The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

How Washington Post and New York Times could outgun hyperlocal sites like TBD and Baristanet

In 2004 Baris­tanet—the lively hyper­local net­work that helped inspire sim­i­lar oper­a­tions in sev­eral states—started writ­ing up pic­nics, schools and other neigh­borly news in Essex County, NJ.

Some five years later, The New York Times set up shop with blogs for Maple­wood, Mill­burn and South Orange, all in the same county.

Last month one of the two hyper­local nets said good-bye to its read­ers and gra­ciously offered a Web link to the other people’s site. No, the farewell didn’t come from lit­tle Baris­tanet, one of whose co-owners is Deb­bie Galant (photo below), a for­mer New Jer­sey colum­nist for the New York Times.

Both online and in an inter­view with On the Media, the Times goliath did its best to down­play the shut­down, depict­ing the year-old New Jer­sey Local sites as an instruc­tive exper­i­ment, which  in fact it had been all along. What’s more, the Times is con­tin­u­ing hyper­local efforts in the Fort Greene and Clin­ton Hill sec­tions of Brook­lyn, in part­ner­ship with the CUNY Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism, and it also will be work­ing wiith New York Uni­ver­sity on The Local: East Vil­lage. Fur­ther­more, Deputy Metro Edi­tor Mary Ann Gior­dano told OTM that the Times might pick up con­tent from other people’s local blogs—perhaps Baristanet?—if they met cer­tain stan­dards. Still, do you really think the Times would have closed its New Jer­sey Local blogs if the Essex County exper­i­ment had taken off?

What the devil hap­pened? Any lessons here for the Wash­ing­ton Post to learn from the Times’ hyper­local shut­down in New Jer­sey? The Post has already chalked up a hyper­local fail­ure in Loudoun County, VA, and now faces com­pe­ti­tion from TBD.com, a hyper­local startup over­seen by Jim Brady, the ex-editor of Washingtonpost.com. In cer­tain ways might this be a repeat of what hap­pened when two L Streeters left to start the Politico, now a sta­ple on the White House’s daily read­ing list? Here’s another twist. TBD’s owner is Allbrit­ton Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, which had fam­ily ties with the late Wash­ing­ton Star and owns WJLA-TV and NewsChan­nel 8, with which TBD will be team­ing up.

How, then, can the Wash­ing­ton Post’s edi­to­r­ial and busi­ness sides pro­tect L Street’s fran­chise as the main local news source for the D.C. area? TBD aims to cover the news and make money, not destroy the Post, just as tiny Baris­ta­nent won’t exactly kill off the New York Times. Still, in the aggre­gate, inde­pen­dent hyper­local oper­a­tions could siphon off a notice­able amount of rev­enue from Post– and Times-style news­pa­pers, espe­cially if they can draw read­ers and adver­tis­ers from a whole metro area as TBD intends to. Let’s ana­lyze what may have hap­pened in Essex County, then pon­der how the Post might fare bet­ter next time it goes hyper­local. Many of my thoughts may also apply to the Times, which, after all, is still com­mit­ted to hyper­local experiments.

In my opin­ion from afar, here’s why Baris­tanet still thrived but the Times failed to score big with its hyper­local net­work in Essex County:

1. The Times kept on its busi­ness suit, so to speak, and failed to acquire a truly casual look for the sub­urbs. The Times sites struck me as more pro­fes­sional, more struc­tured; Baristanet’s, as friendlier.The home­grown oper­a­tion has more pho­tos and its share of videos, and looks like a high-tech fam­ily album. I know. “Eye candy” is what techies and some jour­nal­ist might dis­miss Baristanet’s col­or­ful lay­out as being. But approach­a­bil­ity  counts end­lessly on the Web. Hyper­local sites and pages need to be designed for their par­tic­u­lar read­ers, not just as rein­force­ments of the brand images of the mother ships. Baris­tanet itself, by the way, appears to be named after the cof­fee­house baris­tas. Talk about a warm image and appro­pri­ate­ness! “Barista” can also mean “bar­tender” in Ital­ian, and that’s like­wise fit­ting, con­sid­er­ing the many Italian-Americans in New Jersey.

