What's Next – Rick Waghorn

Posted on 17. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn in What's Next?

Working with Kyle Redinger of TheMediaAge.com in trialling our self-service, local text advertising system, Addiply, through a small site in Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as finding further trial partners here in the UK; preparing to launch the second of our networked sites from the ‘mother’ myfootballwriter.com hub; recruiting a professional journalist to help launch the third; recruiting a part-time ad salesperson to service both new sites; to tie up an affliate advertising deal with the local railway company pulling 10% revenue back from all rail tickets bought through our site; to try and promote the message that, to survive, we need to be both big and small, both micro-brewery and Budweiser; preparing to put together a second and final round submission for this year’s Knight News Challenge; to broaden our range of podcasts; to ponder whether to make comment free for all; to liase with a freelance national ad buyer to cascade national ads through the mother hub; to recruit new monthly columnists to service just the mother hub; to work with a CNYU grad student on both a social mapping function for myfootballwriter.com and a feasibility study on the US prospects for a mybaseballwriter.com; to liase with the MBA student body at the London School of Business over a marketing stragey for the roll-out of Addiply.

To try and maintain the belief that this should be the golden age for journalism – but only if we swiftly re-organise ourselves; re-invent ourselves in new models of commercial and editorial behaviour; to organise a beer and curry night for the staff that baby-sat the site whilst I was in NY. And amidst all of the above, to try and remember that my son will only be seven once.

It might have been slightly tongue in cheek – only slightly – but the offer of www.myeducationwriter.com had a serious intent.

For me, there needs to be a focal point; a wagon to which we can all tie up to.

That we can all fiddle away in our own little corners of the world, but without some structure, some galvanising framework or physical, collaborative project we will all continue to fiddle in the semi-dark.

We need some joined up thinking; a meeting point; a communal gathering place; a work in progress. Something that can people say: ‘Heh, this works really well…. and then we say: ‘Great, let’s bolt that bit on here, to myeducationwriter.com or whatever.

Somewhere where we can all understand what it does and see what it offers.

We’ve all got our little workshops; but every once in a while – hands still greasy – we come out and bolt a new carb, a shiny hub cap onto this brand new networked journalism vehicle we’re building in our midst. Not talking about. Building. Let’s have a party when we hit the first $10,000 in locally sourced advertising; when we open our first county ‘office’…

We don’t have time to drift; in ‘two to three years’ according my pal from BlogAds, Google will have a salesperson in every town and city; it’s ‘a race to the bottom’.

And while I’d agree there was little sign of panic in the room, I’d have like to have seen a mite more urgency; you two set the tone – it was a day for action.

Excellent.

Let’s see some action. Why not divvy up certain feasibility studies beween various parties; if Mark Potts was ‘on the right track only for the track to run out’ – nice line – let’s give him a new branch line to play with – what people talk about over their ‘back fence’, they equally talk about at the school gates…. Go to Mark…

Dangle some carrot in front of them; a minority equity stake… you’ve got 95 nominal $1 shares to play with… use them…