Last week I spoke with John Hawbaker, the Publisher of Chattarati, the Chattanooga, TN-based news and opinion blog. I found John to be an incredibly impressive, interesting individual, and I was especially impressed by his ability to effectively work with others to build a vibrant, relevant, important hyperlocal blog. Like Tom Bridge and his collaborators at We Love DC, Hawbaker understands that when it comes to comprehensive news coverage, it takes a village to raise a hyperlocal blog. Of course, once you spend some time reading Chattarati, you know that Hawbaker and Chattarati’s entire talented team of volunteers understand a whole lot more than just basic teamwork. Here are just a few of the lessons we learned this week.
The Chattarati crew relaxing at their Happy Birthday Happy Hour. Photo courtesy of Flickr user danielryan.
It Takes a Village
I don’t think it’s possible to do something like this alone. You need a great team. From day one, Chattarati has been a team effort. It’s very collaborative. When we launched we had a crew of 5-6 core people, most of whom still write with us today. – John Hawbaker
It Takes Creativity
Chattarati started as a really small, simple idea. I work [in] downtown [Chattanooga], and it’s been changing a lot. I wanted to start a daily photo blog to capture, visually, how the city is changing. I started thinking about it more and talking to friends, and we realized: ‘Something’s missing from the media scene here – a blog about Chattanooga.’ That’s how we started. We started talking about it in April, 2008 and we launched in July, 2008. – JH
It Takes Humility
As we got into more original [reporting and] writing, we realized how many things we didn’t know. That’s really become a strength: we try to learn as much as we can [about a topic], then we try to explain what we’ve learned to our readers. You have to know what you don’t know – and we’ve started to learn that. - JH
It Takes Curiosity
I love it when I get to write a story when I get to learn a lot. I wrote about a local grant program for local food producers, for instance, so I actually got to go and talk to people who are growing the food that we eat. That’s a rewarding experience for me – and then I get to help explain it to the reader so they can learn the same thing. [Since helping to found Chattarati,] I’ve learned a lot more about the area, its history, the people. – JH
It Takes Leadership
Editor-in-Chief David Morton has really led by example, especially when it comes to beat reporting. His coverage of city hall, and the recent budget controversy, is top-notch. He spent hours and hours going through the proposed budget so he could explain it, and its implications, to our readers. He’s also developing a style guide so we can maintain consistent standards throughout the publication.
And there’s a lot more management or facilitation involved than we ever would have imagined. I work a lot with the writers on developing and refining story ideas, and David works with them to edit articles and get them ready for publishing. We work together on planning coverage, and we host a biweekly writers meeting to help keep all our contributors on the same page. – JH
It Takes Resources
We all have full-time jobs. A lot of us work as writers, or in marketing or communications or something like that. I stay really busy, for sure. Any real work that I get done is at night, after my kids go to bed. I can call someone at lunch, but a lot of the time [communication is done] via email, or it’s research online. A lot of the other guys [at Chattarati] have similar arrangements. I spend probably 2-3 hours a night [on Chattarati], so I would say 15 hours a week is a pretty easy estimate. I think one of the biggest challenges is simply time [management] and not having a great deal of financial resources. We’re totally bootstrapped. – JH
It Takes Ingenuity
Our CMS [which we developed] is called PressWorks. It’s built on the Django framework. We started bumping up on some limitations with WordPress, and there were some things we wanted to simplify. The way PressWorks is organized is that it allows us to publish a collection of blogs as one site. Each of the categories on our site [i.e. Metro, Editorial, Culture, Neighborhoods, etc.] is a blog of its own. They have their own editors. Over time, each of those blogs will develop it’s own community feel. It’s very easy to use. Eventually, we’re going to release PressWorks for other publishers to use. – JH
It Takes Vision
We started our company [The PressCore, Inc.] not only to publish Chattarati, but also to develop products that solve common problems facing online publishers. The first is OnLocation, our live blogging app, which is in private beta. OnLocation allows for multiple authors, and the live blog feed can be integrated into any website, so it doesn’t look like a plugin, it looks like you. It’s built on the Tornado framework so it’s fast and scalable. We’ve used it for live blogging recent elections in Tennessee – it also has a mobile admin interface, so we were live blogging from our phones a the victory parties. We feel like we can get our products out there and grow the company. – JH
It Takes Passion
I think you have to have passion, first of all. You have to care about your topic, you have to care about where you live and the people there. Our real goal is to help inform people so they can be engaged and active in civic life, whether that’s involvement in the political process or it’s giving them a good framework about what’s going on culturally. That’s the ultimate goal. – JH
