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Zonied Out

Adam Klawonn tried everything to make his journalism startup succeed. It wasn't enough.
March 11, 2010

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In 2006, Adam Klawonn cashed out his newspaper job vacation pay to reinvent himself as a digital journalist. He bought a laptop and a camcorder, and trained himself how to create a blog, edit HTML code, shoot video and edit it in Final Cut Pro, edit photos, create graphics in Photoshop, and manage a Web siteā€”specifically, ā€œThe Zonie Report,ā€ an online regional news magazine about Arizona (tag line: ā€œThe rest of the Arizona storyā€) that he started on his own dime without any big funders or major journalism connections.

Last week, Klawonn announced that after nearly four years, and ā€œnot a penny to show for it,ā€ The Zonie Report would shut down. He had hustled to promote the site: attending mixers and industry trade shows, relentlessly marketing online through social networking sites, and speaking at media-related events. He even showed up at local charity road races with The Zonie Report logo prominently displayed on his chest alongside his runnerā€™s bib, wearing a sombrero just to draw attention. He had also worked to create a steady stable of contributors. He got local journalism students involved, hired some regular bloggers, signed freelancers to contracts and paid themā€”out of his own pocketā€”the shockingly competitive rate of forty to fifty cents per word. He freelanced on the side to keep himself afloat.

In the end, he had a total of five inquiries from advertisers over nearly four years, and lost all but $500 of the $20,000 he sank into the endeavor. At the height of his siteā€™s traffic, his audience was 8,000 monthly visitors out of the six million Arizona citizens that he considered potential readers. ā€œIn hindsight, I stuck with this longer than I should have,ā€ Klawonn said. ā€œI should have quit two years earlier.ā€

Itā€™s no big secret that deep pockets and name recognition will help any startup company, or that spreading out your risk by finding investors is a good idea. The Internet, though, is supposed to level the playing field somewhat for aspiring publishers, with no major elbow-rubbing efforts, marquee name-endorsements, VC backing, or Ivy League degree required to find success. Many old-media refugees have taken this idea to heart and founded their own one-man startups, only to learn that success can be more elusive than they thinkā€”see here and here. Like them, Klawonn found that having money and connections count just as much online as they do in the real world.

In the words of Thomas Levenson, a professor of science writing at MIT:

[Klawonn] tried a local, focused, partly free-labor news source model and failed. […] It remains the underlying fact that he is one of a number of folks finding it difficult to produce an alternative to oligopolistic mass media on one side and boutique or labor-of-love narrowly focused sources on the other.

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ā€œOn the Internet, thereā€™s something for everyone and if you want to start up a publication about something very specific, like healthcare for children with multiple sclerosis, for example, you can do that. It may not pay the bills, but nothing is stopping you,ā€ Klawonn said. ā€œBut if your goal is to be the Voice of San Diego or MinnPost it certainly doesnā€™t hurt to have old media or old money connections.ā€

Klawonn, now thirty-one, had neither. He worked at The Arizona Republic for three years right out of college before reporting for the San Diego Union Tribune for two years. He left to create The Zonie Report in 2006, after he felt like he wasnā€™t learning the new media skills heā€™d need to stay competitive in a changing industry. He conceived of the project as a sort of masterā€™s course in journalism, investing the money he had saved to pay for a graduate degree. He figured he had nothing to lose even if The Zonie Report didnā€™t make it.

ā€œI was either going to go broke making this site a success and least re-train myself and have fun doing it, or it would be a huge success and I would laugh someday about how it started in my home office,ā€ he said. ā€œEither way, Iā€™d either be really successful or back in the workforce as a totally reinvented journalist.ā€

The Zonie Report had an ambitious mandateā€”covering the entire state of Arizonaā€”and featured magazine-length narrative pieces, blog posts, video, and aggregated links to other Arizona news outletsā€™ stories. Klawonn is proudest of the online magazineā€™s environmental reporting, including an exclusive on a manganese-polluted town along the Colorado River that came from a tipster in the state environmental office; a story on a planned copper mine opposed by its neighbors, written by a contributor who went on to write for The New York Timesā€™s Green Inc. blog; and a piece about the affordable housing gap in rapidly gentrifying Sedona. In 2008, the Arizona Press Club gave him a runner-up award as Community Journalist of the Year.

But by the end, Klawonn, a one-man band, was so busy managing the site and hustling to build its audience that the journalism was no longer his sole focus. As he wrote in response to a Center for Future Civic Media blog post about The Zonie Report: ā€œThe Zonie Report failed because I couldn’t drive enough interest/traffic to it to make it economically feasible to continue my Herculean efforts to sustain it. I really enjoyed the work, but one has to eat.ā€

It turns out, he did have something to loseā€”his idealismā€”and itā€™s not difficult to detect a hint of bitterness in Klawonnā€™s announcement that The Zonie Report would close:

I learned some hard lessons in my idealistic crusade to bring better, more innovative journalism to the expectant masses. Iā€™m leaving a lot out, but Iā€™d like to share of them with you now and hear more about your own observations. Feel free to share.



First, the Internet audience is incredibly fickle, so the expectant Zonie Report masses werenā€™t there. (It turns out there were only about 8,000 of them in a state of 6 million-plus residents.)

Second, the way we consume media online does not lend itself to a deep-reading format, so short stories and truncated video (from car accidents to Britney Spears sightings to bar fights in Scottsdale) proliferate. This says something about the format, about us and about news outlets in general.



Third, itā€™s tough to sell ads using todayā€™s metrics (i.e., impressions, etc.). Online advertising prices continue to head toward the floor and may never recover.



Finally, people are generally more interested in what everybody around them is doing than whatā€™s really going on in the world. There are some exceptions, but this is perhaps the harshest and saddest lesson of all. Who knows if/when this will change.

On Thursday, he amended his original laments in a post on PBSā€™s MediaShift Idea Lab to include a more self-critical look at his missteps and at how other online journalists could learn from them.

Even though The Zonie Report couldnā€™t sustain itself, it opened a few doors for its founder. As a self-taught, new media-savvy journalist, Klawonn landed a job teaching an ā€œIntro to Online Mediaā€ lab course at Arizona State Universityā€™s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. Heā€™s working as the managing editor of PHOENIX magazine. And last year he won $95,000 from the Knight News Challenge for a social networking Web site and mobile service called CityCircles, centered around news and events affecting commuters on Phoenixā€™s downtown light rail line.

But the ā€œif you build it, they will comeā€ spirit that led him to found The Zonie Report is gone. He founded it under the (perhaps naĆÆve) assumption that good writers should be paid a decent wage for their work, that people would care about issues affecting their community, that their eyeballs would find good journalism about those communities, and the ads would find the eyeballs. He was putting his money where his journalistic ideals were; now, after seeing those ideals fail, heā€™s no longer willing to put his own money and reputation on the line.

That said, Klawonn hasnā€™t given up entirely on his original labor of love. ā€œI should have found those big names willing to go to bat for thisā€”funders who also believe that this is a complex state with a lot of issues and that it would be great to have something that goes beyond the daily minutiae to crystallize it on a regional level,ā€ he said. ā€œBut if you donā€™t have that kind of person, itā€™s a long road to hoe. And if that person appears, I would gladly flip the switch and give it another shot.ā€

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Alexandra Fenwick is an assistant editor at CJR.