Lessons from Spot.us

I'm about to leave the warm embrace of the Bay Area and in doing so, take myself out of the jurisdiction of Spot.us. I was lucky enough to meet David Cohn when the San Jose Mercury News opened its newsroom for CopyCamp last year, and he suggested I pitch something in his alpha phase. At that point it was just a simple wiki, The Point and David's seemingly-infinite energy.

In December, when Spot.us launched officially with its new site and its own mechanisms for handling donations, my story was published and republished and spread farther than I had ever expected. It was the first Spot.us story published in print and was translated into Swedish (not really sure what to make of that, but thrilled).

So, as I said, I'm about to leave Spot's territory (more on that in the next post), and it's about time I reflected on my brief involvement with the startup and tried to draw some lessons from the whole experience.

Go. Now. Really.

It's time to launch that great idea you've been kicking around. Really. Stopping pissing away your energy and get it going already. Fail early, often, debrief and relaunch. Iterate!

David took this lesson from Jason Calcanis, and he applied it beautifully. Spot.us as it exists now is an ecosystem exponentially more complex and diverse than the little site David slapped together in late Spring, and the next iteration will probably be an order of magnitude or two bigger and better than what exists now. So what? Four projects that might never have happened were funded, reported and produced with a wiki, an outside organization and a belief that it could work. Optimism is a powerful thing.

There are stories no one is telling.

I knew that, really, but it's refreshing seeing new angles, new questions and new stories. It's heartening to see journalism in the Bay Area coming from something not owned by MediaNews. It's about time.

If it's new and exciting, you're going to have to explain yourself

I never quite figured out the twitter pitch for Spot.us. I had to explain it to almost every source I spoke with, and often a few PR people on the way, but it usually meant a few minutes at the beginning or end of an interview were left to just talking about Spot.us and crowdfunding and where this story might be published.

I don't think I used the same explanation twice. I talked about giving people a voice in media and finding new ways to pay for journalism. At one point, I just told someone: "It's like a wire service, so this story could end up in a lot of places. We just have a cool new way of funding it." David is better at this.

Before: Remembering Deep Throat and the man in the shadows | After: PBS Newshour Online