After a quick glance to make sure the accident victims were still breathing or whatever, domestic mogul Martha Stewart focused on the important stuff: her poor grasses!

The Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray either confused direct messaging with Tweeting, or intentionally offered to buy lunch for 2,400 followers.

NBC's David Gregory had to explain he isn't really a Twitter star, he just plays one on this old thing called "television."

Jeff Jarvis, media revolutionary, declared former MSNBCer Dan Abrams his own, personal Trotsky.

Nicholas Carlson said the revolution will, in fact, be Twitterized, but we suspect he didn't mean it.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

(Top pic via Martha Stewart)

The Local, a new Times blog, has two reporters and an editor covering two neighborhoods in Brooklyn and three New Jersey towns. Jim Schachter, the Times's editor for "digital initiatives," tells the Nieman Journalism Lab that the site will never make money on its own:

If every single person who lives in Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Maplewood, Millburn, and South Orange came to these sites every day and made one impression, that would be about 120,000 impressions a day. It is barely enough to create a ripple in a pond and not enough to be profitable.... If you, for each site, have one full-time New York Times reporter and half of a editor, I don't think there is any way that this could ever pencil out as profitable.

But that's not the point, Schachter says: The Times is trialing the sites in order to build a software platform for other community sites, which local bloggers, possibly unaffiliated with the Times, will run. (It's worth noting that the New York Times Co. is an investor in Automattic, the San Francisco-based maker of WordPress, which Times blogs like The Local run on.)

That explains why the Times is targeting the exact same towns that Patch, a local-blogging startup backed by Google sales executive Tim Armstrong, chose for its debut. Impossibly vain Maplewood bloggers think that the interest reflects the unique qualities of their hometown. Nonsense. The Times wants to squeeze out a startup before it gets established on its home turf.

Both Patch and the Times are really aiming to be a platform for blogging — because, honestly, who wants to pay writers these days?

Of course, the hyperlocal hypercompetition will likely end up killing everyone, leading people to give up on making money from the "placeblogosphere," as Schachter neologizes it, for good. The only person who wins: Noisome media pundit Jeff Jarvis, who is simultaneously advising the Times and Patch.

Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing's sci-fi-tastic blogueuse from another galaxy, cheated on Hollywood.

Jewnadian Web-video comedienne Heather Gold lost her hat.

Political Lunch videoblogger Rob Millis smelled.

Jeff Jarvis, the world's most annoying new-media pundit, faked it.

AllThingsD blogger Peter Kafka stuck Rupert Murdoch with a recession-what-recession bill.

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who believes Europeans are too lazy to found startups, experienced drooling contempt at the DLD conference in Munich.

Vaguely employed videoblogger Amanda Congdon concluded that L.A. is full of racists.

Macworld editor Kelly Turner froze in San Francisco.

BusinessWeek's Amy Feldman thought about the children.

Media critic Jeff Jarvis criticized the media.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us more Twitter usernames, please.

Jarvis, a former ink-stained wretch, calls it a historic moment. Perhaps it is for him, since the Entertainment Weekly founder has made a career out of guiding old media organizations into digital nirvana. To make his living, it helps if he can argue that there's a pot of gold at the end of the online rainbow.

So LA Times editor Russ Stanton's recent disclosure that the newspaper's website revenues covers its editorial overhead — print and online — makes a handy PowerPoint slide for Jarvis.

But Stanton's claim doesn't withstand casual scrutiny for anyone familiar with the economics of online-only publications. The LAT newsroom, even after considerable cuts, still houses 660 people. And yet, in December, according to the newpaper's own figures, its website only generated 120 million pageviews. At that rate, that's 2.2 million pageviews per employee per year. One Gawker Media blogger, in a much-cited example, did double that figure in a month.

And fishiest of all, Jarvis's scenario doesn't include any expense for actually selling those ads. Do Stanton and Jarvis think ads, online or off, get magically sold through the simple grandeur of the wordsmithing to which they're attached?

