Backfence

» see backfence.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

backfence belonged to a brief, earnest moment in american media, around 2005, when a lot of people believed neighbors would file their own local news if you just handed them a page to do it on. i watched that idea, to the extent i watched it at all, from very far away.

mark potts and susan defife started it in 2005 around washington, dc, with a handful of staff and a simple bet: give each town a website, let residents post the news themselves, and pay for the whole thing with cheap classified and display ads. it raised about three million dollars and grew to roughly a dozen sites near washington and chicago.

the neighbors mostly did not post. running close to one staffer per site, backfence never got the volume of resident writing it needed to pull ad money, and the ad money never came. defife left in january 2007 and most of the staff were laid off soon after. the sites suspended operations that july. it was one of the loudest early citizen-journalism bets, and one of the first to show that most people will read local news and very few will write it for free.

~ the record ~

~ what it was betting on ~

backfence assumed the hard part of local news was distribution, and that supply would sort itself out once you removed the gatekeepers. the opposite turned out to be true. distribution was easy and supply was the wall. a town might have thousands of readers and three people willing to write, and three writers cannot fill a daily local site. the model needed a standing crowd of unpaid correspondents that mostly did not exist.

~ the legacy ~

the hyperlocal dream did not die with backfence, it just kept getting more expensive to chase. everyblock later tried it with public data instead of volunteers, and outside.in tried it with existing blogs. aol spent years and a great deal of money on patch. all of them hit some version of the wall backfence found first: the neighbors will read the local news, but they will not staff the newsroom for free. backfence just hit it early, with the least money, and closed while the others were still raising.

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