TweenTribune

TweenTribune.com is an online newspaper for kids, aged 8-15. It is updated daily with stories from the Associated Press that are chosen based on relevancy to pre-adolescents. Tweens can post comments to the stories which are moderated by their teachers, and teachers can use the site as a resource for meeting No Child Left Behind requirements for reading, writing and computer skills. The site first appeared on Nov 21, 2008.

TweenTribune has been featured in articles in the Los Angeles Times, Good Housekeeping and Family Circle magazine (December 2009).

A different financial model for journalism

It is a proof-of-concept model for new ways to fund journalism online. The site employs a series of previously untried methods for building audience and revenue. These strategies grew audience and revenue in a matter of weeks, but it remains too soon to tell whether these strategies are the "silver bullet" that media companies seek to funding journalism in the digital age.

Quoted on Dec. 15, 2009, James Rainey of the Los Angeles Times said founder Alan Jacobson's "ebullient innovation opens a door for an underserved audience and provides the kind of incremental revenue that, strand by strand, eventually just might rope journalism back to a financial mooring."

"We also know that young people are news grazers, surfing multiple sites and stopping when something interests them," Anastasia Goodstein, publisher of Ypulse.com and author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online, wrote on Jan. 26, 2009. She said it will be a challenge for news sites to become a destination for an audience that primarily uses the Internet for gaming and chatting. Goodstein says, "…if tweens or even teens can save the news business by engaging at a young age, I think we (parents, teachers, other adults) have to point them to sites like this."

Business model

To achieve sustainability, the site uses a group of strategies to reduce cost:

1. As of January 2010, all content is provided by outside sources. Stories come from The Associated Press, while comments are generated by children, in the form of user-generated content (UGC).

2. Editing of comments is provided by teachers, so editing is distributed among users as a means of reducing cost rather than centralizing editing with a paid staff. This is an example of distributive editing (DE).

3. Primary source code is provided by Drupal, a free, open-source code content management system. The site also depends upon other open-source applications, such as Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL.

4. All custom source code was written by Ebizon Netinfo of Noida, India, which was more economical than developing the code in the U.S.

Revenue streams

Four diversified revenue streams form a previously untested business model for online news:

1. Local and national advertising is targeted demographically, based on the appeal of the content to a youth audience, and geographically, with specific local ads served up based on the IP address of the user. The user's location determines which ads they see.

2. Sponsorships by national advertisers are targeted demographically, based on the appeal of the adjacent news content. Sponsorships can also be targeted topically, on such subjects as Animals, Technology, Fashion, etc.

3. License fees are paid by local media companies for permission to post their local content as a means of promoting their local brands and creating the next generation of news consumers. In addition, local media companies can sell advertising which is targeted geographically.

4."Freemium" model, in which basic features are provided to teachers and students at no cost, with specific value-added features that are provided at an additional, nominal cost.

History

Alan Jacobson, president of BrassTacksDesign, created TweenTribune as a way of helping his 10-year-old daughter, Sophie, find interesting stories on the Internet to meet a weekly homework assignment on current events.

The site showed little traffic in its first year of existence, but in October of 2009 page views began to jump dramatically after a new promotional campaign was launched that marketed the site directly to teachers — a strategy that hadn't been tried before. Based on traffic recorded in January 2010, the site now has 1 million page views per month.

Technology

The site is built on the Drupal open-source code content management system (CMS), with custom modules developed by EbizonNetinfo of Noida, India. The site his hosted by Rackspace in San Antonio, Texas. The site is very database-intensive and uses a non-standard Web-server architecture to maximize computer resource and responsiveness to users.

External links

Official site