Perhaps the Tribune Co., the publisher of the Times, is phenomenally good at running its business, but I doubt that, since it recently filed for bankruptcy. More likely: Stanton is engaging in wishful accounting. And since Stanton's tale suits Jarvis's needs, he's reprinting it without applying a media critic's needed skepticism.

Entertainment Weekly founder turned new media curmudgeon Jeff Jarvis couldn't remember how old he is.

Ex-Huffington Post editor Rachel Sklar got peeved about words.

Time political writer Karen Tumulty's plane was late.

BusinessWeek media columnist Jon Fine was in Los Angeles checking out the menfolk.

New York Times writer Matt Richtel keeps pretending to be a prostitute.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us their username.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.1. Mark Penn The world's worst pollster delivered Bill Clinton the White House in 1996, you know, when he ran against a literal wooden board in a suit named Bob Dole, so obviously Penn was well-qualified to organize the series of damaging turf wars that was the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, a squabbling joke of smears and slap-dash message reinvention. He charged her a zillion dollars to lose and everyone in the world hates him. Of course he is releasing a book about these little demographic groups he makes up and he is also a columnist at a famous newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.

2. Bill Kristol Bill is also a columnist for a famous newspaper, the New York Times. He invented Sarah Palin. He is a sad pathetic moron whose shame at his own intellectual dishonesty occasionally threatens to break through the surface of his constant lying, to himself and to the nation, about everything. He will probably not be a columnist at the Times for very much longer but he does still have his very own Rupert Murdoch magazine, and his last name.

3. Mark Halperin Mark Halperin used to write a little blog for ABC called "The Note," and it was a terrible thing that was in some part responsible for how bankrupt and idiotic the beltway press was during the late '90s and early 2000s. Then he left to go write a blog for Time and now no one pays attention to him, thank god. But he still writes bad books, like his one a couple years ago about how The Way To Win was to worship Matt Drudge and Karl Rove and Be a Republican. The week John McCain said "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," and finally lost the damn election for good, Halperin blogged that Senator McCain "http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/18/mark-halperin-somehow-con_n_127512.html?page=3">won the week. He will keep his well-paying job at Time forever, or until somewhere else hires him to do the same thing, which is be wrong 100% of the time. Also he'll release a book with someone smarter than him and he'll go on conservative talk radio to fellate Hugh Hewitt as Hewitt bloodies him with a bullwhip, sexily, again.

4. Jeff Jarvis The entertainment journalist who got internet famous for blogging about batteries or something is now the official overpaid consultant of saving the newsmedia, even though he doesn't really know what reporters do (he is pretty sure they should blog about batteries or something). If you give him $1,000 and fly him to Qatar he'll save your newspaper, with a panel discussion.

5. Wolf Blitzer and everyone else at CNN. Wolf basically represents everything wrong with CNN. He just makes noises. Meaningless syllables. He fills up time, so much time, with these nonsense syllables, saying nothing, at all, ever. And CNN this year sucked. Anderson Cooper's show is ratings-grabbing fluff nonsense. The Magic Wall iPhone election map thing is stupid. The fucking holograms! Campbell Brown accepts no bullshit, stop bullshitting Campbell Brown. Oh, and they still let Lou Dobbs fear-monger every day for what seems like three hours of hate. Ugh. Go away, CNN.

6. Steve Schmidt This is kind of a no-brainer, because he lost a presidential election, which is a sure way to make it on one of these lists, but the extent of his failure is still kinda under-appreciated. He destroyed the brand of the Republican party's formerly most sellable asset, Senator Johnny Maverickseed, and hence crippled the party for at least two years. Hah. He is the man on this list most likely to be at least underemployed in 2009, though he won't go hungry.

7. Jimmy Fallon Jimmy can stand in for Jay Leno and Ben Silverman and everyone else at NBC. They have two good scripted sitcoms, and the rest is nonstop garbage. And now this once-forgotten nobody gets Letterman's old show! And national nightmare Jay Leno will be on every day at 10 pm! And Conan will be shipped out to LA in order to become bland and unappealing! 2009 will be a bad year for not wanting to shoot your television set.

