How 3 independent news sites have survived 5 years

Juanita Leon, founder of La Silla Vacia. ISOJ photo.

Versión en español aquí.

Launching a news publication online is the easy part.

Paying the bills and surviving for several years is the hard part.

Three of those who have evolved and survived for at least five years are La Silla Vacia, a political website in Colombia,  Homicide Watch, a news and data platform in three U.S. cities, and Texas Tribune, a news site focused on Texas civic life.

It often takes at least four iterations for a digital initiative to gain traction, according to Michael Maness, vice president of the Knight Foundation’s Journalism and Media Innovation program.

Maness moderated a panel in which the editors told their stories at the International Symposium on Online Journalism April 5 at the Knight Center for Digital Journalism in the Americas in Austin, Texas.

A vote for user comments signed with real names

Versión en español aquí.

A Spanish colleague who has been asked to develop the comments section of a new digital publication asked if it were better to require users to register or allow anonymous comments.

The dilemma is always quantity vs. quality, I told her. If the idea is to generate traffic, comments can do it, and some editors will be content with that.

Although the numbers might please the higher-ups in the short term, don’t expect comments to attract advertisers. YouTube has never made money because major advertisers are skittish about associating their brands with content that might be amateurish or in bad taste. Anonymous comments represent the same kind of risk.