Online ads don’t have to suck; Editors don’t have to call the shots; Chicago blogs don’t have to be ignored – Three things to think about for this Saturday’s conference

Last spring I launched a website called Windy Citizen, which lets Chicagoans share local news with one another and vote for the stories they think deserve attention.  After 13 months, it’s going great. In fact, it’s on track to be self-sustaining by summer’s end.

Since fully opening up the doors in January, Chicagoans have cast 24,356 votes for 3,683 reader-submitted articles and posted 3,275 comments.  A month ago, our readers donated nearly $1100 to help cover hosting costs and other operational expenses.

Windy Citizen is an open service where Chicagoans sift through the latest information on the web each day to find the best of it.  Anyone can become a Windy Citizen member and begin recommending, voting up, and discussing local stories.

Chicago businesses have spotted what we’re up to and are getting involved.  In April, we had 70,000 people stop by and we sent close to 40,000 people out to the sites on our front page.  Last week we announced our first monthly sponsor, a Chicago realtor.  There are more waiting in the wings.  Meanwhile, we’ve created partnerships with the Chicago Reader, CBS2, Gapers Block and Progress Illinois, just to name a few sites that now feature our widgets and story buttons.

This has been accomplished without funding from outside investors or non-profit foundations.  When I started, I had about $3500 to my name and some student debt from graduate school bearing down on me.  I’m having a blast hosting what’s turned into the definitive 24-hour conversation about what’s new in Chicago.

This Saturday, I will be on a panel about making money on the web at the Chicago Media Future Conference.  I wanted to introduce three points that I think about a great deal and explain where WindyCitizen.com fits in to them.

1. Online advertising sucks, but it doesn’t have to.
2. Traditional editorial models aren’t going anywhere, but they will decrease in influence and deserve to.
3. Independent publishers who cover local topics are doomed without better ways to distribute their content.

Online advertising sucks, but it doesn’t have to

This point was ably made by my friend Kiyoshi Martinez at last spring’s Chicago Journalism Town Hall after Eric Zorn called him out of the crowd after reading what he was saying on Twitter.  You can watch the video of his comments at the event here.

You can read Martinez’s thoughts in detail here, but here’s the gist.

Online banner ads are problematic….

1. Readers don’t enjoy banner ads like they (debatably) do print ads.
2. Advertisers don’t take pride in their banner ads like they take pride in their print ads.
3. Publishers don’t make money from their banner ads like they do from their print ads.

And yet news sites continue trying to sell them!  And when they fail, they declare that online advertising “doesn’t work” and the only way to survive is to charge their readers for access.

Maybe it’s just the banner ads that don’t work?

We’ve recently launched two advertising programs on the Windy Citizen that try something new.  One lets a business take over our site’s layout for the day, replacing it with its own.  The other gives businesses a way to syndicate their news and events across our network where Chicagoans can vote on it.  I’ve been introducing this program to local business owners over the last month and getting very positive feedback.  Our site takeovers make brands look incredible while our sponsored news feeds drive real traffic back to sponsors.  New things must be tried in online advertising.  Charging readers for what you’re giving them for free isn’t the only answer.

The editorial model isn’t going anywhere, but it will decrease in importance and deserves to.

Pop Quiz: What one thing do RedEye, The Chicago Defender, WBEZ, and Chicagoist all have in common?

They’re all assembled by editors.  The stories that catch their eye make it into the next edition.  The ones that don’t are left to obscurity.

The editorial approach has served the media well and will always have merit, but it has a few drawbacks:

1. Editors can only edit so many stories. Humans have bandwidth caps.  We don’t scale all that well.  When you rely on a small team of editors to pick all your stories, you limit the range and number of stories up for consideration.
2. Editors don’t always pick the stories you’d like to read. Every person is different. What a reader thinks is newsworthy and what an editor thinks is newsworthy isn’t always the same.  If a news organization’s aim is to meet its audience’s information needs, using editors to decide those is inefficient.
3. Editors require money to do their work. You have to compensate editors with money so they can eat, entertain themselves, raise a family, and have a roof to sleep under.  With newspaper revenues falling at astounding rates, this is a real problem.  Hence all the layoffs.

With both the Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune in bankruptcy and with every media organization letting staffers go and scrambling to cut corners, editors are being asked to edit more stories and accept less money for their work going forward.  Their jobs are only going to get harder.  Their output - or lack thereof - will show.  I believe it does already.

Rather than cry about this, why don’t we celebrate the opportunity to explore new editorial models?  That’s what we’re doing on Windy Citizen, which uses collective intelligence, the disparate actions of several hundred Chicagoans, to filter through the local news of the day and determine the 15 stories most deserving of your time.  Rather than two or three people calling the shots for all of Chicago, we’re letting thousands weigh in on what’s worth reading today, and in the process, we’re finding things that were passed over due to lack of time, interest or resources.

Independent publishers looking to build their own local sites are doomed without new distribution channels for their content.

If you start a blog with a local focus, you are more or less doomed to obscurity.   Chicago’s newspapers are stingy with outbound links in my experience.  Meanwhile, Google takes upward of a year to evaluate new sites and determine if they’re worth sending real traffic to.  In Chicago that leaves Gapers Block and Chicagoist as the only sites that reliably send out solid traffic to other sites, though the latter’s linking policies are designed to keep people on their site.  The Uptown Update and Second City Cop can also send solid traffic to local sites, but they have very specific focuses.

Windy Citizen addresses this problem by offering a new distribution system for local links.  When a story receives enough votes from our members, it rises up the front page where it is seen by hundreds of Chicagoans, syndicated to feed readers via RSS and Tweeted out to our 3300 followers on Twitter.  As of this week, we are sending more than 200 local readers back to each of the stories that top our front page.  Sites that have caught on to Windy Citizen are seeing their traffic surge.  As we sign up more sponsors and grow our audience, we’ll send more traffic out this way. Slowly but surely, we’re leveling the playing field and opening up the conversation to new voices.

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I’m looking forward to this Saturday’s panel discussions.  There are lots of local folks doing interesting things in this space.  I hope you have a better understanding of my point of view and contributions having read this post.  Thanks.  Feel free to fire away at me in the comments below or save your questions for Saturday.