What a Failed Media Startup Can Teach Us About Involving Readers in Reporting

Huge Value in Local Knowledge

The idea of opening a file has a certain charm to it. Digital files were supposed to accumulate knowledge as readers added links, comments, photos, videos and documents about issues in their communities. On good days, that’s exactly how OpenFile worked. Using postal codes as geolocators, readers in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Halifax and Ottawa could open files and readers who lived close by could add information. If the story ticked the usual editorial boxes for a good story, an editor would assign the file to a reporter.

Right away, OpenFile found “huge value” in local knowledge that the legacy media were missing, said Wilf Dinnick, OpenFile’s founder. Reporters also started off further ahead in their reporting. “We had contacts, direct emails and a whole bunch of information,” Dinnick said.

Once a file was opened it never closed. Journalists were encouraged to update their stories, make corrections transparently and even publish stories before they were finished. Lorax B Horne, a journalist for OpenFile in Halifax, described each story as “a link in the chain that could keep linking forward in time,” eventually building an “archive of local news knowledge that could grow over time.”

These reader-initiated stories disrupt the traditional media model for telling stories. At stage one of the model, a single person opens a file. In OpenFile’s case, this person is usually someone who is highly engaged in their community, educated and media-savvy. Once that person opens a file, they have an incentive to share it with others (stage two), including stakeholders who are less engaged but might add their own ideas to the file. OpenFile’s main contribution occurs at the model’s third stage where a local issue is transformed into a story that is relevant to a wider audience. The hope is that some of the people in the third stage will move to the first stage and start the process over again. If each stage works together, “you end up with a really effective model,” Dinnick said.

Story Stages: OpenFile’s submission process for its reader-initiated stories. Image: Screenshot

In traditional journalism practice, a journalist and/or their editor decides what the story will be and then shares it with the wider community. “Very often, the story that you start with at the beginning of the day looks a lot like the one you end up with in the newsroom,” Dinnick said. When that model is flipped on its head, stories that sometimes seem ridiculous reveal themselves as important.

“We learned that we shouldn’t dismiss (a story) just because it’s not articulated in a way that we would as journalists,” said Dinnick.

Many OpenFile alumni point to the 204 Beech story as an early sign of success. It began with a 100-year-old cottage on a large lot in The Beach neighborhood on Toronto’s east side. (Note: the site content wasn’t archived, so it’s not possible to point to links.) Geoff Teehan, co-founder of digital agency Teehan+Lax and now a product design director at Facebook, had purchased the property a few months before. He planned to demolish the house and build a new one that could accommodate his wife, who had been diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder that required her to use a wheelchair. They were about to apply for a building permit when the neighbors got wind that the property would be destroyed and claimed that the house had historical value and shouldn’t be changed.

Jon Lax, the co-founder of Teehan+Lax, opened a file on 204 Beech and had the first story in his inbox a week later. OpenFile was “super responsive,” said Lax. “It was reassuring to know that someone was paying attention. Having a third party say ‘this is important enough to talk about’ is pretty important.”

Josh O’Kane, the reporter assigned to the file, ended up covering 204 Beech for most of the summer, culminating in a story that illustrated a wider problem in the city’s heritage department. O’Kane obtained city-staff correspondence showing that the department was understaffed with a sole employed researcher at the time who could review contested buildings, proving Teehan’s point that the heritage department was “in dire need of a makeover.”

Because the OpenFile editorial team refused to drop the issue and continued to devote resources to its investigation, O’Kane was able to write a local story that highlighted a city-wide problem that transcended the standard Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) debate. “It showed me there is no story too small to keep in contact with people because you never know if that story has another thread that you could be writing about,” he said.

Lax credits the website’s design and the quick response of editor in chief, Kathy Vey, for his positive experience with OpenFile. Without such a simple process, Lax doubts he would have known how to suggest a story to a journalist. While he is aware that other news organizations include “suggest a story” forms on their websites, he’s thinks it would be difficult to find, and that it might lead to an unmonitored inbox. Even if the reporter had come to a different conclusion, Lax said he still would have considered the story a success because the system worked as he thought it should.

