I don’t know a lot of the background on this but it’s a bummer that so many folks are taking one critical WSJ piece as a chance to kick Rob Curley and call into question everything he and the teams he’s created have brought to the craft of online journalism, data, multimedia and social, niche and hyperlocal websites.
If people would have actually rtfa, instead of just the first 5 paragraphs then started foaming at the mouth for their chance to attack him, they’d see in multiple places that the WSJ discusses several internal challenges at the Washington Post that put a noose around LoudounExtra.com‘s ability to gain an audience, integrate more community content and become a staple in the locals’ lives.
“Mr. Curley says whenever a big story breaks involving Loudoun County, the Post typically publishes it on Washingtonpost.com without a link to LoudounExtra. That deprives LoudounExtra of potential traffic. Nor does the Washingtonpost’s own dedicated Loudoun County page send visitors directly to its online sibling.”
This type of “us” vs. “them” in newsrooms has never lead to successful projects and from a marketing standpoint, this is pure suicide.
Besides not having integrated support from the WashingtonPost.com staff, legal wasn’t on their side:
“But there were hazards involved in putting an autonomous team of outsiders in charge of new digital initiatives at a major media company. Mr. Curley says his team had been developing online tools to funnel Loudoun County-related video and photos to the site from other sites like YouTube, Facebook and Flickr, but couldn’t get approval from the Post’s legal team to launch the application. According to Mr. Brady, the legal team voiced concerns about who had legal claim to the content of those sites.”
I’m not trying to claim that Curley and his team did absolutely everything right; I don’t know enough about the inner workings of the whole project to make a judgment call there. I do know that at many metro papers and throughout the industry everyone’s very, very slow and scared to make changes and try anything new. So I applaud his team and the Washington Post for taking a chance even if it hasn’t taken off instantly.
Change is hard.
Trying new things at a media organization that’s claim to fame is on the Pulitzer name is especially hard.
99 percent of innovation is failing, then dusting yourself off and trying things a different way. If people in your own company aren’t interested in helping you succeed, then maybe it’s time to move on.
I’m looking forward to seeing lots more failure and innovation in Las Vegas.
June 7, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Thank you for addressing this, Will. I was lucky enough to work with Rob at the Post and I feel like many are, indeed, taking the WSJ piece as an opportunity to speak against him despite a potential lack of knowledge regarding the project. I believe the article’s headline could have been less damning, too — after all, Loudoun has not failed yet. Rather, it just hasn’t garnered the attention that it could have and has suffered setbacks. I’ll concede that the missteps could lead to worse and that I may have ingested some amount of Kool-Aid at one point or another, but those are my two cents.
June 7, 2008 at 8:56 pm
One thing that the WSJ article had that I think you didn’t mention was a quote from Curley.
FTA: “I was the one who was supposed to know we should be talking to Rotary Club meetings every day,” Mr. Curley said. “I dropped the ball. I won’t drop it in Vegas, dude.”
That is so important: community outreach. If the WashPost had a bad image in that community (I don’t know if that’s the case), then the team for the hyper-local site had to get into the town’s clubs and let them know that their site, while part of the WashPost family, was different, “better,” etc.
Support from “big brother” does help locally oriented sites. It gives them some credibility in the wider audience. In the Post-Dispatch’s case, giving recognition to the Journals, by direct linking to Journal stories on the main site [not in the headline feed area] boosts (some) reporters’ morale at the smaller papers.
June 7, 2008 at 9:07 pm
YEAH!
June 8, 2008 at 9:55 am
I used to work in Loudon (at AOL) and, earlier, at washingtonpost.com. And here’s what I can tell you. Before LoudonExtra, there was NOTHING significant that served that community, which is now one of the wealthiest counties in the country. This industry neds to give Rob some credit for doing what he’s best a — the startup phase — and stop expecting everything new to be a overnight success.
As someone who’s created local participatory sites (Bakotopia and 11 total in Bakersfield), I can empathize with how hard it is to get the word out. Local outreach is key, and really, really hard. It also takes time for the ball to start rolling.
I think the real problem here is not any individual’s failure, but the increasing desperation in the newspaper industries when revenues are plummeting. But we have to remember that every time we try and “fail” and give up because we don’t see an instant home run, there are dozens of others who keep chipping away and are satisfied with every tiny gain. LoudonExtra is ahead of the curve and I doubt the Post sees it as a long-term failure. It’s just a baby! Give it, and other initiatives like it, time to grow up.
June 8, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Thanks for addressing this Will, I second your thoughts.
I’ve been saying that innovation in journalism will require failure for years, so it’s nice to finally see that philosophy enter the mainstream.
Rob Curley is too much of a badass for the Post anyway.
Viva Las Vegas!