2. Baris­tanet is bet­ter plugged into Essex County through peo­ple such as Deb­bie Galant, or at least that’s how it came across to me online. The Times drew its share of local con­tri­bu­tions and for all I know had some locals man­ag­ing it, but its style and approach seemed just a lit­tle more detached. New Jer­sey Local ran a “Vir­tual Assign­ment Desk” fea­ture where you could sign up to do cov­er­age. But Baris­tanet did a bet­ter job of bak­ing the par­tic­i­pa­tory angle into itself in an ongo­ing way. When Baris­tanet served up words and images from Mont­clair High School’s reunion, it asked the pic­nic atten­dees to “tell us who you saw. Or regale us with mem­o­ries of your days at 100 Ches­nut.” Sim­ply put, Baris­tanet has bet­ter posi­tioned itself as a place for chatty neigh­bor­hood con­ver­sa­tions, as opposed to stiffer, more for­mal coverage.

I won­der how eas­ily the New York Times and the weekly Mont­clair Times can match Baris­tanet some­day in its skill in at draw­ing out the Essex County locals. Check out this YouTube video from dkennedy56 where Baris­tanet and the Mont­clair paper offer starkly dif­fer­ent philoso­phies of news cov­er­age. Like both Times, I want sub­stan­tive cov­er­age of civic mat­ters, but the Mont­clair paper’s strat­egy of focus­ing on process—on, say, detailed cov­er­age of gov­ern­ment meetings—needs new wrin­kles to appeal to Web-era readers.

3. The Baris­tanet oper­a­tion has more focus than did the New York Times’s hyper­local efforts. Baris­tanet does not just home in on well-off com­mu­ni­ties rather than wor­ry­ing about places like Newark. In story choice and story place­ment, this seems in some ways like an upscale female-oriented lifestyle sec­tion in dis­guise. See a Baris­tanet adkit show­ing that 63 per­cent of Baris­tanet read­ers are women and 39 per­cent have yearly incomes exceed­ing $150K. The Times had geo­graph­i­cal focus, but the tar­get­ing still was not as pre­cise, even with some sto­ries aimed at afflu­ent women. To be sure, I have mixed feel­ings about this. Con­sider the social impli­ca­tions of hyper­local sub­ur­ban oper­a­tions com­pet­ing with daily news­pa­pers also serv­ing not-so-wealthy areas such as Newark. Baristanet’s typ­i­cal reader is hardly a mul­ti­mil­lion­aire, but we’re still talk­ing about lower-hanging fruit than in Newark. Kudos to the Times for its hyper­local exper­i­ments in a socially mixed sec­tion of Brook­lyn. One aside: Per­haps hyper­local sites could use cookie-based cus­tomiza­tion or other schemes to be have dif­fer­ent focuses for dif­fer­ent read­ers, beyond geo-based ones.

4. The New York Times didn’t suf­fi­ciently rec­og­nize the close rela­tion­ship between news and adver­tis­ing and pay enough atten­tion to the busi­ness side—the ad peo­ple more or less sat on the side­lines, even though I did notice some adver­tis­ing in the Times’ New Jer­sey blogs when I looked this week, includ­ing some from Google. Baris­tanet was and is well stocked with ads on its home page at least; and I doubt that its reach of “more than 9,000 vis­its a day” is the only rea­son. Once again we’re talk­ing about focus on the lifestyles of the not-quite-rich-but-well-enough-off. Mind you, a hyper­local net­work shouldn’t be an online shop­per, with oily trib­utes to local mer­chants adver­tis­ing there, and  in fact, in The Solomon Scan­dals, I write of a fic­ti­tious news­pa­per where busi­ness goals com­pro­mise the edi­to­r­ial ones. But the Baris­tanet is full of upbeat head­lines, on food fes­ti­vals and the like, that appeal to its tar­get audi­ence even if the sto­ries are not nec­es­sar­ily about adver­tis­ers per se. Deb­bie Galant claims in the YouTube video that her com­pany is already mak­ing money, and I can believe her although I doubt the sum is huge. Her father ran a newslet­ter in Wash­ing­ton, D.C., so entre­pre­neur­ship, not just jour­nal­ism, is in her blood.

