New tools, improving ad market a boon to citizen media sites
The combination of growing online ad revenue and cheaper technology is positioning stand-alone news sites (like these citizen journalism efforts) to take on traditional media, AJR says.
Industry Standard co-founder Jonathan Weber -- who recently launched NewWest.net about the Rocky Mountain West -- says NewWest's three staffers and 10 contract workers use Expression Engine, a Web publishing software that costs about $200.
"What we're doing would not have been practical two years ago," Jonathan Weber says. "The tools and the software have radically changed." The company spent a sum "in the low five figures" on software and building the site.That's a mere fraction of what it cost to launch The Industry Standard's site. "I'm not saying that our platform does everything that one did. But we're getting 80 to 90 percent of a high-end system for a 100th of the cost," he says.
Even those who build or commission their own software are finding that process to be much less expensive now. Mark Potts and Susan DeFife launched their "all local" citizen journalism startup, Backfence, in early May in two suburban Washington, D.C., communities. Their team built the technology from scratch for about $100,000 with money they earned as consultants on related projects for major media companies.
They say their software allows visitors to seamlessly add their own content (in other words, to blog), edit posts written by others (to wiki) and post photos, all without being aware they are using cutting-edge technology. Potts, a cofounder of washingtonpost.com, and DeFife, who in the 1990s founded an Internet portal for women in business, say building the software cost hundreds of thousands of dollars less than it would have five years ago--if it would have been possible at all.
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