8. Robert Rubin and everyone who has ever worked for him. Rubin broke the economy, and trained a new generation of democratic finance-wizards who helped break the pieces of the economy into smaller pieces, and then he went to work for Citigroup, where he still draws a nice fucking salary, after shepherding through legislation that allowed for the creation of Citigroup, a massive financial services conglomerate that also broke the economy, this year. Everyone who worked for him will now fix the economy with their fancy new jobs in Barack Obama's administration.

9. Michael Bloomberg Go away, old man, we're sick of you.

10. Everyone in New York By "everyone in New York" we mean, obviously, the type of people who actually think they represent "everyone in New York," which means people in media, finance, the "arts," publishing, and whatever the hell people who read blogs do all day, for a living. Not the "everyone in New York" that includes people who live in, like Staten Island or whatever. No, the ones who watch Gossip Girl. Basically all of these people should be unemployed, next year.

Special Bonus "Never Ever Get Fired" Award

Tribune Company Innovation Chief Lee Abrams He is an insane person and every dollar spent on him is a dollar wasted, by a bankrupt company, but he is a treat, and we would miss his memos.

Time Inc. launched EW in 1990. Back then it was supposed to be a sort of halfway point between, say, Variety and People. That was then! Today celebrities have taken over all media, and everything has become more like a celebrity magazine than an insidery trade magazine, including EW.

Current print-hater Jeff Jarvis was, ironically, EW's first managing, a fact which he has used to establish his own credibility with print people ever since. At the time, EW's launch was considered a big risk. From Folio, in 1989:

Unlike the previous expensive newsstand prototype of Picture Week, which never got off the ground, Entertainment Weekly was tested by more traditional direct mail. Initial circulation will be 500,000; subscriptions will be priced at $1 per issue, and single copies will sell for $1.95.

The launch of Entertainment Weekly is the first since the costly failure of TV-Cable Week in 1983. With a sigh, Brack says, "Eveybody is looking for a connection between this launch and that one—it's irrelevant and I'm tired of it."

We all still mourn the death of TV-Cable Week! But EW flourished, mostly because its sections are bite-sized, it's not too far down on the stupid scale, and it could make outsiders feel, uh, a wee bit insiderey, I guess, so it had broad appeal.

It launched at a circulation of 500K; by the early 2000s it was well over 1.5 million. Plus EW had the bright idea of naming the "Entertainer of the year" every year, which naturally resulted in a ton of free PR, because news holes are huge and the media is desperate. Though some of their choices were kind of vague cop-outs, like Time's Person of the Year is sometimes. Particularly:

Bart Simpson (1990)
Jodie Foster (1991)
...
the cast of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

Fast forward to the modern days of dying print and a plunging economy and all that, and EW is widely considered to have serious troubles. We should note that they do smart things every once in a while. But I do wish that "Owen Gleiberman, film critic for Entertainment Weekly," would get the hell off my TV on NY1 so early in the morning. If EW does, indeed, end up going online-only (which is just a rumor, and not imminent even if it's true), some people will lose their favorite bathroom reading. And we'll probably gain a competitor.

What really pisses me off is that they couldn’t bother to mention my book - the only good reason to talk with a reporter - even after the reporter visited the recording of the audiobook. Now that’s bullshit.

Just how long have you been in this racket, Jarvis? A real internet futurist publishes his book online, for free. As a random blogger once reblogged, "The market and the internet don't care if you make money." But then you already knew that.

The bitter feud between Slate's Ron Rosenbaum and new media simpleton Jeff Jarvis aside, both do agree that newspapers are in deep shit. The Times' Catherine Rampell dismisses the clamor over copies of the NYT's election issue, and doesn't see the newspaper becoming "a luxury product." Newspapers are just another industry, and as currently constituted, papers are way behind the curve in ensuring their survival:

"If you look at the history of firms that have tried to diversify their businesses, you’ll see it’s virtually an impossible thing to do,” says David A. Hounshell, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University who studies technology and social change. "Usually when a firm announces a program to diversify, they’ve pretty much written their death warrant." Newspapers have faced challenges before and have adapted — including through efforts at diversification. Can these historical precedents teach newspapers how to defeat the economic forces of technological change once again?

