When Memoirs of a Geisha began filming at California’s Fitzgerald Naval Reserve in January, 2005, the local weekly, the Half Moon Bay Review, took note. It ran a handful of stories, including a Jan. 12 article mentioning that some local environmentalists were concerned about possible damage to the park.
Coastsider.com, a local citizen journalism site, took a different tack. On Jan. 9, it focused on the environmental concerns. An online gallery posted two days later included 100 photos showing how the film crew was using the land.
On Jan. 13, Coastsider.com also reported that the California Coastal Commission had reprimanded county officials for okaying the filming of the movie without a required permit. The Review reported those developments two weeks later, on Jan. 26.
“Coastsider is never going to be a replacement for the paper,” said the site’s owner, Barry Parr. “But I’m providing information you can’t get from them and providing it sooner.”
Although Parr started Coastsider with the intention of eliciting citizen stories, it has become mostly a one-man operation, with Parr gathering information like a journalist then posting it with a first-person perspective. For instance, he interviewed California Coastal Commission officials and learned that the county should not have waived a permit for the film crew. He supplements his own writing with community announcements and links to related stories from other media outlets.
Parr hails from the world of journalism, having worked on marketing and technology teams for the San Jose Mercury News and CNet’s News.com. At the Mercury News, he helped to develop some of the first banner ads on the Web.
He’s now a consultant living in Montara, which is on the coastal side of the San Francisco peninsula, a region of 30,000 residents between San Francisco and Santa Cruz.
“We’re surrounded by major metro dailies,” Parr said, “but the principal source of news is a weekly.” The Review, published since 1898, circulates each Wednesday to 7,500 subscribers and has a staff of about five full-time writers.
In late 2003, Parr said he began thinking about launching a news site of his own because “there was a lot of stuff not being covered in sufficient depth.”
As he assembled the site, he discovered that the tools he needed were either free or easily affordable. “I’m stunned with the quality of the software available to me,” he said. To build Coastsider, he used:
- pMachine Pro, a free open-source content management system, as the overall framework;
- BBClassified, a $30 PHP script, for classified ads;
- PHPadsnew, a free management system for other site ads;
- Gallery, free, for photo galleries;
- PHP iCalendar, free, for the calendars on each page;
- And Magpie, also free, to display RSS feeds for weather and other information.
Coastsider officially launched in June 2004. Parr initially wanted the site to be more like a community blog with residents posting their own announcements and links. But as people began e-mailing him news leads, he found himself acting more as a reporter. “While I’ve written for publication continually in my career,” he said, “I have had no reporting experience since I took journalism in high school in 1972.”
Parr now provides nearly all of Coastsider’s items and photos, although the number of posts from others, about a dozen as of January, 2005, has been gradually increasing. “I’d really like to see more people posting on the site,” he said.
But he acknowledges that while people are happy to speak from their own authority, “doing interviews is another thing entirely.”
Guidelines for posting, listed at the bottom of the site’s “About Coastsider” page, are simple: write about others the way you’d want them to write about you. Parr will edit submissions if he judges them offensive or illegal but otherwise maintains a hands-off approach. “Nobody’s really tested the limits yet,” Parr said.
Coastsider generally focuses on hard news: “eat-your-vegetables journalism,” as Parr calls it. Around the same time it covered the Geisha filming, Coastsider.com also reported on the poor condition of Half Moon Bay’s roads. In addition to linking to the county report that prompted the story, Parr ran rebuttals to the report’s findings from a city council member and a city engineer, and a list of all the stretches of road the city had improved since October 2003.
Parr tries to run as many photos as possible. He ran 50 photos of community volunteers gathered to renovate and rebuild Moss Beach Park. When he takes photos at local events, he also hands out cards with Coastsider’s URL, inviting people to visit the site and see how their pictures turned out.
Clay Lambert, editor of the Half Moon Bay Review, says he sometimes finds tips in Coastsider as he does in the area’s four other newspapers and various listservs. And he credits Coastsider with a handful of instances in which he’s gone “head-to-head” with them.
“More often it simply appears that he beats us due to the limitations of our weekly delivery. If something happens on Thursday, he is liable to have it before we do on the following Wednesday,” Lambert said.
Lambert praised Coastsider’s design, immediacy and interactivity, but said those features came with a downside. “There is no mechanism to separate important posts from the run-of-the-mill,” he said. “There are no editors. He doesn’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of, rein him in when necessary [or] provide fresh ideas.”
Coastsider currently brings in no revenue. Unlike some community sites, Coastsider doesn’t charge for classified ads. “It’s hard enough to get people to post classified ads when they’re free,” Parr said, citing competition from Craigslist, the free online juggernaut of classified advertising. Instead, he plans to sell text ads to local businesses later in 2005.
One unexpected benefit to running Coastsider, Parr says, is that he’s “much more integrated into the community. For that reason alone, I think you’ll see more people doing this, because the payback is huge.”
