Craig Silverman is the journalist behind Regret the Error, the co-author of Mafiaboy: How I Cracked The Internet and Why It’s Still Broken, and the managing editor of PBS.org MediaShift. [Full disclosure: MediaStyle principal Ian Capstick is a contributor to the MediaShift blog] He’s also part of the team, headed by Wilf Dinnick, that is creating the transparent, multimedia, open-sourced news website OpenFile. In the first of this two-part interview, Silverman discusses the genesis of OpenFile, what separates audience from news, and the business model of news online. -Travis Boisvenue
What’s the elevator pitch for OpenFile?
The short version is that it’s a collaborative local news site.
Collaborative meaning that anybody from the community in Toronto–maybe they’re seeing something happening on their street and they’re wondering, “why are all these trees being cut down?”–they can go to the site, open what we call a File, and say, “there are trees being cut down all over the street, I’m wondering ‘why?’”
And if we at OpenFile, the editors, look at that and say “this is a good story”, we assign it to a reporter.
So the idea is that rather than just having a bunch of editors decide “here is what the news is today”, we’re going to be working with the community, with the people. Their ideas, their suggestions, and then the actual process of reporting is also collaborative. We’re going to be inviting people to be part of the process of putting a story together, we’re going to ask them to add information, add insights.
We’re very very focused on local stories. The term “hyper local” is obviously very popular. Stuff that a larger city paper might not care about is something we definitely care about, and because everything on the site is geo-tagged, as we build up more and more information and Files on the site, you’ll be able to go in and enter your postal code and find a whole page full of things that might be as relevant to you.
It’s aggressively local, it’s open, it’s collaborative, and, of course, it’s online only. So we’re going to be doing a lot of stuff with multimedia.
The ideas behind OpenFile seem to come from gripes with how print media is being run.
I think there’s that element. Overall, we see it as evolutionary rather than revolutionary. A lot of the things that we’re trying to do have been suggested over the years, and in a lot of cases tested.
I would say one of the core problems that we’re trying to address is the separation between people in a community and a news organization that’s supposed to represent and cover that community. It’s true that you could call up the local newspaper and say, “I have a story” and get someone on the phone, or send in an email. But the chances of there being any follow-up, let alone you being part of that process beyond that initial phone call, let alone any credit or acknowledgement for you in any official way, that’s pretty unlikely.
And from my background I’ve spent a lot of time looking for accuracy and errors and corrections, that’s an area of expertise for me. And there is kind of a truth about errors and corrections that I think relates to journalism in general, and it is that we rely on people to spot our mistakes as journalists, and in a lot of ways we also rely on the public to tell us what’s going on, but the problem with corrections is that a lot of the time people won’t bother to report an error that they spot because they think that people in the newsroom won’t care. They don’t know how to go about doing that, and in a lot of cases they don’t think that journalists are all that interested in being accurate.
If you think about a general news example, a lot of people don’t know how to go about getting someone at a newspaper to report something, especially if they’re a regular member of the community, not someone with a PR person. There is a real barrier when there is not a clear message being sent by media organizations saying, “listen, we want you to be a part of this, we want to know about what issues matter to you and what your ideas are”. There is no formal process for it, and that’s sort of a core thing in [OpenFile's] mandate. We’ve got a clear process and a clear message saying, “we want to hear from you”, and we’re not just going to take your story idea and hope that you hear about it later.
Another challenge is figuring out a viable online business model for journalism.
What’s that business model looking like so far?
Our plan is to do advertising rather than to do a pay wall. If you look at the beta site right now, there is no advertising. Obviously, that’s going to change. But one thing you’re probably not going to see, or ever going to see on the site, are your typical google ads, banners, text ads–that kind of thing. In terms of a sustainable model, if you are only selling those kinds of ads, banners, clicks, and things like that, you’re going to have a hard time supporting real journalism. So there are two things we are going for. Number one, we’re going to be looking at a sponsor model, something along the lines of what you might see at PBS where specific programs are paid for by specific foundations. So we are talking to larger organizations about becoming founding sponsors and offering them exclusive placement and positioning on the site.
The second part is the long term part. We’re geotagging everything that goes on the site. As the site evolves and there is more and more content, and as we see where people are distributed over the city, all of a sudden we can do location-based advertising. We think that advertising is more and more looking towards contextual, looking towards location-based.
You mentioned “real journalism”. What kind of distinction do you make between print journalists and bloggers that haven’t had print experience?
For right now we probably are working with people who have done published work for pay. And frankly I don’t distinguish if they’ve written for an online publication or if they’ve written for the Toronto Star. If someone has written real, quality reportive pieces and has been paid for them, that to me is journalism. If someone is writing their own blog and that’s something they do as a hobby–and we see that there is quality work there–and we think that there is a story that they might be really good at, I think think that we’re willing to take a chance on them.
Our vision over time is that people who start on the site as users and typical citizens–if over time they build a reputation and show that they are really good at sniffing out facts and sniffing out stories–if they seem to be good in terms of writing, we do see a time in the future where we can promote people to be reporters for the site, even if they aren’t a full-time reporter.
Do you see OpenFile as a model that could replace traditional newspapers?
As a general statement, I think that if your idea is you launch something new and its going to erase things that have been there for hundreds of years, you’re probably not going to have a lot of success. I see it as an “and” situation rather than as an “or” situation. There are things that the Toronto Star does, for example, they we’re probably never going to be able to do. They maintain a full-time bureau covering city hall. We don’t see ourselves doing that. We certainly see ourselves doing a lot of reporting about city hall and decisions made there and how they affect local communities. I think those institutions for the most part will continue.
For me, it’s just a broadening of options available to people, and really offering a different kind of relationship, experience, and ultimately a different kind of information product. So yeah, I see there to be an element of coexisting. If you look on the site, we already are linking to all kinds of different reports at National Post, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, Toronto Sun. We’re linking to the great work they do when their work touches on areas that we’re looking at. And obviously i think that that’s a bit of a distinction: they’re starting to link out a bit more, but they’re pretty hesitant to show somebody what’s going on at a competing place, whereas we very much embrace the idea of doing that.
