Monday, March 12, 2007

Why I don’t plan on doing business with FOX again

By Mike Orren

PEGASUS NEWS WORLD HEADQUARTERS — You may have noticed in recent days that we were running video from FOX 4 news stories on our site and that we’d switched our national news feed from Topix to Fox.

That was the just the beginning of a partnership initiated by the well-meaning folks at FOX 4. It has come to a screeching halt because of an unnamed executive at FOX corporate who doesn’t know the meaning of the word partnership.

Back in January, we were contacted by FOX 4’s VP of Creative Service John Kukla and Managing Editor Chip Mahaney about exploring a content partnership. We were excited, because we've always known there were some great synergies between what we do here at Pegasus and local TV news -- we had even engaged in some negotiations with another local station that weren’t going in a direction we liked. (“We could work with you but only if you stop linking to other news sources and stop making fun of over-the-top ice deathstorm coverage... And that Daily Show vibe needs to go -- It lowers you to the level of a mere blog”)

So Alan and I met the guys for lunch at Cuba Libre a week or so later. It was a great meeting in which it became clear that at least two people at FOX 4 "got it." They realized that even though, like us, they have a website that contains both professional journalism and blogs, we could actually increase each other's audience. They realized that their video could make more advertising money for them if it was more widely distributed on another news site. They valued "long tail," "hyperlocal" content.

Having seen my share of lone wolf innovators trapped in a corporate tomb, I maintained a healthy skepticism. But, when we reconvened with all the department heads at FOX 4, including the GM, Kathy Saunders, the song remained the same. We did some show and tell, kicked around some ideas, and agreed to meet again on with concrete plans. We did meet, and Saunders and I joked that our separately produced template agendas were identical, save for flip-flopped logos. Out of that meeting, came this list of planned initiatives, compiled by Mahaney:

Pretty heady stuff for an independent local website and a corporate-owned FOX affiliate, no?

Over phone and email, we agreed to move forward with all of the above, first hitting the low-hanging fruit at the top of the list. We got permission to pull video, weather and national headlines but no technological help in doing so. I'd refer to the method agreed upon as "hacking with permission." Our developers, perhaps our most precious limited resource, spent the better part of a week and a half studying raw code from MyFoxDFW.com and implementing it into our content management system so that even a fool like me could embed a video into a story. Along the way, we communicated with the FOX 4 team about moving ahead on replacing Accuweather on our site with their forecasts and video, something that was hard for us to automate but that was important to them. We bent over backward to create a system for weather that would be ready days after the partnership went live, last Monday.

This was, in our collective opinions, a great deal for everyone involved. They had the reach; we had the depth. We had the search engine rankings; they had video people wanted to find. We had the indie cred; they had the network cred. They could promote us to a million people at a pop; we could promote them a million times a month in little increments.

Meantime, being the paterfamilias of a young startup with less than infinite resources, I wanted the larger media and finance community to see what we were up to. I asked Kukla if we might do a joint press release. He enthusiastically agreed and I wrote a first draft.

John's response: "Wow! I love it! I'll distribute this to Kathy and Chip ASAP and we'll get on this first thing Monday. This is, in the words of rascally vice-president Cheney, "BIG-TIME!" Thank you! "

Late Monday, I got back a final version with nominal changes and the following note (link mine):

Just to be safe and respectful of those with corporate overlords, I asked if I could go ahead and circulate it to some industry folk who might not be watching House. Meantime, I'd gotten the official written go-ahead to post video to our site and we started adding Fox 4 videos to stories.

The next I heard was mid-morning on Tuesday. Apparently someone higher up the food chain needed to hear more of an explanation of what was going on. A conference call was to be held in the afternoon. Again, late in the day, I received the following from John, bold emphasis mine:

The modification discussed was to the intro language to the "Outside world" box on our homepage, language I'd originally written for our Topix feed, and had previously only modified to change the name of the providing party. It was a little flip, and was intended to underscore our commitment to local as opposed to national news.

I called John to make sure all was well and to see if I could get a pulse on the discussion with corporate. He chalked the reticence to do a release up to corporate being wary of such an unusual deal. I joked that they didn't want every blogger in the country clamoring for their video. I was disappointed, but I understood.

