Next!

My grade for The City Maven was posted earlier this week, which means the school part of this endeavor is officially over. In the unlikely event that anyone checked TheCityMaven.com today, this is what greeted visitors in place of the site that was up last week:

I thought it would be a little more interesting than the typical maintenance page with that annoying ticker counting down the days until the site relaunches. Yes, I said relaunches.

I have given a handful of City Maven presentations over the past three weeks, and one of the harsher comments I received was this:

“All you have to offer is you used to work there, you’re nice and you bake chocolate chip cookies.”

Good point, buddy!

Excuse me, what I meant to say is that I couldn’t agree with you more.

It has been pointed out to me several times that no one has yet found a way to turn online news or hyperlocal news into a successful business venture. True enough. I’ve also been asking for confidence in the project based upon assumptions, projections and my sparkling personality, none of which you can take to the bank.

Before I ask anyone else to take a chance on The City Maven, I need to do one very important thing: I need to take a chance on The City Maven.

So that’s what I’m doing. Over the next month, I’m going to retool the site, reestablish relationships with my old contacts and sources, build up a library of searchable public documents, and figure out what I can do as a one-man-band.

Then, I’m going to pack up Lola and move back to Los Angeles. I'm gonna go it alone and run this publication.

In the meantime, I am happily taking suggestions on:

• Story ideas
• Web design
• New contacts
• A bungalow located near a mountain or an ocean

The possibility of failure is hardly enough to stop me from pursuing something that is terrifying and awesome all at once.

Labor of Love

Aug. 25, 2010

A year’s worth of work culminates today with the presentation of my independent study project, The City Maven. It's been an interesting year, to say the least. Let’s rewind the tape and see where I was on:

Aug. 25, 2009

Hot. Sweaty, with a thin film of dirt covering my entire body. I'm sitting in a cramped room in the Delhi hostel. There’s a pile of empty plastic water bottles in the corner. This song, then this one, blast through my ear buds until we decide to venture out for dinner. Outside the dirt road is filled with people, children, carts, garbage, excrement and animals. It’s my last day in a country that for two months has pushed me to my physical, emotional and mental limits.

How many nights did I spend on a speeding train, staring out into the darkness of the countryside?

How many times were the sights of begging, suffering and death just too much?

And then, how many times did I think, this may be the most beautiful thing I have ever seen?

The next morning I got on a plane to London, where I met a friend and reacclimated to hot water, clean bedding and meat. It was my transitional week, from one adventure to the next. My last night there, after L had flown back to San Francisco, I turned on the radio and wrote this:

...

game face on. competitive streak polished. with a curl in my hair and a shine on my lips.

...

swapped mountains for skyscrapers. winetasting and cocktail dresses for coffee and sweats in the library.

india. difficult, smelly, dirty, poverty-stricken, loud, congested. and yet, ... something. there's something that's brought me peace. calm in my heart. my fortunes and blessings have never been clearer to me. what is there to complain about? strive for success, love, confidence. bring those to my family and friends.

a return and a beginning.

The first chapter of that beginning has closed. Here’s the next chapter:

To Angelenos who have a financial, business or personal interest in the governmental decisions of Los Angeles’ mayor, city council members and city departments, The City Maven is a news website that produces fair, insightful coverage while providing access to an aggregation of public documents and fostering an online community that encourages readers to voice their opinions and engage with their city.

Other highlights from today's presentation:

Market Analysis—Survey: Preliminary market analysis indicates there is a promising community interest in a news publication like The City Maven.

In July 2010, I contacted 116 Angelenos I identified as potential customers and asked if they would be willing to participate in an online survey regarding their media habits as they related to political and governmental journalism in Los Angeles. The group was made up of City Hall press deputies, political consultants, union and business representatives, and neighborhood council members. Of the 116 people contacted, 47 agreed to participate in the survey; ultimately 34 people started and completed the survey via Survey Monkey. The survey had 10 questions. Some participants received an additional two questions depending on how they answered Question 10.

Market Analysis—Interviews: A series of interviews with heavyweights in Los Angeles’ political and journalism scenes confirmed my findings that there is an audience, and a need, for a publication like The City Maven.

My takeaways from these interviews were:

• Overwhelming support for the aggregation of public documents
• Strong support for live-streaming and live-blogging events such as town hall meetings
• Politicians are always looking for a way to get their message out and would be interested in a weekly, half-hour video chat
• Angelenos are unable to identify with their council members and would benefit from knowing about their backgrounds, personalities and power within council
• The City Maven could empower Angelenos by making public documents available and providing them with an online community in which to discuss policy decisions
• Before launching the site, I need to decide The City Maven’s personality and tone
• There was general agreement from theses interviews that the site needs to have some sort of edge to capture readers’ attention
• Civic-minded Angelenos are a vastly underserved audience
• Material could be sold to the Los Angeles Times and Daily News through a financial partnership similar to the Chicago News Cooperative’s relationship with The New York Times
• Editorial and business decisions must be made in silos

Competitive Analysis: Survey participants identified these publications as their most-visited outlets:

• Los Angeles Times
• The Daily News
• Los Angeles Business Journal
• City News Service
• Los Angeles Weekly
• KPCC 89.3 FM
• KNX 1070 Newsradio
• LAist

Audience Projection: The City Maven’s goal and expectation is to have 100,000 unique visitors per month in two years.

