TBD.com: Strategy & Lessons Learned

Jim BradyFormer GM, TBD

Today’s Agenda

• The TBD Experience• The TBD Concept• Struggles• Successes• Lessons Learned• Questions

The TBD Concept

The TBD Concept

– The time had come for a new kind of local digital news operation, one that:

• Engage the community in real and meaningful ways• Curate the most relevant information about the region,

regardless of source• Geotarget content in order to deliver unique hyperlocal

information to every user• Embrace the power of social media and crowdsourcing

to build relationships and improve our journalism• Build mobile apps that are useful to mobile users• Pick your spots, and don’t cover everything. Identify a

few beats, and kick ass.

Community Engagement

– This is how most news organizations view “engagement.”

Community Engagement

– This is how news organizations should view engagement.

Community Engagement

– The TBD Community Network• More than 225 sites joined• We sold advertising for about 75 blogs• We linked to them aggressively, and put them in

our geo-coded feeds to expose them to relevant audiences

• Provided training sessions for network members on blogging, SEO, social media, etc.

Community Engagement

– In-Person Meetups• Held in-person meetups all around the region to get to know

local bloggers and community activists• Staffers held office hours to meet with local residents

Curation

– We wanted to be the instinctive first stop for Washington-area news consumers, so…

• We linked out to all members of our community network• We linked out to other local news organizations

Geocoding

– We delivered geographically relevant news to users.

• We had a team of real humans reading and adding geo-codes to stories from TBD, our blog network and other local news organizations.

• TBD’s home page had a module that delivered news to up to five zip codes that a user signaled as important to them

Social Media

– We were aggressive on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare and other social tools

• We had one full-time staffer dedicated to social media, and the community engagement team was also active on all social platforms.

• We were conversational in tone on all social platforms• We used social tools not just to disseminate information, but

to gather it as well• We leveraged the audience already using social media for

TBD crowdsourcing projects

Mobile

– We hired our own mobile developers and were planning on having a dedicated mobile team

• We launched Droid and iPhone apps right around when the web site launched.

• We built our mobile sites with a very different focus than the web site: heavy on utility, less focused on general news.

Beats

– We decided to pick just a few coverage areas, and throw all our resources behind them:

• Transportation & Commuting• Arts & Entertainment• Sports• Weather• Crime

– The reason for this: There’s no business in just being OK at a lot of things. You need to be great at a few.

Struggles & Successes

TBD’s Internal Struggles

– Site was still trying to find its editorial voice.– Some of the unique beats we’d crafted didn’t appeal

to our audience as much as we’d hoped.– Mobile apps were well-reviewed, but didn’t get the

pickup we’d hoped for.– We were a little too cute and self-satisfied at times.– Our coverage was a little too D.C.-focused. We

needed to get better at covering the suburbs.– Two-thirds of bloggers chose not to be in the ad

network.

TBD’s External Struggles

– The company did not spend a dime on external marketing of TBD.

– WJLA provided almost no on-air promotion for TBD.– WJLA’s newsroom management didn’t push its

reporters to help TBD at all (that is, of course, until after they took over).

– The WJLA sales staff had little success selling non-traditional inventory like the blog network.

TBD’s Successes

– We were viewed as being part of the broader digital community, and not working against it.

– Because we were partners, local bloggers were invested in our success, and thus linked to us and drove significant traffic via social media.

– We had a 225-blog network that we could turn into a massive news operation in a breaking news situation.

– We became a go-to site quickly because readers knew we would always have links to the latest news, regardless of source.

TBD’s Successes

– We were able to leverage the community to produce better journalism than we could have by ourselves.

– Our coverage of the Discovery Channel hostage situation was lauded by sites across the web.

– Our unique visitor numbers suggested we were on the right track:

• November 2010 715,000• December 2010 838,000• January 2011 1,500,000

• The result of these successes…

So … What Happened?

– Corporate decided to change the strategy, moving away from things like social media and aggregation, and towards more of a breaking news model.

– They put TBD’s staff under WJLA’s management.– They laid off a dozen people, and pretty much all of

remaining original staff has voluntarily departed.– They dramatically cut back links off site, and started writing

abstracts of the work of other sites.– They stopped geo-coding stories.– They shut down the blog ad network.– They relaunched WJLA.com to compete with TBD.com

So … What Happened?

– Corporate decided to change the strategy, moving away from things like social media and aggregation, and towards more of a breaking news model.

– They put TBD’s staff under WJLA’s management.– They laid off a dozen people, and pretty much all of remaining

original staff has voluntarily departed.– They dramatically cut back links off site, and started writing

abstracts of the work of other sites.– They stopped geo-coding stories.– They shut down the blog ad network.– They relaunched WJLA.com to compete with TBD.com

Other than that, it’s gone great.

So … What Happened?

Source: Alexa.com

So … What Happened?

Source: Compete.com

Lessons Learned

– Sites like TBD are better done as pure startups than within a legacy media organization. Why?

• Entrenched and threatened legacy culture• Revenue imbalance equals power imbalance• Lack of patience in difficult times

– If you do this via a legacy organization, you’ll need:• A management team that will support you when the

inevitable conflict occurs with the legacy media organization.• A dedicated sales staff that can handle the very different kind

of sales you’ll need to make at a local/hyperlocal site.• Organizational separation from the legacy media side so that

you can freely innovate and experiment.• A runway of 3 to 5 years

Thanks!