In April, just on the heels of leaving Spot.Us, I announced joining the team at Circa as the founding editor. Six month’s later – I’m happy to point to our new website and more importantly our new App which is available in the Apple App Store (If you like the App – feel free to give it a review!). You can like us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitter – the whole shebang.

With the obligatory “check out my new thing” link out of the way – let’s get to the more interesting ideas, lessons, etc.

For the “journalistic so what” of Circa – check out the Circa blog later this week. For personal reflections – check below.

1. On Keeping Your Head Down: I wrote about this for Spot.Us in detail but the lesson still applies. Focus on your stuff, your product, being the best you can be. Competitors exist. The market moves and you have to pay attention – but it doesn’t help to freak out every time you see something semi-related to your project. Keep your head down or you’ll never see the line in front of you.

Related to this was general mum-ness when it came to Circa. Throughout my time at Circa people have been wondering what we were up to. We weren’t trying to be coy – we just wanted to keep focused. The last thing we wanted was to over promise and under deliver.

This was very different from Spot.Us. It’s not that Spot.Us over-promised and under-delivered – but the nature of winning the Knight News Challenge meant the idea behind Spot.Us was out there in the ether. It was something I discussed. I answered questions about mechanics while we were still building the site.

Circa was very different. The idea behind Circa is out there – but to my knowledge nobody has wrestled it to the ground (see “journalist so what”) and rather then spend time answering questions about “what if’s” or mechanics – we kept our head down and focused on building it out.

2. On “MVP”: Minimal Viable Product: Very related: The importance of being iterative.

What you are seeing with Circa is a first swing. Due to the nature of what we are trying (again – “journalistic so what”) we’ve talked for hours on end about all kinds of cool features, ideas, designs, that could take the concept further, improve the reading experience and more. If we held off launch until we had implemented all of them – we’d never launch. A line has to be drawn in the sand. What you are seeing is one step past that line. Hopefully the minimal viable product (MVP) is enough such that a regular user can see the horizon and can think about features as well – and we will get to them (that includes you Android users). Or they may spit back in our face and point us in a different direction all-together. In any case – we can’t find out until we put it out there.

3. The value of understanding: In the journalism world there is often discussion about how much a journalist needs to know outside of journalism. Should they be versed as coders? Should they be in control of the business side. The conclusion I arrived at was validated with my experience so far at Circa – which is this; I myself am not a world class coder. I am not working on being a world class coder. In fact, I’m getting even more rusty than I was – when I only knew a little to begin with. I am not a business expert. I am not working towards my MBA. In fact, since arriving at Circa and leaving Spot.Us – I have had to think about money less.

BUT: I understand both of these worlds. What a developer does in their day-to-day isn’t “magic” to me. It’s just really hard work. What happens on the business side isn’t smoke and mirrors – it’s just careful management and balancing.

I understand the tradeoffs between coding quick and getting buggy software. The tradeoffs between picking and choosing features and having that tough discussion with development. I know this at the level of development lingo as well i.e.; refactoring code. They don’t need to stop and translate for me. This knowledge helps me work with the tech side and the business side. And we do work together… closely…. every day. Nobody works in a vacuum – we just have different expertise and speak slightly different languages. The imputes is on the journalist in the team to try and understand the lingo, the culture and the work flow that they have so we can sneak into it without causing any ruffles.

So what’s the lesson: You don’t need to be a world class developer to be a journalist working at a startup. But you do need to be well-versed and to understand what other aspects of the business are working on. And the other aspects of the business include technology, design, product, management, business, etc.

4. It never hurts to try something new.

Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around. – Vanilla Sky

For those that didn’t know me before Spot.Us – the crux of my career has been around doing new projects and trying new things. I’m starting to make a habit out of it – good or bad. When it came down to the professional choice of joining Circa (I had an opening to join a more established news organization) I thought about my career and where I want it to go. I thought about bands like The Pixies or actors like Steve Buscemi who had years of underground and independent projects/hits before becoming more mainstream names. Indeed – they were independent icons in their industries and to this day their credibility is founded upon the “doing” they did that slowly but surely earned them kudos professionally and publicly. I’m not saying this can’t happen at established news organizations. But I still have that independent, startup drive. I love the creativity, the fluidity, the chance to make a statement (journalistic so what – last plug, I promise) that comes with starting from scratch.

I’m excited about Circa – to say the least. Not too long ago I wrote that most web technology companies are media companies and vice versa. The more I’ve thought about it – the more I believe this to be an accurate description. Circa is consciously a media/tech company.

And now – the ride really begins.

There was a lot of buzz/talk around Homicide Watch and their Kickstarter campaign. I am not surprised that they reached their goal or the great support they got from amazing folks.

This post is not about getting you to donate (although you should while time is left). In fact, I wanted to wait until after they reached their goal to post. This post is about what their Kickstarter represented – for me at least. And I hope it signals something similar to others.

First two disclaimers

1. I have a bias for the Amico’s in general: Chris Amico was actually the second reporter ever to use Spot.Us and the first outside person to sign up on the web app. Meanwhile Homicide Watch had raised money on Spot.Us in the past for specific reporting projects and I was happy to write Laura a letter of recommendation for the Neiman fellowship which partly put them in the predicament of needing to raise money to bring others onboard.

