A belated eulogy for InsideTheRockies.com

A few hours after midnight on January 1 this year — I was far too tired for anything so dramatic as the stroke of midnight between 2011 and 2012 — InsideTheRockies.com, one of the first projects for America's Fish, was locked down. The site was launched two days after the Rocky Mountain News closed, an last-minute project with my Rocky colleagues Tracy Ringolsby and Jack Etkin. After three years of creating content for the site, I was not and am not prepared to shut down the site completely and prefer to leave the proof of the work we did there for now. But the site is effectively done.

My biggest concern when Jack and I — Tracy more or less moved on from the site before the 2011 season — decided a few months ago to not update the site for a fourth season in 2012 was that the end would be seen either by our fans or other observers as a failure. The site was certainly not a failure. It was not successful in providing any of us with a living income, but it paid for itself and provided a small financial incentive to keep going to see what might be ahead. It provided us all a needed transition from the Rocky and, as it turns out, our newspaper careers. And in my new career it provided me a rich testing ground for Wordpress development specifically but also how readers find and consume content generally.

The decision to shut down the site was a practical one. The site was simply taking more time than we could offer it and to take it to the next level, find a sponsor or sponsors for the site and create real income was more of a commitment than we were willing to make.

We had three good years with the site, creating a community of Colorado Rockies fans who engaged in a conversation that was generally knowledgeable and, more importantly, one that rarely sank to the depths of the comments at DenverPost.com, where the conversation is generally led by a group of readers for whom the Rockies are just something to complain about until Denver Broncos season.

Lingering lessons of the experience:

Moderating comments is a good thing
: From a legal standpoint, I have since learned that truly the best thing a website that allows comments can do is to pay no attention to them at all. Once you begin moderating, if something gets through that is libelous or infringes on copyright, a track record of deleting some comments but not others puts the website in an awkward position of explaining how the bad stuff did get through. But that hands-off approach does not make for a good reading experience. Early on at InsideTheRockies.com, comments that were openly critical of the Rocky or a specific person were taken down because they had no place on the site. Over time that led to an actual comment policy that boiled down in official language to: stay on topic and don't be an asshole. Comments were posted without moderation — except for frequent violators of the policy, who were blackisted by a number of identifying criteria — but those that violated the policy were removed. More important than that, though, was the active commenting by Jack, Tracy and myself. Our willingness to talk back or stand up for points we tried to make in our articles unquestionaly helped keep the trolls at bay. The lesson I take away is that sites that allow comments must pay attention to them and moderate them according to a published policy that is well understood by everyone who is moderating the comments. Going back to my days at the Rocky, the desire for comments, comments and more comments on stories was so strong that the policy was understood by few and often ignored by those who did know it. That's true of many news sites and the result is a missed opportunity by most newspaper websites to use commenting as a way build an online community of readers who can enrich the news.

Anyone can produce content, but journalists report: In the early days, I was primarily an overseer of the site and didn't add much of the content. By our second season, I was contributing regularly to the website. My career as a journalist had been spent happily in the background. I enjoyed my life on the desk as an editor and, while I enjoy writing, never had any particular interest in being a reporter again once I moved to the desk. My increased role at ITR was hardly one of a reporter — I rewrote press releases about transactions. My knowledge about the Rockies allowed me to fill in details here and there and occasionally speculate knowledgeably about what might or might not happen. But I did not report like Jack, who regularly created news about the minor-league organization. The average reader makes little distinction between those two tasks, but when trying to gain traction in a news world where everyone repeats what everyone else writes, that makes a huge difference. What is considered a journalist has changed, but the nature of actual reporting remains the same and increasingly rare.

A blog is not always a blog: Major League Baseball does not think much of blogs. When credentialing news organizations, MLB uses the word blog to dismiss organizations that are not actively producing news. Five years ago that may have been a useful way to distinguish between who was producing news and who was producing commentary, but that doesn't hold up any longer in a world where more and more news is reported online first or online only. Tracy, Jack and I had better access than other online-only organizations because Tracy and Jack are lifetime members of the Baseball Writers Association of America, and I was a member for brief period in the late '90s and had been credentialed previously by the team. Is what we produced, though, significantly more newsworthy than what, say, Purple Row produced at the same time? The latter is more traditionally a blog providing analysis — much of it statistical — on things that did or could happen. We produced news, more or less, but much of it was second hand as well. The substantive difference in my mind is that while we had the credentials, our website was more hobby than job. Many of the writers at Purple Row take their gigs far more seriously than I took mine. That is not to say that Purple Row should be credentialed — drawing a line between who and who shouldn't is essential because anybody can claim to be a journalist but not everyone can claim to be first and foremost a disinterested observer who will adhere to the rules of the press box and clubhouse. But the absence or presence of the word "blog" on a website does not draw that line appropriately. In the end, it was actually my lack of interest in being credentialed — I was a fan first, journalist second — was the signal that it was time to move on.

There were, of course, many more lessons from the experience, but as I made my transition from content to development those are what stand out as being relevant to my past and current professional worlds.

Three years of a website started from scratch that influenced how a signifcant number of Rockies fans view a game was a great experience and experiment, and although by August of the past couple seasons it turned into a bit of a chore I wouldn't easily trade that experience. But for the first baseball season since 1996, I will be merely a fan in 2012.