The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

How TBD could use hyperlocal journalism to kick the Washington Post’s butt

Update, Aug. 19: TBD’s cur­rent cov­er­age is a long way from what I pro­pose below. The Alexa Web traf­fic mea­sure­ment ser­vice is hardly sci­en­tific, and besides, TBD has just started up; but if the ser­vice on the mark, the new site is far from an instant suc­cess. I lack access to TBD’s inter­nal stats. – D.R.

My first edi­to­r­ial in my high school news­pa­per called for a traf­fic light at Gum Springs Road and Route One near Alexan­dria, VA.

You see, my school bus chugged along that way. And I could eas­ily imag­ine an over­grown truck smack­ing into it, maybe right where I was sit­ting. But only after pas­sion­ate pleas did my alarum reach print. Why bother with such a tri­fle? Didn’t stu­dent gov­ern­ment count more as a topic? Safety risks be damned.

My high school edi­tors from decades ago might as well be run­ning the local side of Washingtonpost.com today. The Post is stel­lar in many ways at the national and inter­na­tional lev­els, but not as a hyper­local or even local news source for the fast-growing sub­urb of Alexan­dria.

And I sus­pect that many other D.C.-area res­i­dents find Washingtonpost.com to be as sub­limely use­less for them as a home­town paper. I myself spend far more time nowa­days read­ing the New York Times than the Post.

With­out decent local cov­er­age, and with chaotic Web nav­i­ga­tion com­pared to the Times, what’s the point? A gap­ing hole exists for com­peti­tors to fill.

So TBD.com—the local Web start-up owned by Allbrit­ton Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and tied in with the company’s WJLA-TV—could con­ceiv­ably use geo-targeted Web pages and other strate­gies to kick the Post’s butt at the local level. I’d also sug­gest a mix of more Web savvy, local and hyper­local data­bases and crowd-sourcing (even, with due pre­cau­tions, in the tricky area of inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism). The right busi­ness strate­gies wouldn’t hurt, either.

Washingtonpost.com offers an Alexan­dria page, but much of this home­town news first appeared days ago, includ­ing the June 26 account of sex charges against a 72-year-old T.C. Williams high school teacher. Would you believe, that’s the news item at the top of the screen­shot above, taken today, July 9. The next antique down is 5 North­ern Vir­ginia men con­victed on ter­ror­ism charges, given 10 years in prison. They’re from near-by Fair­fax County, where I grew up, and the date on that one is June 25.

Miss­ing from the top of the Alexan­dria page is Fair­fax board to revisit plans to trans­form Bai­leys Cross­roads, a story dated July 8, just yes­ter­day. For civic-minded Alexan­dria res­i­dents along the Fair­fax County bor­der, all kinds of ques­tions arise about the 530-acre plan. Will Alexan­dria share in the eco­nomic ben­e­fits? What about the traf­fic, air pol­lu­tion and per­haps spill-over peo­ple mov­ing into Alexan­dria itself rather than Fair­fax County? Another bur­den on Alexan­dria pub­lic schools? Or is this a Good Thing? Should every­one cheer, and should Alexan­dria get ready to pig­gy­back on the Fair­fax effort? Bet­ter in the end for prop­erty val­ues and qual­ity of life? Within the Post’s Vir­ginia sec­tion online, as I write this, you will find the Bai­leys Cross­roads story, but it’s under­played, even con­sid­er­ing it’s lit­er­ally yesterday’s news; and why the devil can’t it also show up near the top of the Alexan­dria page? This is the Web, Ms. Wey­mouth and Mr. Brauchli, not print.

Now imag­ine TBD let­ting read­ers choose an Alexandria-focused online edi­tion that would link not just to the Post story and those in other papers such as the Alexan­dria Times and Alexan­dria Gazette Packet, but also to blog­gers pas­sion­ate about their neigh­bor­hoods. And sup­pose there could be forums and com­ment areas in the actual TBD edi­tion, with sim­i­lar mate­r­ial linked or directly repro­duced from affil­i­ate blogs in my city? Instead of the Post broad­cast­ing the news to me, so to speak, TBD would be serv­ing up a truly community-oriented and com­pre­hen­sive site that blended news and dis­cus­sion, far more skill­fully and com­pletely than does Topix.com.

