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News Innovators on the Frontline: Texas Watchdog
Posted on 17. Jul, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.
Two and half years ago, Trent Seibert, of Texas Watchdog, saw the potential for a local online investigative news outlet. Having worked in both journalism — at The Tennessean and The Denver Post – as well government accountability — at the Tennessee Center for Policy Research — Trent had all the right credentials.
Fortunately, a chance meeting with some like-minded funders at a journalism conference in 2006 brought him enough start-up money to launch Texas Watchdog, a nonprofit news site in Houston covering local and state government corruption and waste. The Watchdog’s first story went online in August 2008. Since then the three-member team has divided up the work needed to run an investigative news outlet. All three tackle the editorial work: reporting, editing and assigning stories to freelancers. In addition, Trent handles their public affairs and “carnival barking,” while his colleagues, Jennifer Peebles and Lee Ann O’Neal, manage the site’s databases and bookkeeping.
Texas Watchdog recently joined 25 other nonprofit news organizations at the Pocantico Estate in New York to lay the foundation for an investigative news network.
How did Texas Watchdog get started?
When the Sam Adams Alliance gave us our start-up money, part of the deal was that if we were to make this work, we would have to be in a place with a big enough market for this kind of journalism, a place where we can sustain the work we do. There are only a few places in the U.S. to do that, and I hate to say that because I was living in Nashville, Tennessee, at the time and I love Nashville. But you need to be in a state with a big media market, and that means California, New York, or Texas. These are the places where America’s ideas come from, for good or for bad. So, we ended up picking Houston, Texas, as a place to launch this idea.
In part we thought it was a great market down here, because it’s a big city that wasn’t drenched in media. There was room for us. And Houston has more than it’s share of billionaires, so we thought we might be able to knock on a door and make a 501(c)(3) work.
How do you keep new revenue coming in?
We’re real new, and this whole concept is real new. We don’t have a big benefactor yet. So, a big chunk of our revenue comes from running educational programs that teach people about journalism. Half of our time is doing investigative and enterprise journalism here in Texas. The other half is us, at different times, going around the country and getting revenue by teaching individual groups — whether civic groups, public policy groups or blogging groups — how to do, for lack of a better term, journalism. We teach them how to file a public records request. We teach them how to look at their city halls and their schools.
With the decline of newspapers, they’re getting less information than ever before, so we’re able to give them the tools to find that information themselves. We’ve been able to cobble together a budget, between our initial grant money and creating revenue this way, to get us to the end of the year.
What do your freelancers get out of that?
Well, I can’t tell you exactly how much we pay them. But I will say that we pay our freelancers very well. I know how it feels to be in that boat. I worked at a newspaper once that paid something like 50 bucks for a freelance front-page story. It made me want to walk into the publisher’s office and beat her like a baby seal. It was embarrassing. Good writing deserves good money. Although, keep in mind, our medical benefits amount to a couple of Band Aids and some Aspirin. We’re not in a good position there yet, but hopefully we’ll be there in the next few years.
Sounds good, maybe I’ll swing by Houston in the near future. Do you see any opportunities to expand in other ways?
If you look at New York City as an example, The Village Voice used to be the one waving its fists in the face of City Hall and at the same time doing great media and music coverage. Alternative weeklies have all gone down hill since those days. So, I wouldn’t mind expanding to other areas of coverage some day. But that’s really down the road. Right now our bread and butter is doing the investigative journalism that major metros just don’t have the time and budget to cover anymore. And the local-er, the better for me. If I could find corruption on the sewer commission, brother, I would work on that all day.
What about working in conjunction with other local news outlets?
We get picked up by other news outlets fairly often. But it’s weird. We’re here to help supplement what’s missing in journalism in Houston, but at the end of the day we’re a competitor. We’ve been all over this great story about the Houston airport, with these bizarre companies operating in secret, and nobody’s picked up on it yet. But that doesn’t shock me, because we did the same thing when I was in Denver. When I was working with The Denver Post, our competitor was the Rocky Mountain News, and when they broke something really good that we didn’t have, we tried to make every excuse in the world to convince our editors, “aw, that’s not a real story. We knew that all along.”
Click below to hear an audio clip from our interview with Trent Seibert.
The Texas Watchdog Team
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News Innovators on the Frontline: MGoBlog
Posted on 07. Jul, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.
Brian Cook — a longtime University of Michigan sports fan — runs MGoBlog.com as a solo operation and brings in enough money to keep his blog up to speed with the likes of freshman quarterback Denard Robinson. Brian launched his site in December 2004 and has watched its audience grow to 100,000 unique visitors to date. Since taking on blogging as a full-time gig in mid-2006, he’s relied on the sports-based ad network Yardbarker for half of his monthly revenue. The rest comes from t-shirt sales, ticket links and reader donations, allowing him to fully dedicate his time to managing the site’s content and writing in-depth posts that sometimes hit the 10,000-word mark. We spoke to the Ann Arbor-based blogger yesterday about his business and his belief that traditional sports coverage needs more room for conversation among readers and fans.
