Content won't create itself

Dan Gillmor has basically thrown in the towel on his citizen journalism site, Bayosphere. Gillmor left a great newspaper job to launch the project, which he envisioned as an opportunity for the people of the SF Bay area to collaborate in producing news content.  It didn't work.

I learned some things last year, about media, about citizens, about
myself. Although citizen media, broadly defined, was taking the world
by storm, the experiment with Bayosphere didn’t turn out the way I had
hoped. Many fewer citizens participated, they were less interested in
collaborating with one another, and the response to our initiatives was
underwhelming. I would do things differently if I was starting over.

This site is not about "citizen journalism," but the subject has some bearing on our effort to produce content for niche audiences.  The lesson of Bayosphere is that people will not generate your content for you, out of the goodness of their hearts.

One of the areas I'm most excited about is tourism marketing, because I really believe that new Internet tools are opening up a world in which tourists themselves are telling stories that "sell" tourism locations far more effectively than canned brochure copy.  Aggregating flickr photos, blog stories, and other comments is going to be a gold mine for tourism marketers who figure it out -- but it's going to take some time.  The content is there -- but it has to be mined.  It won't create itself, as Bayosphere shows.

Comments

[Mike Bawden]

Is Dan Gillmor's experience really that much of a surprise? It seems that many of the blog/web sites that are attempting to become local news portals are running into the same problem and, ironically, are finding that the "solution" in many cases is hiring people to produce content on a regular basis for the site.

Five years ago, we called these people "reporters."

Is "citizen journalism" an paradoxical idea? I'm starting to think that maybe social media (e.g. blogs, et al) have just lowered the barrier to entry for a number of us who already like to write and share our opinions - but the vast majority of the "public" are less interested in engaging in a conversation and more interested in reading, watching and chatting among themselves (in relative safety).

Just a few thoughts.

Thanks for this post, by the way. I'm adding it to my "must read" list of posts on Thursday's (01/26) "Much Ado About Marketing" blog.

Regards,

Mike Bawden
Brand Central Station