Here Terry Heaton shows us that aggregation is working in the existing 'sphere but that VC backed citizen sites are struggling. Is the issue Trusted Space or Not?
I am really not a “told you so” kind of person, but the news that Backfence is having difficulty comes as no surprise. For the unenlightened, Backfence is a series of 13 “citizen journalism” sites in three metropolitan areas: Washington, Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area. Funded by VC money, the model was touted by some observers as the way of the future.
Its downfall — if that’s what’s happening — should not be an indictment of hyperlocal citizens media, because there are plenty of other sites that are doing well (Baristanet, SunValleyOnline, Buffalo Rising, H2Otown, and one of my favorites, PegasusNews here in Dallas). It’s a tricky proposition, to say the least, but I think efforts that don’t do well have difficulty, because they’re trying too hard to build something that’s already there. Aggregation is the key, not content creation.
This is why we built Nashville is Talking for WRKN-TV. It is an aggregator of the existing blogosphere and doesn’t try to be anything other than that. The community that has built up around it is pretty amazing, a little society that runs itself quite nicely and brings loads of benefits to the TV station along-the-way. WKRN’s plans go beyond what currently exists, and I think a lot of people are going to be surprised when all is said and done.
The existing blogosphere in any community has energy and life that can’t be duplicated by efforts from without. Bloggers write, because they have something to say. And people who have something to say will find a way to say it. What I don’t like about some citizen media sites is how hard they try to create a forum for people via their own model, reasoning that once the forum is in place, talented people will flock to it. People who have something to say already have their own forums, so efforts to duplicate this, I believe, come off as dry and lifeless.
Fred Wilson has a good summary of the “placeblogging” (this is the new term) phenomenon in his blog this week.
Like other observers, I’ve supported Backfence and the people who were trying to make it work. Nobody has a lock on where all this is going, and we’ve got to accept that some things will work and others won’t. Part of that, I think, is deciding what we mean by “works” and then building accordingly.
Media 2.0 is not Media 1.0, and the more we try to make it so, the quicker we’ll go down in flames.
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