Monday, March 1, 2010
Media / News Bites Mike Doyle Tells ChicagoNow Never Again
Posted by Michael Miner on 03.01.10 at 06:12 PM
Blogger Mike Doyle's just parted company with ChicagoNow, and Monday, on his own blog, Chicago Carless, he says why. Doyle calls the blog smorgasbord the Tribune launched last year perversely hard to navigate and says it was designed to serve the paper's interests, not the bloggers'. "ChicagoNow is a blog platform that simply wasn’t designed with bloggers in mind," Doyle writes, and at fiery and entertaining length he explains how.
"I was offered the same rate as other bloggers: $5 per 1,000 local page views," Doyle tells us. "Curiously, many of my ChicagoNow posts generated healthy national page views. That’s no help in the Tribune’s financial worldview. Although most bloggers would benefit from the platform-enhancing exposure of a national readership, the Trib makes its money from local ad revenue. Instead, ChicagoNow’s compensation scheme is aimed at disincentivizing national readership. In essence, the Tribune demands that its bloggers ignore the growth potential of their own brands while expecting them to help bolster the Trib’s brand. I’m left wondering: who woke up one day and decided to create a blog platform seemingly designed to make it as hard as possible to be an effective blogger?"
I don't hang out much at ChicagoNow, but I've dropped in often enough to have noticed how hard it is to get around in. "Bloggers were told that by allying with ChicagoNow they would reap the benefits of a fertile online platform with a limitless ability to grow. In reality, they just ended up pulling the plow," Doyle writes. "I don’t think the needs of bloggers were ever truly considered when ChicagoNow was originally planned out. I don’t think they have been taken seriously in the months since the network debuted. And I fear they never will be."
For instance: "I was just told to try harder, as if good writing and focused SEO [search engine optimization] can make up for a lack of a useful navigation strategy." And...
"Last summer a TweetMeme button was installed on all ChicagoNow blogs. Developers didn’t ask bloggers for their personal Twitter details first. Instead, they left TweetMeme’s default settings unaltered. As a result, thousands of retweets of ChicagoNow articles went out across Twitter that all pointed back to TweetMeme’s corporate account instead of the Twitter accounts of the bloggers who had written the retweeted posts, eliminating any possibility for bloggers to build new social-media relationships with readers. I was responsible for pointing out the problem to ChicagoNow staff. Unfortunately, although the TweetMeme rollout took place in a morning, it took days to actually fix the problem. The delay was caused by ChicagoNow's contracted developers being beholden to other clients. Making matters worse, after the problem was fixed, every time a global site rebuild took place, TweetMeme would revert to the default settings once again."
Bill Adee, who calls himself ChicagoNow's "blog scout" but also answers to the much more corporate title of vice president for digital, doesn't particularly quarrel with what Doyle had to say. "Mike's post today shows why we wanted him on ChicagoNow," Adee tells me. "He's a true blogger -- a shit disturber. He makes great points in there about the navigation. I agree it should be better and we're working to address it. But most of the traffic is to the individual blogs -- it's people going to a blog they like and sticking with it. So it wasn't from our standpoint a fatal problem." But, says Adee, it's a problem he's working on.
As for Doyle, "I thought he was extremely valuable to have on the site," Adee says, "and we would have been happy to have Mike continue." But only at the standard rate of $5 per 1,000 local page views, which was less than Doyle started out at ten months ago and less than he was willing to accept.
Adee tells me ChicagoNow has 220 or so bloggers, more than ever before, despite attrition that runs at about 10 percent. According to Doyle, ChicagoNow is "moving away from a niche blogging strategy and towards a 'community news' model, creating new neighborhood blogs to provide more 'granular' local news."
Community news was always the goal, says Adee, but ChicagoNow needed to grow fast, and he believed provocative voices like Doyle's would accomplish that and community news wouldn't. But now that ChicagoNow has grown from 0 pageviews a month to 13 million, and to 1.3 to 1.5 million unique visitors a month, Adee figures it's time for phase two.
