Sean Blanda

Yet, there are still layoffs. 

David Heinemeier Hansson (Creator of Ruby on Rails & Partner at 37signals) thinks local is hard. I agree. And he forgot to mention Patch.

Most of the changes in online media and journalism have a common theme:

Journalistic entities are becoming product companies, offering products that turn content into marketing. As a side effect, this creates businesses that follow Jack White’s theory of control: vertically integrated, creating content that markets a product that markets the content that markets the product all over again.

Journalism as product

Like USA Today selling its data, POLITICO making a bookstore, my local public radio station selling membership or TechCrunch launching Disrupt. Publishers that successfully turn their content into brand building and marketing for a product are the ones that are surviving.

It’s the real reason Patch is having so much trouble: they’re selling nothing but pageviews and sunshine. I’d bet Aol would make more money with Patch if it used it as a sales channel for its dial-up internet access. You know, the business which still accounts for the majority of its revenues.

In the past that product was a subscription and publishers were quite good at marketing and selling it. Now, we have to all get a bit more creative. Your role as a publisher is to connect and help your chosen community. Content is just one way of doing so.

Product as journalism

The irony here is while publishers are racing to be more like more “traditional” businesses, businesses are becoming publishers.

Fields like editorial strategy, content marketing and custom publishing are emerging, teaching brands how to act like publishers through company blogs, social media and more. Think of what American Express is doing with its OPEN network, Behance’s The 99 Percent or Groupon’s army of writers. 37Signals is a master of the company blog and spins its content off into books.

Suddenly, businesses are in need of carving out their own niches online as thought leaders. This leads to publications that can blur the line between journalism and marketing.

For example, OkCupid publishes an excellent blog about mining its data for trends in the dating world. I’d call this journalism, though its end goal is marketing a product. Is this any different from PaidContent using its content to sell $500 conference tickets? How about Mint.com’s blog about personal finance? How is this different from the financial columnist at USA Today?

This collision exists beyond the web. Know why the New York Yankees continually snap up marquee free agents that aren’t named Cliff Lee ((Yeah, I went there))? They own a TV network. According to Forbes, the Yankees made $400 million from the YES network. That’s more than ticket sales. Yankee Stadium could be completely empty for an entire season and the team could still make payroll, all from a TV network that “covers” them. Same goes for MLB, NFL, The Boston Celtics and multiple college teams. The product owns the medium.

How about e-commerce? Amazon is using its Prime program to rope users in, delivering the products first and then the content.

So what should I do?

The common theme among most of the aforementioned products is that the product is not the content. Sure Kindle singles and news apps are nice, but they won’t make a significant dent in anyone’s bottom line.

As much as it pains me to say it, I think Gary Vaynerchuk had it right when he gave a newspaper executive advice at the Inc 500 conference a few weeks ago. ((I said on Twitter that I wasn’t a big fan of Gary’s and he offered to change my mind. I think that’s pretty cool.))

You shouldn’t be worried about pageviews, Facebook likes or what Poynter is saying about you. You should worry about the trust of your customers and the strength of your product.

You know, like a real business.

At Technically Philly we are in a unique position.

Because we have such a specific niche, we are often the first interaction a local company has with the press. Many times we are dealing with first-time entrepreneurs who are responsible for their own marketing and media outreach. Typically, these entrepreneurs are programmers or business majors who don’t know anyone in the media and, as a result, are unfamiliar with how most media outlets operate.

Recently, at the end of one of my interviews, an entrepreneur I was speaking with turned the tables on me and asked me for advice for building a good relationship with the press.

Below is a synopsis of our conversation that I thought may be useful to other startups. Hopefully it leads to better business profiles and an amicable relationship between press and startups.

The very first thing you should know: journalists are an ethical bunch, sometimes annoyingly so. There are strict rules that journalists often follow. As a rule, journalists won’t let sources dictate when stories will run. They will often double check your claims, especially when given numbers. To get a feel for the world that journalists inhabit, I suggest paying a visit to Wikipedia.

