Scott W. Graves

I received an a-mail from conservative writer, thinker, and new media strategist, Joshua Trevino. Joshua was writing about the demise of Culture11, a relative newcomer to the new media world that operated in the realm of society, family, and everday life. The site was backed by some big name conservatives, but apparently did not gain the critical mass of readers necessary to sustain it through this difficult economic time.

Joshua was also co-founder of Red State, the popular conservative blog owned by Eagle Publishing. If you have never had the opportunity to read Joshua’s work, I highly recommend you visit his website (http://joshuatrevino.com/). Rarely will you find such a thoughtful writer who better understands the complex dynamics between the tools of new media and the challenges of the conservative movement.

I identified with Joshua’s latest piece because I can relate to the challenges of building a conservative brand and a robust user community through my experience with Red County. Although the fate of Culture11 has not been shared by Red County, the realities of building a new community centered around traditional conservative values, are the same.

Joshua’s analysis is spot on. Abridged paragraphs and lessons learned can be read below. Read the full article here.

Culture11: The End
By Joshua Trevino
January 27, 2009

[Culture11] would leverage the Internet, rather than grasping toward a print model that would only guarantee financial crisis from day one. Most important, it would have serious financial backing from serious people: chief among them William Bennett, but also, rumor said, Steve Forbes. That backing was solid for at least two years. Was I interested?

Yesterday evening, I received a rather shocking e-mail. It read, in part: “Today the entire staff of Culture11 was laid off. The news was quite unexpected. Because of the poor economy, we just weren’t able to secure additional funding to keep us in business. I’m not sure what the future holds for the site, but for the staff the outlook is rather dreary.”

Beyond the fate of the staff are the lessons that Culture11 holds for the online sphere in general. In no particular order, I believe they are as follows:

Grow your Communities Organically
The great evil of The Huffington Post (beyond everything it has ever published on any topic) is that its existence encourages the notion that a multifaceted, influential, and lasting online community is something that may be purchased. This isn’t a total fiction, as HuffPo still exists (and the Daily Beast might well make a go of it), but the only people with the Rolodexes (Rolodices?) and deep pockets of Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown have already started their websites. Ordinary and semi-ordinary people, by contrast, have to work to get big. Whether quality results is debatable, but the record is clear enough: of the big sites today, the overwhelming majority began as, well, small sites.

Don’t Depend on Funders
Every longtime blogger dreams of the benefactor who will come along, recognize his work, and hand over the cash. Certainly I’ve cherished those hopes myself. Those benefactors are rare, and where they do exist, they are unreliable — as Culture11 knows well now. The cold reality is that the only reliable income stream in the online world is the one you generate yourself.

Stick With It
It is impossible to know whether Culture11 would have emerged a self-supporting entity after the purported two years of funding ran out in August 2010, but its chances would have improved as time went on. As a friend at The New Ledger pointed out, Culture11’s subject matter was perfect for, say, summer 2000: heavy on pop and principles, light on policy and prescriptions. But it launched in summer 2008, when the national conversation was focused on war and economics. In that sense, it was marginalized from the start

The Right is Not the Left
Sure, Culture11 did “not toe a party line,” but it was a conservative endeavor, with conservatives’ money, and conservatives at the helm. It was also one of a handful of right-of-center online communities presently having a go at engagement with the popular culture. Its surviving peers include Sam Karnick’s The American Culture, Mike D’Virgilio’s The Culture Project, and Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood. There’s considerable overlap here (Karnick, for example, is involved in all three), but I suspect that Culture11’s fate may suggest more writers than readers in this sphere. From a purely market perspective, it seems unlikely that online conservatism can support more than a couple of these cultural-engagement sites. Contrast this with the left, which teems with them.

This isn’t the end of the lessons we’ll derive from the short, unfortunate tale of Culture11.