May 16, 2010
Bay Citizen: Partners welcome
Editor Jonathan Weber says the new San Francisco regional news site will rely heavily on local content partners for highly local and culture content when it launches May 24
The Bay Citizen, a regional news Web site for the San Francisco Bay Area, will launch later this month with an editorial staff of 15 people, including six reporters who will focus on these enterprise beats:
Politics
Criminal Justice
Education and social policy
Money and business
Environment
Health, science, technology
The site also hopes to develop highly local and cultural content through partnerships with local community news sites and blogs.
Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Weber outlined these plans Friday at the site’s new San Francisco offices to a roomful of potential content partners.
While Weber said content partnerships may take different forms, the basic pitch is co-publishing - Bay Citizen will publish selected stories in full on its site simultaneously or immediately after publication on the originating site. Typically, co-publication will not be exclusive so local publishers could syndicate their content elsewhere as well. In return, the community publishers get exposure and a very small fee, $25 per story published.
Weber is smart to get ahead of the partnership issue in a transparent way. Relationships between well-funded start ups and established, grassroots, not-so-well funded news providers can be a tricky if the new site is seen as threatening or an interloper. Newly hired community editor Queena Kim will coordinate partnerships.
While the benefits of co-publication for Bay Citizen are obvious (content the site staff cannot generate), Weber emphasized that Bay Citizen hopes to be a “connector and supporter of the whole media ecosystem in the Bay Area, especially the emerging ecosystem.” At the same time, Weber said, Bay Citizen is “not in a position to be financial underpinnings for a variety of organizations. We don’t have the money or the structure for that.
While Bay Citizen will not link directly back to a co-published story, it will “provide strong branding for the partners and hopefully drive traffic to other stories.”
He said the site may occasionally co-report a story with a content partner. Bay Citizen also expects to host monthly conversations on different topics of interest to partners, technology issues, for example, and there will be desk space for partners in the newsroom.
Among its signicant partners is the journalism department at the University of Calfiornia, Berkeley and Bay Citizen expects to publish student work. The site has two paid summer internships, and the first two interns this year are from UC Berkeley.
Bay Citizen is also a New York Times content partner. The organization will provide two pages of local content to the Times twice a week.
Weber said the site will focus on reporting but may offer opinion down the road. In addition to original enterprise content, the site will feature a news blog with original and aggregated items.
As for audience, Weber said, “We’re definitely a regional publication… our goal not to be a sf site but to be a bay area site.” Bay Citizen wants to be a ‘Broad, general interest publication, which is kind of out of fashion but that’s certainly our goal.”
Weber said the site might find its “natural audience” among New York Times and National Public Radio users, “but that’s not enough to be successful.”
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