If you thought TBD.com was already dead, well, it certainly passed away for good this week when Allbritton redirected the URL to its TV station master, WJLA.com. “It’s the end,” confirmed news director Bill Lord to the Washington Post. “It no longer made sense to support the two sites.”
TBD.com was the most aggressive web startup at a local TV station in the short history of the internet. Allbritton hired an all-star cast, built up a 50-person team, created a new brand and hit the web with a differentiated product which included an aggressive social media strategy and a collaborative network of community sites. Editor Jim Brady said he was promised a long runway to profitability, but after strategy and sales conflicts, Allbritton slashed the team after 6 months. It’s been downhill ever since.
Without regurgitating the complexity of TBD’s demise, we should praise both Allbritton and the startup team for having the guts to experiment. Local TV is so terrified of failure, the fact they took a swing at a hard problem should be praised from the rooftops. We need more experiments — large and small — without fatal repurcussions. (For the record, the former TBD team has moved on to great things, thank you very much.)
In fact, TV groups should carve out respectable chunks of their budgets to experiment in earnest, empowering talented teams to create disruptive new products. These efforts don’t need to be as big as TBD, but they should come with a dose of patience and an eagerness to learn.