TBD.com, a much-hyped local news website in Washington, D.C., launched to the public this morning. Poynter, Newsonomics and Nieman Lab wrote lists on why it’s the news company to watch this year, and PaidContent has a great interview with Robert Allbritton, the guy in charge of TBD’s parent company. Mashable even has a nice writeup this morning, too.

Any time there is this much hype surrounding a product launch, someone is going to end up disappointed.

This time, it’s not me. I’m impressed with TBD so far, and I’m not easily impressed with news sites nowadays.

That’s a testament to how many cool little things are packed in this site. And from all accounts, it still doesn’t have nearly as many cool things that were planned for it, either.

Perhaps I haven’t run into many of the bugs that Erik Wemple spoke of in his letter from the editor. I have run into a few, which I list at the bottom of this post. But I love the ideas, the layout, the concept, the conversations, and I can’t wait until even more features are unveiled.

What I love:

• The main news pages have the number of updates in the last 72 hours in the left-hand rail (see the picture above). In the right rail I find all the news in the area of my community. And you can refine that list by category? Be still my heart!
• The headlines-from-everywhere idea. That’s hardly new, but I love the way it’s implemented here. They’ve pulled in content from a slew of different sources, from mainstream media outlets to blogs, and they geotagged them into locations, so they’re searchable by zipcode or neighborhood. And I love how every headline on the main pages has the source of the story in clear sight.
• Complete This Story. On a story about D.C. mayoral hopeful Vince Gray, there is a box you can fill out if you have more information on his campaign. Two birds, one stone: TBD gets better opportunities for reporting, and users get better opportunities to interact.
• I love the upfront traffic delays, using data from BeatTheTraffic.com. Public transit delays take data straight from WMATA. It works brilliantly for a major metro area whose transit data is publicly available.
• The “Long Story Short” box on each TBD story. It’s a Twitter-friendly headline you can tweet with one click. (See it in action on the left here.)
• Love the Foursquare partnership. It reminds me of a simple request I’ve seen in several newsrooms — “Hey, let’s put all our restaurant reviews on an interactive map” — yet is difficult to pull off because all the previous reviews aren’t in a data-structured form. Because TBD is built from the ground up in a purely digital format, it doesn’t have that problem.
• Love The Facts Machine (on Twitter at @TBDFactsMachine). It’s in the same vein as PolitiFact and the San Diego Fact Check. Though all reporters need to be checking facts, I think every news organization should have at least one full-time employee doing nothing but fact-checking the crap out of politicians’ claims.
• When I am logged in (with my Facebook account even), I can bookmark articles from within the site. Why haven’t more sites done this? Or have they been doing it and I’ve been blind?
• They have a reporter dedicated to lists, says Erik Wemple. That’s kinda… a little bit… awesome. (If you read my blog, you know I’m a sucker for lists and bullet points. You’re reading ‘em right now!)
• Comments. I love that reporters are actually responding to comments. I also like that the default sort is by highest ranked, but you can choose to have them listed in chronological order.
• Each Metro station has its own page. For example, the Rosslyn station page has live boarding statuses, a trip planner, even a widget that shows when someone is tweeting about the station (this morning’s tweet from a random person is warning me there is no air conditioning on a Blue line car. THAT. IS. GOOD. TO KNOW.)
• There’s a live chat all day today to answer questions. That’s “community engagement” right there.

What I don’t love:

• The relatively few hard-news reporters. Of the dozen reporters on staff, only four are doing “news” news — one fact-checker and three community reporters, according to the letter from the editor. I understand that entertainment and sports rake in the dough, but more news news, please!
• It’s still not clear how much vetting there will be of outside blogs. What if a blog posts an unfounded rumor and it gets aggregated, even featured? I know I spoke to Steve Buttry before about this, but now that I can see the site, I’m still unclear. (UPDATE: Not two minutes from posting this, I see that some of my concerns are addressed here.)
• The name. Sorry. It just doesn’t quite sum up how cool the site is. I know if other domains were available, the TBD folks would have snatched it up. Also, there is no immediate explanation on the site on what the heck the name means and how it was chosen. That’s question numero uno for most visitors.
• The Incidents page would be much better as a map.
• This ad. Don’t know if there’s any way to block BP from an ad network, but SRSLY LOOK INTO IT.
• Bugs. Yup, there are a few. I know the site had to launch before it was fully cooked because some tech-savvy people guessed the testing URLs correctly, so bugs are to be expected. I’m willing to bet the staff already knows about these ones I encountered. But I’ll write about them anyway in hopes it helps squash them:
  • Saved items. I could have sworn I saved more than two stories. Does it only register if it’s a TBD original? If so, what do the stars by the aggregated content do? And the star on the TBD story that IS in my queue is greyed out. Shouldn’t it be colored still?
  • Setting up locations. I was surprised that when I typed in the name Rosslyn, Va., TBD’s own home base, the name didn’t pop up under the list of suggested locations. And when I tried typing in three locations at a time, it didn’t seem to save.
  • If I mark a comment as a “Good point” on accident, I can’t undo.
  • The Facebook social plugin on this page seems to link to example.com. Or does it?
  • Minor quibble, but on my Chrome and Safari browsers, the “All Over Washington” tagline is hidden below the TBD logo on the home page. I think that’s just a CSS tweak.
• And the biggest thing I don’t like about TBD: That it’s not based in my community. Doesn’t do me much good to enter my real zip code, does it? :)

So that’s my official two cents (in a reference to their comments section). Overall I’m quite excited about the site and what it means for digital journalism as a whole, and I’m happy the site is finally out in the open for everyone to see.

And I bet you the staff is operating on about 15 minutes of sleep. I’ve experienced this when the SF Public Press launched its first print edition last month.

