The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

1. 

   Daniel Victor
   July 1st, 2010 - 11:18

   As a word of intro­duc­tion, I’m one of the com­mu­nity hosts on Steve Buttry’s com­mu­nity engage­ment team. There are lots of valid points here, some we’re already work­ing on and some we should take longer looks at.

   A few points in response:

   – I was glad to see you repeat­edly use the word “yet,” as we have a long, long way to go. You’ve seen just the needle­point of the ice­berg so far. That’s espe­cially impor­tant when it comes to the site design, as we’ll have a full-fledged news site at launch. The blog you see now is really just a place­holder to keep peo­ple updated on what we’re work­ing on, so I assure you we’ll soon be much more ambi­tious with multimedia.

   – As far as reward­ing blog­gers, we’re offer­ing them the best incen­tive of all: finan­cial. We’re not pay­ing them directly as mem­bers of the TBD pay­roll, but we are cre­at­ing an adver­tis­ing net­work that we think will be much more fruit­ful for them than what­ever adver­tis­ing sup­pli­ers they’ve been using. It’s impor­tant to us that the rela­tion­ship be mutu­ally ben­e­fi­cial, so if at any point they’re not happy, we’ll try to fig­ure out a way to respond. So far, though, the blog­gers we’ve dealt with have all been very happy to work with us.

   – I actu­ally tweeted a link yes­ter­day to that same story you linked of the New Jer­sey cof­fee­house, and sev­eral TBD staffers debated how we could use or mod­ify the con­cept here.

   – On book blogs: Our only require­ment for any blog is that it be about the DC area, and we want as diverse of a net­work as pos­si­ble, so we’d gladly take book blogs that fit the bill. We really haven’t tar­geted any area over others…it just so hap­pens there are many more blogs about food and the Red­skins than books. But if you know if any that we should include, please let us know because we would cer­tainly take them.

   – I love your idea of video inter­views with our blog­gers and will be push­ing it now (with proper credit to you, of course).

   – One of our com­mu­nity hosts, Nathasha Lim, has pitched a sim­i­lar idea of video inter­views with local chefs, for exam­ple. We may not get every­thing like that in for launch, but it is some­thing we’re look­ing at.

   – Finally, as far as cov­er­age of edu­ca­tion, crime and civic mat­ters, we do have some blog­gers who cover those areas, but keep in mind that we’ll also have our own report­ing staff who can hit the must-haves of a local news site. If blog­gers are doing a good job in those areas, great, but either way our report­ing staff will step up where needed.

   So we’re very much a work in progress…which is fit­ting, since we still haven’t even announced a launch date. But this was helpful…feel free to keep the feed­back coming.
2. 

   Cindy Cotte Griffiths
   July 1st, 2010 - 11:23

   Thanks for men­tion­ing our Rockville Cen­tral. We have been vol­un­teer­ing part-time but we fit your descrip­tion because our pas­sion is civic engage­ment. The site was founded by Brad Rourke to encour­age more peo­ple to get involved and vol­un­teer in Rockville. Our cov­er­age includes zon­ing and schools plus all the other news and we try to make it neigh­borly and fun. Sub­mis­sions from the com­mu­nity are strongly encour­aged. We’d love for the sur­round­ing com­mu­ni­ties to have sim­i­lar sites but there just aren’t any. It’s a lot of hard work.

   We’ve also been hav­ing reg­u­lar lunches called Rockville Round­ta­bles which are open to all. Peo­ple come together to talk with­out an agenda. We do get story ideas and sug­ges­tions about direc­tions and poli­cies for the site, and encour­age contributions.

   Brad and I are excited to join the TBD net­work. This con­nected com­mu­nity has great poten­tial. We’re look­ing for­ward to “toil­ing” along with all the other sites.
3. 

   David Rothman
   July 1st, 2010 - 11:50

   Nice hear­ing from you, Cindy (and like­wise Daniel, whom I’ll answer next).

   Yes, your Rockville blog is def­i­nitely more civic-oriented than the typ­i­cal one in the TBD net­work so far. Nice work. I hope that oth­ers look to Rockville for an exam­ple and that you can spread the word about the glo­ries of seri­ous hyper­local journalism.

   I almost men­tioned your civic-related items in the post but wanted to focus on the big­ger pic­ture. You and Daniel are very wel­come to do follow-up com­ments here report­ing on the progress in the areas I discussed.

   Thanks,
   David
4. 

   David Rothman
   July 1st, 2010 - 12:17

   Once again, Daniel, thanks for your prompt and respon­sive note.

