E-Media Tidbits

Courtesy of Sharon Wheatley Editor Travis Henry and some of the staffers from yesterday's YourHub meeting.

Yesterday, I stopped by the staff meeting at the new Denver offices of YourHub -- the syndicated online/print citizen journalism venture of the Denver Newspaper Agency. My, how they've grown... They're now up to a paid staff of about 25 -- several community journalists and community assistants, plus editorial and advertising staff. That's not even counting the technology consultants and all the volunteer citizen journalists, bloggers, and other contributors.

This meeting apparently was smaller than usual because many staffers were in the field covering signing day for athletes at local high schools. However, one of YourHub's avid volunteer contributors, Sharon Wheatley of Golden, Colo., attended. YourHub volunteers are always welcome at the staff meetings, I learned.

This meeting was both similar to and different from newsroom meetings I've attended throughout my career. The main difference was the emphasis on outreach. At YourHub, it's apparently a major ongoing effort to get community members to contribute -- even to understand that they are welcome and encouraged to contribute. This is pretty different from most online media, but editor Travis Henry noted that YourHub is significantly different from most other citJ efforts: Since YourHub always partners with newspapers, it enjoys broad print distribution.

That would probably explain why, in the meeting, staffers mentioned several times about how community members often complain "Why did you put that person in the paper?" or "Why didn't you cover this event?" In those situations, the YourHub staffers must keep explaining that anyone is welcome to contribute. Community reactions to this are mixed. Often, the readers complaining just want to be heard by YourHub, they don't want to contribute.

In my experience, print and online audiences generally have different expectations from media, especially when it comes to community news and issues. Trying to serve both audiences from the same base of nontraditional content is not quite a comfortable mix. Online audiences often innately leap into contributing to the public discourse -- but print audiences often assume a more passive role. "To a lot of people, citizen journalism is still a foreign idea," said Henry. "We have to hit them over the head with it over and over again before they understand that they can post their own news."

That said, the print component is crucial to YourHub's business model -- and YourHub is turning a profit, Henry said.

Henry noted that he routinely hears from people who want to subscribe specifically to the weekly print edition of YourHub, and are surprised to learn that it only comes delivered with a regular Rocky Mountain News or Denver Post subscription. This is a deliberate strategy, Henry says: YourHub is positioned partly as an incentive to retain and increase subscriptions to the papers. It'll be interesting to see whether future reader surveys for the papers indicate whether YourHub is in fact having a significant effect on circulation.

While YourHub is going strong in the Denver metro area, that's not always the case in other communities where the YourHub infrastructure has been syndicated. "Some places seem to think that this thing will run itself, and that's a problem," said Henry. "It takes a lot of hands-on involvement to grow the kind of community you need to make this business work."

Courtesy of Sharon Wheatley Several members of the YourHub team, plus me. Click to find out who's who.

I've decided to learn more about YourHub by getting more involved. For a little while I've been writing in my personal blog about my recent experiences with going voluntarily carless. That's fun, but it makes more sense to publish that content where it will be more visible to the general population of my town, Boulder, Colo. So today I started a blog on YourHub, Carless in Boulder. I figure, I would have written this content anyway, so way not make a media experiment out of that effort?

I'm even considering subscribing to the Rocky so I can receive the print edition of YourHub, to tune in more closely to both ends of this venture. If I do that, it would be the first time I will have subscribed to a print newspaper in 14 years. Will I take that plunge? Stay tuned...

(CORRECTION: Originally this article stated that in the Denver area, the weekly print edition of YourHub was delivered only to Rocky Mountain News subscribers. As editor Travis Henry clarified in a comment, in fact YourHub gets sent to both Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News subscribers.)