Saturday, May 22, 2010

First Beatup at Civil Beat

We held our first "Beatup" at Civil Beat on Thursday evening.
I held a lot of community meetings in my former role as editor of the Rocky Mountain News. It wasn't uncommon to run into anger. What was fascinating about this meeting with members of our Honolulu news service was how much of a personal stake they already felt in the site. They were there to help, because they cared.

Very cool. We'll be doing more of these public meetings going forward.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Two interesting takes on Civil Beat

I've been away from this blog for a couple of weeks, focused on work at my new job at Civil Beat.
But I wanted to point out two thoughtful pieces that give a good outside perspective on what we're doing at Honolulu Civil Beat and how our effort fits into the search for a new business/editorial model for local news.

Rick Edmonds, author of The Biz Blog at the Poynter Institute, is a seasoned and measured observer of the news business. His blog post accurately captured what we've done up till now.

Mark Potts, author of the savvy Recovering Journalist blog, provides an analysis of how our discussions at Civil Beat are working and whether our approach to comments is leading to the kind of civil discourse we said we wanted to support. I loved his headline, "Reader Comments, Hawaiian-style," because it captured the spirit we hope permeates what we're doing.

Both pieces provide an informed assessment of where we are at Civil Beat.

One thing I would add is that I've been struck by how quickly we can change at a start-up where the software developers built the site and know its guts so well. Not even two weeks have passed since our hard launch, and the site is very different from its first day. As are our subscription offers. We still have our $19.99 full members, but have added a daily membership for $1.49 and a discussion membership for 99 cents for 30 days.



Tuesday, May 4, 2010

"First Edition" of Civil Beat

Today we published the "First Edition" of Honolulu Civil Beat

I've been involved with a few first editions. The first edition of RedBlueAmerica.com. The first edition of YourHub.com. The first edition of RockyMountainNews.com.

The first edition is just that, a beginning. So much more to do.