Like previous industries fearful of obsolescence, newspapers can either develop a new product, or find a way to remarket and remonetize the old one. Right now, newspapers are doing a little of both: They’re adapting their product to the Web to attract new audiences, and they’re trying to re-monetize by delivering more targeted advertising.

Meanwhile, we’ve already seen some of the "destruction" half of Joseph Schumpeter’s famous “creative destruction" paradigm, with many newspapers cutting staff and other production costs. Unfortunately for newspapers, historians say, the survivors in previous industries facing major technological challenges were usually individual companies that adapted, rather than an entire industry.

We know an insane man (Lee Abrams, right) who works for the Los Angeles Times who totally agrees with you, Ms. Rampell. Hell, the LAT is promoting today's edition as a Twilight collectible! There is an optimistic note sounded at the end:

But perhaps the destruction will lead to more creativity. Perhaps the people we now know as journalists — or, for that matter, autoworkers — will find ways to innovate elsewhere, just as, over a century ago, gun makers laid down their weapons and broke out the needle and thread. That is, after all, the American creative legacy: making innovation seem as easy as, well, riding a bike.

A quilt newspaper might be a keepsake we'd all like to enjoy. To our thimbles, journalists!

'How Industries Survive Change. If They Do' [NYT]

Rosenbaum just took him down in Slate, partly for his new book about Google that happens to be just made up of things Jeff Jarvis thinks about Google. Here is the important part of the rant:

But what makes him wined, dined, and comped by Dubai to fly to self-proclaimed summits all over the world? It's not just that corporations are dumb enough to waste what's left of stockholders' money to pay for someone to tell them to "listen to the market." No, it's Jarvis' pretensions to guru-hood, his gnomic "laws" and pronouncements. Firing people on the writing side because of the incompetence of the business side is a long tradition in the media business, and Jarvis gives management a New Age fig leaf with which to shift the blame from their own incompetence.

He offers chestnuts like, "The link changes everything," "Stuff sucks" ("Nobody wants to be in the business of stuff anymore. … Google's economy is more appealing"), "Atoms are a drag," and—yes, his contribution to the "X is the new Y" genre—"Small is the new big."

Yeah, down with stuff! Let them eat fake. Sleep in buildings not made with atoms. Everyone should be a new-media consultant, and then we won't need any media at all.

Hah. Rosenbaum is frankly far too kind to Jarvis, but Jarvis responded with a snippy post about how Rosenbaum is stupid and he always confuses Salon with Slate, a joke that is about 10 years past making any sense, because Slate is now a Washington Post-owned established web magazine and Salon is just pure crazytown. Jarvis takes it all so personally! Is it his fault people keep calling him to discuss the future of media? No! It's the fault of the people who call Jeff Jarvis looking for insight into anything. LOOK AT HOW MUCH GOOD WORK HE DOES:

Just this morning I attended - busted! - another conference where I talked over coffee and croissant with chief executives of four newspaper companies as they brainstormed new models for news. I ran a conference at CUNY last week in new business models for news. I am starting an organization at CUNY to find, explore, and share best practices in new business models for news. I teach a course in entrepreneurial journalism in hopes supporting small sparks of innovation. Full disclosure: I also advise or invest in a number of related startups including Daylife, Publish2, 33Across, Black20, Brightcove, Outside.in (and haven’t made a penny on any et). I hope the profession - or someone - finds ways to save journalism.

We're sure one of those terribly named startups will save journalism forever!

Anyway Jarvis is pretty sure the way to "save journalism" is to turn it over to "the market," which is always right, and in practical terms obviously that means a world where positioning your content to make the front page of Digg is more or less the goal, so listicles and tits are seeming like probably the model we're going to be dealing with, in this wonderful future.

