Farewell Backfence
The hyper-local community journalism site is now defunct. It will be missed, but the lessons learned from the project can help all journalists. It showed that journalism that is more local — and not the trend towards more national as most main-stream media outlets had been doing — resonates with readers.

The problem Backfence had was that it ran out of money, probably partly due to the company trying to expand too quickly. They should have found a successful business model from one area and then expanded. That never happened.

Also, Backfence was a nice community, but it was light on journalism. A project like LoudounExtra.com (launching July 16) should prove a lot more popular, profitable and long lasting. It combines a lot of database and social networking features of Backfence with real journalism from dedicated Post employees.

Personally, I am excited as ever for hyper-local journalism, but you know what they say: You can always spot the pioneers. They’re the ones with arrows in their backs.

CNN winning raves from designers
I’m a fan of the new CNN.com and it seems some accomplished designers are too. Although my rave review was more on the technical end because of the use of Ajax.

Andy Rutledge writes:

Like many people, I’m a big fan of CNN’s recent website redesign. While I believe that a few structural and hierarchical elements could have been addressed better, the overall result of this redesign is a very neat, very clean and clear presentation of information; exactly what an online news site needs.

After looking at the CNN site for a week now, it is growing on me more. It’s simplicity and grace aren’t eye catching, but the more you use the site, the more you come to respect and appreciate it. It’s something that a lot of non-Web people I spoke to last week didn’t appreciate, but I think users will find its style and layout to be exactly what they were waiting for.

It’s finally a content first approach to design.

Newspapers and training
Now that new media has arrived, companies need to harness the talent they have and give their staff members additional skills. You can’t learn everything in college and most j-school students know very little about new new media.

So, why are paper’s so loath to provide training or send staff members to courses? Many are still stuck in the old mindset that you can learn everything you need on the job. That’s not the case anymore.

I have been trying to get my work to send me to some programming classes for a few months now. I laid out exactly why I wanted to learn these languages and how they could help me build better and more advanced products for the company. And it’s not like I am a newbie to the Web — I have been building Web sites since I was 12-13 years old.

If a Web editor like myself has trouble getting his paper to sign off on additional training (I think they will in the end), I can only imagine the trouble many of you are having, especially if you are a print person trying to add new skills.

If newspapers want to succeed, they have to spend money to make money and unfortunately the trend for many papers has been to cut budgets. To be a new media journalist, you need to be a journalist first, which newspapers have plenty of.

Now they just need to give those journalists the skills they need to make products for the Web. It’s not all about hiring dedicated new media people, it’s also about giving established journalists new skills.