20 Comments Add your own

• 1. david  |  September 23rd, 2008 at 10:56 pm

  WOOHOO! Congrats on the success — I think that your model is destined for even greater success, in many other communities.

  Thanks for sharing the story - and keep us posted.

• 2. Tracy @ WSB  |  September 24th, 2008 at 1:12 am

  The comparison of reach vs. circulation is one I didn’t think to make until relatively recently. In our case, we reach more homes/businesses each week than the local weekly paper’s stated circulation … 14,000 us (consistently, per G-Analytics), 12,000 them (per 2007 Washington Newspaper Publishers Association numbers available online). I think there is a place for both kinds of news organizations - the weekly newspaper could take on a more magazine kind of feel and provide context and color (there was a decent example of that in our nearest paper this week, telling the story of a transportation project open house through the eyes of an attendee who had campaigned for previous projects; our coverage, the night the event happened last week, was a fairly quick-and-dirty photo/paragraph/link to how to have your say even if you missed the event). But anyway, we say congrats to Cory too - lately we’ve had some synergy in Ballard and West Seattle coverage (and one of his satellites, Magnolia) and it’s fun to crosslink, share pix, etc.

• 3. tdc  |  September 24th, 2008 at 7:18 am

  you have a very smart wife.

• 4. Rob  |  September 24th, 2008 at 8:11 am

  You hit the nail on the freaking head Cory. And I love that layout … same one I use for my personal blog.

  As for your correspondents Geeky Swedes and the Kravitzs … I grew up in Bellevue and totally get it. Yah Sure. Yah Betcha.

• 5. Angela  |  September 24th, 2008 at 9:25 am

  Cory: I just spoke to a group of Egyptian bloggers and they were saying that it’s really hard to grasp the U.S. interest in local news and how the concept doesn’t really exist at all in Egypt. I was showing them our site GOLO.com and they were really amazed at the level of interest in what’s happening in a particular neighborhood or community. One commented that in a city of 18 million, local really isn’t your concern. They were also a bit stunned about Americans’ lack of knowledge of national news. Conversely I was a bit perturbed about their “emergency law” and tales of bloggers being arrested and even tortured by the police. Just wanted to share. At any rate, I think hyper local is the new black.

• 6. Rob  |  September 24th, 2008 at 10:15 am

  At second Glance … Video of the lutefisk eating contest won by Einar Johannsen? OMG you really do have your fingers on the pulse of the Ballard community, don’t you?

• 7. wtf  |  September 24th, 2008 at 12:30 pm

  you forgot one huge aspect as to why it works:

  it doesn’t have to answer to a huge bureaucratic oversight committee(s) that tries to standardize the site to some sort of ‘ideal, one size fits all’ template with 30% of the page being badly placed ads.

• 8. Jim  |  September 24th, 2008 at 7:01 pm

  The formula is simple. The success comes from a focus on doing the job of becoming a daily news source and getting it right before worrying about the revenue.

• 9. william perrin  |  September 25th, 2008 at 12:39 am

  good stuff - we have been doing something similar here in London’s gritty Kings Cross - a small hard pressed subdistrict that doesn’t have its own ultra local media.

  We too find that once you get going there is a good stream of contributions. The trick is not to approach it from the webby or tech side - find activists or community organisers who havesomething to say and give them a voice by showing them how to publish. I now have about six people writing for me as volunteers. We also have a spin off web TV station and a campaign site.

  The bottom line is that the time and money cost are so low now that communities rather than economics can define their own ‘news’ geography

  I am not sure that there is money to be made per se - not enough to cover full time staff costs - but you shoudl be bale to cover basic subscription costs. And if you use wordpress or typepad you are hardly likely to hit traffic or storage limits quickly. You have to see it as a volunteer effort - a sort of rolling barn raising. I have recently started a site to cover ultra local voice in wordpress.

  We are working on proposals in the UK to train more community activists to publish in this way - it is very cheap to do.

• 10. Tracy @ WSB  |  September 25th, 2008 at 3:13 pm

  There is a difference, however, between being a multicontributor site and - as Cory put it at a panel we both were part of yesterday - the community, with a “layer of journalism.” We take it even a little bit farther than that - we are lots of original journalism, plus community contributions (which are not posted directly, except in our forum). To #8, I also think get it right first, then worry about the revenue, is ideal … our site was in operation almost 2 years before we sold a single ad. We see some others start up here and try to sell ads almost from the start, with very little traffic, and we worry that they may ultimately harm the market if those who unwittingly buy on low-traffic sites don’t see results and then think “oh, local online advertising doesn’t work.” We try to do some advertiser/business education, not so much with the ulterior motive in mind, as to make sure they understand what they’re getting and what to ask, before advertising in ANY medium.

