Sorgatz: Big Media Needs to Act Small
Rex Sorgatz, who started MNspeak, a Minnesota community website, sold it and moved on to MSNBC.com, says in a Minnesota Monitor interview:
This might sound contrary to how we usually formulate “community” — as a collection of diverse voices. But every community needs some common ground, some guidelines that subliminally frame how conversation works. For better or worse, community is not everyone — it is a defined group. Community is, by definition, a limitation.
He adds:
Looking at the online media landscape right now, I see one sector that no one has really figured out: local. There are good publications around every single vertical market imaginable, but there are only a handful of good local blogs. If you follow this industry, you’ve read about some of the attempts at local citizen journalism. American Journalism Review recently had a story about the failure of the more prominent citizen journalism sites. But all of those failures have one common characteristic: they were started by former Big J newspaper people. And that reveals the other quality that is required to make “placeblogging” work: sexiness. It’s a crass way to think of publishing, but it’s an essential quality….(My definition of sexiness: hot content with a strong voice that leads to people talking about the author and engaging with the publication.) I just don’t know if these new citizen journalism projects will have the sexiness to gain audience. It’s like old media dressed up in new media clothes.
He is working on a big idea right now. He says:
I’ve been working on an epitaph for my dozen years working in media. Here it is:
“Big Media Is Hard.”
Epitaph or bumper sticker? I’m not sure, but it’s so true. Building small little sites is so rewarding because you can build an entire new universe in a month. But getting a big media company to change directions is ridiculously frustrating. Big media is hard! But big media is also influential, interesting, powerful, gargantuan, mysterious — in a word, exciting. So my little dream right now is to create a “small media mentality” within “big media company.” What does that look like? Check in at the end of the summer and I’ll hopefully be able to show you.
