|
Filling
in the Gaps – Emerging
Competition
Debbie Galant, Editor, Baristanet.com Lise LePage & Christopher Grotke, Editors, iBrattleboro.com
"We're
a big fish
in a small pond. Half of the news
we get happens on the playground, in the parking lot. We
get the story
because we're there. "
"In
the
beginning it was just me. Now we
have a few writers. We have more
of the sensibility of The Daily Show. We're not afraid to have opinions. We're
sort of columnists, sort of journalists, sort of bloggers. It's fun, sassy, everything a weekly
newspaper is not. We do a lot of silly polls. On April Fool's Day, we publish
fake stories and wait for people to get enraged before we let them in on the
joke."
In the early days, Baristanet gave away free ads just to show what they'd look like. Now the site attracts more advertising, especially from realtors. But it was spot news that gave Baristanet its first 1,000-visit day, when amateur photographers sent in pictures of a car fire downtown. Now, the site gets an average of 7,000 visitors a day.
Galant
said Baristanet is "blowing away the competition."
There are plenty of weeklies and tons of shoppers distributed in the area, but
when a micro burst (like a tornado) blew through her community on a Monday,
Baristanet was out covering every angle of the story. "Even though the town
lost power, people sent in pictures, and posted needs to a bulletin board. A
pet store owner offered to refrigerate people's medicines. People came to
Baristanet to find out if the trains were running. The 'competition' – The Montclair Times – didn't use its Web site at all
since they were covering the story ... for Thursday!"
A month later, when a manhole exploded on a main shopping street, only Baristanet was all over the story, with eyewitness reports and updates from both the major and fire chief. The power of immediacy – and citizen participation again – gave Baristanet a boost in traffic, during heat and snow emergencies, and even during community debates over whether to Astroturf a field, over a racist rap CD called "Porno Hate Train" being sold in the public school, over the local filming of the final episode of the HBO hit series "The Sopranos."
Galant
also shared a story of serendipity which reveals the
magic of hyperlocal online citizen media: "We post announcements about lost
dogs and cats all the time. This guy who owned a vacuum cleaner repair shop
lost his dog three weeks earlier.
He's never been on the Internet.
His brother tells him to go online and he Googles the words, 'Bloomfield
Sopranos' and the first thing he sees is our site with a photo of his own lost
dog!"
The site is without a doubt a big success, now grossing $100,000 a year with four part-time staff, and 63,000 unique visitors monthly.
*
"When
you want to write an official letter to the editor, you go to your
newspaper. But when you want to
sound off or whistle-blow, you come to us."
The founding pair are Web developers who were concerned about media consolidation, the mainstream media's support for the war in Iraq and the exclusion of dissident voices in that debate.
iBrattleboro has an innovative strategy to deepen its
coverage of the community and get more readers involved as citizen reporter. The site has an assignment
desk where visitors can sign up to cover meetings and events the editors
consider newsworthy.
"We
have tons of content of varying quality. We have a lot of one-liners, but the
story develops through the comments.
It's extremely eccentric.
It's immediate, you can go to the site any time of day and you'll see
fresh content and see other people logged in, " said LePage.
And the site encourages people to use their real names, so you can read the "unfiltered, unvarnished voices of real people you know in Brattleboro." The police chief often posts on the site, as do various agency heads.
LePage and Grotke say they can measure their success off-line too. Attendance at community meetings is way up, in part because of announcements and discussions on iBrattleboro.com about controversial issues like development. And they've seen change. Pressure from citizen activists has led to changes in leadership at the business organization, the police department and the board of the public access TV station.
Does
the local newspaper
feel the competition? Grotke
said, "We've heard anecdotally they feel we're breathing down their neck. But
I
don't think our $300 a month ad revenue is a threat. We are plankton. Citizens are saying that this is what we're
into. The newspaper should go out
and cover it."
"We've had almost no complaints about inaccurate
information," said LePage. "We trust our readers and writers and, almost all
the time, they are accurate.
Citizen journalism is always going to be advocacy. They attend a meeting
because they have a reason for being there, but that doesn't mean their
coverage is going to be inaccurate."
J-Lab
is a center of the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College
of Journalism. It is a spin-off of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism
(www.pewcenter.org). © 2004
University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism
Subscribe to J-Lab's RSS feed (What is RSS?)  |
|||||||||||||||||||
Debbie Galant
Calling
their site the "gray lady of
citizen journalism," Lise
LePage