5. Although Times’ hyper­local oper­a­tion in New Jer­sey  blogrolled other local sites, Baristanet’s home-page list was far more detailed and use­ful. In effect, it made itself a good ref­er­ence source—for new and old res­i­dents alike—rather than just a bul­letin board and vir­tual water­ing hole. Whether you’re a gar­dener or a can­cer sur­vivor look­ing for oth­ers, Baris­tanet can help. The above image on the left shows just a frac­tion of the links run­ning along the right col­umn of the Baris­tanet site’s home page. The link col­lec­tion serves another pur­pose, in posi­tion­ing Baris­tanet as a a hub, as an online  insti­tu­tion, rather than just another local blog. Along the way, do you notice the taste­ful, well-done local ads?

My rec­om­men­da­tions for the Post and the Times

All this is highly applic­a­ble to the New York Times and Wash­ing­ton Post, whose tra­di­tional cor­po­rate and edi­to­r­ial cul­tures could hurt them if the peo­ple in charge doesn’t change. The Post will need to mas­ter the art of online conversation—not just good writ­ing and reporting—and part­ner with the local blog­ging com­mu­nity in a much big­ger way than it has so far. Q & A’s with staffers and news­mak­ers aren’t the same for blog­gers and other read­ers as are gen­uine part­ner­ships. Like Baris­tanet, the Post should bake in the con­ver­sa­tion on local top­ics rather than add it as frost­ing. Baris­tanet is not claim­ing that its sto­ries pro­vide full cov­er­age. Rather, the idea is to start a dia­logue. As best I can deter­mine, TBD’s peo­ple feel the same.

One way or another, TBD is out to rewrite the rules of local cov­er­age for the D.C. area. It will rely on a mix of its own staff report­ing and  links to local blogs. In the OTM inter­view, the Times’ Mary Ann Gior­dano cor­rectly notes the amount of energy and time that pro­fes­sional hyper­local jour­nal­ism can demand, and I’m not cer­tain that a staff of some 50, the size envi­sioned for TBD’s launch in the Wash­ing­ton area, will be enough for both thor­ough cov­er­age and com­plete fact-checking. The good news is that TBD is try­ing to adapt Web inter­ac­tiv­ity to jour­nal­ists’ tra­di­tional focus on get­ting at the truth, com­plete with the details. I love the head­line over a TBD blog item today and hope that the peo­ple there can keep their word: TBD is com­mit­ted to accu­racy; help us cor­recct, ver­ify.

TBD Com­mu­nity Engage­ment Direc­tor Steve But­try (photo) and Edi­tor Erik Wem­ple write: “A box will accom­pany most TBD arti­cles under the ban­ner ‘Com­plete This Story.’ It’ll prompt users to tell us what’s wrong, and it’ll also note the story’s weak­nesses as iden­ti­fied by edi­tors and reporters at TBD, invit­ing you to help us fill the holes.” Great! When I ran an e-book blog, I, too, played up read­ers’ com­ments and encour­aged our vis­i­tors to cor­rect us and add miss­ing facts. The old paradigm—of jour­nal­ists as infal­li­ble souls—is out of date. Read­ers are wise. Whether in hyper­local cov­er­age or other kinds, the Post and the Times will have to adjust. The quest for truth needs to be less one-sided—more of a gen­uine dia­logue. Vir­tu­ally all of daily jour­nal­ism, even the New York Times’, is like a sausage fac­tory, because it’s done on dead­line. TBD is sim­ply being straight­for­ward about human frailties.

Here are some of my other rec­om­men­da­tions, beyond striv­ing for gen­uine dia­logue with read­ers and try­ing to be trans­par­ent, the way TBD is:

#1: Both the Times and the Post are repairable at the local level and may even have cer­tain advan­tages: Use them

It isn’t as the Times and Post are staffed by net.dunces. Mary Ann Gior­dano, Times deputy metro edi­tor who’s over­see­ing hyper­local efforts,  has hun­dreds of Face­book friends, and although her New Jer­sey sites weren’t quite as well tar­geted as Baristanet’s, they had their share of positives.

Just as sig­nif­i­cantly, the big boys have more resources on both the edi­to­r­ial and busi­ness sides. In the Post’s place, I would home in on the big weak­ness of TBD’s strategy—its heavy depen­dence on local blog­gers, just a frac­tion of whom are writ­ing civic-oriented items. I would resign myself to some heavy short-term losses and either deploy staff to start local blogs or invest heav­ily in inde­pen­dent local sites or try a mix of these strate­gies. Go for in-depth hyper­local cov­er­age of edu­ca­tion and zon­ing and other areas where TBD right now is weak. While the Post has started a local blog net­work, it is too small to be of any real con­se­quence com­pared to what TBD envi­sions for itself.

