State of the Start-ups

On May 21, just over two months after the death of the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, a party was held in the lobby of the Seattle
Art Museum to toast the first two months of the paper’s online-only
reincarnation, SeattlePI.com.

Waiters offered trays of razor-clam fritters with aioli, Beecher’s
cheese melted on toasted baguette slices, and mini-burgers. Hearst
Corporation executives milled about. And Michelle Nicolosi, the site’s
executive producer, made introductions while staffers made small talk
with the invitees—people who the start-up hopes will become fans
and business partners.

How does a two-month-old website that’s part of the struggling
journalism industry manage to pay for a swank venue, free wine, and
fancy hors d’oeuvres? Someone on the SeattlePI.com‘s marketing staff whispered
that a lot of it was offered in trade for advertising. Which works for
a night, but hints at a bigger question that hovers over this and two
other recently launched Seattle news sites in Seattle: Can they really
make the online-only model work?

SeattlePI.com, which started
life with a large base of people already used to visiting the site and
with the deep pockets of Hearst behind it, seems to be in the best
position. According to Nicolosi, it drew 4.3 million unique
users—meaning 4.3 million individuals—in April, an increase
of 1.6 percent over the previous April. “We’re very psyched and feeling
very strong about the start that we’ve had,” Nicolosi said during a
presentation for advertisers in the SAM auditorium.

As she gave this presentation, Nicolosi was standing beneath a large
image of a cat projected on a screen to demonstrate how popular the
site’s MySeattlePets feature has become. Another major draw, according
to Nicolosi: photo galleries of celebrities and fashion shows.
Generally missing: slides and boasts about, say, in-depth investigative
journalism.

“They’re there for the news, of course,” Nicolosi said of the site’s
readers. “But everybody likes a little time-waster in the afternoon,
maybe around lunch… I know some people have commented, ‘How can you
have 100 photos of that fashion show?’ Well, we tracked the usership in
these galleries and found that most of the people who start on page 1
are still there on page 100. So why not?” Nicolosi didn’t say exactly
how many people—or unique users—are clicking through those
galleries, and it’s worth noting that celebrity photos and pet pictures
are not exactly a unique offering on the internet.

Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist David Horsey later explained
in a comment on Slog, The Stranger‘s blog, that he saw no
problem with this new fashion-and-pet-photo-based model of online
journalism. “Most of my P-I friends and colleagues are now
unemployed, and the newspaper to which I devoted my career is gone,” he
wrote. “If all those people looking at pictures from beauty pageants
motivate businesses to buy the ads that pay for our journalism, that’s
fine with me.”

Less flush, but no less interesting, is PubliCola, the no-frills
political news and gossip site launched in January by former
Stranger staffers Josh Feit and Sandeep Kaushik. Unlike the
generalist SeattlePI.com, PubliCola
has focused on state and local politics, along with weekly posts on
food, books, and music. “Things have been going very well considering
how new this whole endeavor is,” Kaushik said. “On the financial side,
we’ve reached a point where Josh is not at imminent risk of
starvation—which is a modest achievement, but an achievement
nonetheless.” PubliCola earned early notice by breaking the news of Ron
Sims’s departure to take a post in President Obama’s Department of
Housing and Urban Development, and it now draws around 1,500 unique
visitors every weekday. “It’s not a huge audience, but certainly an
influential one,” Kaushik said.

There’s also a breaking down of traditional barriers at PubliCola.
While Kaushik blogs about politics and media for the site, he makes his
money as a political consultant, with clients including Mayor Greg
Nickels and King County executive candidate Dow Constantine. “It’s an
unusual arrangement, but not all that complicated,” he said. “I don’t
write about anything that I’m involved with.” They’ve landed some
regular advertisers, are pursuing potential investors, and generally
are riding their (admittedly small) success. “It is an immense amount
of work,” Kaushik said. “But as long as it keeps going up at this pace,
I’m thrilled.”

Less thrilled, and seemingly least likely to succeed, is the man
behind the Seattle PostGlobe, which offers a newsy take on the city
similar to what a number of other sites, including SeattlePI.com, are already offering.

Former P-I reporter Kery Murakami launched the site a month
ago, relying on office space donated by KCTS 9 and a core of about
seven unpaid former P-I employees. “It’s been hard,” Murakami
said. “We’re kind of making some improvements and kind of feeling a
little hopeful that things are going to turn around. But it’s going to
have to happen pretty fast, because folks are going to have to get
paying jobs at some point.”

Murakami couldn’t say how much traffic his site was getting, and
when asked about the quality of his staff’s work replied: “It hasn’t
been very good, frankly.” But he has raised $9,500 in donations, hopes
to start paying a few reporters soon, is excited about a new redesign,
and still believes the site can add some depth to the local news
conversation.

“Hopefully in the next month we’ll start to establish ourselves.”