On the pos­i­tive side, TBD is wisely cement­ing rela­tion­ships with sports blogs, hob­by­ist blogs, hyper­local din­ing guides and other spe­cial­ized sites, the very kind of nar­rowly tar­geted con­tent that so many adver­tis­ers could poten­tially cher­ish, espe­cially if TBD skill­fully aggre­gated the good­ies. On the neg­a­tive, will this by itself really be good local jour­nal­ism? You also need to report civic news, like development-related top­ics, and that’s a chal­lenge when so many local blog­gers are dri­ven by nar­row pas­sions and don’t want to write about their neigh­bor­hoods per se—just about din­ing there, for example.

TBD will either have to hire more than the approx­i­mately 50 staffers planned for the start, or try even harder than now to find the right local bloggers—or per­haps it can start or buy par­tial inter­ests in local blogs or use a mix of these approaches.

Yes, to TBD’s con­sid­er­able credit, it already is try­ing to offer detailed local and sub­stan­tive cov­er­age. When I last checked, just 22 or so of the blog­gers were using a civic– or gen­eral neighborhood-oriented approach. Since then TBD has added at least sev­eral more blogs within that cat­e­gory,  not just hobby blogs, and efforts are ongo­ing. But for now we’re still not talk­ing about cov­er­age of civic affairs as thor­ough as I have in mind.

One par­tial solu­tion would be for affil­i­ates to turn to invite read­ers to send in heart­felt hyper­local com­men­tary and even videos. Look at the above YouTube and the explana­tory arti­cle from New York City’s West­side Inde­pen­dent, about which I wrote on July 2 while dis­cussing TBD and the civic blog­ging issue.

“Just two weeks ago,” Inde­pen­dent Edi­tor Avi Salz­man emailed me when I asked this month for details about his oper­a­tion, “there were a cou­ple of very seri­ous acci­dents around the same inter­sec­tion on the Upper West Side. Two dif­fer­ent peo­ple sent me pho­tos of each of the acci­dents, and after I posted them along with info from the fire depart­ment another per­son made a video of why he thinks the inter­sec­tion was dan­ger­ous. It was very heart­en­ing.” Avi, in fact, gets half a dozen “good tips” in a typ­i­cal week. “If I had a staff,” he told me, “I would have two or three times as much orig­i­nal cov­er­age.” TBD’s blog­ger affil­i­ates ide­ally can draw the same participation—and per­haps pass news tips them­selves to TBD, one way to stretch the 50-person staff.

For TBD and its civic blog­gers, I would also sug­gest elab­o­rate data­bases of local and hyper­local infor­ma­tion and crowd-sourced mon­i­tor­ing of them, along with tools for cit­i­zens to take imme­di­ate action. The data­bases could track crime and traf­fic acci­dent sta­tis­tics and indi­vid­ual inci­dents, real estate val­ues, pro­posed zon­ing changes, other local laws, health code vio­la­tions and local polit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions, among many other cat­e­gories. Ide­ally there would also be full records of city bud­gets, as well as timely tran­scripts of city coun­cil and county board meet­ings, plus gov­ern­ment salary records, as well as school test scores and other edu­ca­tional infor­ma­tion and cen­sus data, citizen-written reviews of ser­vices such as schools, and other Yelp–style opinions—with the affil­i­ate blog­gers and TBD team­ing up to push for infor­ma­tion from gov­ern­ment sources when politi­cians and bureau­crats did not offer it. The MSNBC-owned Every­Block net­work, in Chicago, New York,  D.C. and 13 other cities is a wor­thy endeavor, but I see the project as just a start, espe­cially when it comes to pre­sen­ta­tion of content.