Of course there is no right answer to this question, and cranky old Ron Rosmbaum doesn't have a better idea, he just feels bad for people who write ten-part newspaper serieses on police torture and then their newspapers fold. We're sure there's room for your ten-part series on police torture at The Huffington Post, friend! Or, at least, they might have an intern link to it. Which is just as good.

In closing, we hate the internet.

Yes, by Jeff Jarvis' logic, the hardworking reporters now on the street were fools: They didn't spend their time figuring out how to multiplatform themselves. I think of that guy John Conroy, who wrote about police torture for years for the Chicago Reader, which is now bankrupt and had to let Conroy go just as—after years and years—Conroy's reporting (100,000 words!) on the subject was vindicated and an official investigation began at last. Dedicated guys who did great work at the dying dailies are being made to feel by Jarvis that they deserve to be downsized. Yet who has the most honor, the men and women who did the work or the media consultants who mock them?

(Photo by Jeff Jarvis)

On Friday, The A.P. issued a statement defending its action, saying it was going to challenge blog postings containing excerpts of A.P. articles “when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste.” An A.P. spokesman declined Friday to further explain the association’s position.

Now they're not setting these standards yet, and they say they won't go around suing bloggers, but that has not stopped outraged internet people from announcing their intention to give the AP exactly what they want. It's boycott time! Jeff Jarvis will fuck you up.

* Remember, AP, you declared war on the bloggers. Remember that.

* I don’t really give a damn what your guidelines are. I have my own guidelines. I stated them below. The point of fair use and fair comment is that there can be no set guidelines. That’s just ridiculous.
[...]
* One last bit of advice for the AP before I get on my plane: Back off.

The moral here is that no one understands fair use, at all. Not the copyright holders, or the bloggers. Or the courts?

Will Gawker join the boycott? Yes. From now on the only wire service we'll link to is UPI, because their reports have that hint of nutty Moonie-owned desperate madness that we love.

JARVIS: It's an economic decision, Howie. You know, it starts with a joke where a priest, a rabbi and critic get on a boat, and one of them has to get off. And that's really what this is about. There is no punch line here. It's that it's about saving the leaking boat of newspapers.

And, you know, criticism has changed necessarily, because it's not inherently local. The opinion about a movie in Cincinnati or Cleveland is not different...


HOWARD KURTZ, Reliable Sources, CNN: Jeff Jarvis, I mean, I certainly agree that if you're really down to a crunch and you've got to lay off the city hall reporter, or the school's reporter, maybe the critic is going to go first. But what about the local flavor of a newspaper? I mean, people arguing about whether Joe Jones panned or praised the new George Clooney flick.

Isn't that — wouldn't that be lost?

JARVIS: I don't really buy that. There is nothing local about it.

You know, when I worked for "The Chicago Tribune," in the same city with my parents, my mother would tell me about stories that she read in the paper. And I'd have to say, "Ma, yes, I know. I wrote it."

My own mother didn't notice my own byline. So I don't think...

KURTZ: Don't bring your family problems into this.

JARVIS: It tells you a lot, I know. But I don't think that that value of the byline is so great.

Transcript: [CNN]

(Photo via Buzzmachine)

When it became obvious that the audience was hostile to her — cheering Zuckerberg when he told her to ask a question — she acted hurt, as if this hour was about her. Worse, she told us how tough her job was. It wasn't tough. It was a privilege and she was blowing it. And at the end, when she said that people should send her an email telling her what went wrong, she was so 1994; she didn't understand that the people in the crowd were already coalescing in Twitter and blogs into an instant consensus. Oh, if only there'd been a back-channel chat projected on the screen beside her. Then, she could have seen.