• 11. Anonymous  |  September 25th, 2008 at 7:08 pm

  It will last maybe another year and have a trainwreck. They all do. Make the most of it.

• 12. Aaron  |  September 26th, 2008 at 5:17 am

  Blogs survive largely on the passion of their owners. The idea that main stream media properties are “too old” or are “dying” is simply not true. They are just in the process of reinvention. The myopic nature of human process examination misses several larger key ideas.
  1. The money is STILL in print…even today a print READER is worth more on a CPM basis than an online reader. Newspapers make more money than blogs.
  2. While there are observable trendlines, it’s useful to remember that many long time media companies employ some very talented people and are turning out very compelling content.
  3. It takes more than passion to build a business. It takes a truly sustainable business model. What if both of the primary people who build and maintain a blog get sick or are injured in an accident? Your news source dries up? What if they are sued for a variety of reasons (this is in the courts even now and will have a chilling effect on blogs without question)…? What happens when the local media properties begin to offer better synergies to advertisers covering both print and online at a price that makes more sense?

  Like many trends on the internet (remember Push Media?)…blogs will be around because the format is so easy to use…but they are not a long term business model since to effectively compete they must spend more time and effort than is practical for
  a business owner. In other words…selling the “property” is not an option for bloggers in a hyper local market because new owners would not be able to match the passion which is the basis for their modest success. How do you measure success?
  Money. Not readers, not time spent, not pageviews..all those are measurements with only “blue sky” value. How much money does the property make? How truly sustainable is that revenue stream or more pointedly, how sustainable would it be for someone other than those who started it?
  Blogs serve a purpose…but they will come and go.
  It’s just a fact of life.

• 13. Steve  |  September 26th, 2008 at 6:13 am

  As much as I would like to disagree with Aaron, I can’t on most of his points.

  Local newspapers can rule their local markets if they are smart and have a solid web strategy. Their problem is the print edition gets in the way.

  A blog by itself, even with multiple authors and great content, will not be able to survive in the long-term when going up against a local newspaper (if that is the goal).

  The only way to break through is to shed the blog stereotype, whatever that may be. Become a media entity. That’s what it sounds like MyBallard and the WestSeattleBlog have done. They have a network of blogs, forums, restaurant guides and calendars. They need to keep thinking of new ideas to stay ahead of the paper and their website, if they even have one.

  The passion will remain if the visitors keep coming back and telling their friends. Their friends just may be potential advertisers. Advertisers can be part of a sustainable business model.

• 14. Cory  |  September 26th, 2008 at 7:41 am

  It is about the money, and we certainly understand the print-web CPM imbalance. But here’s what makes this different:

  We’re tapping small and medium businesses that don’t advertise in the regional newspapers or TV stations. Many just advertise in the yellow pages, in coupon books, and perhaps in monthly circulars. Many are unfamiliar with internet advertising.

  But they know the WestSeattleBlog because they read it and their friends read it. They’ve met the WestSeattleBlog authors. They see others in their SAME neighborhood advertising in it. Perhaps they see competitors in their SAME neighborhood advertising in it. Now they want to be a part of it.

  So what happens when this scales, when we neighborhood blogs get packed full of SMB (small and medium business) ads and local media wakes up? Good question. But newspapers and TV stations are incapable of selling at this low of price point. Yellow pages, however, have made a business out of it for years. So there will be more competition for those dollars, but not to the extent I think you might expect.

  The one big competitive advantage we have is community. People don’t just come to us as another news source, but a place to start the day, a place to contribute content, even a place to give back to their neighborhood by learning about events and volunteering opportunities — and supporting local businesses. Just slapping comments on the end of stories — as the local media sites have done — is not creating community. We email back all these people with personal notes. We meet them at events. We run into them at the grocery store. We live here, too. We love our neighborhood, too.

  As a local media company, you can’t simply create a neighborhood blog, promote the hell out of it from SeattleTimes.com, and expect to emulate this.

• 15. tdc  |  September 26th, 2008 at 8:16 am

  short sellers won’t take down a strong company.

  hang in there, kate and cory.

