The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

19Jul/102

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

image imageIn 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.

imageimageBoth 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?

image 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.

imageHow, 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:

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6Jul/100

Georgetown Dish joins TBD blog network: Deju vu angles—in Washington Post’s backyard

image imageNewest mem­ber of the TBD blog net­work in the Wash­ing­ton area is is none other than the George­town Dish. It’s the same hyper­local site I’ve been men­tion­ing for some months now because of the fame of the neigh­bor­hood and the lively writ­ing—and, yes, a founder named Beth Solomon.

George­town is home to ex-Washington Post edi­tor Ben Bradlee (still a Post vice pres­i­dent at large if you go by a bio in his lat­est book, a col­lab­o­ra­tion with his son Quinn) and count­less other well-known jour­nal­ists. The Dish deal hap­pened, in other words, right under the Post’s nose. What’s more, remem­ber who TBD’s top guy is: Jim Brady, who for­merly edited the Post’s online edi­tion. Only, now he’s build­ing up TBD, owned by the Allbrit­ton inter­ests, the same peo­ple who years ago owned the Wash­ing­ton Star. A few lit­tle ironies and a  lit­tle Back to the Future in all of this, eh? Beth her­self is the niece of the late Nina Hyde, once the Post’s fash­ion edi­tor. The Dish runs short items where Quinn links back to his site devoted to learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties, and I’d hope that wouldn’t change even if tech­ni­cally he’s abet­ting the competition.

imageStrate­gi­cally, the deal means that the Dish and TBD can learn from each other and lever­age each other’s resources. A Dish gos­sip colum­nist with a juicy media-related item in the Dish, for exam­ple, could end up with facts spread far and wide by the TBD net­work. What’s next in this déjà vu world? Bring­ing back The old Ear col­umn (not The Ele­phant in The Solomon Scan­dals but a source of inspi­ra­tion). Right now the Dish’s Alexa rank in the U.S. is 343,136, with just six incom­ing links listed by the Web traf­fic ser­vice (huh, no Scan­dals link shown there?). But the num­bers could improve with the new alliance.

For more details, see a just-posted Scan­dals com­ment by Steve But­try, TBD’s com­mu­nity engage­ment direc­tor, as well as the cov­er­age from the Dish and the TBD blog. I’m be curi­ous what this means in terms of the Dish’s own pos­si­ble net­work plans. Could they still hap­pen at least out­side the D.C. area? Or does Allbrit­ton alliance mean they’re dead?

This week’s promised items in the Scan­dals blog: They’re still on, just not today. Break­ing news first. Tag and Google fans, you can win a free trade paper­back of The Solomon Scan­dals by reveal­ing the source of the related pho­tos in my pre­view of com­ing attrac­tions.

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2Jul/108

TBD, meet NYC’s Westside Independent: Role model for SOME neighborhood blog affiliates?

imageYou already know if you’ve been fol­low­ing the Solomon Scan­dals blog.

My name is David, I’m a newsa­holic, and I’m cheer­ing for the TBD news startup to thrive here in the Wash­ing­ton area.

But will top­ics like sports and food elbow aside civic mat­ters at times because of the per­sonal pas­sions of TBD’s affil­i­ate blog­gers? Here’s to balance!

So what’s a well-rounded neigh­bor­hood blog like? TBD, meet the West­side Inde­pen­dent in New York City. Good local and hyper­local blogs exist in the D.C. area, but the Inde­pen­dent is still a great poten­tial role model, with a stel­lar mix of grass­roots cov­er­age and pro­fes­sion­al­ism. So it seems at least, from some 250 miles away.

image Click on the Inde­pen­dent link above. The orange nav­i­ga­tion strip at the top will speed you to cov­er­age of sub­jects rang­ing from “Food” to “Busi­ness,” “Devel­op­ment” and “Edu­ca­tion.” On the home page itself, you’ll see a gem: Proof that the New York Times is More Pop­u­lar than the Wall Street Journal—Among Thieves, with the low­down com­ing straight from the Star­bucks at 73rd Street and Colum­bus Avenue. Now that’s a full-service neigh­bor­hood blog. Hob­by­ist blogs, too, can be worth­while for both read­ers and cre­ators, as I’ll make clear later on. I’m just point­ing out the differences.

In the strictest sense, the Inde­pen­dent is a site rather than a blog; it even includes a sub­blog. Still, we’re not talk­ing big bucks for seri­ous site oper­a­tors with a touch of Web savvy. The Inde­pen­dent runs on the omnipresent and free Word­Press just like the Solomon Scan­dals blog, except that the own­ers have added a Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Mag­a­zine theme ($95?) to jazz it up.

imageNot all TBD affil­i­ates can or should strive to be the Upper West­side Inde­pen­dent. But ide­ally TBD will encour­age inter­ested blog­gers to aim for the Independent’s mix of com­pre­hen­sive­ness, live­li­ness and pro­fes­sional pol­ish. Only 22 or so of the 82 blogs in the TBD net­work seem to be gen­eral neigh­bor­hood blogs or are civic-oriented in other ways, if you assume that TBC has men­tioned them all on its site. Per­haps the Inde­pen­dent can inspire TBD-network blog­gers, allow­ing, cer­tainly, for lim­its of time, resources and experience.

Granted, the Inde­pen­dent could be more inter­ac­tive and serve up mul­ti­me­dia, and in the inter­est of sus­tain­abil­ity, more adver­tis­ing wouldn’t hurt. Still, Edi­tor Avi Salz­man (“a native New Yorker liv­ing on the Upper West Side with my wife and our Labrador/Shiba Inu mix”) shows us the breadth of cov­er­age that even small neigh­bor­hood sites can strive for.

