Apparently, citizen journalism pioneer Backfence is shutting down.
The people are using it as an example to suggest that CZ was doomed to fail. It need not be that way.
CZ as a trend can succeed, but only if actual newspapers embrace its potential and launch platforms to nurture it. Of course, they won’t. Rather, their egos won’t allow them to. After all, some people point out to the NYT’s resistance to linking out to other sites, let alone bloggers, because not all links are created equally (they’re not) and not all writers are created equally (they are, technically).
In Web 1.0, we saw a lot of companies raise a lot of money to try to do things online that companies were already doing, quite well I might add, offline. Eventually, the survivors had to burn through a lot of VC money and original investors got diluted to the point that only a few made money off of it.
The problem boils down to infrastructure. For a Backfence to gain critical mass and brand awareness - let alone brand equity - they have to fight the wrong battles.
My gut says that if newspapers let their readers partake in CZ initiatives, it would work. Or could work, but they might not want to admit that their readers, thus newfound writers, can compete for mindshare with their better paid (or simply, paid) journalists.
When I launched BloggerMojo.com, the idea was to allow writers to join the discussion. But what I realized was that we lacked the resources to make a dent in journalism, let alone make waves in CZ. The money we had to spend in marketing and infrastructure we’d have to spend in those things and in talent. But for a news company that has writers, readers and advertisers, it would make a lot of sense to let their otherwise educated and well-versed pool of readers to grab the pen and start writing.
Of course, that would have to mean that writers and reader-writers would have to coexist, which has never been an easy thing to pull off.
In a few years, we’ll see some companies, and who knows, maybe a BloggerMojo.com, survive in the space. But I’ve realized that I am better off relying on the traits that made journalism become succesful before worrying about making CZ a viable medium.
Subscribe:
July 5th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
[…] be better if newspapers took a stab at some citizen journalism themselves — but admits that would be a difficult mix of cultures (and I would have a tendency to agree). backfence, citizen […]
July 5th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
[…] be better if newspapers took a stab at some citizen journalism themselves — but admits that would be a difficult mix of cultures (and I would have a tendency to […]