TBD.com

Some pundits have interpreted TBD’s demise as proof that you can’t make money in hyperlocal journalism, but I think that’s nonsense.

For starters, TBD — like The Bay Citizen — was not in fact a hyperlocal site at all, but rather a metro news site in a large city. A big metro site is actually a regional operation, not a hyperlocal or even a local one. You have the city. You have the suburbs. You have the exurban business centers. The challenge is not to cover every bit of routine community news and engender conversation around it, as a true hyperlocal does, but rather to figure out what kinds of stories and events resonate on a regional level and draw out the elements that make them relevant beyond the immediate neighborhood.

This is a particularly complicated issue in the Bay Area, which encompasses three major cities and whose notional “center” — San Francisco — is not home to most of the population. But covering a sprawling metropolis like Washington presents many of the same challenges. Hyperlocal coverage is, at most, a subset of the broader mission, and thus TBD’s experience doesn’t really speak to the hyperlocal question at all.

Second, the trajectory of TBD suggests that its shutdown had little to do with its accomplishments, or lack thereof, and everything to do with internal issues at the parent company, Allbritton Communications. The site posted solid traffic numbers, reaching 700,000 unique visitors per month after just six months, according to Compete.com (and more than double that according to internal figures cited by the Washington Post). If those numbers were below plan, the planners must have been smoking something.

Ad sales apparently were not going very well, but that’s not much of a surprise either. It takes time for any new media property to establish credibility with advertisers, and TBD was also trying to sell into a large network of affiliated local blogs. That’s not easy; it requires specific sales skills and a lot of persistence. The fact that TBD had to rely on the sales staff of its TV station partners made this even more difficult, because old-media salespeople have little incentive to understand and sell comparatively inexpensive (and complicated) Internet ad campaigns.

I’m sure TBD was losing lots of money — as anyone with even passing knowledge of the business would have expected to be the case at the outset. Allbritton initially said it was giving TBD three to five years to reach profitability. Maybe it was losing even more than planned, and Allbritton got cold feet. Or maybe Allbritton’s other businesses, which include the political website Politico in addition to eight TV stations, were not throwing off as much cash as expected over the past couple of quarters.

Or perhaps the TV station brass at Allbritton just didn’t really see the point of this resource-draining startup, when that money might have been poured into their own online operations. (And in fact some TBD staffers will be moving to a revived WJLA website). You'd think the war between old media and new media would be over by now, especially at a company like Allbritton that already has a very successful Web startup. But it isn't. 

As John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register Company, pointed out in a pungent blog post, this is not so much a case of TBD failing as of Allbritton backing out of a brave experiment. The company is certainly entitled to change course — but it doesn’t leave a whole lot of lessons for the rest of us.

The Bay Citizen is an experiment too, and a very different one from TBD. We’re a nonprofit, we don’t sell traditional online advertising, and our editorial approach leans more towards enterprise journalism than up-to-the-minute breaking news. But like TBD, we definitely need time to prove it out. Happily, we’ve already raised enough money to assure at least a few years of runway — and whatever the merits of hyperlocal, we’re confident that regional metro journalism has a bright future in one form or another.