Xark!

Hyperlocal isn't the issue, scale is

So today is supposedly the day of reckonning for thousands of digital journaists who work for Patch, the horribly named AOL entry in the corporate arms race to "monetize the hyperlocal space." Big layoffs (nobody knows yet exactly how big), plummeting morale, disintegrating trust and blamethrowing between local outfits and corporate towers. 

It's the same story, over and over and over. TBD in Washington. Backfence in ... well, lots of places. There are other examples, but who really cares? If you're reading the coverage of this extremely predictable failure, you'd think that the culprit is "the model."

In the case of Patch, media analyst Ken Doctor of Outsell thinks part of the problem is that the network grew too large too quickly. The downsizing, he says, "is basically an acknowledgment of failure, but in part a noble failure," adding that in 2011-12 Patch hired more journalists than anyone else in the country.

As for hyperlocal generally, Doctor says, "The economic model still doesn't work after 15 years."

Well, allow me to retort! Doesn't work for whom?

Because here's the thing, Ken (and it's not just Doctor I'm speaking to -- he's simply saying what all the media executives say). You can make that claim all day, but it doesn't explain the fact that you can still go to Baristanet.com and read more than you ever wanted to know about Montclair, N.J. They've been doing hyperlocal journalism since 2004. Still going strong. And it's not alone. 

So let me Mansplain this to all you corporate media experts out there. Hyperlocal doesn't work for you. And it doesn't work for you because you're not out in the field trying to satisfy people's desire for information about their communities. The Tim Armstrongs of the world don't give a flying fuck about your community. They're chasing the hyperlocal fairy through the forest because they know that local businesses need local media in which to advertise to local customers. It's a huge market -- if you could simply organize it, aggregate it, commoditize it, and drag it back to those plush old-media economies of scale. Who wouldn't want to control that market?

Well, I wouldn't. 

After years of splashing around the edges of the hyperlocal pond, I finally dove in this year and built CHSSoccer.net, a hyperlocal web site devoted to soccer in and around Charleston, SC. And while it's not like I didn't think long and hard about the value of that market before committing to it, in the end I concluded that the way to understand its value was to take a risk and get to know it first. As a reporter, the way I get to know things is by covering them. Intensely. Personally. Maybe even obsessively.

So CHSSoccer.net isn't based on the "most efficient unit-cost model," but the Seth Godin Otaku model. To wit: Making average products for average people (think standard "news judgment," or what I've come to call "the Great Averaging Machine") is the 21st century recipe for failure. To succeed in this new world, we have to make things that are remarkable, and one way to do that is to design for people who have a profound passion for that thing -- whether it's ramen noodles in Tokyo or well-made camp tools or an awesome minor-league soccer team that gets only carefully averaged attention from mainstream local media. 

Of course, Godin's ideas on this subject -- like Chris Anderson's Long Tail and Dave Winer's visionary but half-formed dream of a new kind of DIY media culture -- have all, in a sense, failed. Because while Godin's now-dated books and blogs and TED talks are brilliant, they haven't really been predictive. American companies continue to chug along making average products for average people. Investors have largely given up on the Long Tail and returned to the herd-safety at the head of the curve. And all the potential media outcomes I outlined in 2009 have largely succumbed to the lowest common-denominator, with metro newspapers "lurch(ing) along zombie-style as scaled-back copies of the original."

We had chaos and hope between 2004 and 2009. Everything since has been a bloodbath. Kinda reminds me of Tiananmen Square in June 1989, except instead of Chinese security forces we got paywalls, reality TV, DRM, auto-tuned pop ... and Patch. 

So yes, Patch hired journalists. But Patch was always a sweat shop, designed from the top down to prove the validity of the corporate desire to view "content" as simply a cost-factor. It was hometown news as a Beta test for a corporate-scaled platform of clone sites. And you simply can't run an enterprise at that scale, with that reliance on low-overhead -- without uniform policies, uniform productivity, uniform... everything. 

How the fuck is that local?

So let me tell you what local is (and frankly, if you disagree, I don't care -- start your own local site and prove me wrong). Local is relationships. Local is trust. Local is caring about the same things your readers care about, and helping local business people make money. 

Local is about speaking in your own voice, all the time, even when that's hard. Local is about feeling supported... and intensely vulnerable. You're local when someone writes you an email that criticizes something about your coverage (I got one of these emails yesterday) and you answer that person honestly, in a way that's true to yourself and your values. You're local when people recognize you as a personal resource.

