Made a small breakthrough today. Someone in the car vertical jumped on board with the next print edition. It's the smallest ad (they seem to be testing waters), but the fact we got them to sign a check is good, I think. Other bigger advertisers are being courted. Again, it's going slower than I thought, but I have the fact that my product is brand new against me.

Three years ago, around this very same time, I sent out my declaration of independence from big media. I thought it was worth a smile, but I was also trying to send a serious message. Amidst the soaring newsprint prices and declining ad revenues, the media corporations have more to worry about.

One of the threads on Poynter's Online-News mailing list over the last week or so was Frequency: Our Toughest Challenge. Greg Harmon of Belden Associates had some good thoughts I want to share here (with permission.)

Greg Harmon wrote:

Heh. Was driving down Main Street in Elwood today and remembered back to a few people who were commenting on Al Jordan's site about people not mowing their yards on Main Street.

We got a police scanner for our office (oh yeah, we have an office sort of now... more on that later ;), and I was looking up Indiana Code to see what the law said about us having it. The only way to carry it in a car is to get permission from the local police chief (what happens if we cover multiple counties??) or be a 'newspaper.' Here's Indiana's definition of a newspaper. It seems you have to have a printed publication.

The Star Press recently announced the appointment of a new executive editor. The previous Editor (Evan Miller) is now Director of Strategic Planning and Audience Development. What I wanted to point out is that Miller is praised for bringing The Star Press pageviews up from over 1 million per month in 2003 (when I was still there toiling) to almost 5 million this month. On the surface this sounds good, but it can be traced to just putting more content up there. The thing is, I've recently introduced a feature on the Muncie Free Press homepage that might hurt our "pageviews" a little. It will help make the site better for users, though.

I'm going to start referring to what I do as independent media, I think, rather than citizen journalism. Certainly I'll still be working with the citizens, teaching them the journalism trade, but I think what I'm doing at Muncie Free Press is more than a blog. (Nothing against blogs, but they're not a cure-all for what ails media.) I had someone in the press office of an Indiana politician refer to Muncie Free Press as a blog, and something they wanted to get into because it spoke to the people, the constituents. I explained (politely I hope!) that we were more than that.

In any case, before I get too far off track, what I want to talk about tonight is something Tom Grubisich, Mike Orren and others have been talking about - the difference between a shotgun approach to an independent media site (using lots of press releases to get breadth of coverage) and a rifle approach (narrow in on one or two niches and dig deep!)

After all the brouhaha (or is that brou-mua-haha) last week with The Star Press, I had a great example of cooperation yesterday with Al Jordan, the person who runs ElwoodIndiana.org (he's hesitant to call himself a journalist, although he's getting closer and closer to replicating the 'real newspaper' in Elwood online - with a thriving community to boot...)

Thank you Google News. Gannett still insists that we don't exist and aren't newsworthy (and i keep mentioning that fact), but it begins to matter less and less. Soon they will have burned the bridge completely. In any case, Muncie Free Press has been accepted into Google News! I'm already seeing an upswing in traffic.

So I'm looking through my stats (as I often do), and I came across several referrers from The Des Moines Register. Intrigued, I of course went to the Gannett site and looked around. No links. Well, maybe it's off the homepage already. A link from a story maybe? Not finding anything, I grep'd the raw logs to get more info.