2. I didn’t actually contribute to the campaign at first – and that pained me. But after 4+ years of Spot.Us I have committed to curbing my philanthropic gifts to journalism. And again – this post is not about the specific campaign – but what I thought it symbolized. I was always confident they’d get their support.

To start: Kudos again to the Amico’s. Since the day I first met Chris at a pre-HacksHackers type meetup at the San Jose Mercury News I co-chaired called “CopyCamp” – I could tell he was a rockstar (but we all know the real brains behind the operation – Laura). And Kudos to Laura – through Spot.Us (to a small degree) and now Kickstarter to a bigger degree she is able to keep her passion going in a very legit way.

But there are the two major things that come to mind when I see their success. I probably sound like a Johnyy-Come-lately with the first point because David Carr already pointed it out and linked to a recent post from Alan Mutter that did an even better job. I read that Alan Mutter post and it hit a sore spot for me. I’m on the board of a few nonprofits now. I was neck deep in that space for several years. I can relate to the pain of not getting a grant and seeing larger, well funded organizations, that aren’t necc. doing the most interesting things or are even for-profits get a red carpet.

I never did write much about the interactions I had with folks in the philanthropic world. I obviously need to put a disclaimer that Spot.Us was funded by the Knight Foundation – but now that I’ve left Spot.Us you can decide for yourself if I have “skin in the game” or not (I am currently working at a for-profit startup):

But I will say – Knight is far and above the most transparent, accessible and open minded journalistic philanthropy organization I encountered (they funded me when I was a 25 year old kid with a crazy idea … I like to think I made good on that grant). Most other philanthropic journalism organizations are missing the boat and the proof is in the pudding. I am not surprised Homicide Watch got nothing but closed doors. So did Spot.Us (I have interesting stories and anecdotes to share here) with most other philanthropic organizations. And I think they should take heat for that and funding other (un-named) projects that might do great journalism – but are trying to spit into a content hole the size of the Grand Canyon.

So Point One: There is a problem when a project like Homicide Watch can’t seem to get its footing via traditional philanthropy. An excellent counter-point here is J-lab’s Jan Schaffer on the difficulty in selecting where philanthropic money goes. I also know this first-hand having been a judge for past Knight News Challenge contests. But therein lay the point! Knight Foundation (and J-lab which was Knight Funded) both had OPEN applications and an accountable judging process. Most philanthropic outfits require you to KNOW somebody, their grant proposal lingo, etc before you can really be taken seriously.

Point Two in What HW represents for me: More than Matter, more than Narratively, more than any other journalism project I’ve seen on Kickstarter this Homicide Watch campaign hones in on part of the vision I always had for Spot.Us.

Homicide Watch is local. It’s original reporting and it’s about stories that might otherwise go untold. And these aren’t trivial stories – these are people’s lives.

Perhaps it’s because I associate the Amico’s with Public Media – Homicide Watch to me represents a potential future vision for Public Media. In truth, I don’t even know if they are nonprofit. But it doesn’t matter to me. They are certainly producing journalism in the public interest.

Public Media and crowdfunding: I’ve gone on rants about this publicly and probably in my blog. So I really don’t want to go on a tangent about it now. But this simply is GOING to happen. It’s not a question of “if.” Public Media will be caught with their pants down if they don’t start preparing for this future.

This is different from a pledge drive. So that infrastructure doesn’t prepare them. There is transparency and participation about where money goes in crowdfunding. There is a goal and a sense of what happens at the end of that goal. Moreover – the impact of crowdfunding (Point #2) is directly proportional to the relationship public media currently has with large classic philanthropy (point #1) – the kind where you need to sit down, have lunch, schmooze to get very large checks. All activities that seemed closed to me at Spot.Us 99% of the time and probably felt closed to the Amico’s at HW.

The real question is: Will Public Media be smart enough to own its own means of crowdfunding or if it will need to rely on third party platforms? 

American Public Media now owns Spot.Us. How and what they do with it – if they take advantage of it is out of my hands. But I guarantee this – they WILL do crowdfunding in the future. All Public Media entities will.

While I have been railing about this for close to 4 years – for some reason I think the attention and success of Homicide Watch, again because of the nature of what they do and the players involved, timing, etc, might signal that future more than anything else in recent memory. Public Media – I KNOW you are paying attention. This combined with 99% invisible campaign MUST get your attention about how crowdfunding (not Kickstarter, IndieGoGo or any other company) can change what you do. If you want to leave it to the third party companies – you can. But as a citizen – I prefer you own your own means of revenue. Get thee to a hackery! The good news – it’s not rocket science.

For now – I am going to break my commitment to not giving anymore small donations to chip in at Homicide Watch (just don’t tell my wife!) – I personally am thrilled to see what HW does in the next year. But more than the success of their campaign – I hope it lights a fire in two worlds: Traditional philanthropy to question the values they use to decide who is in/out of their world and scope. And the world of Public Media – to question if/how the audience can/should participate in programming when they contribute funds.