Note to friends at TBD: Do get some shut-eye. If the only flat, non-Red-Bulled surface in the newsroom is Jim Brady’s desk, well, I’m sure he’ll forgive you for your nap.

Oh, and congratulations.

ADDENDUM: Read the Knight Citizen News Network’s  great post, “Lessons Every News Site Can Learn from TBD’s Launch.” And also catch up on the excellent live chat archive at Poynter with some of TBD’s top dogs.

If you want to learn everything you can about journalism’s business models — the ones that are collapsing and the ones that are emerging — then load your RSS reader up, my friends. These are some of my favorites:

1. Reflections of a Newsosaur: The best of the best in my opinion. Not only does Alan Mutter write original content about the business side of journalism, he also uses cold hard data to back it up. A numbers man and a news man.
2. The Media Business: I only found Robert Picard’s blog recently, and I wonder why this guy isn’t mentioned just as often as Alan Mutter. Certainly he has the resume to impress and the blog posts to back it up. Really great information and analysis.
3. Poynter’s NewsPay: One of Poynter’s newer blogs, created to keep track of all the new crazy ideas for reinventing the news business. The Transformation Tracker is also a must-read: It’s a supplemental list of links that’s updated constantly and by category.
4. Poynter’s Biz Blog: How this differs from NewsPay exactly, I’m not sure, but it is different enough to be a separate blog. It seems to be more news and analysis of the already-established industry. Still essential reading.
5. Editors’ Weblog: Gives an international perspective on everything from print journalism, Web 2.0, multimedia and other analysis. From the World Editors Forum.
6. MediaCafe: It’s more hit-and-miss than the previous blogs, but when it hits it really hits. Like this post that offers a downloadable spreadsheet of different scenarios for paid online content for 50K circulation newspapers. (What do you expect? They’re media consultants.)
7. MMCDigiMe: The blog has numerous interviews with key players in the reinventing-journalism business. The MMC is for the Media Management Center at Northwestern, which also offers plenty of research available to download. The blog is coupled with MediaNoted, a great aggregate of links.
8. Newspaper Death Watch: Of course it’s depressing. But someone’s gotta do it. And the folks behind Newspaper Death Watch do a great job of rounding up news on the industry that’s more than just some paper’s obituary somewhere.
9. Monday Note: Every Monday like clockwork, these two Frenchmen write in-depth thoughtful analysis on various media and their complex business models, complete with numbers and data. This used to be an e-mail only newsletter. So glad they turned it into a blog.
10. Rebuilding Media: This one brings together four thought leaders in the field and lets them opine on rebuilding the industry. Good focus on business models in particular.
11. PaidContent: Content comes in many forms. PaidContent snatches up news and headlines about how those content creators can, do and should get paid.
12. MediaBistro: In addition to the excellent TVNewser and WebNewser blogs, you can go to a local media blog for LA, SF, NY and DC, or turn on the firehose with all news about print, ads, design, TV, web and everything else here.
13. RevenueTwoPointZero: It’s slightly outdated and quotes Clay Shirky too much for my liking, but it has really interesting ideas for boosting revenues. From the Society of News Design people.
14. State of the Media: OK, so it’s not quite a blog, but it is such absolutely essential reading that I couldn’t NOT mention it. The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism hands over the keys to understanding where the business is and where it may be headed.

I also have to mention Nieman Lab and Romenesko. Though they aren’t strictly business, they still blog about what’s happening on the biz side of things. They’re just too good to leave off this post.

What are some of your favorites?

Also, a very short apology for lack of updates here, though it’s not for lack of writing. I’ve been writing here and there for the Public Press, San Jose Metblogs, TNTJ and these writeups that summarized our big CollegeJourn chat a few months ago. Plus, Twitter and Facebook are killing blogging, don’tcha know.

Trying to nail down specific operating costs from one newspaper is next to impossible. That information, naturally, is proprietary and confidential, as I came to find out in my handful of phone calls. But that doesn’t help anyone who is trying to analyze a newsroom’s business plan from afar. I know I will not be hired as an accounting consultant any time soon, but I really want to understand just how tough it is to survive as a newspaper in 2008. Are these massive layoffs necessary? Where else could be cut before personnel have to go?

I shot an email to Paul Kauppila, a reference librarian that works specifically with the school of journalism here at SJSU. The resources he pointed me to were invaluable (a list of which I will post PDQ), and I ended up crawling on my hands and knees bookhunting through the section of the library that dealt with newspaper issues.

I found something.

(more…)

My major may be journalism here at SJSU, but my minor is business, because I realize a little too well that if you want to make it in this tough working climate, you can’t rely on your “hirable” skills. News flash: no one is hiring. You have to be innovative and entrepreneurial. I know next to nothing about the business side of the journalism world, which is why I chose my minor.

So in the accounting class required for my minor, I’ve been asked to write a paper on anything my pretty little heart desired, as long as it had something to do with accounting. Naturally, I pick the future of the journalism industry, and in particular newspapers.

I just “finished” the paper and turned it in, but it is in no way finished. I have more stuff to find out and more resources than I know what to do with (with the help of my new BFF, the journalism department’s dedicated librarian). So I want to start a series of blog posts, adding to the cacophany of already-established journalism bloggers who write about the future of journalism.

But here I want to emphasize hard numbers above lofty ideals, because frankly hard numbers scare me but that’s what we all need to look at. Journalists and math tend to go together like oil and water, but it’s the math that’s needed and sorely missing from the online resources I found. I suck at math, too, but I’m willing to push the data and discussions in a cohesive place and open it for discussion.

So I hope this works, and I hope this discovery process helps others too. Let me know if you know of any resources.