Updated, read below: Michael Zimbalist asked me a very valid question on our panel at the OPA Global Forum in London yesterday, and I have faced a non-trivial amount of criticism on this one before. I sorta knew I would be asked about this sooner or later in a public forum, so I was ready for it. His question was: I talk about our site/efforts and the users as a community, but where is our community? We don’t really get too many comments on our sites (at least not on paidContent.org…we get more comments on MocoNews.net and most on our Indian site ContentSutra.com).
Why is it not visible online? Well, in most part due to my fault…I did not open up comments for the first year of operation, back in 2002-2003. Then when I opened the site to comments, we got so much comment spam that its management became a big effort so I closed it. And this happened thrice, but we finally opened it for good mid-last year.
But there are some alternate ways to look at community…a diffused and decentralized way of looking at it, where our sites are but the start of that community. Our community is everyone who links to us on their blogs, and when we link back them, everyone who picks up our stories and sends it out each other in e-mails.
Each and every one of you who comes to our mixers is a comment, a trackback, and much more than that: a living, breathing member of that community. And then, there is a reason why me, Staci, James and our other journalists press the flesh at these conferences we go to all around the world: we bring the community to you.
Every day, a huge number of you get an e-mail from me (our newsletters go out from my address…that was a historical mistake but in the end turned out to be for the better) every morning…I am in your inbox every morning. All you have to do to talk to me is to hit the reply button as a huge number of you do. Our e-mails are plastered all over the sites, so the online and RSS users can write to me, Staci and James anytime they want (the downside is a big one too: we get so much spam, it is a huge problem).
Then there is an undeniable fact: a majority of our users are too busy to worry about being part of the community. To them, they get whatever they want out of it: quick and digestible chunks of news which they use in their day to day work.
You have to see one of us in action at a conference before you judge us of not having a community. Our users and readers we meet at these conferences call themselves as “our fans”….that’s the predominant thread we hear from each one of you. Is that the right way to develop a community…we’re the stars and the readers are our fans? Well, I have no illusions or hubris about this…we exist because you read us, write to us, come to our events, and help us in every way you can: sponsorships, buying our reports, posting jobs, and ever willing to help us out in technical and business issues etc.
Is this the best way to do it? Who knows, but we’re making it up as we go along…if we find better ways to do it, we will adapt to it. That’s the beauty of this medium and our model: the open-sources media ethic, as I have repeated endlessly over the years. Learning by iterations, by doing it. At the end of the day, I go to sleep satisfied that me and my journalists put in as much effort as we humanly can.
Updated: Irony of ironies, I accidentally managed to delete about three weeks worth of comments today while I was trying to delete comment spam. Do apologize to everyone who did post.
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