Local isn't about being universally popular. But if you're accountable and serious and reliable, and you deliver a product that people want and respect, you have a shot at becoming a viable business. Oh, and it also helps if you're not a dick.

Because in the end, if local isn't human-scaled, it isn't actually local.

I knew when I started CHSSoccer.net that I was going to face unexpected problems, and I was right. I knew I was going to make mistakes, and I did. Every day is an iteration. Every idea I had at the beginning is provisional. 

And the only money I've made off it so far has been by accident. I got a sponsor in April -- long before I felt ready to "sell" the site. I'm still not convinced it's ready. Is the audience large enough? Can I deliver real value to a mom-and-pop sponsor? And so on. Yet in one trip to a local bar to cover the Battery's most recent away match, two business people approached me to ask about sponsoring the site somehow. 

I don't expect to make money off CHSSoccer.net  this year, and I know that building a product without even proposing a firm business model for it would never fly in most boardrooms. But this is the way people used to do work, dammit. You built a good thing, and then you sold it. If the effort and the reward were commensurate, you kept on doing it. You learned from your customers, adapted, and rose according to the value you provided.

I can do this because I don't have to sit at a conference table while a bunch of self-interested pricks play clever political fuck-games with my ideas. I can do this because I earn my living as a freelance writer/editor/consultant/geek/mobile-bicycle-repair-service, and work on the site in my spare time. I can do this because I'll be happy with the outcome if CHSSoccer.net becomes a nice part-time job that cuts regular little checks to a few talented local writers and photographers, while improving soccer in my community. I'm a fan.

So when "experts" tell you that hyperlocal doesn't work, please understand what they're really saying. Hyperlocal doesn't work as a massive platform to extract the maximum amount of cash for the the minimal amount of overhead from every identifiable community in America. Local can't be commoditized. Local can't be lead-shielded to obscure their greed and bullshit from their customers. 

If some tech-centric entrepreneur out there really wants to make money in "the hyperlocal space," I've got a suggestion for them: Build a shared, scalable infrastructure that start-up sites like mine can use to make the business side of hyperlocal journalism as painless and easy as Wordpress makes the publishing. Add value instead of extracting it.

And if you treat me like a human being, I'd be proud to be your first customer. 

My latest thing: CHS Uptown Bikes

Back when I was working as a mechanic in a bike shop, I used to wonder whether a journeyman mechanic could make a living by offering a mobile repair service. Someone needs a tune-up, you schedule an appointment and show up with your toolkit, parts and stand. Low overhead, only one employee to pay. 

Only it's not that simple. Dig into the business plan for something like that and it's easy to see how you could wind up starving. Quickly. 

So it wasn't until this summer, while fixing a neighbor's bike, that the thought of trying a variation on the mobile repair idea -- except only part-time, and on a very limited geographical basis -- crossed my mind.

When I ran those numbers, they came up OK. Not as something you live on, but as something that fits pretty well within the freelance-writer-new-media-street-hustler life I've been living.

So after building a site and investing in some additional tools during the month of August, today I unveiled my CHS Uptown Bikes service. And a few minutes later, I booked my first service call. 

I'm withholding judgment, obviously. I'll need do do quite a few jobs just to pay for my TS-2.2 truing stand, for instance. But we're off and rolling, and we'll see where this leads.

P.S.: If you love me, order one of our T-shirts. Pleeeeeeese...

Hampton Park Fun Facts

This list of facts about Hampton Park in Charleston, SC, was compiled by neighborhood resident Kevin Eberle and posted on Facebook on May 31, 2012, by Marshall Walker. I'm reposting them here to make this valuable community knowledge easier to find via Web search later, once the original post inevitably disappears into the proprietary memory-hole that is Facebook... dc

On the subject of Hampton Park, did you know:

• That it was originally the “front yard” of a large plantation called “The Grove” which spread from Rutledge Ave. to the Ashley River and had a large, masonry house on the bluff overlooking the river with an avenue of trees in both directions, a large fish pond on one side, and an orange grove (hence, Grove St.)?
• That the park area was used as a staging area during the Siege of Charleston of 1780, the worst defeat of the colonists during the Revolutionary War?
• That the plantation was destroyed during the Revolutionary War, and the land was divided up for sale since the couple who lived there had had no children? 
• That the South Carolina Jockey Club bought a large portion of the land and operated the Washington Race Course there for almost 80 years, during which time it was the most important social week of the year each February?

Harriet's (Go Away) Hurricane Cookies available to the public!