   I was glad to see you repeat­edly use the word “yet,” as we have a long, long way to go. You’ve seen just the needle­point of the ice­berg so far. That’s espe­cially impor­tant when it comes to the site design, as we’ll have a full-fledged news site at launch. The blog you see now is really just a place­holder to keep peo­ple updated on what we’re work­ing on, so I assure you we’ll soon be much more ambi­tious with multimedia.

   Couldn’t overem­pha­size my appre­ci­a­tion of “yet”! In my opin­ion, how­ever, even a place­holder site for a major media start-up should include com­pelling design and mul­ti­me­dia. The cur­rent site is professional-looking, but doesn’t fully reflect the con­sid­er­able tal­ent and expe­ri­ence of those behind it. There isn’t so much dif­fer­ence in the time required to do what I have in mind—the right blog tem­plate would work won­ders, espe­cially with an improved flag. Even that, of course, will be a long way from the actual news site.

   As far as reward­ing blog­gers, we’re offer­ing them the best incen­tive of all: finan­cial. We’re not pay­ing them directly as mem­bers of the TBD pay­roll, but we are cre­at­ing an adver­tis­ing net­work that we think will be much more fruit­ful for them than what­ever adver­tis­ing sup­pli­ers they’ve been using. It’s impor­tant to us that the rela­tion­ship be mutu­ally ben­e­fi­cial, so if at any point they’re not happy, we’ll try to fig­ure out a way to respond. So far, though, the blog­gers we’ve dealt with have all been very happy to work with us.

   May this con­tinue to be the case. You do need to think long term. It’s pos­si­ble some may want more rewards later on.

   I actu­ally tweeted a link yes­ter­day to that same story you linked of the New Jer­sey cof­fee­house, and sev­eral TBD staffers debated how we could use or mod­ify the con­cept here.

   Ter­rific! The NJ folks are really on to some­thing. I love it when peo­ple bridge the gap between the Net and the real world. Y’all come back here and let us know what you end up doing.

   On book blogs: Our only require­ment for any blog is that it be about the DC area, and we want as diverse of a net­work as pos­si­ble, so we’d gladly take book blogs that fit the bill. We really haven’t tar­geted any area over others…it just so hap­pens there are many more blogs about food and the Red­skins than books. But if you know if any that we should include, please let us know because we would cer­tainly take them.

   I’d rec­om­mend one par­tic­u­lar book blog­ger, but (1) he seems to have enough on his plate already and (2) he seems gen­er­ally more inter­ested in review­ing already-established writ­ers than in writ­ing about local obscu­ri­ties (no reflec­tion on anyone’s talent—just recog­ni­tion of the prob­lems get­ting media attention).

   Do keep in mind alter­na­tives to blog­gers if you can’t find the right one. You could start a book forum over­seen by a TBD staffer, for example.

   I love your idea of video inter­views with our blog­gers and will be push­ing it now (with proper credit to you, of course).

   Won­der­ful. Of course, the main credit here goes to Carol Joynt, who does such a good job of it with the Q&A Café. She is actu­ally broad­cast­ing this for the D.C. cable sys­tem, I think. There are other cable sys­tem inter­view­ers, includ­ing some in North­ern Vir­ginia; but I’ve never seen any of them take their work more seriously.

   One of our com­mu­nity hosts, Nathasha Lim, has pitched a sim­i­lar idea of video inter­views with local chefs, for exam­ple. We may not get every­thing like that in for launch, but it is some­thing we’re look­ing at.

   I know you can’t do every­thing in the begin­ning, but this is some­thing to aim for.

   Finally, as far as cov­er­age of edu­ca­tion, crime and civic mat­ters, we do have some blog­gers who cover those areas, but keep in mind that we’ll also have our own report­ing staff who can hit the must-haves of a local news site. If blog­gers are doing a good job in those areas, great, but either way our report­ing staff will step up where needed.

   Prob­lem is that there’s so much darn news to report, and you may not always find out about, say, impor­tant zon­ing tid­bits, which even the estab­lished media might miss. What’s seem­ingly rather arcane can even­tu­ally have a major impor­tant on the qual­ity of life in neigh­bor­hoods. I’m con­fi­dent your Rockville affil­i­ate would agree.

   So we’re very much a work in progress…which is fit­ting, since we still haven’t even announced a launch date. But this was helpful…feel free to keep the feed­back coming.

   I said “expected later this sum­mer” or some­thing like that, based on ear­lier state­ments. Will it pos­si­bly be fall instead? No prob. I’d rather that TBD took its time and did things right.

   Best of luck,
   David
5. 