TBD and its affil­i­ates, in par­tic­u­lar the George­town Daily Dish, which has picked up Web tal­ent from AOL, could pack­age local and hyper local infor­ma­tion to make it easy to digest and as action­able and spread­able as possible.

What do I mean by easy to digest? I can envi­sion a home-page “dash­board” show­ing major trends of the moment and also offer­ing links to in-depth infor­ma­tion. Read­ers could ben­e­fit from num­bers and col­or­ful graph­ics offer­ing all kinds of data at both macro and micro lev­els. For exam­ple, TBD and its net­work could not only come up with sta­tis­ti­cal cri­te­ria to help rate the over­all qual­ity of life in neigh­bor­hoods for the pop­u­la­tion as a whole, but also break the infor­ma­tion down by income or edu­ca­tional level or other demo­graph­ics, such as by race.

Read­ers could even sup­ply their own rat­ing sys­tems for optional use. Poten­tially con­tro­ver­sial? Yes, but in a con­struc­tive way that helps peo­ple get more engaged as read­ers and cit­i­zens. Sim­i­larly read­ers could cre­ate fil­ters and other means for their fel­low com­mu­nity mem­bers to process the information.

Fur­ther­more, trend-related sta­tis­tics could be sources of anecdote-enlivened news sto­ries encom­pass­ing both the “why” and pos­si­ble solu­tions to prob­lems. TBD could teach affil­i­ates how to express the num­bers in human terms—both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive. We could learn about the neigh­bor­hood girl who over­came socioe­co­nomic bar­ri­ers and got into Har­vard, hav­ing helped to jack up those test scores. Tie in sto­ries about indi­vid­u­als with the stat-based news and vice versa, just as newsweek­lies have done. The big dif­fer­ence is that the sto­ries would be fresh. The New York Times has also excelled in mak­ing num­bers come alive; and with proper guid­ance, so could most civic blog­gers among the TBD affil­i­ates if they wanted to.

Pro­posed zon­ing changes and devel­op­ment in gen­eral would be steadily mon­i­tored by TBD and affil­i­ates, so that read­ers would learn imme­di­ately of plans from stores, restau­rants or builders—and fol­low the decision-making process effort­lessly. “How did I not know this was hap­pen­ing?” Mag­gie Hilliard, an e-book-related mar­ket­ing man­ager tweeted ear­lier this week. “There will soon be a @Target in Manhattan—very close to my neigh­bor­hood. I. DIE.” Whether she loved or hated Tar­get, the jour­nal­ism world may have failed her, just as the Wash­ing­ton Post local sec­tion on the Web con­stantly dis­ap­points me. Did she reg­u­larly read a hyper­local site, and if so, did it send her emails on top­ics of her choice?

Ide­ally, hyper­local sites could also let read­ers mix and manip­u­late information—in a spread­sheet way, not an evil press agent way—to deter­mine, for exam­ple, if a strong cor­re­la­tion existed between suc­cess­ful zon­ing vari­ance appli­ca­tions (or city con­tracts) and local polit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions. Let the con­tracts data­base and the dona­tions one be tightly linked. In gen­eral, in fact, I’d sug­gest that TBD work with affil­i­ates to struc­ture infor­ma­tion within the data­bases so that it was usable as pos­si­ble. Make this eas­ier via a mas­ter data­base in the cloud, per­haps, with affil­i­ate back­ups encour­aged? “The major­ity of news­pa­pers take the time to col­lect this information—which is the hard part—but they dra­mat­i­cally reduce its value by not stor­ing it in struc­tured for­mats,” the Online Jour­nal­ism review has quoted Every­Block founder Adrian Holo­vaty. “Instead, they dis­till it into big blobs of text for pub­li­ca­tion in their print edi­tions, and then they shovel those big blobs of text onto their web­sites. At this point, all struc­ture is lost: Crime reports can’t be sorted or searched intel­li­gently, and event list­ings can’t be viewed in any sort of user-friendly way.” TBD, please, help your affil­i­ates over­come these chal­lenges, if this isn’t in the plans already?