Financials—Expenses: It will cost $47,050 to start the company. It will cost $187,248 to operate for the first 12 months.

Financials—Revenue: There are three revenue streams The City Maven intends to pursue:

1. Advertising
2. Membership
3. Content-sharing

Watch Your Tone, Missy

A frequent comment I heard during my trip to Los Angeles was that my site needs to have an edge. What is it's tone? Here goes:

The maven is a stylish nerd. She loves curling up with RFPs and highlighting all the jargon and numbers. She’s tickled pink when she gets business cards from mid-level City Hall staffers. For her, the best feeling in the world is to post an article and have readers say, “I didn’t know this. That’s outrageous!”

The maven is also a perfectionist. She gets up at 5 a.m. every morning to hike through the Santa Monica Mountains. Her skirts are perfectly pressed and her hair always has just the right amount of volume. She is one of those women who are always prepared with extra batteries, duct tape, foot petals and Band-Aids.

Everyone smiles when they see the maven, and why shouldn’t they – she’s witty and charming. She makes time to stop by parties for a drink, even when she’s been up all night baking chocolate chip cookies for her fellow reporters.

The maven has great joy for her life.

All that being said, what does it mean for her reporting and writing?

Waste, inefficiencies and lies are personally offensive to the maven. Any hint of a politician behaving in a way that puts himself before his constituents drives her crazy. She believes it’s her responsibility to hold elected officials accountable and empower Angelenos to get personally involved with their city. The maven loves Los Angeles and wants it to be the best city it can be.

The maven believes in tough love.

True Love

The coffee, not the mug.

Tweet Tweet

Tweet, tweet. What’s that, a cute baby chick?

Nope, it’s just the network of friends, coworkers, reporters, gadflys and major corporations pounding down the virtual wall of my computer. Every minute of every hour of every day.

I was a Twitter holdout for a long time. I didn’t see its value and it seemed like one more thing to steal away my time and attention. I finally caved in March when a professor told us we could pick up extra credit by tweeting articles related to our course materials. Extra credit – it’s my kryptonite. I went home that day and joined Twitter as fast as I could. Thank goodness I did because without those two extra points, I’m sure my A would have … still been an A (OK, not the point ).

I am five months into my Twitter experience and I have to say I dislike it even more now than I did before. Seriously – the site is user-unfriendly, unorganized and I’m constantly stuck looking at that stupid whale.

All that said, I still created an account – twitter.com/TheCityMaven – for the project when I started putting together the website and a web presence. I see Twitter as a tip sheet. It’s a way to grab headlines and news updates. Plus, it’s important to keep an eye on the tweets of politicians, department heads and press deputies. If you don’t, there’s the danger of missing gems like this:

Last quarter I took a class called Building Networked Audiences, and one of the areas of study was social media. It wasn't content that we focused on but rather the physical and electronic structures of networks. One site that does this is Klout. It measures Twitter influence based on:

1. True Reach
2. Amplification Probability
3. Network Influence

True Reach is the size of the “engaged audience,” meaning the number of followers minus spammers and inactive accounts. Amplification Probability considers the diversity of the audience, the likelihood that a person’s tweet will be retweeted, and the effectiveness in generating new followers, retweets and @ replies. Network Influence, finally, is the influence level of the engaged audience.

Klout provides an even more detailed explanation on its website but you get the idea.

I looked up Klout scores for a couple of LA media outlets. On a scale of 1 to 100, LAist has a 65. NBC4 has a 31. LATimes has a 78. LAObserved has a 46.

These numbers leave me with some questions: what is the true “influence” that these sites have? I understand within the context of Twitter, but what about within the context of something that actually matters? Do the people behind these accounts actually have clout when they need to get ahold of an elected official? Do they have the ability to set news agendas?

Twitter has critical mass on its side, for now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it shows itself to be an important tool for marketers. Maybe it will continue to be a tip sheet for reporters (and a place where anonymous strangers hilariously impersonate famous dudes) but I don’t see the staying power. The problem with 140 characters is the same problem with the useless ticker streaming on cable news stations – it trains us to believe we’ve been told the most important piece of information and anything else would be ancillary. Can't we all agree by this point that if a public person's statement includes 2, U, @, ;) , reload, or patently false and misleading facts, then there's more to the story?