22Local Featured in Planet Jackson Hole News

As published in Planet Jackson Hole:

Jackson Hole, Wyo.—Nearly a year ago, a number of Jackson Hole residents noticed a story about an aggressive skier atop Teton Pass, who allegedly yanked a fellow backcountry user out of his way. A reporter became intrigued when, out skiing the pass, he discovered an unusual second boot-pack up Mount Glory, marked “express.” His investigation lead him to the report of a snowboarder getting “turtled,” or pulled from the trail by a tug on the equipment on his back.

Jim Stanford, the reporter who uncovered the incident, also reflected on the divisive aspect of two separate trails, publishing a mixture of reporting and personal analysis on his blog, JH Underground. What followed was one of that website’s most widely followed posts to-date, with 3,200 page views and nearly 60 comments submitted by readers.

One reader, who identified himself only as “Chris,” claimed he had in fact been the one pushed from the trail and identified his affronter—a locally known, sponsored skier. The tenor of the online discussion quickly heated. Some rushed to defend the alleged trail hog, while others strongly condemned that sort of behavior in a place that, as Stanford pointed out, belongs to no one. Much of the reader discussion relied on certain assumptions about what can be verified when people are allowed to comment more or less anonymously (JHUnderground, like many blogs, requires readers to submit a name and email address before commenting, though this does not always prevent fraudulent entires).

“A fierce community debate exploded,” recalled Stanford recently. “I was the person who provided entrée into the discussion, but then everybody else chimed in. For the first time in Jackson Hole, people really learned what a blog is.”

Although the heated discussion mostly occurred back in January and February of this year, a recent visit to the post, titled “Rush Hour on Teton Pass,” revealed someone had commented on the story as recently as Dec. 3. This indicates the sort of longevity some posts can have, even on an obscure blog with little appeal outside of Jackson Hole. For Stanford, a writer and photographer who once reported for the News & Guide, JH Underground is a way to exercise his writing abilities. He also uses it as a calling card and way to help drum up freelance assignments.

But JH Underground, which may have left at least one milestone in Jackson Hole’s new media evolution, is just one of the websites looking to secure a dominant place in the emerging blogosphere of locally produced content. A growing, but practically unknowable, number of individuals and organizations use blogs to document life, news, opinion, business, entertainment and more in and around Jackson Hole. Yet, only a handful of bloggers involved so far are hungry enough. Some of them are content to cultivate a larger audience, locally, while others aspire to cash in on Jackson Hole’s natural attributes and global allure to attract more viewers from around the world.

While many of the country’s larger newspaper organizations have been hit hard during the electronic reformation of media, small community papers in general seem poised—current economic crisis notwithstanding—to weather the storm. A recent study released by the Suburban Newspapers of America, which tracks community newspaper trends, stated that overall ad revenue for that organization’s membership had dropped just 2.4 percent in the second quarter of 2008 from the same period the year before. This was trumpeted by some industry watchers as a victory for small newspapers, particularly in light of bleaker news from the Newspaper Association of America, which represents the larger $55 billion newspaper industry as a whole, and reported an ad revenue plunge of 13 percent over the same period.

The effects of a worsening recession is expected to continue to hit Jackson Hole’s second home and tourist economies, and some local businesses will brace for lean times in part by cutting advertising budgets. Despite this, and with many businesses holding out hope for the imminent winter tourist season, the valley’s newspapers, like many of their counterparts in small communities across America, do appear safe in print—if also evolving their own online incarnations.

To what degree the robustness of Jackson Hole’s print newspapers or the idiosyncrasies of this community as a whole have precluded or fostered new media is anyone’s guess. But some local bloggers wonder about the valley’s capacity for new media and just how many local websites this small community can buoy. When David Gonzales launched The Snaz in early 2006, he believed he could generate dollars through ad revenue. One of the first blogs of its kind in Jackson Hole, The Snaz quickly gained enough exposure to acquire an “appreciable audience,” Gonzales said.

Arguably a better artist than businessman, though, Gonzales found his website worked better as a venue to showcase his primary work—filmmaking—and also his writing and photography, which largely deal with action sports and the outdoor life.

“The blogs here do enjoy the notoriety of Jackson Hole,” Gonzales said. “It’s part of the reason we all started blogging. We thought we’d have a built-in audience.”

The big ad dollars never poured in, but The Snaz has garnered Gonzales some attention as a filmmaker and writer, and even landed him some work. “It basically allowed me to retire as a wedding photographer, but by making income indirectly, not through the site,” he said.