On the busi­ness side, I would go after ads from national com­pa­nies with a major local pres­ences such as McDon­alds, so that adver­tis­ing sup­port from the Post came with the ter­ri­tory when blog­gers signed up to help stock hyper­local editions.

I would also work to pack­age both the main paper and the hyper­local off­shoot or off­shoots as slickly as pos­si­ble. In PR terms and even legally, it would be a dis­as­ter if the Post launched a war on local links. But just like the Times, L Streeters can hire bet­ter Web help than hyper­local com­peti­tors can, and the Post could go on to build thriv­ing com­mu­ni­ties of forum par­tic­i­pants and blog com­menters, so that the Post-related sites are gen­uine des­ti­na­tions, not just fod­der for links and sum­maries from TBD and the Allbrit­ton blog network’s affil­i­ates. What’s more, I would strike alliances with phone com­pa­nies and Google so that the Post pro­vided well-packaged, location-aware cov­er­age for those want­ing it—and of course the accom­pa­ny­ing ads.

Yet another issue is con­tract exclu­siv­ity with blog­gers. I’d rather this not hap­pen, but just out of curios­ity, I won­der if is there a way, with­out break­ing anti-trust laws, for the Post to require some kind of exclu­siv­ity. Given all its cash from Kaplan, the Wash­ing­ton Post Com­pany could prob­a­bly sur­vive a bid­ding war nicely. The down­side of this is that a war could sig­nif­i­cantly jack up expenses, and besides, as noted ear­lier, nasty issues may emerge when you try to make use of links exclu­sive (exclu­siv­ity for full repro­duc­tion of con­tent is a dif­fer­ent mat­ter). My own belief is that severe copy­right restric­tions would hurt every­one, even large con­glom­er­ates, whether they real­ize it or not.

In another area, if I sud­denly took over the Post’s local oper­a­tions, I would make use of my resources to imple­ment the data­base con­cepts described ear­lier in the Solomon Scan­dals blog.  Yes, TBD could set up data­bases of its own—for its staffers and affil­i­ates. But if the Gra­hams really care, the Post will have the resources do out-database TBD.

I don’t know the pre­cise capa­bil­i­ties of the Post’s tech­ni­cal staff to set up the infra­strac­ture for a hyper­local ini­tia­tive, but if the right peo­ple are not in-house, I would hire them. Come on, Don Gra­ham. The money is there. If you don’t want to invest your Kaplan cash in the right peo­ple and tech­nol­ogy for a decent local news oper­a­tion, maybe you need to think about sell­ing off the paper.

Finally, as long as we’re dis­cussing advan­tages of the big boys, I won­der if the Post could team up with a TV sta­tion to counter TBD’s rela­tion­ship with WJLA and NewsChan­nel 8..

#2: Strive for a good bal­ance of the light and the seri­ous in a way that draws in read­ers: Improves their lives—and maybe even save them

What kind of hyper­local news should the Post and Times focus on? I favor a mix. Who says the seri­ous can’t be as com­pelling as the friv­o­lous and maybe even more so? TBD affil­i­ate Beth Solomon’s first-hand write-up of her expe­ri­ence as a crime vic­tim—in the very ter­ri­tory cov­ered by her George­town Dish—is one exam­ple. Here’s another.

Read­ers already know of my inter­est in high­way safety—I’m the guy whose first pub­lished com­men­tary in his high school paper was an appeal for a traf­fic light at the inter­sec­tion of Gum Spring Road and Route One.

Now what about my har­row­ing expe­ri­ence on Inter­state 66 yes­ter­day with Google Maps when I went out to Fair­fax, Vir­ginia to pick up a used iPod I’d bought through Craigslist?  When I was on my way to the seller’s house, Google couldn’t have been clearer, as these two images from screen­shots show.  Google told me to turn left from I-66, then head right on Stringfel­l­low Road. No men­tion that the Stringfel­low Road was gated off at the time I was trav­el­ling, Sun­day morning!