Remember that your startup is like your child. Most tech journalists speak to three entrepreneurs a day who all think their startup will change the world. Most startups also are unnecessarily protective about seemingly trivial bits of news like hires and new feature launches. Your startup is like your child. Tremendously important to you, but for other people its just another kid. Have pride and be excited, but don’t let your ego and possessiveness affect your conversations with the press.

Keep the description of your business simple.  Explain it to me like I’m a five year old…  who speaks another language … and has been living under a rock. Your best bet is to give me a sentence (i.e. “We help students organize notes”) and provide a use case (“Let’s say Mary is in Math class and she wants to record her lecture…”) For an example of simplicity, I suggest reading the famous “No, shut up” thread about Dropbox on Quora. Also, read this before coming up with your pitch.

Have a demo or the press won’t write about you. I want my readers to read my profile of your business and immediately run off to go use your product.

Good design has an unfair effect on how I judge your company. When you launch, I can’t tell if you have the most streamlined code in the world or the smartest sales guys in the country. The easiest way for journalists to see if you’re serious about your company is design. Make it pretty and the press will give you an unfair pass.

Know what the publication is looking for. Like applying for a job, five minutes of research on the publication will go a long way. Decide what fits into the publication’s coverage area and what’s important to the publication. For example TechCrunch covers consumer Internet startups and places a high value on breaking news. GigaOm covers enterprise and Internet technology and places a high value on analysis. Technically Philly covers tech companies based in Philly and places a lot of value in promoting Philadelphia technology community.

It’s unfair, but there are several “red flags” that make me doubt your seriousness. These include businesses that are seeking press but are stilling looking for a technical co-founder or lead developer. If you’re unable to convince a programmer to help you, what chance do you have of convincing your customers? If your big “feature” is integration with Facebook or Twitter, I get skeptical. If you rely exclusively on advertising revenue, I get skeptical. If your business has the chicken and egg problem (or a “marketplace” business model) where the more users you have the more useful your product becomes, I get skeptical.

Don’t play the press against each other. I don’t think it’s worth it to promise media outlets “exclusives.” Journalists disproportionately value “scoops” and will get irritated if they discover you promised something to a competitor. TechCrunch is infamous for holding companies hostage in exchange for coverage. If you choose to get in bed with TechCrunch, know that you will be angering every other outlet.

Give me discounted product codes for my readers. I can provide my community value for reading me and you can measure the success of your pitch and the popularity of the media outlet. Everybody wins.

Practice your “personal elevator pitch.” You know how to pitch your business, but know how to pitch the founding team. Have a few anecdotes about the founding of the company or the circumstances that led to the creation of the business. Business journalism is often writing the same “entrepreneur saw problem and created company” story over and over. Have a few anecdotes ready and journalists will write a better story and you’ll make a better connection with that journalist.

A journalist is on your side. You’ll be asked questions like “How many users do you have?” or “How much revenue are you making?” Many entrepreneurs get defensive when asked these questions by the press. The press wants to help you. I want every company I interview to become the next Facebook. If I cultivate you as a source and you become successful we both win. Give the truth or know that the user/revenue questions are typically just ways of asking “How legit are you?” If you can’t speak to revenue or users talk about your team or your advisors. Tell me why you will succeed.

No, I will not let you read the story before publishing. And any publication that does is not a real news outlet. Remember item number two? Check your ego before talking to the media.

Follow up with headshots, hi-res logos and screenshots. If an entrepreneur doesn’t send me a headshot, I often snag a picture from Facebook or Twitter.

Questions you should be prepared to answer:

1. Tell me what [your product] does.
2. How did you meet your co-founders? Who are they and what do they do? How old are you all?
3. Where are you located? Why?
4. What problem are you trying to solve? How did this come up?
5. How many users do you have?
6. Who is your target customer? What has their feedback been so far?
7. What’s your plan for next six months? How do you plan on growing?
8. How are you different from [obvious competitor]?
9. Why did you raise money? What will you spend it on? Why did you choose [VC firm, angel investor]?
10. What’s the coolest thing [your product] does?
11. What do you think of [trend in your industry]?
12. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me that I didn’t ask you?

