AR&D Reinventing Local Media

The Austin American-Statesman has started as a dedicated feed just for stories about the Fort Hood tragedy, and it’s a good move. The paper has recognized the enormity of the story, and by grabbing the Twitter URL quickly, the paper is showing a real dedication to giving people streams of information around topics and not just brands.

Why dedicate a separate feed to one story? Because of the audience. I’m following the Fort Hood story, but I’m not especially interested in the other stories coming from the paper/website. To get information about the story that interests me, I’d like to see the local reporting on the story. It’s a big plus for me to be able to opt-in to this one story. I can’t speak for locals in Austin, but I’ll bet they appreciate being able to break out this one story from the others the paper may cover in a given day.

Poynter’s Craig Kanelley talked with Robert Quigley, the social media editor at the Statesman:

“When we heard (the first news about the shootings), we knew we had to get moving and sent out a breaking news alert,” Quigley said in an interview conducted by phone and e-mail. “Within a few minutes, we had a reporter on the phone with Fort Hood and got confirmation. And we turned it around really fast, setting up the Twitter account.” Statesman Editor Fred Zipp first proposed the idea of creating a separate Twitter account to cover the event, according to Quigley. Quigley said he liked the idea and immediately jumped on it, trying different name combinations on Twitter, including “FortHood,” before deciding on “FtHoodShootings” to fit Twitter’s character limit for an account name.

Smart stuff. The instinct was to Think Social. The updates on Twitter are not all about driving traffic to the main site. Some updates have links, others don’t. As of this writing, the paper had sent out 265 Tweets and had garnered 3,300 followers just of this one stream. That’s huge. The paper’s “master” Twitter feed, twitter.com/statesman, has 15,000 followers. To pick up 3,500 just for the one Fort Hood stream – in the space of a week – is an enormous success.

It so happens that the story broke as Twitter introduced a new feature – Twitter Lists. (See next article.) These allow you to curate lists of your favorite feeds, and your friends can decide if they want to follow your lists. Statesman’s Fort Hood Twitter page made it onto 154 lists. This improves the chances that the page and stream will go viral. That, in turn, helps the Statesman become the authority on the story. This is where we want to be.

The not-for-profit Texas Tribune launched this week, with the mission “to promote civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide concern…”

However, it has a disclaimer that seems a little odd:

Should I read you instead of my local paper?

No, you should read us in addition to your local paper. We’ve always believed it’s both/and, not either/or. The reason we started the Trib is not because your local paper doesn’t believe in journalism in the public interest. It does, and it produces as much as it can. But in this severely depressed economy, human and financial resources are not as plentiful as they once were.

It’s my feeling that this is something of a sop to the local press. The idea behind a native news organization is that it should be a standalone. We’re not in this so people will read our work as an adjunct.

Further, The Austin Chronicle reports, the site raised $3.5 million in capital and is paying its execs handsomely. And the site seems to have a strange attitude about whom it hires:

Texas Tribune is paying (Editor Evan) Smith $315,000 a year. (Managing Editor Ross) Ramsey is making $165,000; technology director Higinio Maycotte, $120,000; and general manager Alisha Ring, $115,000; (Brian Thevenot) is the top-paid reporter at $90,000. “You don’t want clowns who can’t get a job working for public media; you want the best you can find,” Thornton said. “Did I ask Evan to take a pay cut? No.”

Clowns? Is that any way to begin a news organization? By, effectively, calling potential contributors from your audience “clowns?” Those are some handsome salaries for an unproven model. I’ve run the numbers before on not-for-profit news, and you have to have an absolute fundraising machine to make it work. (Or those sugar daddys need to keep giving you $3 million per year.) A staff of 16 will burn through that money in no time.

Cities could benefit from an online, multi-platform news source. I’m just not sure this approach – or attitude – is the way.