Harriet McLeod was so good at her turns writing the anonymous (yet wildly popular with readers) Good Morning Lowcountry column that it only made sense to turn it over to her as a full-time job.

For years Harriet wrote five to seven columns a week, which made reading the second page of the B section the literary equivalent of wandering past her desk in the newsroom on a slow day. This is to say that you never quite knew what you were going to get, but you knew it was going to be entertaining: travel photos from Edinburgh or Daufuskie, personal stories about David Lowrey, salacious gossip about the sex lives of various Charleston elites, first-hand experiences with local root-doctoring magic, or the latest news from her extended network of siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews, the Lowcountry equivalent of The News From Lake Woebegon.

If you live along the South Carolina coast, you know that hurricane season is a dreadful time that lasts from June through November, and that like baseball season, it's a marathon, not a sprint. You also know that the first two months are quite literally a warm-up, and that November is an afterthought. Our summer of living dangerously runs every August through October, when monsters spin out of the equatorial waters and threaten to turn the greater Charleston metro region into just so many piles of broken, sodden Tinkertoys. These threats put newsrooms on high alert, scrambling every plan you had, reminding you that as a journalist, your life was really not your own.

During our post-Hugo sojourn at Charleston's metro daily, Harriet and I were threatened with numerous hurricane nightmares and one tropical apocalypse (Floyd, a Category 5 storm that was so big that even though it missed Charleston, we still experienced a Category 1 hurricane on the peninsula). Yet each time the worst seemed inevitable, something always seemed to steer disaster out to sea... or at least to North Carolina.

Now it can be revealed. That "something" was Harriet McLeod's (Go Away) Hurricane Cookies. Harriet never gave anyone the recipe, though she did reveal that the cookies were made with caramel, pecans, chocolate and "root doctor gris-gris that makes hurricanes go away."

In truth, we didn't give a damn about the gris-gris at first. It was a newsroom. Newsroom run on schwag, ambition, fear and free food, and Harriet's Hurricane Cookies were the best free food we ever got. Period. But even journalists can detect meaningful patterns. Month after month, year after year, storm after storm, we watched two events unfold:

1. Harriet would troop into 134 Columbus St. with plates full of delicious storm-bending magic;
2. Satellite loops would show storm eyes suddenly and dramatically turning away from Charleston to visit destruction on some poor Tar Heels instead. 

I believe in Harriet McLeod's hurricane cookies, and even if I didn't, I'd eat them just for my daily recommended allowance of awesome. And since the News Overlords at Charleston's metro daily saw fit to kill the daily GMLc column (consistently rated as the readers' favorite piece of content in ever survey I remember) and lay Harriet off, she now has the time to make these available to the cookie-consuming, hurricane-fearing public. As her email announcing the product rollout puts it:

(Go Away) Hurricane Cookies

 Gourmet caramel, pecan, chocolate chunk cookies. Messy, like a hurricane.

Powerful gris-gris against tropical storms*
*With secret ingredient guaranteed to make hurricanes go away

 Order by the dozen at [email protected].

$15/dozen

$7.50 half/dozen

Sign the Maybank bike lanes petition!

Little things are important, as is timing.

So here's a cool thing. If you live in the Lowcountry, you have an opportunity, today, to a well-timed little thing that could have an enormous, lasting effect on our communities' quality of life.

The quick summary: SCDOT is about to resurface Maybank Highway. Local cycling advocates asked the DOT to include a bike lane in the project, and the DOT denied the request. Which is pretty much the story of cycling and state agencies in South Carolina.

But here's the sweet part. Earlier this month the US DOT changed its policy on human-powered transport, essentially declaring that bikes are no longer second-class citizens within the nation's transportation system. Add that well-timed development to all the municipal and state policies that DOT managers are ignoring in their short-sighted plans for this project, and you've got a strong case for review.

Now all we need are a few more names on a petition to hand over to bike-friendly civil servants, a little more leverage behind Charleston Moves and a slightly higher profile for the emerging bicycling community in this beautiful city of ours. And once things start rolling our way, we've got more projects in the pipeline that will make riding safer and driving easier.

Sure, it's just a bike lane on Maybank Highway. But if we can demonstrate that cyclists represent an active, engaged, united local movement, we can change the status quo for transportation planning in the Lowcountry. There's not a reason on earth (well, beyond the dreaded "swampass," anyway) why Charleston shouldn't become the Portland of the Southeast -- a coastal city known around the country for its cycling infrastructure, livability and bike-friendly culture.