Brandon Minor Logo
What got you into sports blogging?
In college I had written for the school’s satire newspaper, their version of The Onion, and I had been looking for a job where I could keep writing after I left. I tried a few things that never panned out, and then it occurred to me that I spent a lot of my time following the Michigan football team. Whenever anybody ever asked me, I would rattle on for about 15 minutes, usually until their eyes glazed over. So, I figured there might be a better spot for that kind of knowledge other the disinterested ears of my friends. From there I started my blog and went about feeling my way.
What was your level of business and sales experience at that point?
Zero. And it’s pretty much stayed that way. Luckily I’m in a nice position, since MGoBlog is probably the number one college football blog in terms of traffic. When you’re in that position, the ad networks that want to get you in the fold will offer you certain CPM minimum guarantees — shares of the advertising dollars they make, as long as your site gets enough traffic. So, I’ve stayed with Yardbarker for the past couple of years, and that’s really helped me out. At this point, they’re still in the venture phase and don’t mind spending money to keep me.
And I’m able to supplement that with other revenue sources. One of the nice things about being a sports blogger is that there are ticket and betting companies that will pay you just to put text links up. I’ve also been selling t-shirts through the site, which have done very well. And then there are donations from fans, which bring in a couple of thousand dollars a year.
Have you ever thought about hiring a sales person to help expand your advertising reach?
Yes, I have, and I’ve thought about adding some freelance coders to help out as well. But it’s hard to tell if that would be worthwhile at this point. Before I get there my biggest priority is to expand the amount of traffic I’m getting. One day the site might hit a saturation point, and stop growing as quickly as it has been over the past few years. If that happens, then getting more mileage out of my traffic will probably become more important.
So, how do you keep Michigan sports fans coming to your site?
There’s a lot of advice out there. It’s always like write this or do this, and I kind of defy it. My signature post is something called Upon Further Review, which is a play-by-play break down of every play in every Michigan football game, which usually runs about 10,000 words per game. And I split that up into offense and defense. My strategy has always been to just kill a category. If you want analysis of a Michigan football game there’s nowhere else you can go.
A lot of newspaper sports writing strives for objectivity, and it holds itself a little bit aloof. And then when it tries to talk to about the intense emotions inspired by a game, it kind of falls flat. To the readers it’s like asking a virgin for his opinion on what an orgasm feels like.
The Ann Arbor News recently reported that it will become an online-only news source this month. What impact will that likely have on MGoBlog.com?
I don’t know how much of an impact it will actually have, because the kind of people who are still subscribing to The Ann Arbor News aren’t my core demographic. My core demographic is very male, very young, highly educated, and I would assume, highly internet-oriented. The kind of people who are affected by The Ann Arbor News becoming annarbor.com are generally less hardcore about their sports coverage.
But with the transition to the web, they are promising to link out a lot, so having more of a two-way relationship with the local news sites would help, probably just in terms of Google ranking and maybe some traffic. Right now I link to them and The Free Press fairly often, and I don’t think I’ve ever received a link from any of those sources. That seems a little unbalanced.
Click below to hear an audio clip from our interview with Brian Cook.
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Innovation: An interview with GlobalPost.com co-founder Charlie Sennott
Posted on 07. Nov, 2008 by David Cohn.
Chris O’brien writes at the Next Newsroom Project….
Charlie Sennott, a former foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe, likes to say he had one of the last great rides in international reporting. He came up as a metro reporter, got sent overseas, and got to do international reporting for the paper he loved. But when he returned to Boston a couple years ago, he learned the Globe was pulling the plug on its international bureaus.
That set off some soul searching that has turned the career journalist into an entrepreneur who wants to reinvent the model for international reporting with GlobalPost.com. The online only international reporting site launches Jan. 12, 2009 and will have 70 correspondents around the world covering international news from an American perspective.
Sound crazy? I thought so. But I changed my mind after listening to Sennott. I saw him speak at the New Business Models for News Summitt in New York a couple of weeks ago (see the video above). And I got to talk with him last week to fill in some of the details of what he has in mind. Sennott is passionate about journalism, and clearly believes he and his partners have a sustainable model for a new international news organization.
“I’ve covered cops, courts, war zones, huge stories,” Sennott said. “I’ve never done a start-up. I’ve never been so busy in my life. But I’ve never been so excited about an opportunity to try to build something.”
You can listen to my interview with Sennott here:
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Politics–if you listen, stories will bubble up
Posted on 10. Oct, 2007 by daniel.massey.
Politics: Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake; Micah Sifry of Tech President;
Mike Krempasky of Redstate. Moderator: Micah Sifry
Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake:
“What happened with the Libby trial is we had had so many readers interested in the case, stacks of court files, people saying conflicting things. We developed a group of people obsessed with the case who would go through all the stuff. When it came time for the trial we had a group of core people with such a knowledge base, that we became the people to go to, to analyze testimony for consistency, for factualness. Many of the journalists admitted that they followed the case through our live blogging. It wasn’t something we set out to do. If you listen to community stories will bubble up.