I was cruising youTube looking for clips of Jason Calacanis' keynote speech today at the Blog Business Summit. Some of the blogs covering the talk had mentioned Jason was filmed and hoped it would be posted online in the near future. I didn't find JC at the BBS, I found something much better, 1938 Media going off on Netscape's Jason Calacanis, Buzz Machine's Jeff Jarvis collectively call them both a-holes for going after PayPerPost. I don't know who 1938 Media is, but he's my new hero.

WARNING, VIDEO CONTAINS UNCOUTH LANGUAGE!

Jason And Jeff Are Jerks [youTube]

Just like Christmas in July, New Year predictions deserve a mid-year refresher — especially since Valleywag wasn't here for New Year's. Valleywag predicts that by the end of 2006:

• Rocketboomers Andrew Baron and Amanda Congdon finally give into the sexual tension and get hitched. Media critic Jeff Jarvis reprises his role from "Moonlighting" by appearing on Rocketboom to explain it all. Rocketboom's ratings tank.
• Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, feeling threatened by a tidal wave of journalists predicting that he'll step down by December, barricades his office in November and insists on running the company from within. Sharp-eared employees can hear him urinating into bottles, wiping down his keyboard with sanitizer, and muttering, "The way of the future. The way of the future."
• Oracle founder Larry Ellison rediscovers his giving spirit and pledges a $200 million donation to Stanford, one week before the deadline for Forbes' next "Most generous billionaires" list.

The rest is after the jump.

• "Long Tail" breaks free of its scare quotes by Halloween.
• Blog mogul Jason Calacanis, realizing that AOL has given him the entire budget left over from the Access department, starts paying his circle of friends for "doing what they already do." Competitor Nick Denton starts eating lunch with Jason for $80 an hour.
• Three hours after YouTube and Facebook merge, the entire student population of America walks out of class in a rush to update their FaceTube profiles.
• After Lloyd Braun greenlights three expensive shows against everyone's advice, the Yahoo Media Group head finally gets fired. Weeks later, the shows go live, and Braun's "Puppet News Nightly" quickly becomes America's favorite Internet show.
• Dave Winer joins the Black Panthers, changes his name to Faqih, and leaves blogging for the promising medium of hand-out flyers.
• The Valley goes carb-counting-crazy when portly Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak loses 120 pounds and publishes his diet book, "Slim Down the Woz Way."

Photos: Amanda and Andrew by Scott Beale, Jeff Jarvis by Mary Hodder

Media pundit Jeff Jarvis, who wrote the epic "Dell Hell" blog chronicle about his trouble with customer service, is gloating over the disappointing blog from behind his Apple computer. He quotes the blog, in which an exec says that dell.com is ten years old. "Yes," says Jeff. "I think I spent about 10 years on hold with you guys."

one2one [Dell blog]
Well, well, Dell [Jeff Jarvis]

• Batting .000 on his New Year's predictions, Firefox developer Blake Ross rushes out a second batch:

  Citizen journalism will finally topple Old Media, ushering in a remarkable new age of incisive journalism—"That Dude Across the Street Walks His Dog;" "Local Mail Arrives Ten Minutes Past 4." Illegal immigrants will protest the discriminatory name, forcing the blogosphere to rechristen the new model "Asscasting," short for "Broadcasting while sitting on my ass, which will never leave this chair."

  [Blake Ross]

• The new site Relishio does a cannonball into the news-aggregation-site pool that's already full with Digg, Netscape, Newsvine, TailRank, and TechMeme. Its founders are either clueless, arrogant, or — oh, the founder is 14-year-old Jake Jarvis, son of blogger and entertainment pundit Jeff Jarvis. We're not going to make fun of an eighth-grader, are we? [Relishio]
• Why is it hilarious that IT titan EMC bought security titan RSA? Because I know at least one RSA employee who quit the company months ago and joined a startup that RSA bought. Life wants some people to work in huge corporations. [EMC]
• Is the Internet down? [Internet Status]

In the press release, Backfence touts itself as "a vital gathering place for local information and discussion that's not available anywhere else."