Within the TBD blog net­work (just part of the oper­a­tion from Allbrit­ton Com­mu­ni­ca­tions) I’d espe­cially like to see more one-city or one-neighborhood sites with a civic focus like TBD affil­i­ate Rockville Cen­tral’s. If enough bal­anced neigh­bor­hood blogs don’t hap­pen on their own, then per­haps TBD can use some extra finan­cial incen­tives, as well as expand the planned size of the approx­i­mately 50-person staff to fill in the gap.

imageimageBrad Rouke (left photo), a blog net­work and pub­lic affairs vet­eran who pub­lishes and founded Rockville Cen­tral, says his asso­ci­a­tion with TBD already will be worth it for him; and Cindy Cotte Grif­fiths, the edi­tor, is like­wise enthu­si­as­tic about the net­work. “TBD.com,” he writes, intends to pro­mote “indi­vid­ual arti­cles through­out their site, based on geocod­ing.” It is “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.” He prefers the shared ad model to pay-per post and notes there is “no cap to the upside.”

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26May/100

‘David Rothman’ namesakes: Egosurfers, here’s what the rest of us are up to

Kitty Kelley on the home page of The Georgetowner site I’ve remarked before on weird coin­ci­dences related to my name.

Two let­ters, for exam­ple, dis­tin­guish me from David Roffman, at least if you don’t include mid­dle names. He’s the vet­eran jour­nal­ist asso­ci­ated with the George­towner news­pa­per, shown with a Kitty Kel­ley fea­ture (tem­po­rary link).

Much of The Solomon Scan­dals hap­pens in George­town, which, by the way, is home to a net.friend of mine named Beth Solomon, founder of The George­town Dish web­site and most def­i­nitely not the real estate mag­nate in Scan­dals. You can read the Dish’s own Kel­ley fea­ture here.

But back Topic R or DR. For the ben­e­fit of any stray David Roth­mans who ego­surfed their way to this post, here are a few more stray facts about peo­ple shar­ing The Name or close to it:

–David the Almost Roth­man and I are now friends on Face­book, which will make it all the eas­ier to catch up with him when once again peo­ple con­fuse us and I need to redi­rect them.

image–I  enjoyed The Girl on the Train, an excel­lent French film about an attention-grabber who falsely claims to have been the vic­tim of anti-Semitism. Authen­tic anti-Semitism hap­pens against a fic­tion­al­ized char­ac­ter in the movie (French title shown). His name? “David Roth­man.” Hey, for the pur­pose of this list, we’ll con­sider him an hon­orary real person.

–Yes, other book-writers exist named David Roth­man, even though the sur­name isn’t exactly “Smith.” David B., is the author of Mr. Death: The Life of a CIA Assas­si­na­tion Expert, by His Son. David J. writes poetry. Per­haps the most promi­nent David Roth­man, at least in the United States, is the pro­fes­sor at Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity, an expert on med­ical ethics and a pro­lific author. He’s a sec­ond David J. Finally there’s the med­ical librar­ian David L. Roth­man, a library blog­ger and author, whose life became per­haps a lit­tle less dif­fi­cult when I sold off the Tel­eRead site devoted to e-books and libraries. That’s him to the right, doing a funny rant against a LibraryJour­nal blog.

In Florida a David Roth­man works for Dis­ney World, or at least was when our paths crossed vir­tu­ally due to con­fu­sion on Hot­mail. Flor­dia is also home to David B. Roth­man the lawyer.

I don’t know of any crooks, child-molesters, etc., with The Name but will do an adden­dum if I find any. Minus the “David” in the title, there is a Roth­man Scan­dal novel.

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22Apr/100

Hyperlocal journalism: Georgetown publisher robbed—and eager to tell neighbors about it. Lesson for the Washington Post?

Update, 1:47 p.m.: Post rival’s local news strat­egy—a Poyn­ter Insti­tute item. — D.R.

image My online friend Beth Solomon, pub­lisher of The­Ge­orge­townDish and absolutely no rel­a­tive of the Sy Solomon in my news­pa­per novel, got robbed. A thief car­ried off Beth’s purse, check­book, credit cards, wal­let, car keys, iPhone, Black­berry, every­thing, after she left her car doors open while mov­ing into her new house, just the kind of lapse I’m good at.

Let me pass on my sympathy—and con­grat­u­la­tions. An ex-ABC radio jour­nal­ist, Beth is mak­ing a highly read­able series out of her mis­for­tune. Check out Parts I and II. Scads of issue arise at the neigh­bor­hood level and far beyond. For exam­ple, could police some­how use sig­nals from her stolen cell­phones to track down the thief? And if not, why not? The big point here is, Beth’s first-person series will be close to home for her George­town read­ers, who know that the Dish will play up their feed­back. Else­where on her site you can find detailed infor­ma­tion about the doings of the Advi­sory Neigh­bor­hood Coun­cil.

If the Wash­ing­ton Post wants to thrive as a local pub­li­ca­tion, then it needs to use Inter­net and data­base tech­nol­ogy to repli­cate on a mas­sive scale what Beth and her tiny site are doing rather than sim­ply giv­ing read­ers the same old, same old. It also should think “neigh­bor­hood” about ads from local small busi­nesses and cus­tomized adver­tis­ing from out­lets of national fran­chises such as McDonald’s.

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