So what hap­pened? Well, I know that Google has warn­ings that it is not infal­li­ble, but you’d expect road direc­tions to be updated reg­u­larly. So here I was cruis­ing along in a 1988 Honda and was just at the level for a behead­ing if I went through the gate. It was day­light, so I spot­ted the threat in time—but with a lit­tle dif­fi­culty just the same, because of the con­fi­dence that a com­put­er­ized map gave me, deserved or not. Talk about cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance! What’s more, sup­pose it had been night, the warn­ing lights on the gate had been work­ing, but it was hard to judge the dis­tances involved. And mean­while cars were whizzing past me at per­haps 75 miles per hour, eas­ily over the limit—I-66 is really NASCAR in disguise.

Notice all the angles here? The first-person story—or reports of oth­ers’ experiences—could be just the start for a good hyper­local blog­ger. How about con­tact­ing Google and the gov­ern­ment offi­cials respon­si­ble for I-66. Is there any coör­di­na­tion? If Google isn’t get­ting timely updates from the high­way peo­ple, should it seek them out and maybe even press for daily ones? I think so, and by way of dis­clo­sure, I’m more than a lit­tle annoyed at the com­pany despite being a very small long-term share­holder for retire­ment pur­poses. The I-66 inci­dent, had it hap­pened at night, might have deprived me a chance even to live to retire­ment. Also, why the need for the gate? Some kind of HOV arrange­ment? And what about the clas­sic I-66 issues? Who counts the most, local com­muters or tourists and truck­ers? In places, thanks to some dum­mies in Rich­mond or else­where, parts of I-66 lack a safety shoul­der at times, so an SUV could give your body a good blood­y­ing if you’re in the wrong place after your car breaks down.

All kinds of I-66-related angles emerge, in other words, some asso­ci­ated with my lit­tle expe­ri­ence, some not; and I’ll be dis­ap­pointed if TBD and the Post offer us hyper­local fluff at the expense of bread-and-butter issues like high­way safety. Bal­ance, please! Not one extreme or another. Pub­lic ser­vice jour­nal­ism, rather than just cov­er­age of pic­nics and cup­cake tast­ings, could pro­vide good hyper­local blogs with a halo effect and actu­ally help bring in adver­tis­ers. So can fluff. bBut bal­ance might be still more effective.

Quite rightly, Baris­tanet has pointed out that tra­di­tional inves­tiga­tive report­ing can be inef­fi­cient, and in fact I myself am resigned to less-than-perfect cov­er­age of indi­vid­ual issues in order to cover more ter­ri­tory for read­ers. But as you’ll see in Item #3, there are ways to improve effi­ciency and reduce the costs, by way of data­bases and crowd-sourcing. The Post itself has already been exper­i­ment­ing with crowd-sourcing of some doc­u­ments, whose major points read­ers can help home in on.

#3: Give read­ers the source mate­r­ial, so they can track the pro­ce­dures of government—but keep your eye on the results

In line with the above, I’d sug­gest that hyper­local oper­a­tions first decide what counts most in people’s lives—safe high­ways, good schools, liv­able neigh­bor­hoods and the rest—and work back­wards to deter­mine the nature of government-related cov­er­age. Focus on both pos­si­ble out­comes (alerts for read­ers about items on offi­cial agen­das) and actual out­comes (board votes, etc.). Then ask such ques­tions as: Who are the peo­ple behind the mess on I-66? Their names? Their con­tact infor­ma­tion? Which gov­ern­ment agen­cies, boards, etc., are respon­si­ble? How to track their actions and pos­si­ble actions, includ­ing impor­tant items on agen­das for votes?

The right data­bases with this infor­ma­tion could save the time of both blog­gers and pro­fes­sional staffers and enable them to alert the cit­i­zenry in timely ways. If the orga­ni­za­tions can share the infor­ma­tion with cit­i­zens, then so much the bet­ter! Give them tool­boxes for action!