It was 30-minutes before our ONA panel, and everyone wanted to be our best friend.

“I’m going wherever you’re going,” said one women stopping mid-conversation.

“Where’s the party?” yelled one of the guys manning the sponsor tables in the hall way.

As much I’d like to say it was because they saw our handsome faces in the conference program, it was likely more about the three 12-packs of Harpoon IPA we were carrying through the halls on the way to our panel.

I’m often critical of conference panels. Talks on theory don’t do much for me. I love actual examples, systems, numbers and next steps. And beer.

Which is why I was excited to speak at the Online News Association’s annual conference in Boston last weekend. I partnered with my Omaha-based counterpart Danny Schreiber of Silicon Prarie News for “Making it Work With a Small Staff” a panel about a growing sector of the media ecosystem: bootstrapped journalism startups with less than 10 employees.

We took great pains to include lots of actionable advice from the point of two people who are in the trenches. Our panel even got a bit meta as it was originally supposed to be a four-person panel. So we had to, um, make it work with a small staff. We did this by shifting our original structure of the panel and by creating a friendly environment by handing out a few beers before we began our talk.

We discussed how Technically Philly and Silicon Prarie News make money, how we sell sponsorships, who we plan on hiring next and how we keep tabs on our growing communities. We goes lots of questions on our events business and many people remarked on how our editorial advice sounded familiar.

We gave out a handout that I’ve included below that includes links to the actual sponsorship materials, invoices and other raw materials that we use at Technically Philly. The full video:

Excepts from the handout:

Business takeaways:

• Establish a workflow for invoices.
• Have goals. Do you want to bring on your founders full-time? Hire three writers? Launch four sites?
• When selling, always have reference material. Examples: a sponsorship one pager for a large event. For a small event.
• “How can we get involved?” = “We want to buy something from you.”
• Focus your efforts on products and services that yield maximum return per hour invested. Spending an hour selling a $50 advertisement? Not efficient.
• Many online publishers are constantly approached by vendors. Avoid them.

Editorial takeaways:

• Schedule tweets/Facebok posts with CoTweet or Hootsuite.
• Keep a strict editorial calendar with weekly features and departments to ensure there site never looks stale. The simpler the better (i.e. a Q and A, link roundup, a weekly picture, unedited video content).
• Alerts, RSS and Google Reader are your friend. Have Google News, Crunchbase & Twitter mention alerts for all companies, places and people that you cover.
• Never send three reporters to an event when one will do. Let the community fill coverage gaps if needed.
• If you can write something in bullet points, write it in bullet points. Not every story is a narrative.
• Freelancers can be a great way to relieve pressure on your staff or a huge waste of time and resources. Choose your freelancers with care and provide them with tools to succeed.
• Have an ethics policy and keep it public. Refer to this when faced with controversy.
• Be absolutely ruthless with your time. Don’t meet in person when a phone call will do. Don’t call when email will do.
• If you do meet with someone, send an agenda containing the topics you want to talk about. This helps the other party prepare for the conversation and keeps you on topic.
• Your reporters may also sell ads. Disclose this. For most outside of the journalism community, this is enough. Example of disclosure.

Other ONA notes:

• Somehow, my bio in the program got replaced with Joshua Benton’s from Neiman Lab. I’ll take it.
• Advice for future panel speakers: be over-prepared.
• Also, spend lots of time with your fellow panelists and determine points of disagreement. This leads to a better conversation.
• Many thanks to Andrew Pergam for helping us organize our session.
• Much of ONA is dedicated to digital departments within a larger news organization. I found myself wanting more for the indy news site.
• Conference attendees want new services, tips and tricks that they can write down and immediately implement when they return to work.
• Before ONA11, Danny had never heard of ONA. The group should do more to reach out to these independent and profitable news sites.