On Verge Of Launch, TBD Aims to Change D.C. Media
TBD's Jim Brady and Steve Buttry.
For starters, the people behind it say that they're not really concerned with beating their major competition.
No, seriously.
"We don't want to have this 'zero-sum' web war," said general manager Jim Brady, the brand's top dog, who been on a crusade to increase interconnectivity by any means necessary since he was named the venture's frontman last fall. "The winner-take-all mentality is kind of dead."
In a preview held on Friday morning inside TBD's Rosslyn newsroom, Brady and several TBD executives assured reporters that they're not hellbent on pushing the Washington Post -- or any other media outlet, for that matter -- out of business. Rather, the group is all in on a Google-esque business model, in which a faith that providing a high-quality service -- fed, in part, by the work of those they're competing with for page views -- will be enough to get readers to make TBD's website their first internet stop.
Of course, that will take some time.
"We've been working on this since October," said Brady, who also noted that he realizes that the site will be launching during what is normally the driest spell in Washington media: mid-August. "It always takes time to build," he added.
Besides, TBD couldn't steamroll through its competition even if it wanted to. After all, such an overly aggressive strategy would cut a big slice of the brand's potential -- as both a launching point and a repository for information about the mysteries of everyday life in the District.
That kind of initiative demands a unique editorial approach, and the organization's website will employ an innovative one. TBD.com will feature 12 full-time reporters, including one editor focusing solely on the neighborhood beats of population centers in the District, Virginia and Maryland. [Full disclosure: the former editor of DCist, Sommer Mathis, is TBD.com's news editor for the District of Columbia.] The website will also feature original reporting on sports (former Postie and sports reporter David Aldridge is TBD's latest addition), entertainment, transportation and a big focus on weather. But the real highlight of TBD's web presence is its inclusionary ethos: TBD's blog affiliate network, which currently boasts an impressive 127 well-thought-of blogs covering everything from small businesses to allergies in Loudoun County, will drive content. The affiliate network is designed to plug in the gaps that the reporters -- who will focus on population centers: Arlington, Silver Spring, Takoma, and Washington's "gentrification plume" -- admittedly can not reach. (In comparison, the Post employs nearly 100 reporters to cover the Metro area.)
The site's biggest feature: everything that is posted to the website -- be it an originally reported piece, a wire report from the Associated Press or a cross-posting from one of the site's blog affiliates -- will be geocoded, so that people who might be overwhelmed by sifting through the hundreds of stories in this town every day can personalize what they're reading. So, basically, a neighborhood blog on steroids. Of course, TBD is also planning big rollouts on the mobile end, including an app which will tell readers where traffic delays are at any given moment and supply transit directions.
On the television side, News Channel 8 will eventually fully rebrand itself as TBD TV, and the sheer amount of programming on the network will increase. (Currently, afternoons on the station consist of an hour-long afternoon report repeated until 3 p.m., when infomercials kick in.) Under the new brand, TBD TV will produce original news content at 4:30, 7, 8 and 10 p.m., the latter featuring new anchors Morris Jones and Katherine Amenta. Steve Buttry, TBD's director of community engagement, even said that the organization is encouraging bloggers in its network to sign up for Skype, so that they can contribute to the discourse on the air.
As I wound my way around the maze of cubicles that hosts not just the nascent TBD, but also its sister publication Politico and the WJLA video library, I was impressed with the level of collaboration that was on display, even to an outsider who was simply making his way to the door. It's this embrace of the competition's attributes (including lending bloggers more respect and professional courtesy than any other media outlet of this size anywhere) and the utilization of said attributes to its advantage which TBD hopes can change the media game in this town.
Don't get me wrong: TBD isn't some slacker-chic organization with pie in the sky ideas about the way things should be. Sure, the editorial staff arranges assignments with a shared document, just like any large city blog would. The execs seem like a good bunch of people to share a beer with. And there's definitely a ton of tongue-in-cheek floating around the office. (One mockup of the site's layout we saw was a fake story about TBD's secret launch date that admitted that "we weren't able to smoke out TBD's launch date.")
But everyone's in suits, and it's serious media, for sure.
That's kind of the way things need to operate when you're trying to create a sea change inside the District's stuffy media scene -- loyal to the cause, dressed to sell it -- especially in the age of Twitter, where there's nothing too small to be written about, and things move at a hundred miles per hour. Take the name, for example. When the venture was still unnamed, Erik Wemple, who moved to TBD from the Washington City Paper, just started signing his emails with "TBD.com" at the bottom. Of course, the name just kind of stuck -- because no one really knows what's going to happen next, even though they're prepared to use whatever comes next to their advantage.
"There's no question that we're going to step in some you-know-what over the first couple of months," said Brady. "But that's the risk we're willing to take to move things forward."