mattwaite.com

On Saturday, Sept. 1, after nearly two weeks of being online, PolitiFact amassed more than 1 million results in Google (see the update below about this figure). It’s a meaningless milestone, except for one thing: it shows the site has spread widely around the net. And fast. How’d we do that? We didn’t, really. The marketing we’d done to that point was pretty basic — we posted it on our politics blog and on Tampabay.com. That’s about it. Bloggers and social media sites did the rest. The comments on this Daily Kos diary are pretty indicative of the reaction we’ve gotten so far — people really like it and it appears we’ve found something people want. Our traffic has been growing pretty much daily.

I say all that as prelude to this: Several people have asked me how we did it. How did we build something on a platform we didn’t support, in a style we’d never used all while up-ending traditional modes of covering presidential politics at our newspaper?

My honest answer? It was a good idea. And everyone knew it. It got people excited to work on it. After that, the rest was just implementation.

When trying something new, when trying to innovate online, the idea is everything. You could have all the resources in the world — piles of cash, a room full of smart people, more computers than Google — and if the idea is junk, you might as well stop. A good idea will energize people, challenge them to overcome obstacles, take risks, change career paths.

I get why newspaper people are working so hard to learn new skills. But for what end? What’s the idea? Are you learning something new just so you feel like you’re doing something in this changing media environment? Or is there an idea here? And is it any good? Is doing a new bad idea better than doing nothing? These are the questions on my mind now that I’m working on what’s coming next.

UPDATE: Interesting. After the comments from Mark Schaver below, I went and did the same search again now a week after the original post. The number now stands at 687,000, and it remains consistent as you page through the results. Regardless, the point remains — your Google hit count is a largely meaningless milestone, except to show that the site has spread widely.