the Web site that created a brand that could extend into print in the first place. If you took the Web site away, Bakotopia as a brand would falter. If you stopped the magazine, its revenue would falter. The two are married at the hip.
Second, we have a tendency in the newspaper industry to read too much into the troubles of our core products. Print circulation is falling at most daily newspapers around the world, and I think a lot of industry people assume that this means print is disappearing. But if you look at things from a higher level, even in your own life, this isn't necessarily true.
More and more stuff is crammed into my U.S. Postal Service mailbox every day, and I see more little magazines and newsletters and flyers around town than I did in the past (and increasingly, also in my mailbox!) Most of that content is full of paid ads, but it differs from newspaper advertising in significant ways. It's more targeted, and thus less expensive for the advertiser (although more expensive per target reader, which shows they're willing to pay more for targeting). And it's more focused and relevant to specific interests or needs -- for example, buying a house, finding a car or getting deals at nearby establishments.
Sometimes I think those of us in the "new media" realm tend to get caught up in our own manifestos about what people want, and in the process of doing that we miss the bigger picture. Our experience in Bakersfield suggests that people don't necessarily want more web and less print. They want more relevance, convenience and control in every aspect of media, which includes both print, online, mobile and who knows what else in the future.
With small local advertisers there is a bit of a disconnect. Right now, they primarily want to see their messages out on the street where they do business, and print is still the best vehicle for that. Do they also want online? Some of them do, but they also seem to be hesitant for reasons that I'm not sure are fully grounded in reality. If an online ad fits their budget and it reaches the right people, they buy, but they expect immediate results that aren't as easy to track as when someone walks in the door with a clipped coupon. So maybe we have some work to do around online ad trackability. I also think there are some opportunities to make local self-serve easier and more effective at reaching local audiences than Google AdWords (let's face it -- a donut shop is never going to sell 100 more donuts to locals by placing an AdWord).
Would Backfence and The Enthusiast Group have succeeded with print publications? I don't know for sure, but I think it would have helped. It also would have cost a heck of a lot more, which is difficult for any startup.
So my final thought is that there are still some significant advantages that existing media companies have over startups. They have more resources and capacity and -- assuming their publishers are as forward-looking as ours is -- time than a typical venture-backed company. The question is whether they focus those resources more on innovation, especially as the economy appears to be on the verge of recession.
I have faith in the Californian to do that, but I'm not convinced about the rest of the industry. I'm really looking forward to having others prove me wrong there.
LATER: Steve Outing responded to this post. You can read his response here. And Mark Potts has some comments below this post.
I can appreciate the concerns around cost. Even for an exsiting media company like the Californian that has its own presses, the startup costs for printing and distributing a new printed product -- even one with 10,000 - 20,000 copies that comes out every two weeks -- is daunting. Those costs require a longer "runway" than most small startups probably have. Don't assume that you need your own printing presses to do this, though. Many of the niche publications I mention that are managed by Mercado Nuevo are now printed outside of the Californian because it's cheaper for them, based on the number of copies and type of print stock that they require.
I have thought for some time that there must be a way to let anyone publish a printed publication using online content, starting with PDFs and then moving to home printers, Kinko's and -- for the right type of content -- a larger press run. We submitted a concept to the Knight News Challenge for this, and have been invited to gointo the next round. If we win (a longshot given the number of entries), maybe the next citizen media startup will have more options when it comes to print. And if we don't, I think this idea is so compelling that we'll keep looking for a way to make it happen. I think the only reason it hasn't happened yet at a local level is that nobody has tried. All of the technology to create instant print publications exists, muchof it open source.
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Labels: Backfence, Enthusiast Group, newspapers, social networking
posted by Dan at
11/26/2007 10:11:00 AM
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