The obstacle to making appreciable amounts of money on blogs—or any media websites, for that matter—is that it is difficult to generate significant ad revenue, particularly for sites that mainly cater to a small local readership. When this newspaper revamped and relaunched the Planet JH website, in January 2006, it invested tens of thousands of dollars on the expectation that local ad revenue would soon follow online. That never happened. (But the upshot of the investment is a blog-style news site that allows reader comment threads and also hosts some actual blogs.)

The Jackson Hole News&Guide, meanwhile, recently began offering an “e-edition,” making the entire paper available online to paid subscribers. Some News&Guide reporters liveblogged election night coverage from Teton County headquarters.

Asked if blogging sponsorships do much to supplement primary incomes, bloggers like Stanford and Gonzales guffaw. But while the Internet’s great, the unanswered question is “How will generators of free content make money?” one Jackson Hole blogger is looking forward to quitting his day job, one of these days.

Steve Romeo began posting his backcountry ski trip reports on Teton AT when he launched the site in late 2006. His blog now receives on average about 1,000 unique visitors a day, or 50,000 page views per month, which are generated each time a user loads a single page of an Internet site. With an almost exclusive focus on backcountry skiing, Romeo has attracted readers from around the world, developing partnerships with some of the backcountry skiing industry’s top product developers along the way.

“I feel having a core focus is extremely important—it attracts a core group of advertisers,” Romeo said, explaining his relationship with each advertiser varies. “Some of them care about me posting really positively about their gear. Some of the larger companies that have contacted me say ‘You need to guarantee this many [page views featuring an ad] and when you do, you get a paycheck.'”

Romeo has the advantage of working with national and international companies with much larger budgets as advertisers, and because of this, he does not often court local businesses for their ad dollars. So might he really one day hope to leave his job as a gear authority at a local shop? “The goal is to have Teton AT support me 100 percent. I definitely see it as doable.”

If the blogs mentioned so far have skewed toward the action sports world (and even JH Underground, which occasionally breaks local news and features blogs about skiing), there is a reason why Teton AT and, to a lesser degree, The Snaz, were able to grow viewerships outside Jackson Hole so quickly: Teton Gravity Research.

The TGR website receives 4.2 million page views per month and boasts a community forum of 25,000 registered users, according to Todd Jones, part owner of the action sports film and lifestyle apparel company. Apart from being one of the industry’s top ski flick companies, TGR has built an online presence since 1997, a few years before anyone ever heard of anything called a “dot com bust.”

Exposure on TGR’s largely user-driven community forum helped launch Teton AT and The Snaz out of the limited ethers of Jackson Hole’s thin blogosphere and onto the computer screens of mountainophiles outside of Teton County.

In November, Circumerro Media, the Jackson Web design and branding firm, debuted 22 Local. Although still in a beta, or public test stage, 22 Local may be the most ambitious community website in town, one that Circumerro head Latham Jenkins hopes will portend an Internet trend beginning to transform the way communities engage themselves. It’s called “hyperlocalism”—involvement in issues down to a neighborhood level that could not be covered comprehensively even in many small town papers. Users will eventually be able to go to 22 Local, where Jackson Hole residents or those looking in from afar can go for most of the local media needs they could possibly have—including posts generated by other blogs—according to agreements with bloggers, Jenkins said, and user generated content. This would make 22 Local a kind of aggregator site, a kind of one-stop clearing house in a time when Internet users are constantly evolving the ways in which they “media snack,” Jenkins said.

“People aren’t used to participating in the news,” he said. “This is like a huge community bulletin board.”

Though Jenkins said he cut startup expenses by having the site designed in-house, he created a full-time editor position and hired Sabra Ayres, a former Planet JH editor, who has been periodically posting text and video content to the site.

Sources contacted for this story said they had not yet been approached by Circumerro and did not know 22 Local might potentially use content produced by them, though Jenkins said those arrangements will be worked out in coming months. “It’s going to be a long road,” he said.

It remains to be seen how sites like 22 Local will be able to attract what every free media outlet needs—advertisers. Jenkins, who firmly believes in the future of progressive media, said his website will attempt to connect ads to content in various ways that are still evolving. What is also unclear is how Jackson Hole residents and onlookers will shape up as “citizen journalists” actively generating content. And, what’s more, is the blogging community vibrant enough to help drive an aggregating website?

“I don’t know if there are enough people creating media,” Gonzales said. “I think that’s going to be the challenge. But if there’s anybody who can do it here, it’s Latham.”

Jenkins does not expect to change overnight how Jackson Hole goes about “media snacking”—or consuming media in bite-size chunks. But it will happen here, he believes. “It’s going to be a long road,” he said. PJH