Except, of course, for the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News (well, until it dies), SFist, Metroblogging SF, Craigslist, Craig Newmark and Jeff Jarvis's upcoming site, local blogs, Upcoming.org, Laughing Squid, and every restaurant, cafe, conference room, college campus, and office in the Valley.

But hey, it's the new hotness, so gorge on the press release after the jump.

Welcome to Backfence [Backfence.com]

Backfence launched its first sites in McLean and Reston, Va., in May 2005 and has since added sites in Bethesda, Md., and Arlington, Va. Consisting entirely of content contributed by readers, the sites provide hyperlocal news coverage of the communities, as well as event listings, reviews and ratings of local businesses, photo galleries, free classifieds and other services.

"Backfence provides local community members with a vital gathering place for local information and discussion that's not available anywhere else," DeFife said. "It has been exciting to watch as each community creates a place that reflects its unique personality. We look forward to being part of the Bay Area and watching as it brings its own voice to Backfence."

DeFife said Backfence chose to launch its first Bay Area hyperlocal site in Palo Alto because "it is the linchpin of Silicon Valley. Its broad collection of community organizations, strong business and commercial base, high Internet penetration and its population base are the kinds of things we look for in deciding where Backfence should open local sites. We're looking forward to becoming an important part of the Palo Alto community and then launching additional sites in Bay Area communities over the next few months."

Both Backfence and Bayosphere received funding from Omidyar Network, the mission-based investment group founded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to foster social, political and economic self-empowerment. Bayosphere also received funding from technology entrepreneur Mitch Kapor.

Backfence also announced today that Merrill Brown, the founding editor of MSNBC.com and a leading new-media consultant, has been elected to the company's Board of Directors.

Brown, who had been a member of the Backfence Advisory Board for the past year, brings a wealth of media experience to the company's Board of Directors. He is a principal in MMB Media, a consulting and investment firm and was recently named National Editorial Director of News 21, the content development component of the news initiative launched by the Carnegie and Knight foundations. In addition, Brown was the founding Editor-in-Chief of MSNBC.com and a founder of Court TV. He also has been an executive with RealOne, Channels magazine and The Washington Post Co., and is a member of the advisory board of Gillmor's Center for Citizen Media.

"I'm very excited by the potential for Backfence to reinvent the way that local communities get and discuss local news and information. The company's concept for hyperlocal citizens' media represents a powerful new form of advertising-supported information, and I'm looking forward to helping the Backfence management team bring their concepts to fruition," Brown said. "I'm a longtime admirer of Dan Gillmor, and am pleased that he's working with Backfence. I'm confident that Bayosphere will be a vital part of Backfence's westward expansion."

About Backfence
Founded in 2004 by Mark Potts and Susan DeFife, Backfence (www.backfence.com) has headquarters in Vienna, Va. Backfence is building advertising-backed, hyperlocal community Web sites in which members of the community create virtually all of the content. Backfence sites bring together user-generated content tools such as blogs, photo galleries and events calendars, as well as do-it-yourself advertising tools. Backfence is designed to be easy for participation by everyone in the community. Access to the sites is free, and all that is required to post information is a simple registration. Backfence is supported by local and national advertising, including display ads, enhanced Yellow Pages listings and business classified ads—all priced low enough to make purchasing an ad to reach the Bay Area community a "cash-register decision" for local businesses. The company raised $3 million in funding in October 2005 from SAS Investors of New York, Omidyar Network of Silicon Valley, and a group of Washington-area private investors. The company has 10 employees.

About Dan Gillmor
Dan Gillmor is founder and director of the Center for Citizen Media, a project to enhance and expand grassroots media and its reach. The center is an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Gillmor is author of "We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People" (O'Reilly Media, 2004), a book that explains the rise of citizens' media and why it matters. From 1994 until early 2005 Gillmor was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. During 2005 he worked on media projects at Grassroots Media Inc., which was funded by Omidyar Network and Mitch Kapor. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Vermont, Gillmor received a Herbert Davenport fellowship in 1982 for economics and business reporting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Who Should Get Fired for This? [Out of Focus]