Even if you're not a cyclist, please join me in signing this petition. Every bike commuter you pass in the Lowcountry is one car that isn't idling in front of you at rush hour, one more parking space, one less person trying to merge. Everything you do to help us take unnecessary cars off the road will make your drive cheaper, shorter and more pleasant. It should also reduce your road taxes. 

To sign the petition (and read more about it), go to Bike Charleston's new Advocacy page. While you're there, poke around a bit and read about all the bike-related events that are going on around us. Then come out and ride with us!

Speaking a riding, here's a scene I shot last year during the SC State Criterium Championships ... which just happen to be returning to Hampton Park on April 22. It's a fun day at the races. (April 19 note: For the record, the organizer's website was wrong, and the actual date of the event was April 18. So I knew about it because I work in a bike shop and live up the street... and apparently everybody who needed to know knew... but what about interested outsiders? Makes you go "hmmm.")

Don & Leslie get hitched

It wasn't until late 2009 that our buddy Don Lewis ran into Leslie McLeod Muller again. They'd been friends in high school and as soon as they reconnected, everything clicked. Like crazy. Janet started referring to them as the "GARC," a.k.a. the "Get-a-Room Couple."

We heard last week that, to the surprise of no one who had seen them together, Don and Leslie had decided to get married. Janet made plans for us to all go out to dinner together at 17 North on Saturday in celebration of their impending union.

It turned into a different kind of celebration though, as Don and Leslie quietly went down to the notary at the First Federal branch office in the Summerville Wal-Mart and got married on Saturday. This officially topped Janet and me, who got married on our lunch break at a Mailboxes Etc. in April 1999.

In the picture above, Don and Leslie share their wedding cupcake. In the shot below, they're just happy. May everyone who reads this be so very lucky.

New Charleston

Defensive ornamentation, East Bay Street, Charleston (Dan Conover photo)

Because Charleston was founded in the 17th century at the southern tip of a north-south peninsula, power and class here have always run on something of a north-south axis. So in the 1970s, when the area around the navy base incorporated as North Charleston, the name spoke as much about the new city's blue-collar identity as it did about its relative location.

Well, I think it's time we imposed a new axis on Charleston. Not North and South, but Old and New. 

Charleston, for all its considerable charms, remains a backward-looking city. Not "backwards," as in unsophisticated or unintelligent, but more enamored of its past than its present. So while the city officially recognizes the value of its "creative cluster," its "tech sector" and its "knowledge-based industries," Charleston's institutions, typically dominated by the same old families and traditions, remain wary -- if not openly hostile -- toward new ideas and new people.

Since that anti-outsider bias tends to limit opportunity, Charleston has developed a reputation as a place where who you know is more important than what you know. It's why so many talented people here seem to direct their energies toward celebrity instead of substance.

Once upon a time I wanted to change that. Now I believe we should let eccentric, odd Old Charleston be whatever it wants to be. I thank Old Charleston for preserving this beautiful city, and aren't we stronger when we value and preserve indigenous cultures?

Instead, I want to encourage Charleston's outsiders to start appreciating their own significance. The prosperity of the Lowcountry depends on the energy, creativity and spirit of people who moved here "from off," and once we start acting on that knowledge it simply won't matter whether Old Charleston recognizes this truth.

New Charleston doesn't have to beat Old Charleston. It simply has to stop looking to Old Charleston for permission.

What are we waiting for?

Go to a New Charleston event -- Kulture Klash, Pecha Kucha, BarCampCHS, a TweetUp or an SMCCHS happy hour -- and look around. Hundreds, thousands of musicians, writers, artists, designers, art directors, photographers, programmers, Web-heads, researchers, engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, chefs, dancers, filmmakers, actors and big-thinkers live here. How many are "from off?" Most.

Yet I still meet people who tell me different versions of the same story. Instead of being encouraged in their new ventures, they are visited by members of the local establishment who always deliver the same message. Get back in line. There's some kind of old-boy system here, and it wants to pick the winners of every contest in advance. I don't understand it, but there it is.

My question is, so what? Yes, these people have some money. Yes the city has various programs and perks it can dole out to the favored few. Yes, the local paper acts an unofficial enforcer of Old Charleston orthodoxy. Again: So what?

We don't need mass media to spread the word. We don't need membership in exclusive social clubs to meet interesting people. And the sophisticated tool users here can do more with less money in less time and with less formal organization than Old Charleston can even imagine.

It isn't as if they're offering us an alternative. You're never going to be accepted into the Old Charleston clubs, so why bother conforming to their rules? What have you got to lose by ignoring them?

