It Wasn't Supposed To Be a Placeblog: George Johnson on Buffalo Rising

It wasn't supposed to be a placeblog.

Buffalo Rising Magazine was a small-run hyperlocal quarterly begun by Newell Nussbaumer in 2002. Newell and I have known each other since 5th grade and when I came back home to visit family in late 2005, I came across a copy of the magazine and made it a point to tell him how much I liked it. The book used a compelling mix of pro/am content to cover New Buffalo-the parts of the city on the comeup as well as the activists, entrepreneurs, politicians, developers, business and cultural leaders who were responsible for the increasing number of positive developments in Buffalo.

Newell was just about to have a website for the magazine designed and asked if I'd attend a meeting and share ideas. I'd been away for almost 10 years and most of my time was spent helping to grow a small internet professional services firm and managing the creative services part of the business after it was acquired by a large advertising holding company. The opportunity to work on something small, something I cared about personally (my best friend's magazine about the city I'm from and love) and to experiment in media as opposed to my usual diet of marketing work was enough to make me extend my visit by a few days.

The deeper we got into the design of the magazine site, the longer the features list got and the more involved the design became, we realized this was well beyond the scope of a long-weekend project. We knew we wanted to extend the magazine's voice online though, and we didn't want to wait months to do it. So one night, after a volume of wine dwarfed only by the number of hours spent earlier that day designing, we thought we'd give blogging a try.

Before that night though, we were longtime fans of blogs, specifically ones that understood that the medium was all about conversation-a conversation between author and reader, author and commenter, commenter and commenter. We wanted ours to be a conversation among writers for the magazine-a chance for readers to see what those writers spoke about in between issues and an opportunity to engage in that dialogue and perhaps shape what those writers wrote.

It turned into something else completely.

While some of the writers for the magazine contributed, the blog was effectively a chance for Newell and I to talk about cool things in our city-cultural events, cool neighborhood initiatives and real estate development. And to our complete surprise, people started to not just pay attention, but to engage in a dialogue with us. On it's best days, the discussion on Buffalo Rising was like a great cocktail party: memes we started were picked up and extended and expanded and debated. In posts about real estate, brokers, property owners, developers and investors had conversations that lead to offline commerce. Controversial civic and neighborhood issues were debated ardently and Buffalo Rising became the forum for issues from governance to the built environment to development to whether restaurant bars should have tvs and the ethics of foie gras.

Feeding it and moderating was the most fun we'd ever had and it was then that we decided that we wanted to figure out how to scale this effort so that we could have even more fun making it the cornerstone of the kind of local media we'd consume (and interact with).

We wanted to make local media for other people like us-and members of the community we'd helped build online. We don't read local newspapers. We don't seek local news. The important stuff finds its way to us. We're much more intrigued by broad local conversations about a bunch of different things (conventional local news being a radical subset).

And so we put the online magazine idea to bed and came up with a list of functions and features for our ideal platform (a product we call Downtown) for making local social media-ways to not just better serve local online communities and the conversations, but ways of offering practical utility to local audiences. We also thought of how to reinvent the magazine to serve the online, at the same time being of unique value to readers-and how to do it with greater frequency and with greater reach more profitably.

So we set up a corporate entity (Hyperlocal Media), put together a business plan, pitched it to a few local investors, found an angel who not only provided a round of financing, but also used his business expertise to help us evolve our plan. We completed that round of financing in July of 2006.

Since then, we've been able to bring on some folks to help us scale our effort: designers, developers, sales reps and writers. Buffalo Rising Magazine, which was previously a quarterly publication of 15,000 copies, is now a monthly tabloid of 75,000 copies with a significant ad hole and distribution throughout the city and in select locations throughout its affluent suburbs. We've been developing a new online platform, the beta version of which presently serves our first effort outside of Buffalo: Until Monday. Until Monday will be a series of placeblogs in urban destinations written by tuned-in locals for other residents and travelers who want to visit as if they lived there. Until Monday's first instance is Brooklyn and the site is about to get a pretty significant upgrade, a few additional contributors as well as a companion-Until Monday: Toronto.

We're also preparing to move into our new office in February-the 4th floor of a reclaimed warehouse in Buffalo's Cobblestone District after working out of coffee shops and living rooms for months. Soon, Buffalo Rising will migrate to the new Downtown platform with a few cool and potentially disruptive features up its sleeves. And after a few more instance of Until Monday go live, instances we're planning/preparing now, we'll experiment with what we hope will be a pretty cool accompanying print product. We're also playing around with the idea of hyperlocal verticals and other microbrands-just a bunch of ways to keep leveraging our platform and what we learn to create local media products that will hopefully become a welcome part of people's daily local lives.

Location

Buffalo, NY

United States

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