If noth­ing else, I’d like to see pow­er­ful news orga­ni­za­tions like the Post and the Times edi­to­ri­al­ize and oth­er­wise pres­sure city and county gov­ern­ments into get­ting as much infor­ma­tion online as pos­si­ble in a truly timely way that would serve the pub­lic inter­est. That would include sum­maries and even full tran­scripts of meet­ings, which will be eas­ier and eas­ier to offer as speech recog­ni­tion grows in accu­racy (we’re not there yet). Then the net­works could more eas­ily crowd-source the infor­ma­tion to read­ers, pro­vid­ing them with handy expla­na­tions of the infor­ma­tion via hyper­links so that it was in con­text. Home page recog­ni­tion and other rewards could go to the most help­ful par­tic­i­pants. Crowd-sourcing isn’t a replace­ment for old-fashioned shoe-leather report­ing but could save news­room resources.

As for city bud­gets, I don’t just want them online—I’d like to see them hyper­linked to plain-English expla­na­tions of expen­di­tures. If the cities won’t anno­tate help­fully, then that’s one more task for hyper­local net­works and their affil­i­ates, per­haps through crowd sourc­ing in coöper­a­tion with civic asso­ci­a­tions and others.

#4: Cher­ish report­ing that reflects actual neigh­bor­hood surroundings

Detach­ment from phys­i­cal surroundings—that’s a fear I have about too heavy a reliance on hob­by­ist and sports-oriented blogs, as to gen­uine neighborhood-oriented ones.

I’d actu­ally like to see alliances between hyper­local news orga­ni­za­tions and Wikipedia, which offers a sur­pris­ing num­ber of items about local land­marks and insti­tu­tions. Check out Wikihood’s site—pro­mot­ing an iPod and iPad app—for a hint of the pos­si­bil­i­ties. I don’t just want to see news­pa­per libraries just put online in full: I’d like to see them keyed bet­ter to phys­i­cal sur­round­ings. Granted, many news­pa­pers love to chal­lenge the accu­racy of Wikipedia, but they could always alert read­ers or offer vet­ted ver­sions of its con­tent. And speak­ing of phys­i­cal sur­round­ings, how about pos­si­ble alliances with Google Maps-style out­fits, too, the I-66 goof not withstanding?

#5: Don’t just limit blog­ger recruit­ment efforts to exist­ing bloggers

Trou­ble find­ing blog­gers with in-depth knowl­edge of issues and a will­ing­ness to take the time to cover them well? Then look for gen­uine experts, pas­sion­ate about their top­ics, and teach them to write if they can sub­mit­ting promis­ing sam­ples. Say, the sub­ject is edu­ca­tion, an area where TBD laud­ably admits it’s weak. I’d sug­gest that TBD or the Post check out a for­mer ABC pro­ducer who, as far as I know, isn’t an edu­ca­tor but who is a gen­uine num­bers geek and loves to ana­lyze the test scores of Fair­fax County stu­dents. A teacher friend of mine rec­om­mended her. The ex-producer was pres­i­dent of her PTA. A most promis­ing mix of qual­i­fi­ca­tions, if my infor­ma­tion is accu­rate. While TBD and the Post can get up to speed most quickly with exist­ing blog­gers, it’s impor­tant to build for the future and per­haps adjust busi­ness mod­els and con­tract terms accord­ingly. With more resources, news orga­ni­za­tions like the Post and Times could enjoy an advan­tage in blog­ger recruit­ment, just so they treated the recruits well and trained them for the job.

Well, I’ll stop now and send the Web address of this post to Baris­tanet, the New York Times, the Mont­clair Times, TBD and the Wash­ing­ton Post for their own per­spec­tives, if they care to offer them in this blog’s com­ments area. Let the con­ver­sa­tion start (or—in TBD’s case, given our use­ful exist­ing dialogue—continue).

Mean­while, another reminder: I hope that both the Post and TBD will thrive; and I won’t favor either side. Like the other posts, this one is about strat­egy, not about whether the Post or TBD deserves to win.

A few related items, in case they don’t show up auto­mat­i­cally below via one of my favorite Word­Press plug-ins: How TBD could use hyper­local jour­nal­ism to kick the Wash­ing­ton Post’s butt; How TBD Web startup in the D.C. area will work with affil­i­ated blog­gers; and TBD, meet the West­side Inde­pen­dent: Role model for SOME neigh­bor­hood blog affil­i­ates?

Update, July 20: Also see TBD’s links to blog posts about the startup, includ­ing this one and other uppity stuff I’ve writ­ten. Thanks, guys.

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• TBD’s Washington area news startup: Niche blogs wooed—but no signs YET of a hyperlocal nirvana
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