Man bites dog: How hardcore policy reporting is paying the bills at a Seattle web startup (in 4 easy steps)

By Michael Andersen

Beat reporters have always had to guard against going native: seeing stories with the narrow viewpoint of your sources, sliding into jargon, getting tangled in micro-stories that matter only to insiders, losing touch with the general audience. It’s an occupational hazard. Or, at least, it was. Now it may be a funding model.

In media-rich, ahead-of-the-curve Seattle, where the general audience has been splintering for more than a decade, one of the biggest success stories has been a profane, lighthearted alt-weekly upstart called The Stranger. You likely know it best as the home of sex columnist (and editorial director) Dan Savage, but The Stranger some years back stumbled upon an unlikely niche: heavy-duty city hall coverage. Much of that work was done by The Stranger’s perennially award-winning city reporter, Josh Feit, 42.

Now Feit is looking to mimic that formula on his breezy, shamelessly wonky new online startup, Publicola. And so far, against all odds, he’s succeeding — and simultaneously helping to answer a really big question:

If databases can write tomorrow’s cops blotter and philanthropy can fund tomorrow’s big investigations, who’ll finance the day-to-day surveillance of city hall for petty corruption and bad decisions? Feit’s finding out the insiders will.

Ethically problematic? Totally! But after drawing two bursts of venture capital and a respectable stable of advertisers, a site that appeals largely to folks “in the cubicles of power” totally seems to be working, too. Working so well, in fact, that city hall and statehouse content is now subsidizing Feit’s next goal: beefing up culture coverage to create, more or less, an online-only alt-weekly.

Here’s how Feit spun insider-friendly content into gold, in four simple steps. Keep reading »