Carll Tucker, founder of hyperlocal news organization MainStreetConnect, was profiled on Wednesday on Journalism.co.uk, and his claims about the companyâs goals raised some eyebrows at CJR.
The company made news when it raised almost $4 million from independent investors a few months after its March 2010 launch. MainStreetConnect now has a network of nine sites, all in Connecticut towns, and features twenty editors, reporters, and photographers on its masthead. But thatâs just the beginning:
The company currently employs 44 people full-time and with its target of 3,000 sites could eventually hire 10-15,000 journalists. “We’re helping to rebuild a profession,” says Tucker.
Fifteen thousand journalists, a vast army of young grads setting out to conquer the country? Letâs not get carried away. Itâs still unclear whether Tuckerâs business model is sustainable over the long termâor in communities that donât rate as some of the wealthiest in the nation. (So far, there seem to be two sure-fire ways to make money with a hyperlocal news company: get a lot of venture capital, sell the company to a large corporation that wants to hedge its bets by experimenting with local news, or both.)
But to the latter point, if Tucker really intends to ârebuildâ the profession of journalism, itâs worth examining what kind of product MainStreetConnect is actually delivering to its readers.
The nine sites in MainStreetConnectâs Connecticut network are colorful and flashy, but the content is almost all the same on each of the sites (each one just has a different lead story at the top). Most of the stories are very short, superficial pieces that give the sites a Pennysaver feel (âSchool Year Finally Ends,â âHow to Beat the Heat,â etc.). Having so many different URLs might impress investors, but there doesnât seem to be enough content to sustain them. Tucker told journalism.co.uk that MainStreetConnectâs model differs from sites like Patch.com and the Timesâs experiment The Local in that editors work in teams on several sites at once, rather than having one paid editor at each. This arrangement might be an efficient oneâbut, so far, it doesnât produce content thatâs editorially compelling.
Tucker describes how incredibly hungry the public is for hyperlocal coverage, and Iâm not inclined to disagree. He says:
âThereâs a very intense appetite for high quality community news that the âMain Street momâ who is the core reader, who I have served all my life, will come for as a regular readerâŠ. [F]or time immemorial people have craved their community news.â
On the other hand, just because the audience is ravenous doesnât mean that they will be easily satisfied. The fact that editors work on several sites at once results in less original content on each site, and the companyâs âfranchiseâ modelâin which MainStreetConnect farms out the basic site infrastructure for a cut of the revenue and then steps back from editorial oversightâcould also signal a lack of centralized quality control.
When we talk about a journalistic experiment succeeding, there are two types of success to consider. First: is it financially sustainable, or potentially profitable? (Maybe.) And second: does it succeed editorially? (Not yet, not at all.) A news startup has to succeed in both areas for its success to matter. If it doesnât succeed in the second one, then it doesnât matter whether the company plans to employ a baseball stadiumâs worth of journalists.
MainStreetConnect is still very young, so it remains to be seen what they will do with their new hires and quickly multiplying URLs. It would just be nice for press coverage of start-ups like these to remember that community readers deserve quality reporting. Just because a story is about your neighborhood doesnât mean you will necessarily want to read it. The content has to be interesting or useful enough to keep readers coming back.
Lauren Kirchner is a freelance writer covering digital security for CJR. Find her on Twitter at @lkirchner