Craig Silverman, the digital journalism director who helped launch OpenFile, remembers the 204 Beech experience as “exhilarating.” It was one of the first times OpenFile saw the full potential of its model: people were coalescing around a geographic area, and the people who lived in the neighbourhood wanted to know more and contribute to the reporting. They also wanted to see the story spread outside of the community, proving that the more people you involve in your journalism, the bigger your network becomes. “We felt like, if a lot of the stories we did were like this, then OpenFile would be a really powerful thing,” said Silverman.

Ron Tite, a creative director and now CEO of ad agency Church+State, was the reader behind another successful story in 2012. At the time, Tite lived near Liberty Village, an up-and-coming neighborhood on Toronto’s west side that was becoming well known for its trendy bars, cafes and creative residents. The only problem was the abattoir where thousands of pigs came to be slaughtered each day. The stench that wafted from the building on a humid summer’s day was enough to make people nauseous. Ron wondered why the city would promote urban development in a neighborhood that housed something so horrible. So he opened a file.

Tite received a phone call from an OpenFile reporter and heard from Mike Layton, the city councillor for his ward, who reiterated the city’s perspective on the abattoir. From the OpenFile story, Tite learned that the slaughterhouse was the only downtown employment opportunity for many of the people who had lived in the neighborhood for decades — long before he and his trendy neighbors had arrived.

Tite found himself sharing the story with his community and explaining the value of the abattoir whenever he heard someone complain about its smell. More importantly, he said, the experience “took the blinders off” and gave him a greater appreciation for the place he lived. “I didn’t know anything about the large immigrant population that lived in the area and worked (at the abattoir),” Tite said. “There was this whole section of the community that I was willing to write off because of a smell.”

Other OpenFile Stories of Note

• Forever21 Comes to Ottawa: A reader in Ottawa asked why a storefront in an Ottawa mall had been closed for so long. An OpenFile reporter called the general manager of the mall who told her it was going to become a Forever21 store. OpenFile broke the story before Forever21 had a chance to make its announcement, making it one of the bureau’s most popular stories.
• BikeFile: The city of Toronto released statistics on cyclist deaths in the city, and OpenFile decided to portray the problem nationally using an interactive map. Some cities wouldn’t release their data, so OpenFile asked readers to fill in the gaps in their communities.
• The Missing Poppy: OpenFile placed poppies on a map of Toronto to show where soldiers lived before they fought and died in World War I. A reader wrote in to say that her uncle was missing from the map, leading OpenFile to publish a story about a soldier whose life was almost erased from the public ledger.

Problems in the Pipeline

J-Source recognized Dinnick as Canadian Newsperson of the Year in January 2012 for “engaging citizens with local, public service journalism in an independent environment, without the backing or safety net of working within an established news organization.”

But while OpenFile was celebrating its journalistic successes, the company was still trying to figure out how to make money. OpenFile started with several million dollars in investment from an anonymous angel investor. By Dinnick’s calculations it cost a newspaper about $1,000 to print a story. He hoped to produce stories for slightly less and sell them back to the newspapers for a profit. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get it off the ground fast enough to keep OpenFile running.

In September 2012, OpenFile suspended publication. Today, it only exists as a homepage and a Twitter account frozen in time.

These are the three key engagement lessons we think can be gleaned from OpenFile’s sudden departure from the Canadian media scene.

Openfile Takeaway #1: Know What You Are

Before you can ask for a moment of someone’s time, be they a source, a volunteer or a colleague, figure out exactly what you want to achieve and build an organization that is powerfully designed to make it happen.

If he could do it again, Dinnick said he would have spent the first few months focusing on how to make the user flow intuitive — before raising any money — and then he would have sold that product to other media companies. “It would be all about utility: getting the OpenFile widget on to as many news websites as possible, and nailing down the user flow to make sure that anybody can suggest a story,” said Dinnick. That’s not to say that the editors and journalists weren’t providing value for the company and the community, he said. But producing stories pulled focus away from OpenFile’s true intention, which was to improve community engagement and get those stories into the world as efficiently as possible.

