Scoop / Youpost (סקופ)

» see scoop.co.il as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Scoop launched on 15 January 2006, built by Michael Weiss and Michael Eisenberg on a stated goal of giving a wider public a place in the media conversation and widening what counted as a story worth covering. The template was OhmyNews, the South Korean site that had already proved readers would file real reporting if you let them. Readers submitted pieces, editors checked them for reliability before publication, and readers then rated what got through, which moved things up and down the homepage. The first editor was Ronit Sela, who had run the Jerusalem Post site. She lasted three months. Yossi Saidoff replaced her and stayed about two years.

For a while the model worked in the way its believers promised. By early 2008 the site was claiming roughly 250,000 unique users a month, which is a serious number in a country of seven million people. The address was scoop.co.il and the proposition was simple enough that it did not need explaining twice: the professionals were not covering your street, so cover it yourself and we will check it before it goes up.

This one I could only have read in translation, and by 2006 I had ttnet broadband and was spending my reading time on Turkish hardware forums rather than anybody's citizen journalism experiment. Turkey had its own version of this argument later and it mostly played out on forums and in blog comments rather than on a site built for the purpose, which is part of why the Israeli attempt is worth writing down: somebody actually built the thing and let a university measure it.

~ the record ~

~ four percent ~

Dr. Zvi Reich of the communication department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev compared how the volunteers at Scoop worked against how salaried journalists at established outlets worked. At the institutional sites, items originating in press releases and spokespeople's communiqués made up around half of everything published. At Scoop the same figure was under four percent.

The reason is unflattering to nobody and revealing about everybody: amateurs had no access to official sources, so they could not be fed. Lacking a spokesperson's phone number, they had to initiate their own stories and rely on happening to be standing where the news was. Reich published in 2008 and noted that several Scoop stories were picked up and developed by the established press with no credit given. He also said he did not expect citizen journalism to replace institutional media, which stays wired into the sources. Both halves of that finding turned out to be right.

~ seven to one ~

In early 2008, the same year the research landed, the site went through what was described as economic streamlining. The number of salaried employees went from seven to one, and the one was the editor-in-chief. Shai Golden took the job. A site whose entire premise was unpaid contributors discovering that it could not afford paid staff either is not a contradiction exactly, but it is the point where the model stopped being a choice.

~ the petition, and the year it paid off ~

In January 2008 the site petitioned Israel's High Court of Justice against the Government Press Office. The complaint was about press cards. To be recognized as an outlet whose writers could receive GPO credentials, a news site had to demonstrate more than 20,000 visits a day, a bar the printed press did not have to clear in any equivalent form. Scoop argued this discriminated against online outlets as a class.

The Press Office lowered the threshold to 10,000 daily visits in 2013. By then Scoop had been dead for two and a half years. The rule it broke was broken for everybody who came after, and nobody who worked there ever got a card out of it.

~ the second name ~

At the end of 2009 the site was renamed Youpost and moved to youpost.co.il, with Rehavia Berman as editor and Efrat Shposhnik as chief executive. The rename did not arrest anything. Walla reported on 30 November 2010 that the site was about to close, and it shut on the last day of that year. Shposhnik put 2010 traffic at 45,000 unique monthly visitors, down from the quarter of a million claimed two and a half years earlier, and attributed the money problems to an editorial policy that refused to bend before commercial interests. That is the sort of reason a closing executive gives, and in this case the payroll history makes it hard to argue with.

Both domains are gone now. scoop.co.il does not resolve at all, and youpost.co.il has been answering 404 for years, which is a stranger fate than a parking page: something is still running at that address and it has nothing to serve.

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