Robert Niles of Online Journalism Review on the deserved troubles being experienced by some "citizen journalism" operations.
Fake grassroots don't grow.
It seems an obvious statement. But it remains lost on too many Internet entrepreneurs, who will lay down plenty of fertilizer, but who seem unwilling to plant actual seeds.
Last week, a relative who works in the journalism field told me of a pitch he'd heard from a gentleman who's planned a national network of hundreds of local "citizen journalism" websites. He'd hired a techie to produce a site template ("Which should be ready in four months!") and was seeking investors to raise money for a national sales staff. As for the content... well, the readers would provide that!
If anyone wants to take bets in another dot-com dead pool, put down March 2008 as my guess. (And that's assuming the would-be CEO finds a full year's worth of venture capital funding.)
Last week also brought news of turmoil at Backfence, one of the more notable attempts to create a local "citizen journalism" network. Co-founder Mark Potts returned after other co-founder Susan DeFife left the company, amid reports of lay-offs of up to two-thirds of the company's staff. (Backfence was one of the local grassroots reporting sites that disappointed OJR writer Tom Grubisich in his round-up of CitJ efforts in 2005 and 2006.)
One might think that thousands of failed newspaper dot-com discussion boards from the 1990s would have taught the everyone in the industry that "if you build it, and don't staff it, at best, a few wackos will show." But some managers and investors continue to cling to a new media business model that reads like something written by the "South Park" underpants gnomes:
Step 1. Install discussion/blog software.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!