We discussed the modification in language on the national news box and I told him it was fine, but there was no discussion of urgency. I emailed the alteration to our developers and got word Wednesday morning that it had been changed.

Now, that didn't mean that users had seen the change. Those familiar with web development know that often changes are made piecemeal on a separate developmental site and then pushed periodically en masse to the live user, or production site.

Late Wednesday afternoon, my phone rang with Saunders and Mahaney on the other end. A vigorously unnamed FOX exec, who it was now admitted had been against the deal happening at all on the conference call about the press release had visited our site and seen that the requested text change had not yet gone into effect and unilaterally called off the whole deal. Yes, no one told us that the request was critical. No, there was no explaining that. No, there was no chance of reasoning, discussing or even learning who had cut the deal off at the nub. No, no part of the partnership could be salvaged. Everything Fox needed to come off our site and we wouldn't be working together on hyperlocal news.

The best that could be offered was "maybe give it a time interval and try again." How long? "I have no idea ... a long time."

And what of the young startup that had only hours ago told its staff to tighten their belts while longer term financial issues are worked out? The 70-odd manhours they had put into the technology to enable the partnership? The media analysts who had looked favorably on the deal and would now have questions? No answer.

Now I sympathize with the local FOX employees. My take is that they saw an opportunity for mutual benefit, ran it through the proper channels and were genuinely excited when they got approval. Then, some naysayer a couple levels up decided he was scared of this kind of collaboration and found a way to kill it. By trying to be nice and not seem like they weren't mandating that we lose our indie cool, the locals may have understated the one thing that the bigshot had keyed on and gave him the opportunity he was looking for to kill the deal. I suspect, though, that he would have found another excuse soon enough.

Meantime, we wasted two of most precious assets: time (for implementation) and buzz (from launching the partnership and having to pull it back.)

The lesson here? Maybe there is no lesson. Maybe there's just one cowboy at FOX world headquarters who doesn't like the way we smell.

But, if I had to peg something, I'd say that the lesson is one we've learned over and over, maybe this time for good:

You can wait for corporate media to "get it." You can think they have. But, in the end, corporations aren't inherently smart, even if people inside of them are. And corporations aren't inherently honorable, even if people inside them are. And those who can't see past their nose and who don't have regard for their partners will pull stunts like we just saw from Fox.

This shouldn't be new to us. We should know better. I thought I'd learned my lesson after we walked away from the bait-and-switch offer Belo put in front of us to take control of our company before we launched. We were tempted, but couldn't do it, fearing that even if there were people who wanted to give our model a chance and use it as a laboratory, the corporation couldn't help but try to kill us, even if we were an internal enemy to the status quo.

This Little Company is at its best when it is flying the jolly roger. We work and play well with others, but apparently mainly those others that, like us, are on the outside. This episode thoroughly re-taught me that lesson, one that I won't soon forget. That's not to say that we can't work with big corporations -- we just can't until we look the people who pull the pursestrings in the eye and they tell us that they, too, believe. And probably even then, we wouldn't be safe unless they had a financial stake in our success.

One other thing is clear to me: We will, sooner rather than later, eat these larger media corporations for lunch, unless they learn how to behave in a world of distributed media. Granted, that's the larger "we." I can't guarantee that Pegasus News will be The One, or one of the ones to pull it off. We've grown more quickly than you could have ever imagined with fewer resources than you waste in an afternoon. The "people formerly known as the audience" are mobile and transient and will abandon their old media habits without prejudice -- perhaps worse, without even realizing they have done so. Blogs, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, RSS, Flickr: how many had you heard of a few years ago? These and others have disrupted the hell out of media in general, but have had less of an impact on local media. That's changing, and fast. We thought we'd found a Big Media company that was ready to embrace that, rather than shrinking from it. I'm disappointed that we were wrong about that.

Related stories

• SMU journalism students cover presidential primaries for Fox 4/KDFW (Jan. 7, 2008)

See more stories in:

• The Media > Broadcast Media
• The Media > Online Media

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