June 8, 2008 at 3:36 pm
@Patrick Yen: “Rob Curely is too much of a badass for the Post anyway.” A cogent, reasoned, intellectual and, above all, comprehensive argument. Well done.
Will, I agree that the almost giddy and weirdly personal backlash against Rob Curely following the WSJ story (and isn’t it bizarre that they wrote such a story at all?) is both unseemly and unjustified. However, we shouldn’t overlook the point that parachuting an all-star team of big names into a unique community, and they’re all unique, is no guarantee of success. Local coverage still requires local knowledge and experience, and no amount of talent, funding or cookie-cutter solutions can replace that.
June 8, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Hey Will,
I’m one of those bloggers who you might have had in mind when you lamented about people kicking Rob Curley and calling into question “everything” he and his team have created.
Except nobody I’ve seen has kicked him (ok,I did say he "flopped") and certainly didn’t question everything he had his team have done for online journalism.
Rob’s a forceful, enthusiastic supporter of newspapers and journalists and has been (and I’m sure will continue to be) an innovator and much needed online catalyst.
But – and I’d have thought Dan, with his experience at Bakutopia, would have put his finger on this – Rob is at heart an old fashioned journalist: for him it’s all about what WE can do for our audience. He does amazing and often useful things for his audience, but he still hasn’t grasped where this nascent web culture is going: it’s about the conversation. As a new, community website, you’re joining the conversation – you shouldn’t be dominating it, controlling it, owning it.
Will, you point to the lack of support from the wpost.com legal team etc. for failing to back him in their efforts to bring Loudoun youTube and Flickr contributions on to the site. Stop and think about that for a second. As cool as his plans were, they were about LoudounExtra.com taking that content and then using it on their site – not about providing a platform for the community to share that content. Two very different things: one old school, one new.
Rob see’s some small piece of this, I think, when he says he should have hit every one of those Rotary Club meetings, but it’s about a lot more than that. It’s about becoming part of that community, about listening more than you talk.
This really isn’t about Rob at all – it’s about understanding our role and our place and the “flop” or “failure” or merely “slow start” in Loudoun county – despite the amazing talent and resources thrown at it – is an opportunity to learn some pretty powerful lessons.
Let’s focus on understanding what worked and what didn’t rather than worrying about the Curley cult’s reputation.
Bill
(a proud member of the Curley cult)
June 8, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Bill,
I just wanted to say that the point of the LoudounExtra.com user-generated content piece that never saw the light of day was that readers were already posting content on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and other sites. Rather than force them to do the uploading to yet another site, we were trying to give them another place to display their photos and videos. We always try to, as Rob says, build sites the way the Internet works, and the Internet works by people uploading their content to sites that are specific to the type of content they have (videos on YouTube, photos on Flickr, etc.). It was our belief that making a reader upload their content yet one more time would deter their interest in using LoudounExtra.com, rather than increase their use of the site. Also, we viewed trying to (re)do what those sites already do very, very well, was old school, while working with those sites and making things easier on the reader was new school.
June 8, 2008 at 8:01 pm
@Bill
If you really think every newspaper is going to be able to build tools that will beat Flickr, Youtube.com, etc. AND get the local community using them at the penetration level those tools have then I want some of the drugs you are on. You talk about how he should have been out in the community, and true, I believe that, and Curley even admitted they could have concentrated more on that. But they were also concentrating on catching tech-savvy local audience that was already online sharing content, on Flickr, Youtube.com, etc. by aggregating and sharing that content on a local website because the 98 percent of Loudon wasn’t going to dig through and find that local content on the mega sites like Flickr, Youtube, etc.. easily.
@All
I absolutely agree with the general sentiment that local sites should be wearing out their shoe leather in the local community. I’m sure Curley’s team did that and I know for a fact in the months leading up to Loudoun’s launch, they were busting their asses working on the some of the most in depth school guides ever seen on an news website. I don’t believe for a second that they built this awesome site, then just sat back in the office and drank Mountain Dew out of champagne flutes.
It’d be interesting to see how worn out the shoes of some of the other hyperlocal ‘experts’ talking smack are and also how useful their web tools and the quality of content is — I doubt they could pull off half the site, as fast or as in depth as LoudounExtra.com.
We all know that community building is hard to do and now everyone and their freaking mother now is a ’social media’ expert. The great equalizer is time — we all only have 24 hours a day, 365 days in a year. If there’s one thing I do know, it’s Rob and his team are some of the smartest, hardest working in the business that go balls-to-the-wall when they work on a project. LoudounExtra is ridonkulously impressive in it’s depth and sophistication, going from 0-60 in the blink of an eye. As Dan Pacheco said above, “LoudonExtra is ahead of the curve and I doubt the Post sees it as a long-term failure. It’s just a baby! Give it, and other initiatives like it, time to grow up.â€
June 8, 2008 at 8:19 pm
Rob Curley speaks on the matter:
http://robcurley.com/2008/06/08/after-the-flop-flap-lessons-learned-from-loudoun/
June 9, 2008 at 8:49 am
Thanks for writing this, Will. Having worked with Rob Curley (and other members of his team) in the past, I constantly praise Rob for coming up with good ideas and inspiring others to love the work as much as he does. One of my classic memories of Rob from Lawrence was when he would come bounding up the stairs as say something like, “You know what would be really cool? We should….” That type of thought, innovation, ability to learn and all-out passion is what the newspaper industry needs. Sorry to see him leave the D.C. area, but I hope the entire group goes out and rocks Vegas.