But what is action­able infor­ma­tion? The dash­board could include super-simple forms for con­tact­ing appro­pri­ate officials—for exam­ple, city coun­cil and zon­ing com­mis­sion mem­bers. What’s more, peo­ple could eas­ily email the infor­ma­tion to friends and use social net­works, in addi­tion to send­ing copies to TBD and affil­i­ate blogs. What a con­trast this would be to the Wash­ing­ton Post, which, although let­ting read­ers com­ment on var­i­ous arti­cles, really does not play up inter­ac­tive capa­bil­i­ties in the sys­tem­atic way I’ve described above. Face­book links and Twit­ter links and the like are pathet­i­cally inad­e­quate by them­selves. Same for “Fix this” forms that some news­pa­per sites offer to help you to com­plain about pot­holes and the rest.

So what would this mean in terms of inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism? Well, with com­pre­hen­sive and well-structured data­bases and enough engaged read­ers, the grass­roots could reg­u­larly scoop the pros at TBD—for exam­ple, iden­ti­fy­ing a heavy polit­i­cal donor with a sus­pi­cious knack for bag­ging down gov­ern­ment con­tracts (the Post has very laud­ably exper­i­mented with crowd-sourced scrutiny of some doc­u­ments to iden­tify impor­tant points). TBD could pick up the high­lights and pack­age the alerts in fair, pro­fes­sional ways, tak­ing advan­tage of access to many data­bases and civic-minded affil­i­ates to spot and write about area-wide trends. At the same time readers—actually, reader-researcher-writer-citizens, aka RRWCs—could see and act on the data at the hyper­local level. We’re talk­ing about some major crowd-sourcing. If noth­ing else, I’d cer­tainly advise TBD to con­sider the use of care­fully vet­ted experts to help digest com­plex infor­ma­tion for at least cer­tain inves­tiga­tive sto­ries. In Florida, Gan­nett recruited accoun­tants, engi­neers and government-hip peo­ple as vol­un­teer advi­sors on a sewer story.

But how to keep all this afford­able, beyond using free open source soft­ware? That is one of the advan­tages of a net­work approach—spreading the costs. TBD and the affil­i­ates could agree on tech­ni­cal stan­dards and prac­tices and slowly build the tech­ni­cal infra­struc­ture and stock it the data­bases with infor­ma­tion. Is it nec­es­sary for all of these mir­a­cles to hap­pen this very nanosec­ond? Of course not. Just allow for future scal­a­bil­ity. I’m merely sug­gest­ing that TBD and affil­i­ates pri­or­i­tize and work toward com­pre­hen­sive and ongo­ing neigh­bor­hood pro­files and news alerts (dis­cov­er­able via email or RSS feeds, of course, not just read­able on the dashboards).

I’d also sug­gest that if the TBD staff is not large enough to cover such a wide geo­graph­i­cal area in detail, then the Allbrit­ton inter­ests could con­sider start­ing new bogs and  invest­ing in appro­pri­ate exist­ing ones, with the under­stand­ing that there would be suf­fi­cient neigh­bor­hood cov­er­age. The exis­tence of the data­bases would make this much eas­ier, since so much of the news would be easy pickings—already iden­ti­fied trends at the local and hyper­local levels.

The data­bases would be handy tools, too, for prospec­tive adver­tis­ers, some of whom might pay for more detailed demo­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion. TBD and affil­i­ates could also work with adver­tis­ers to build their own com­mu­nity pages, to which the main site and the oth­ers could link, with spon­sor­ship infor­ma­tion and other iden­ti­fiers to avoid con­fu­sion with inde­pen­dent sites. All kinds of pos­si­bil­i­ties emerge. For exam­ple, with­out impos­ing on res­i­dents who didn’t want to go pub­lic with their inter­ests, a large apart­ment com­plex might find that X per­cent­age of peo­ple in it were canoeists or watched a pop­u­lar TV pro­gram or enjoyed a cer­tain kind of book, and con­sent­ing res­i­dents could even be fea­tured in adver­tise­ments, maybe in return for reduced rent. In other words, cer­tain adver­tis­ers could sell com­mu­nity along with their prod­ucts or ser­vices. For pay, TBD’s busi­ness side could even set up and main­tain online com­mu­ni­ties for the res­i­dents of spe­cific com­plexes to enjoy.