When we stop fighting and cajoling Old Charleston, we can invest all that energy into building a healthy New Charleston. A separate culture that reflects the values of the people who came here by choice. A culture that's more egalitarian, educated, productive and open.

This change doesn't require government loans or angel investors. Just start small. Cooperate. Do business with each other -- and with the thousands of like-minded Lowcountry natives who are our good friends and collaborators. Support each other. Work together.

Opposing an existing power structure gets us nowhere. Building our own power structure, with our own open networks and values, is progress.

In conclusion...

You don't undo an old habit. You have to create new habits, and to make them stick you have to reinforce those new patterns until the old ones silt over.

That's how we're going to make progress. And the funny thing is, Old Charleston won't even notice it.

It will simply benefit from it, along with the rest of us. Now go forth, join ranks, and start inventing a new city.

(BarCampCHS photo via Ken Hawkins on Flickr)

BarCamp Charleston: Geoff's video

Geoff Marshall has been a good friend since we met back in the early Lowcountry Blogs days. I helped him get a job at The Post and Courier and in the early days of the paper's web video push it was pretty much just the two of us, wandering around with cameras, figuring out technical tricks, comparing notes, and each of us trying to develop personal styles of storytelling.

It didn't take time much time for him to begin establishing a style that I thought was not only distinctly his, but very, very good.

Geoff covered BarCamp Charleston this weekend and just posted his video. I think it's excellent in all sorts of ways.

And it makes me feel a bit nostalgic. He's leaving Charleston in a few days with a one-way ticket back to London, his true home. So in a way, this #BarCampCHS video is his parting gift to the Lowcountry. It shows not only how far the tech community has come, but also how sophisticated Geoff has become.

Thanks, mate.

The #helpgeoff thing

Earlier today Janet (@xarkgirl) messaged me that our filmmaking buddy Geoff Marshall was in trouble: His 48-state documentary roadtrip had been interrupted in Greensboro, NC, by a smash-and-grab auto break-in. He lost about $6,000 in video and computer electronics, and apparently some of his material for the film (which he has been videoblogging along the way).

Janet wanted me to contact our Greensboro friends, which I did, getting quick responses from John Robinson, Sue Polinsky and Ed Cone. And as I was doing that, Chrys Rynearson popped up in my Google Talk bar:

exposur3: dude
fundraiser

let's get it going

we can raise 5k

what do you think?

A few hours later, Geoff had bloggers in Greensboro and Charleston working his case and offering help. We had a Help Geoff blog, a Help Geoff Twitter account, a new e-mail address, plus accounts at Tipjoy and PayPal.Someone suggested a #helpgeoff hashtag. We'd worked through numerous technical difficulties, all without anyone "being in charge."

The best place to follow all this? At Charleston's TheDigitel, where Geoff's former boss, Ken Hawkins, is covering this like the community story it is.

Here's what makes it all particularly sweet to me: The most influential moment in my turn toward networked media occurred in 2005 at ConvergeSouth , the Greensboro conference organized by Sue and a host of others. It's where we met John Robinson. It's what inspired Janet and I to launch Lowcountry Blogs in April 2006. At the final free ConvergeSouth in 2008, one of the largest and most enthusiastic groups in attendence were bloggers from coastal South Carolina.We owe a lot to those people in Greensboro.

As his friend, it's my duty to say that Geoff is a dumbass for leaving his stuff in the car, but as Chrys said, "He's our boy." And frankly, I just don't want want his documentary to end in a way that portrays America that way. Online communities are communities nonetheless. Let's see how well they function.

House party @ Chez XARK!

 
(Click on the image to see it larger... click here to download a PDF of the party flier to post wherever...)

We've been meaning to throw a house party for a long time now, and on vacation last week, Janet got over her innate terror of guests realizing that we don't live in a Southern Living showcase and said "OK." So it's on, people: SATURDAY, JUNE 27 (from 6:30 p.m. until the cops arrive). here in lovely North Central Charleston, just up the street from the intersection of Rutledge and Grove which played such a funny role in Charlie Geer's novel Outbound.

It's not the biggest house in the world, but we've got a nice porch and a back yard and I'll open up the garage and the boys have said they'll set up and play live out back (if you feel like jamming, bring your instrument). Don't bother to dress up, remember that early evenings in June mean bug spray if you're gonna sit in the back yard, and then make plans to drop in, hang out and have fun.

Here's our house on Google.If you think you might come, feel free to let us know (helps with the shopping). We're looking forward to seeing you!