   Brad Rourke
   July 2nd, 2010 - 07:35

   Hi there, Brad here. I am part­ner with Cindy (above) on Rockville Cen­tral.

   This is an inter­est­ing and use­ful piece (and thread). David, thanks for it. I want to pro­vide my per­spec­tive on just a piece of it: the whole “reward the blog­gers” ques­tion, espe­cially Daniel’s point.

   I have been a part of start­ing other blog net­works before. I also helped design one. They never work out as well for the blog­ger as they promise. That’s because the power dynam­ics are all out of whack between the par­ties. The host site thinks “we are pro­vid­ing this awe­some plat­form.” The blog­gers think “we are pro­vid­ing this awe­some content.”

   Because the host site rarely goes out of its way to pro­mote its blog­gers (by putting them on the front page, e.g.), the blog­gers are more right than the host site. Yet the blog­gers are asked to give away their con­tent (and typ­i­cally have to post or cross-post it into the platform).

   TBD.com specif­i­cally is try­ing to dis­avow that dis­con­nect by pro­mot­ing indi­vid­ual arti­cles through­out their site, based on geocod­ing, AND are explic­itly say­ing that blog­gers’ con­tent remains on their blogs. Some­one plunks in 20850 as their ZIP Code and they’ll see a bunch of Rockville Cen­tral arti­cles — and the links will come back to us. I antic­i­pate an upswing in traffic.

   I founded Rockville Cen­tral for civic engage­ment pur­poses, not to be a traf­fic mon­ster. So Cindy and I look at slightly dif­fer­ent met­rics than oth­ers when we deter­mine whether we are suc­ceed­ing. (We ask our­selves, among other things: Are new peo­ple enter­ing pub­lic life? Are we hear­ing new voices and see­ing new faces?”)

   How­ever, we don’t mind traf­fic and part of our join­ing TBD.com coin­cides with an attempt to begin to mon­e­tize Rockville Cen­tral in appro­pri­ate ways as a way of mak­ing our effort sus­tain­able. So, in fact, I pre­fer the shared-advertising model of TBD.com to some kind of pay-per-article com­pen­sa­tion plan. This will allow us to sell ads to local busi­nesses and so fur­ther embed Rockville Cen­tral into the community.

   With the adver­tis­ing model, we have our built-in incen­tive to crush it in terms of con­tent, and there is no cap to the upside. And, we don’t get into this mind­set of “well, they’re just pay­ing me $20 for this arti­cle so I will mail it in.”) And, and and … it’s sus­tain­able for TBD.com.

   I am thrilled to be a part of the TBD.com com­mu­nity net­work and I fer­vently hope (and expect) it to suc­ceed. It’s got smart peo­ple at the helm, a lot of run­way, and is nimble.

   Thanks so much for spurring this conversation.
6. 

   Maria Hardy
   July 2nd, 2010 - 08:36

   Thank you for your men­tion of Allergy Life In Loudoun! The blog was a cat­a­lyst to found­ing of the Loudoun Allergy Net­work and in my efforts with this group, I have made many pro­fes­sional con­tacts in the local com­mu­nity who have pro­vided a great deal of help to our mem­bers. As a result, they have seen sig­nif­i­cant busi­ness growth due to the expo­sure to our group, but the Speak­ers have been selec­tively cho­sen and the mem­bers have appre­ci­ated it. I plan to con­tinue that in my blog efforts to help raise money for Johns Hop­kins Chil­drens Cen­ter and national food allergy non profit pro­grams and events. There is a tremen­dous oppor­tu­nity in this new medium.

   As a spe­cial note, sev­eral ded­i­cated Moms in our group this year worked very closely with LCPS in improv­ing the stan­dard guide­lines in car­ing for stu­dents with food aller­gies and we look for­ward to hav­ing safer envi­ron­ments for our kids in Loudoun County in 2010-11. This effort was ini­tia­tive by LCPS for improved well­ness pro­grams in our schools. Our group just hap­pened to be the most out­spo­ken of the diet restric­tion com­mu­nity and we were invited to par­tic­i­pate! Regard­less, none of this could have been accom­plished with­out the proac­tive actions of the Safety, Well­ness and Health Board Com­mit­tee in Loudoun Schools.

   You can see the pub­lished LCPS well­ness guide­lines at http://cmsweb1.loudoun.k12.va.us/50990419143321/lib/50990419143321/Food_Allergies/Food_Allergies_School.pdf?50990419143321Nav=|&NodeID=6113

   Best,
   Maria Hardy
   Founder
   Allergy Life in Loudoun
   Loudoun Allergy Network

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