Doyle is by all means the shit disturber Adee describes him as. He digresses from ripping ChicagoNow to single out Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin for "writing a three-page angry letter to ChicagoNow management [and] yelling at me over the phone for 10 minutes" over something Doyle wrote that Kamin didn't like, and he goes on to say, "it’s safe to assume he’s not the only asshole in the newsroom." (Kamin has no comment. Adee tells me that he, himself, is somehow at fault for the blowup, for not making it clear to the newsroom who the bloggers were and what they'd been hired to do.)
As far as Doyle's concerned, bloggers and MSM reporters occupy two separate and antagonistic worlds. Last September he wrote on his Chicago Carless site that I'd just "committed a despicable act unworthy of a journalist." My sin was passing along a suggestion that the Sun-Times might fare better with fewer columnists [i.e., commentators with opinions, such as himself] and more reporters. And on his ChicagoNow blog he wrote that my "surprising" admission that I read the print version of the Chicago dailies "immediately undercut" my "contemporary credibility" for him.
Comments (14)
Showing 1-14 of 14
FYI for readers, the article I wrote this morning regarding ChicagoNow can be found on my personal blog at http://www.chicagocarless.com/2010/03/01/t…
like
dislike
Glad to see someone finally getting the Trib response, which was refreshingly open and honest. Previously, we've only had the bomb thrower's comments anywhere and everywhere he could voice his opinion about taking on the big bad Tribune. Suffice to say, Chicago Now's page views will continue to grow and Doyle will continue to bitch and moan about something, anything.
"FYI for readers, the article I wrote this morning regarding ChicagoNow can be found on my personal blog at"
Yes, we know that. In fact, in the very first sentence Michael Miner linked to it and even named your blog. It really isn't necessary to promote yourself every second of every day, especially when your post was already linked to. But as you know, that has always been how you worked.
IAC: Actually in Mike Miner's original version he had left out the link. It was an oversight but by the time he caught it, I had submitted the above comment. Miner and I emailed about this story back-and-forth several times today and though we had a previous disagreement, I'm grateful for him giving this issue a wider airing. Many people in Chicago's blogosphere have been saying the very things I wrote behind closed doors for a year now. And several of them have been emailing and DMing me all day thanking me and telling me their own ChicagoNow horror stories, at least one of which equals my run in with Blair Kamin.
Kevin: Tribune and ChicagoNow staff were welcome to participate in the enormous and still-ongoing discussion of this story that Chicago new media folks have been participating in on Windy Citizen all day. Find it here:
http://www.windycitizen.com/chicago/media/…
Nothing stopped them but they never showed up. Nor did they ever utter a word on Twitter or on ChicagoNow, itself. You can't fault me for using my own platform and the forums of the online community of which I am a part for speaking my mind. The real question should be, why didn't they?
The answer is because--as Chicagoist editor Marcus Gilmer noted to me today--the Tribune almost never talks to or comments on bloggers who aren't paid by the masthead. It took Michael Miner to get them to say anything on the matter. And as you may have noted, Blair Kamin had no comment.
As far as open and honest, my blog post was completely open and honest. I shared exactly what happened to me and what I witnessed at ChicagoNow, and those things have already been verified by Adee and several dozen commenters on Windy Citizen.
As far as a bomb thrower? That's pure Chicago rhetoric. Some people in this town love to label people who refuse to accept the status quo that way. It's unfair and jingoistic. But it's not going to shut me up.
I have no idea who's right or wrong on any of this -- aside from having a longstanding respect for Bill Adee -- but speaking as an old-media fossil, I suggest others of my ilk read the discussion on the link Mike posted:
http://www.windycitizen.com/chicago/media/…
If, like me, you've been mystified by much of this Blog stuff (aside from enjoying some content, or not), it'll be an eye-opener.