Openfile Takeaway #2: Community Engagement is a Full-time Job

Be realistic about the amount of resources that community engagement requires and measure success based on what you are trying to achieve (see the first takeaway). The struggle to find a revenue stream pushed OpenFile to focus on clicks to attract ad dollars. At some point, OpenFile started to shift into something different, said Neal Ozano, Halifax editor. It wanted to be “this community-minded thing,” but it also wanted to be competitive with other media outlets, he said. That meant content needed to be pumped out daily, which didn’t fit the speed at which community-suggested stories evolved. Editors were trying their best to drum up story ideas from the community, but they were also busy assigning stories, editing them and interacting with readers on social media.

Eventually, it became apparent that it would be impossible to forge strong community connections with only one editor in each city, so OpenFile hired additional editors for each city and a community editor in Toronto who was responsible for social media outreach. But even with the new hires, founding editor Silverman said OpenFile asked too much of its editors and writers.

“I think a lot of news organizations have realized that community engagement is a full-time job,” said Silverman. If you’re going to expect journalists to engage with the community, you have to appreciate that it takes effort and certain skills. Editors need to figure out ways to help journalists do this type of work, perhaps by forming teams that can buttress the amount of work that is required, he said.

It’s also important for editors to be realistic about output, said Silverman. If editors only focus on the number of stories that a journalist produces they are ignoring other important indicators, like the amount of engagement that a community has around that journalist’s work. The infrastructure of managing and rewarding community engagement properly is “the big thing” that editors and managers need to think about, said Silverman.

Openfile Takeaway #3: Meet Your Audience Where They Are

Identify your audience and go to the places where they hang out, both online and in person. Keep in mind that this takes a lot of time (see the second takeaway) so be thoughtful about how you use your resources.

“We underestimated just how hard it would be to attract new readers and new story ideas. I found that social media and word-of-mouth weren’t nearly enough for what I was trying to do in Toronto, which I hoped they would be,” said David Topping, OpenFile’s Toronto editor.

It’s not necessarily the case that if you build it, they will come. “There’s a step before they find your publication that you might be incredibly disconnected from,” said Topping. Silverman added: “It’s not that people don’t want to help or don’t have enough useful information — but you have to make an effort to reach them where they are.”

Consequently, the people who were finding OpenFile’s website were only a subset of the audience that editors hoped to reach: mainly engaged, educated and media-savvy people who had the time and interest to suggest a story. That made it more likely that OpenFile would receive a certain type of story idea, making it into an urban issues website rather than a broader news site that gave underserved communities a platform.

The reader-suggested stories that OpenFile did produce had the ability to “foster an understanding and caring for the places that people live,” Topping said. Done well, those stories also produced empathy and engagement for the journalistic process. But in the end, OpenFile couldn’t maintain the flow of reader-suggested stories that it needed to sustain the site. “For a while (story suggestions) came in, then they sort of petered out,” said Halifax editor Ozano. It became easier to run the website like a regular news site and push freelancers to find more stories.

As for journalists who want to integrate community engagement into their work, Silverman’s advice is simple: “Introduce yourself with a sense of openness and humility and say ‘you know more than I do. Here’s what I want to try. Here’s how I would love it if you could help. What might you be able to do?’” It’s not about throwing up a form and expecting magical things to happen, but actually doing the work to get out there in front of people and meet them.

Some of the people we spoke to describe an OpenFile-shaped hole in journalism that has never been filled. Others are more optimistic that new companies like Hearken have stepped in to fill the gap and journalists are becoming more engaged with their audiences on social media and through live events. Regardless of its mark on the media landscape, OpenFile proves that communities have untold stories they are eager to share and that journalists work with them successfully when they’re given resources to engage with readers in prolonged, sustainable ways.

Jessica Best, Emily Goligoski, Leon Postma and Jay Rosen contributed to this post, which first appeared on the Membership Puzzle’s website. The post is cross-posted here with permission.

Ashley Renders is a video producer at the National Post. Previously she was an associate producer at VICE Canada where she helped to produce a digital news and culture show called Daily VICE. Before that, she was the assistant editor and senior writer at Corporate Knights magazine, and was a Global Journalism Fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs in 2014.