Two years ago, when Vocalo was new, I got an earful from WBEZ journalists who despised everything about their station’s new Web-based baby—the incoherent audio and online products, certainly, but also the time, attention, and money that Chicago Public Radio was lavishing on it. To CEO Torey Malatia, Vocalo was the cutting-edge hybrid that would reinvent public radio. To many WBEZ reporters and editors, it was a lost opportunity. They “wanted to seize the day,” I would write, “responding to the crumbling of Chicago’s newspapers by spending the money it would take to turn itself into the city’s preeminent news source.”
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The Vocalo blogger closest to my heart is a temp, John Conroy, who wrote about former Chicago police commander Jon Burge and police torture for the Reader from 1990 until budget cuts made him unaffordable in 2007. Conroy is now blogging the Burge trial for Kaufmann, who made a better offer than anyone else in town (including the Reader) for his commentary.
Joining Conroy this week are three permanent additions to the network: former Sun-Times rock critic Jim DeRogatis, cohost of WBEZ’s Sound Opinions; novelist Achy Obejas, who’s written for the Reader, the Sun-Times, and the Tribune; and author Anne Elizabeth Moore, a former editor of Punk Planet. Steve Edwards, who as CPM’s content development director is Kaufmann’s immediate boss, will soon join the site to contribute interviews and commentary.
Two weeks ago the Poynter Institute and Mashable.com jointly named ChicagoNow one of “5 innovative Web sites that could reshape the news”—and it was the only one of the five that was a product of mainstream media. Imaginatively assembled and aggressively promoted by social media and by alliances with such less-than-obvious partners as AOL, the burgeoning ChicagoNow—editorial director Tracy Samantha Schmidt herself isn’t sure how many bloggers she has, but the number’s approaching 350—officially launched last August. In September, Schmidt says, it received 3.2 million pageviews, last month more than 20 million.
In 2007 WBEZ launched a blog and in 2008 Kaufmann—a former Eight Forty-Eight producer—took it over, moving into the newsroom to work with the reporters and editors who posted on it. And then, he says, Malatia “had the idea of bringing Feder in. He said, ‘Let’s amass some talent and make a dent.’ And obviously, Feder has been tremendously successful.”
So if a golden era of Vocalo blogging is remembered, it’ll be as little more than a moment. But the moment’s done a world of good at putting a respectable face on a secretive operation that made a lot of people mad: the WBEZ staff whom Vocalo staffers had no contact with, and the WBEZ supporters who weren’t even told where some of their money was going. “We wanted to create space for us to experiment in,” says Ash, explaining the Berlin wall around the Vocalo operation, “and it created a lot of tension. We learned a lot with Vocalo and it was tough learning.”
