Just back from an Internet-free vacation, I’m plowing through a
mountain of e-mail. One of the most interesting things in there is a
pointer from Jay Rosen to a guest critique of citizen-journalism start-up Backfence.com posted late last week to his Pressthink blog: “Guest Writer Liz George of Baristanet Reviews Backfence.com Seven Months After Launch.”
If you care about “citJ,” definitely read not only George’s essay but
also the lengthy reader comments thread below it. This is good stuff.
A key point brought up by George and her readers is the difference
between Backfence’s rather generic-looking community sites (all based
on an identical design) and personality-driven local citJ sites like
George’s own Baristanet. Baristanet is an editor-driven local site in which George and co-editor Debbie Galant (an ex-New York Times
New Jersey columnist) hold forth and through their efforts and personality
drive reader participation to high levels. Backfence operates more on
the notion of creating an infrastructure to support citizens submitting
their own content to a community online gathering place; there’s not a
strong personality guiding each of its town sites.
Backfence operates with a business model that seeks to replicate its
websites for many towns and cities. Baristanet is a one-off operation.
George’s essay and many of the reader comments are critical of
Backfence sites for being too bland, too identical (where’s the
local-community personality?), and too sparsely used (especially in
terms of number of user comments to content that has been published).
I tend to think that personality is important on local citJ sites like
this. I’m skeptical that just setting up an infrastructure and hoping
people will populate it with content will work. That’s not
what Backfence is doing; its founders are clear that they’re spending
much effort beating the local bushes to get people to contribute
content. But Backfence doesn’t (yet, anyway) have people like George
and Gallant driving each of its local sites. I think that may prove to be
required.
(Disclaimer: I’m currently working on a citJ project — not related to local news — of my own, outside
of my part-time work for Poynter which includes writing for this blog
and covering the topic of citizen journalism. Ergo, my interest in this
topic is not solely academic.)
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this item misspelled “Pressthink,” Jay Rosen’s blog.