"enormous and still on-going discussion"
What qualifies as enormous in your mind? A few hundred clicks on a link, or a discussion in which many comments are from the same people, the majority of which come from you? All on a niche site that barely anyone outside of your little blogger world even knows about?
That's enormous? Wow.
You had a run-in with an asshole at work. Big deal. We all experience that on a regular basis. Your feelings got hurt and even though it appears to have been dealt with, you decide to make it public because your little feelings got hurt. Grow a pair, Mike.
Besides complaining about things in order to get attention, you often times have very little to bring to the table in the blogging world. Outside of your flare ups, it's not like you were setting the media world on fire with your scary intelligence. What's funny, is that the Trib has responded and you still won't let it go. What exactly are you exposing?
How is this crucial work of yours benefitting the community?
Oh, it's just a blogger upset that things didn't go his way, and now because of that horrible platform he was on, he's now able to drop their name and get more pub than ever.
Whatever you may think about the rest of Doyle's complaints, you HAVE to read the part where Blair Kamin attempts to ream him for daring to comment on... a public building! Yes, that's right, the entire subject of architecture belongs to the official architecture critic; if it sits outside in Chicago, it's his, and don't you forget it!
If anything, at that point I actually had some sympathy for Trib management in at least trying something like this (even if, like Redeye, it often seems aimed at a hypothetical illiterate twentysomething, who if that's the future of journalism, journalism ain't got no future), in the face of internal opposition from people who actually think they have an exclusive on the things that matter to readers.
For the record, I forgot to include the link to Mike Doyle's article when I put the above post online. It was as proper as it should have been unnecessary for Doyle to add the URL in a comment, and when I fixed my post by inserting the link I should have deleted his comment (something he suggested).
Kevin: in your flippant comment about the debate of this topic on Windy Citizen (you obviously didn't read it), you have effectively flipped the bird to just about every major independent blogger in Chicago who has participated in the discussion there for the past two and a half days. If you're looking for what I occasionally bring to bear on fostering debate in this city, look there. It's now the largest and top-rated debate ever to occur on WC. And all I did was write one, very honest blog post. If it made ChicagoNow look bad, that's not my fault.
Doyle: "Kevin... you have effectively flipped the bird to just about every major independent blogger in Chicago..."
I'm a freelance writer who helps feed my family by going tappity-tap-tap on the keyboard, but since I contribute some content for free to one or two sites I guess I can claim "independent blogger" status (Isn't that what that means? "Nobody will pay me -- at least not very much -- for my rantings so I'm 'independent'?"), so Kevin, let me say your blanket statement is incredibly... oh, wait:
Doyle (continuing directly): "...who has participated in the discussion [at Windy Citizen] for the past two and a half days."
Never mind, I jumped the gun before realizing we were talking about, at most, a dozen or so people.
Mike, quantity of "votes" (especially given your penchant for self-promotion) and comments certainly don't convey importance/relevance of a topic -- the parenting site I own currently has over 23,000 comments on a post about Kate Gosselin. By your logic I should feel important for helping to "foster debate" about the stylishness of Kate's current hair extensions. By crowing about such meaningless statistics you just reveal your own insecurities.
Also, as a website publisher, I agree with Agee that I occasionally look for a "shit disturber," i.e., somebody that wants to pick a fight over every goddamn fucking little thing in life, but it's not for their valuable insight but because they generate comments, and comments = pageviews. So congrats, Mike, you've achieved a tiny microcosm local level equivalent of a Glenn Beck.
"...the Tribune demands that its bloggers ignore the growth potential of their own brands while expecting them to help bolster the Trib’s brand."
and how is that any different from any freelance reporter the trib has ever contracted, or for that matter, any staff reporter ever hired ?
you're not picked up to make a name for yourself ... you're picked up to glorify the masthead.
and you thought the advent of the blog was going to change that?
good god man, they don't promote anything they don't own.
