TBD wasn’t given time to bloom

If you follow new media and journalism at all you’ve probably heard that Allbritton Communications is breaking up the TBD.com band. The news is pretty distressing. The site is not shut down, but everything that made it great is gone or going away soon now that the layoffs are happening.

Instead, TBD is reverting back to just another TV station website. Vision, gone. Innovative experimentation, gone. Patience, apparently never had it.

TBD was a much-watched experiment in pushing journalism forward in an age of cutbacks and more cutbacks. It was an open break from the traditional model of hierarchy and standard beats, focusing instead on news that is breaking and done in concert with community conversation. It’s hard to describe their model except to say that they used community conversation and contribution to build news as it broke, then followed it up with original reporting that made use of that conversation as well as other journalistic skills. Social media was a tool at the heart of all of this, not just done for its own sake but rather to produce news collectively.

I’ve come to admire some of the amazing creative staff that was making this project go, folks such as , , , and . They are the kind of journalists I hope my students will become one day, people with a deep sense that journalism rooted in community is vital journalism.

Most inspiring was their sense of discovery, something we need more of in these trying times for journalism. Their palpable sense of adventure was a gift to us all because it seems in short supply these days. Perhaps the loss of that excitement is the most depressing result from this layoff news. They really were trying to reinvent the way we conceive and produce news. It was a worthy experiment, and one I hope others will emulate.

Allbritton gave up on this thing too soon. It only had six months, hardly enough time to build audience while trying to dream up something new. Some of us have been talking today on Twitter about whether TBD failed. Nonsense. TBD wasn’t given enough time to fail.

The good news is that there are some talented folks on the market now for a visionary who wants to do something great, something Allbritton apparently couldn’t stomach. I’m certain there is more to this story behind the scenes, but I can’t imagine any scenario in which TBD would have been highly profitable in the D.C. market while trying something totally unique. Allbritton should have known this going in, and if it didn’t have the patience to stay the course then it should not have tried. TBD was a true startup, the best idea I’ve seen in a while that offers a vision for online journalism that actually shows it gets the read-write Web. It had the kind of vision that needs time to bloom.

I hope we can move forward on what TBD gave us, and that the sense of adventure and experimentation isn’t lost. Even if Allbritton failed in its sense of vision, TBD gave us a roadmap. Let’s keep traveling those paths and see where it takes us.

And if it takes ditching the corporate structures to really give things like TBD time to incubate, do it.

Update: Some analysis of TBD’s traffic numbers. Shaking my head a little bit more. If visits and uniques were good after just a few months, why abandon ship?