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On Feb. 9, Philly.com discontinued reporter Dan Rubin's popular blog Blinq -- to the great dismay of its devoted community. |
On Feb. 9, the popular and venerable (at least by online standards) Philly.com weblog
Blinq, written since 2005 by reporter
Daniel Rubin,
bid farewell to its community. As
Pat Walters recounts today in
this interview, Rubin has taken a new job as a metro desk columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Personally, I'm very happy for Rubin, and I understand his desire to move on, to do something different. However, I'm sad for Blinq's community -- and for Philly.com. Rubin worked hard to build a strong, vibrant, highly engaged community around Blinq. Now, Philly.com is just letting that community die. From a business perspective, this seems to me like a huge error. I hope Philly.com reconsiders before it's too late.
And that's the beauty of it -- they can reconsider. Philly.com could opt to assign a new writer (or better still, a team of writers) to carry on with Blinq and continue to cultivate that rich community. If they do that now, before too much time passes, while the connective tissue of feeds and e-mail alerts are still in place, they could make a transition work.
The thing is,
in online media community is golden. Community isn't merely fun, "feelgood," and energizing -- it's the foundation of most successful online business models, especially those that rely on advertising, subscriptions, and related products or events. You can't buy community; you must grow it and continually nurture it. Rubin did just that. Brilliantly.
The Inquirer dearly needs all the community loyalty it can get. Remember, this is the paper which last month laid off 68 newsroom employees (16 percent of its editorial staff). Its longtime print-focused business model obviously isn't working anymore. And yet, it's plowing under its most promising online sapling.
According to Kevin Donahue, executive producer for Philly.com, Blinq wasn't bringing in enough traffic to justify its continued existence. Its numbers "pale when looked at against the site in its aggregate. According to our traffic monitoring software, Blinq had 210,199 views in its last complete month, January. It's a good number of views, but represented just 0.6 percent of our total views for the month. In 2006, Blinq had more than 1 million views. Again, this was less than 1 percent of our total traffic." (UPDATE: Donahue updated the page-view figure Feb. 14.)
I asked Donahue whether Philly.com did enough to try to sell ads around Blinq as premium space or otherwise try to build a business model around that community. He replied: "We sold ads on Blinq, but have not yet created a blog-specific ad strategy. As such content has become more central to our content offering, it'll become more important to our bottom line."
...And thus, rather than try now to work out a better blog-focused ad or other revenue strategy, Philly.com tied the toe tag on Blinq. Rather than nurture the potential of a promising experiment, it judged Blinq against the performance of more mature and familiar mass-audience fare. Personally I'm amazed that with such little business-side attention Blinq ended up building what, in online terms, is a large and rich community so quickly. However, a business model that values pageviews above community and engagement -- and, of course, branding -- is bound to miss the point of conversational media.
Read the comments on Rubin's farewell Blinq post. They're heartbreaking, from a community and a business perspective. A typical remark: "This is a giant step backward for the Inquirer and only makes me shudder more deeply about its future."
In his farewell post, Rubin tossed out this teaser: "As I start to get a feel for the new job, maybe Blinq will resurface somewhere down the road, in some form, as a sketchbook for the column." That would be nice -- but wouldn't it be better if Blinq kept gaining momentum, and Rubin could pop back in to a rolling community instead of having to reinvent so much of his painstakingly crafted wheel?
That said, Rubin's own perspective is contributing to the untimely and unfortunate demise of Blinq. Yesterday he told me, "Obviously I had nothing to do with ads, being fond of the traditional firewall between editorial and sales. Had I been in sales I might have looked to blog ads and Google ads and other micro sources of income that were related to my subjects."
While I totally understand the advertising/editorial firewall -- and agree with it in most cases -- I do think that journalists who choose to see their role as completely separate from concerns such as site traffic and business models are not going to fare well as the news business evolves.
As Adam Glenn reported in Tidbits earlier this week, "Bill Grueskin (managing editor of the Wall Street Journal online) [said] that he'd like to see more incoming journalists who understand traffic and user navigation patterns for news Web sites, and how that relates to profitability."
In that same article, Glenn quoted Wilmington (DE) News-Journal managing editor Pankaj Paul: "It's not one person's job to get content online. It's everyone's job."
To that, I'd add that in the news business, it's now everyone's job to realize potential value from the content they create -- and to think creatively about how to nurture and capitalize on that potential in order to help news organizations survive. This especially means that if you end up creating a strong, positive, engaged community, know that it's precious and don't waste it.
It's generally bad business to cook the goose that lays the golden eggs. It's especially bad business to starve it and let its corpse rot. Communities remember such behavior, and it makes people less likely to respond to your future attempts to engage them. Who wants to get summarily dumped?
Philly.com: Your golden gosling is still breathing. Let it keep growing. You'll get your golden eggs eventually.
(Thanks to Stephen Keating of the Denver Post for the nudge on this.)
What an opportunity the Inquirer and Rubin are missing by...