June 9, 2008 at 5:24 pm
@Will and @Levi,
Gentlemen – I fear I must have been unclear. I have absolutely no problem with newpapers aggregating community content that already is being posted on services like YouTube or Flickr, (both are commonplace strategy of place bloggers) nor do I imagine for a second or recommend that newspaper.com’s should seek to do the video or photo sharing job that YouTube and Flickr do. That would be a fools mission, certainly. And I agree with you both that using those services to capture and then aggregate community content is simply smart. I was merely trying to point out that it is not a strategy that is indicative of a commitment to the local news site as a community platform, a place for multi-directional conversations and content.
Curley and his crew have been brilliant, persuasive, innovators in providing useful community information online. But they have yet to do very much innovation – or very much at all – in building web components that permit people to create and engage in communities of interest around that information and news. And I’m suggesting that that piece is what’s missing at LoudounExtra.com and at too many local news websites – much to our peril.
June 9, 2008 at 6:20 pm
@Bill
So where is this innovative “multi-directional conversations and content” you’ve done? I’m just having a hard time understanding what you mean. If you don’t have any examples to show, perhaps you can just unpack all that language for me. Give me some example, please, of what you mean. Facebook? Twitter? Would a user-to-user chat system have been more interesting to you? Or would you criticize us for copying those other sites?
I appreciate the kind words you say about other aspects of our work (I am a programmer who works with Rob and Levi), but it just seems to me your criticism is rhetoric rather than substance. And to be fair, you’re criticizing a feature that was never released. True, LoudounExtra lacked the kinds of community tools and engagement you desire, but it wasn’t for our lack of trying. So I take it as bit unfair for you to make sweeping generalizations about Rob or our group not grasping “where this nascent web culture is going.”
It was our goal to engage the Loudoun community and provide the readers with tools to have their voice on the site. We were going to put the tools in place, then see where the dialog went. We really have no idea even among ourselves what that would have looked like because we never got the tools up. No Web feature emerges fully formed — not at newspapers or at other types of dot coms. Sites become great as they gain an audience and grow with that audience. Unfortunately, we didn’t get there with LoudounExtra, but I assure you we are very much aware of what the Web is really like.
June 9, 2008 at 11:17 pm
@Deryck
You’re right, of course. There are precious few examples of what I’ve been talking about among newspaper.coms because it runs counter to our culture. We’re the authorities, we’re the source, we’re the arbiters – and have been for decades upon decades. We need to own the content we “publish” and god forbid we point our readers at someone else’s useful content. And, as you seem to have found out, we need to own and control all the tools we use to publish and produce content.
All of that runs counter to the creative, roiling, fascinating parts of the web where a new information culture (and economy) is being built, largely without us.
The examples I’d point you to for the community engagement piece are mostly outside of the newspaper.com world, although not all.
One that’s impressed me is the Knight Foundation Challenge winner, Village Soup, as hyperlocal a news site as you can imagine (you can find the restaurant’s daily lunch specials on the front page). The Village Soup asks readers, community groups and businesses to become “members” of the Village Soup community and paying for the privillege (at costs ranging from $1-$20 per week). That gives them the right to post content alongside the work of the professional journalists on the site – everything from events to blogs to new products to births and engagements and death notices and, yes, the lunch specials.
According to founder Richard Anderson, something like 33% of their readers visit the site 7 or more times a day .
I think most news web sites would be very, very happy with that kind of engagement from their “readers”.
Beyond that I think we have a lot to learn from Digg and Fark and Metafilter and, of course, Slashdot – sites where members of their online community take responsibilty for the editor’s job – chosing the site’s content. The entire world’s news gets filtered through one single brain before the decisions are made about what should be in my paper. On these community news aggregator sites that job is crowd-sourced to hundreds, even thousands, of people and those people don’t care about owning that news, they care about linking to it and sharing it – commenting and discussing and debating it.
Build me a tool that allows my community to suggest and control what news they see and get rewarded for participating in that process (I guess Newser and Knewsroom are trying to do that) and I think we’re a good way there.
Please re-read the end of my first comment: this isn’t about Rob or his crew or their worth. This is about what can we learn from the amazing work you folks put in there in Loudoun county.