I am really grateful for NashvilleIsTalking. I appreciate all of the work that Brittney, Mike, Terry, and others put into it. I love experimentation and NiT was a very public experiment. An experiment that created a community.
When Terry left Nashville it felt like a little piece of the experiment left. The ad-network hadn’t materialized. The Nashville bloggers were not taking up video. NiT was not making any money. It wasn’t a failed experiment, but it wasn’t a perfect endeavor either. When Terry left it felt like NiT had lost it’s vision.
When Mike left it also felt like a little piece of the experiment left. At that point it seemed obvious that the big bosses were starting to run out of patience. Lacking new vision, NiT had hit a performing stage. The only problem was that it wasn’t performing financially. I think the financial meagerness of NiT is why Mike left. When Mike left, NiT lost it’s drive.
Now Brittney is gone. The writing has been on the wall for a long time (or at least it has been on SW21 for a long time). Brittney was quite literally the voice of the NiT experiment. She built NiT into a blog worth reading. She was honest about difficulties and was authentic. We all have good times and tough times, but Brittney perservered through them all. As Brittney leaves, NiT is losing it’s personality.
Today, the NiT experiment has ended. It is a process that has been happening for months. There may be a new experiment at the nashvilleistalking.com domain, but it is going to need vision, drive, and personality.
Update: Wow, look at this list of links!
4 Comments
Jackson: NiT as an “experiment” never failed. The fact that it wasn’t fully exploited financially was a decision I made. I didn’t want the local bloggers thinking we were making these moves only to profit off their posts. To me NiT was a public service to the community. I watched with great satisfaction the growth of NiT and Brittney for the past two years. It got the station’s toes into the waters of blogging and led to what once was 23 separate station blogs. I was just as stunned as anyone yesterday when Brittney resigned. We had ridden out many a controversy at NiT which wasn’t unexpected. We jumped feet first into unexplored waters and along with the accolades came just as many if not more arrows. Broadcasters are used to and expect to control anything and everything leaving their station in any form. NiT and the blogs that followed where completely counter- intuitive to that.
As Terry Heaston constantly pointed out we were a Media 1.0 company now playing in a Media 2.0 world. That’s too much of a leap for some people on both sides. I hope NiT survives but even if it does not I’ll still count it as a success and I don’t believe the local bloggers will let the idea die. It will be reborn in some form.
I don’t believe the local bloggers will let the idea die. It will be reborn in some form.
I believe you are 100% right about that, Mike.
Not only because the majority of the bloggers just won’t give up, but there’s also a fairly good-sized cache of bloggers in the mix with, as they say, “mad web skillz” (myself included). Nobody wants to lose NIT, but were the ax to ever fall on it, I have little doubt that something else (possibly along the same lines of how the KnoxViews site & aggregator operates) will rise up in its wake.
I don’t think I ever said the experiment failed. I said the experiment ended. (short reply b/c I am on my phone)
Jackson: I stand corrected.