By Nathan Alderman, J-Lab Online Editor
For citizens of Fredricksburg, Va., FredTalk.com is a place to gather online for discussions about current events and just about everything else.
For reporters at the local newspaper, the Free Lance-Star, which runs FredTalk, the Web-based bulletin boards have an even greater value: they’ve become a useful source for news leads.
For Chris Muldrow, the paper’s director of Internet, FredTalk.com demonstrates how an initial experiment with online discussion forums has reinvented itself as a vibrant community site, based on topical message boards.
Muldrow first launched online discussion forums in 2000 at Fredericksburg.com. “It didn’t turn out very well,” he recalled.
His team had better luck with a second try in late May, 2002. The new FredTalk.com debuted just as news broke of a sensational double murder with local ties. Erika Sifrit had been a popular basketball star while attending college in Fredricksburg. She and her husband Benjamin, both 24, were accused of murdering an older couple in an Ocean City, Md., condominium. Local residents filled the Web-based messageboards to discuss the Sifrits’ individual murder trials and eventual convictions, and an online community coalesced.
FredTalk.com now includes 7,200 registered users with dozens of new members joining each month. More people visit the boards without registering: “If you have 10 (registered) people logged on,” Muldrow said, “you might have 50 (unregistered) people ‘lurking.’” He estimates that 700 of FredTalk’s users are regular, active participants. The boards run on UBB, inexpensive Web bulletin-board software from infopop.com.
The boards are divided into 60 sub-communities by topics, from Crime to Teens, from Trading Post to FUG (FredTalk Users Group) Events. The Hot Seat section hosts community conversations on such issues as politics, morality and religion.
FredTalk is the most popular area of the Fredricksburg.com Web site, attracting one-fourth of all Fredricksburg.com users, Muldrow said. “It’s grown by word of mouth so much that we don’t really need to worry about marketing.” Banners and text-based ads help FredTalk some of its expenses. Muldrow estimates the site costs $1,000 a month for monthly salary, labor and hosting. “My gut is that (FredTalk) pays for itself through traffic to the rest of the site,” he said, “but I think there is more potential for revenue.”
Discussions about adding Web-only classified ads to FredTalk are currently underway. “Our model for real revenue has been an ongoing argument/discussion with the print side of things,” Muldrow said.
Meanwhile, FredTalk is showing its value in other ways. “What we say around the [newspaper] is that we can no longer break a story – it’ll show up on FredTalk first,” Muldrow said. He says that about a fourth of all the paper’s reporters visit FredTalk regularly.
“For breaking news, you just can’t beat it,” Muldrow said, adding that reporters, especially for the paper’s online edition, now regularly find leads through posts on the FredTalk boards or via direct e-mails from FredTalk members. In one case, Muldrow said, “A store clerk started a thread about seeing a parent borderline-abusing a child in her store and asking what she should do to respond.” As a result, he said, “Brian Baer, who’s now the editor of Fredericksburg.com, wrote a story about what police/authorities suggest doing in such a situation.”
Aside from a basic set of rules – be respectful, don’t harass others, avoid obscenity – Muldrow, Baer and online producer Alex Russell take a mostly hands-off approach to FredTalk’s content. “The communities (on the boards) can decide what’s acceptable and will self-police,” he said. Muldrow and his team, who are also responsible for the Fredricksburg.com Web site and the Free Lance-Star’s printed telephone directory, spend two to three hours each day monitoring and tending to the boards. They often work in cycles, actively participating in discussions for a few weeks and then backing off for a while to let the community manage itself. “You basically make it known that you’re around and keeping an eye open,” Muldrow said.
As FredTalk continues to grow, Muldrow hopes to find even more uses for the site. His next project: seeing if people are willing to buy, sell and trade items through the FredTalk messageboards. “I actually got a clawfoot bathtub from someone on FredTalk,” Muldrow said. “That kind of commerce is going on right now.”
“We went in with the goal of increasing (site) traffic,” Muldrow said. “We’re seeing now that’s not the only barometer of success.”