• 16. Tracy @ WSB  |  September 27th, 2008 at 10:53 pm

  What the comments above who dismiss us as “yeah, what happens when a car hits you” fail to recognize is that we are building companies. And we are building them from a completely different starting place than the old-media companies which are at the evolve-or-die junction … a place where the community is a partner, not just an audience. There are already talented people vested in our success at the moment who I believe would pick up the ball and run with it if space aliens kidnapped me tomorrow - and I expect to have at least one of those people hired as an official employee within the next few months. This is NOT a “blog.” This is a new-generation neighborhood news source that publishes in blog format. And it’s not even the “passion” of its owners that keeps it afloat - it’s the passion of the “readers” (I hate to call them that, because they are so much more) to get and share information about WHAT MATTERS TO THEM — the topics that most old media (and remember, I was there, so I’m to blame too) arrogantly decided didn’t matter any more. What’s moving into that storefront, what’s that new restaurant about, why is it taking forever for that pothole to get fixed. AND a local, neighborhood-minded take on the big stories - there are several major citywide transportation projects for which I attend the big media-event briefings too because they matter so much to my coverage area, and my take is different from that of the citywide media, which is often looking for political dirt, or cost scandal, and not simply looking at “does this make sense? will it make residents’ lives easier or harder? when does it start?” Not to say their questions aren’t valid - but this perspective is important too. When I quit my TV gig late last year, somebody said or wrote, yeah, we’ll check back on you in a year and see if it lasted. You bet it lasted … we’ve doubled our traffic and vastly increased our content … and wait till you check in a year from now.

• 17. Safran  |  September 28th, 2008 at 9:44 am

  Cory:

  You and I have long debated *comments.* I believe your position is that a blog is not a “blog” unless it allows comments. WSB does not. So is it a “blog?”

  Oh - and since it’s west of the Mississippi, shouldn’t it be “KSB?”

  

  SAS

• 18. Tracy @ WSB  |  September 29th, 2008 at 1:34 am

  Do you mean us? We do too allow comments. And we have forums. About 35,000 comments in the archives so far, and more than 29,000 forum posts (for the latter, note that we only launched forums in December 2007, two years after we started the site). However, we don’t consider ourselves a “blog” … but rather a news site that publishes in blog format. (Some more-eloquent writers than I have argued that “blog” really doesn’t describe anything more than a publishing format, and should not be used as a characterization of a site - way too broad.)

  While I’m at it, one more point I wanted to make, refuting some “you guys are just one banana peel away from disaster” comments from above.

  Community-level “old media” isn’t any further from the bone than we are, at least around here. Maybe it’s an anomaly, but it so happens that the community weeklies for Cory’s main coverage base and mine share the same editorial staff - a grand total of one editor, one reporter, one photographer-reporter, last time I checked bylines. That practically means that between Cory & Kate and my husband and myself (let alone the community contributor/tipsters), we’ve already got more personpower. Just another datapoint.

• 19. Aaron  |  September 29th, 2008 at 11:31 pm

  As much as the power of belief is apparent in Tracy’s comments…the idea that someone else would do what she does at the level she does is ludicrous. VERY few people have the background to approach a local blog like a tiny TV station which is her background. From what I’ve seen around the web, owners of traditional media have an investment in their brand, and a long history of trust with a large group of small businesses. If that weren’t true…they would have simply stopped publishing. How is it that David Black in the northwest and across Canada has a rather limited web presence (though it IS growing) and yet makes FAR more money than any blog or combination of blogs you can name? Coming from a broadcast background does not give you insight into the business of newspapers. While certain trend lines are obvious, it would be the height of arrogance (something bloggers who achieve a certain level of success or who sacrifice the better part of their lives day in and day out to get there are often guilty of) to think that existing companies will simply lay down and go away. Some will invest time and money to leverage their print product along with online to offer small to medium advertisers a more compelling choice.
  And the community building done by blogs is easily duplicated. Never forget, the audience is fickle. They will go where they get what they want and what they want can change… rapidly. Many people denigrate blogs for being chatty or even bordering on gossip… but that’s not really the point. They are SIMPLE, easy to use, even fun and if well done and frequently updated can develop a loyal audience. But the lesson of television should not be lost here. Remember when NBC had “Must See TV”?
  Thursday nights? They ruled the airwaves in the 90’s. Today? Not so much. Things change, Passionate people get sick. The audience grows bored with one thing and wants another. Competitors come along and chip away at tiny margins. All things must pass… Even for blogs… It doesn’t pay to be cocky.

• 20. Anonymous  |  October 12th, 2008 at 5:29 pm

  You’re a lonely 800-pound gorilla, judging by the imaginary status of uber-popular blogs like yours in the Boise area.

  Blogs just settle into a stable clique in Boise.

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