On Oct. 12, Falls Church, Va.-based Backfence Inc. secured $3 million in venture-capital funding -- the largest single investment in the emerging field of web-based community news sites. On Aug. 24, Backfence co-founder and Chairman Mark Potts answered questions from The Media Giraffe Project.

MGP: Briefly describe your professional and educational background, including where you grew up and any early influences that have motivated you.

POTTS: I'm a native of Connecticut who published a mimeographed neighborhood  newspaper as a kid and then became a professional journalist, mostly as a reporter and editor for The Washington Post but also as a staff member of the Associated Press, Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Examiner. I moved into new media in 1992, co-founding what is now WashingtonPost.com. I was part of the founding team of the @Home  Network in 1995, ran the digital division (more than 120 magazine Web sites) for Cahners Business Information (now Reed Business Information) and have been a strategic, business and product development consultant to WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive, New  Century Network, Classified Ventures, Infoseek/Go Network and many other media and technology companies.

MGP: Who owns Backfence, how long has it been in existence, what is its purpose, who is it for? Provide some metrics of usage, a sense of scale. Is it all web? Is there a print, broadcast or other-media component?

POTTS: Backfence Inc. is owned by its founders, Mark Potts and Susan DeFife, as well as its employees and other investors. The company was founded in August 2004 and launched its first hyperlocal citizens media sites in McLean and Reston, Va., in May 2005. We don't discuss metrics, but we're very, very happy with our numbers and the communities' response. We intend to launch additional sites in the Washington market in the near future and to roll out Backfence into communities in at total of 16 metro markets in the U.S. over the next couple of years. Backfence.com is Web-only--there is no print or offline component.

MGP: Is the project mostly about DOING something directly (a direct service for the public) or about HELPING others to do something or about TEACHING or LOBBYING in an educational or political sense?

POTTS: Backfence.com is about providing community members with a platform on  which they can create content and interact with each other in many  different ways--posting stories, sharing photos, making comments,  placing advertising, rating and reviewing local businesses and many  other modes.

MGP: What are you doing and why are you doing it? We are especially interested in your PERSONAL MOTIVATION and sense of MISSION, as well as the overall project motivation. We would like to really focus on understanding motivation. How do you convey that sense of mission to others around them? How about examples of that?

POTTS: My experience in newspapers and new media has given me a longtime  fascination with how the Web can be used to provide detailed, neighborhood-level information to local communities, and how to tie  communities together online. I've found memos dating back to 1993 in  which I explored these themes in thinking about projects for The  Washington Post. The advent of blogs and the rise of self-publishing has made many of these concepts much more of a reality in the past couple of years, and that led directly to the conception and founding of Backfence.

MGP: What is the business model? Is your revenue from sales,donations, or a combination? Does your project rely upon volunteers? Is the business model sustainable any longer? Is it changing?

POTTS: Backfence gets revenue from advertising--display, classifieds and Yellow Pages. All content is created by members of the community. A very small local staff manages the sites, sells ads and does community outreach/marketing.

MGP: Please talk about your sense of innovation and entrepreneurship especially in comparison to other things you have done or other competitors/collaborators. Who or what is similar to what you are doing?

POTTS: We believe that no other site has tied together all of the pieces that we are combining in Backfence--blogs, wikis, photo galleries, events calendars, display ads, classifieds and Yellow Pages listings. That, as well as our easy-to-use and -understand design and our backend administrative and security capabilities (the Backfence platform was created by us and is proprietary) makes the product unique, based on what we've seen in the marketplace. Moreover, we have not seen a similar plan for a national rollout of a service like Backfence. While there are many other excellent and interesting and important citizens media efforts, we don't believe any have the scope and business model of what we are planning.

MGP: Tell us how you are teaching others to do what you are doing? We want to know if your project is REPLICABLE. Is it usable by the general public? How are others able to contribute?

POTTS: All content on Backfence is created by the community; we very deliberately designed the sites to be easy to use for a non-technical  member (a soccer mom, for instance), in spite of their underlying  sophistication. Posting content is similar to writing an e-mail or a  text document. We market into the communities we serve to urge citizens to sign up to become members and post content, and to date  those efforts have been very successful.

MGP: What aspects of personal, professional or financial RISK are there to what you are doing? Please be specific. How do you cope with those risks? Will it get easier?

POTTS: My business partner Susan DeFife and I have built Backfence over the  past year on our own sweat equity and personal investment, as well as the sweat equity and risks taken by our excellent team. So the personal financial risk has been considerable. Entrepreneurship isn't  for everyone, because of the uncertainty and the financial risk, but we love the challenge of creating something new and innovative completely from scratch.

MGP: In what sense is what you are doing "fostering participatory democracy or community"? What do those words and ideas mean to you?  What  pecifically do you achieve this arena?

POTTS: We tend not to use those words; Backfence is not on any sort of social mission. We are a for-profit company, and we're trying to build a business around the provision of tools to allow the community to create nd share local content and information online. If that, in turn, "fosters participatory democracy or community," that's great -- but it's a byproduct, not our corporate goal.

MGP: Do you have views about what is wrong with our media, our democracy, our journalism? What is right about each? How do we preserve the best and fix the worst? Who else do you recommend we look at as examples?

POTTS: How much time do you have? Clearly, something is wrong with the  journalism business--the declining circulation and advertising statistics, as well as countless anecdotes about audience mistrust and decline, illustrate that. Audiences are seeking something other than that the media is giving them. I believe the traditional media must change in many ways to better serve these audiences, rather than getting stuck in old, increasingly anachronistic models. One way to do that is to provide much more detailed local coverage, since many studies show that news consumers want more local information, and much of what we see in national and international coverage is essentially commoditized.

That said, I absolutely do not believe that the media business is going away, or that Backfence is some sort of challenge to established media--indeed, we believe we are a strong potential partner to media companies seeking new ways to serve local audiences. In addition, citizen media sites like Backfence will hardly replace  traditional journalism; instead, I believe that they will thrive  alongside and complement traditional reporting. You don't need Woodward & Bernstein to cover a Little League game; nor can average  citizens generally provide investigative journalism about perfidy on the town council. Both types of journalism have their places and can  co-exist very happily.
___________________________

Mark Potts, Chairman and Chief Creative Officer
Backfence Inc.
mark@backfence.com
www.backfence.com
703-338-5126