Honolulu Civil Beat: Where's the Marketplace?
Every village has its marketplace, right? Everyone’s gotta eat and buy a few things.
In our let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom era, we wish good luck to Honolulu Civicl Beat, unveiled this week and set to officially launch May 4. Better name than the temp “Peer News.”
The business model, though, has a lot of people scratching their heads. $19.99 a month to participate in this community-oriented water cooler of a news website? Right now, you can get the first month for just $4.99. Yes, cheaper than the thinning Honolulu dailies, but still quite a commitment. MinnPost — with its welter of top-notch local journalism — was just pushing 2000 members, at last report, after a couple of years, and it offers variable, self-chosen price points.
Maybe founder/funder Pierre Omidyar and editor John Temple can form an interesting community, but it’s going to be a small one. Unless, of course, there are more announcements to come. Like a marketplace. Omidyar made his fortune as an eBay founder — he gets commercial community deeply, though there’s little sign of it on the preview site. In my community, I’d have great local news reporting, great community discussion — and great Yelp-like functionality, great Open Table-like functionality, great-Angie’s List like-functionality, hey, great eBay-like-functionality-mixed with craigslist (aka The New Classifieds!). Maybe, that’s a wrinkle up Civil Beat’s sleeve. I hope so. For that, I might open my wallet, though $240 a year still seems steep.
One thing we can learn — and transport — from daily newspapers: It’s the winning combo of news and commerce that readers have long prized.