So after four-plus years of crowdsourcing and curating Chicago news stories, Windy Citizen is shutting its virtual doors. Founder Brad Flora explained why in a post on the site (reposted above; Poynter offers some context): “The internet is a lot different today than it was just over 4 years ago when I started Windy Citizen…Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Everyblock, these sites do a great job of keeping people up to date on what’s happening in the communities they care about.”
Probably the most telling part of the sign-off was the contact info at the end: brad@nowspots.com. Given the early success of his new project, NowSpots – a real-time, social media-fueled ad service – it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Brad would focus his energy where it would have the most return.
While it’s fair to say that Windy Citizen no longer provided a unique, essential service (and its revenue apparently reflected that), there’s no doubt it was difficult to let go of this baby after all the time he put into it. It’s a brave, and all too rare, move to recognize when it’s time to cut your losses and move on to the next challenge, but it’s not surprising. This kind of thinking is much in line with what I experienced while working with Brad and his team for a short time in 2010.
Windy Citizen stirred up the local ecosystem when it first burst onto the scene, drawing attention partly due to a desire to cultivate new voices and a willingness to play with new platforms (the site was an early adopter of Twitter, for one). Though the idea – user-submitted stories that could be voted and commented on by the community – was not new, the hyperlocal focus was. It was an outlet for news-obsessed citizens to engage with stories that directly affected them, in ways that traditional news outlets didn’t really offer. From the democratized front page (where you’d get pushback for a vague or misleading headline) to the homegrown blogs, it truly felt community-driven, rather than a community tacked on to a commercial entity. At times the discussion could be a little insular and snarky (did I mention the site was full of local media members?) but that would change as the population expanded – and compared to the daily mosh pits in the Tribune and Sun-Times comment sections, Windy Citizen’s threads felt almost academic.
During my short time as the site’s community editor, I learned a lot about how to build and maintain a strong community (in a nutshell: understand the audience, communicate like a real person, and elevate the best stuff), launch new content products and, perhaps most importantly, how to change the game plan when something’s not working. I tried out more things there in four months than I had over the previous couple of years, because brainstorming and risk-taking were encouraged. Crucially, along with that encouragement came challenging questions – How will that work? What makes it special? – that pushed weak ideas out and improved stronger ones (I’m still not sure where Mayoral Mad-Libs falls).
Obviously, not everything went according to plan, but those lessons have some serious staying power, and I don’t think I was the only one who learned something from the whole Windy Citizen experiment. Beyond all its content contributions, the site pushed both news producers and consumers to think a little differently about engaging with stories, and for that alone I think it has to be considered a success.
