This stuff takes time. Talking Points Memo wasn't built in a day. Here's what I'm doing in Chicago. It's not perfect, but it's working. Let me know what you think.
1. Build a social news site for local stuff. Gather an audience of local news junkies who like sharing, rating and discussing the best links from across the city. This is a somewhat efficient way to generate pageviews and gather like-minded folks together. Exhibit A: http://www.windycitizen.com the first local, social news site.
2. When you find crazy power-users of your social news site who have specific passions for topics, create blogs for them and nurture their interest in writing about these niche subjects. Exhibit B: http://dailydaley.windycitizen.com a group blog written by a handful of our power users that posts a daily briefing on the mayor of Chicago's appearances, schedule, comments and coverage. We have 40 more blogs where that came from, of varying quality but with some really good ones here and there http://www.windycitizen.com/blogs
3. Team up with local hackers for the occasional special project that scorches the local sites. Exhibit C: http://election.windycitizen.com, a rails app built by HN member collint
4. When you feel the social news site is growing consistently and having an influence in the community, hire a part-time ad sales person to develop relationships with local businesses who want to reach your audience. Exhibit B: The Craigslist ad I posted last week: http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/sls/1071989015.html I've had 5 great resumes sent my way so far and am excited to put this piece of the plan into motion.
5. Once you get $300-400 dollars a week in profit coming in, you can afford to hire an honest-to-goodness pro journalist to cover whatever it is your community is interested in that week, scooping the dying local papers at least once a week. If the story has national implications, you pitch it to Gawker, Politico and the HuffPo and rack up the backlinks and google mojo, making your social news aggregator even more powerful.
6. Add more writers to your blogs, which are essentially open source journalism projects. Some may grow to be powerful/influential in their own right, letting you sell more niche advertising or get direct donations.
7. Get to the point where your front page links are driving 1,500-2,000 readers to the stories that make them (which would make you the most powerful traffic-supplier for local sites), your blogs are breaking news every now and then and doing a great job of covering ongoing stories a la TPM. And your special reports, directed in part by the votes and story submissions of your users are setting the agenda in your community.
8. Repeat elsewhere.
Am curious to hear what folks think. The limiting agent for us is always technical development. We're using Drupal and I've learned that 9 out of 10 contributed modules either don't work or are so poorly-designed you'd never want to use them on a production site. This has meant paying and begging friends for custom dev work and me having to learn a lot more Drupal than I want. But that's the thing that I'm trying out here in Chicago. I think of it as a kind of open source newspaper.
This is fascinating! I know you wrote me about your site a few days ago, but I only saw the front page: the more detailed expansion is an excellent idea. I'd love to see if you can get to the point where you're hiring journalists. If that goes well, you might have just started the first online local newspaper.
Add more writers to your blogs, which are essentially open source journalism projects.
That's a great mindset. Make blogs into projects and see what works and what doesn't.
Thanks. Your front-page critique was really helpful. I'm working on putting a few of your suggestions into practice.
The design thing that drives me mad is figuring out what the front page should look like. How do you combine a Digg/Reddit interface with original content without short-changing one or the other? If there are any pro or amateur UI designers out there with advice, I'm all ears. I've created about 40 front page mockups in the last year and finally just decided to stick the original stuff in the sidebar to focus on getting the social news up and running as best possible.
1. I actually started work on an uber-twitter feed for all our members (we've almost reached our first 1,000 registered users). It seemed like a fun idea, but what's the use case? What made you suggest it?
2. In all honesty, I have very little prior personal knowledge of Chicago and few, if any personal connections here in the city. I'd certainly do a lot better if I had family here and knew lots of folks, but I'm getting by. In the last month I've started meeting with local media who are seeing what we're up and wanting to get on board with our voting buttons on their sites.
3. Nope. In fact, everyone I pitched this idea to told me it was awful, including Kevin Rose himself. I'm doing it anyway. Like I said, this is far from a success, but it's growing and people who find us are signing up and getting involved.
1. Build a social news site for local stuff. Gather an audience of local news junkies who like sharing, rating and discussing the best links from across the city. This is a somewhat efficient way to generate pageviews and gather like-minded folks together. Exhibit A: http://www.windycitizen.com the first local, social news site.
2. When you find crazy power-users of your social news site who have specific passions for topics, create blogs for them and nurture their interest in writing about these niche subjects. Exhibit B: http://dailydaley.windycitizen.com a group blog written by a handful of our power users that posts a daily briefing on the mayor of Chicago's appearances, schedule, comments and coverage. We have 40 more blogs where that came from, of varying quality but with some really good ones here and there http://www.windycitizen.com/blogs
3. Team up with local hackers for the occasional special project that scorches the local sites. Exhibit C: http://election.windycitizen.com, a rails app built by HN member collint
4. When you feel the social news site is growing consistently and having an influence in the community, hire a part-time ad sales person to develop relationships with local businesses who want to reach your audience. Exhibit B: The Craigslist ad I posted last week: http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/sls/1071989015.html I've had 5 great resumes sent my way so far and am excited to put this piece of the plan into motion.
5. Once you get $300-400 dollars a week in profit coming in, you can afford to hire an honest-to-goodness pro journalist to cover whatever it is your community is interested in that week, scooping the dying local papers at least once a week. If the story has national implications, you pitch it to Gawker, Politico and the HuffPo and rack up the backlinks and google mojo, making your social news aggregator even more powerful.
6. Add more writers to your blogs, which are essentially open source journalism projects. Some may grow to be powerful/influential in their own right, letting you sell more niche advertising or get direct donations.
7. Get to the point where your front page links are driving 1,500-2,000 readers to the stories that make them (which would make you the most powerful traffic-supplier for local sites), your blogs are breaking news every now and then and doing a great job of covering ongoing stories a la TPM. And your special reports, directed in part by the votes and story submissions of your users are setting the agenda in your community.
8. Repeat elsewhere.
Am curious to hear what folks think. The limiting agent for us is always technical development. We're using Drupal and I've learned that 9 out of 10 contributed modules either don't work or are so poorly-designed you'd never want to use them on a production site. This has meant paying and begging friends for custom dev work and me having to learn a lot more Drupal than I want. But that's the thing that I'm trying out here in Chicago. I think of it as a kind of open source newspaper.