With­out finan­cial sus­tain­abil­ity, the jour­nal­ism I have in mind here can go only so far. “I am far from a hyper­local evan­ge­list (the rev­enue poten­tial is very sketchy right now),” Avi tells me, “but run­ning the site has been a rev­e­la­tion for me, in terms of com­mu­nity engage­ment.” Is there a way to turn this engage­ment into dol­lars and cents with­out com­pro­mis­ing the Inde­pen­dent jour­nal­is­ti­cally and while still look­ing out for read­ers’ inter­ests? Same for TBD. Per­haps even though Avi is in the New York rather than Wash­ing­ton area, he and TBD should be part­ner­ing up in var­i­ous ways, assum­ing that the New York Times or another NYC giant doesn’t buy him out first. Mean­while TBD would do well to make Peace Corps-style appeals—community ser­vice and all that—and be very, very restrained about the finan­cial poten­tial, espe­cially of civic-oriented blogs. What’s the point of brag­ging about “’no cap to the upside’” if the rev­enue is low for now and maybe forever?

I’ve made these friendly sug­ges­tions in a TBD con­text, but if the Post is pay­ing attention—I won’t get my hopes up—then so much the bet­ter. Alas, for now, in many ways, L Street’s cur­rent metropolitan-heavy approach may be dis­cour­ag­ing cit­i­zen involve­ment at the hyper­local level. Met­ro­pol­i­tan news is essen­tial, given how inter­twined the peo­ple of the Wash­ing­ton area. I agree that more than a few work in sub­urbs across town from their res­i­dences. But shouldn’t the Post do more to alert peo­ple about news in their own backyards—even the neigh­bor­hood level? Will the Post for­ever make the mis­take it did with LoudounEx­tra and fail to think suf­fi­ciently about indi­vid­ual neigh­bor­hoods, as opposed to an entire county or coun­ties? Any­thing pos­i­tive? Has the Post allied with Every­Block (founder Holo­vaty, pic­tured, once worked as a techie-journalist hybrid for the Post and is still  active in his neighborhood-news com­pany despite the MSNBC own­er­ship)? Or might it strike a deal in the future with Every­Block, before a com­peti­tor like TBD swoops in, assum­ing this hasn’t hap­pened already?

No, I won’t dis­miss the Post as a superb local or hyper­local news source in the future if it can learn; and remem­ber, there’s the tricky lit­tle issue of whether TBD.com can grace­fully evolve from an embry­onic site to a gen­uine reporter and aggre­ga­tor of news and opin­ion. But for the moment, TBD seems to be far more sen­si­ble about com­mu­nity engage­ment, and some months or years from now, the results could be bad news for the L Street if it does not come up with a suit­able response, espe­cially since WJLA-TV can spread around TBD’s high­lights and help gen­er­ate traf­fic. If WJLA even­tu­ally moves to the Net in a big way, increas­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for direct link­ing, that could make even more difference.

As if the above isn’t enough, the Post may have to con­tend not just with TBD and Every­Block but with a slew of other hyper­local com­peti­tors such as Main Street Con­nect, which hopes to start up 450 URLs in the New York DMA alone.

Sim­ply put, the Post and TBD will both need coher­ent strate­gies and good exe­cu­tion. Think grand visions if you want. But don’t for­get Gums Springs Road and Route One.

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• Solomon Scandals hyperlocal series so far: A list for latecomers
• TBD’s Washington area news startup: Niche blogs wooed—but no signs YET of a hyperlocal nirvana
• Hyperlocal journalism: Georgetown publisher robbed—and eager to tell neighbors about it. Lesson for the Washington Post?
• Hyperlocal journalism and TBD: More coming on what makes a great ‘hyper’ site
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