M:M Feature Story: No Kidding (The Mommy Battles)

(ScreenGrab: Rachael Ray Show) Revised.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The interviews were conducted via E-mail. The attributed quotes are excerpts and, besides taking a passage from within a larger block of text while still keeping the context and the use of quotation marks in some cases, the excerpts are otherwise unaltered per the style tradition of Mediaverse®.

By Richard Thompson
Mediaverse®

It seemed like an innocent enough story: an 8-year-old kid talked to a Memphis zookeeper for a research project and discovered that a male lowland gorilla, Mwelu, loves watching talk show host Rachael Ray on TV.

Yet, the kid’s mom is a former TV producer. She called the show. They sent a film crew to Memphis this past July. Fast forward to Sept. 11, when the segment aired, and the kid is shown on location, holding a flagged microphone, saying, “This is Matt Sharpsteen reporting for MidSouthMoms.com...”

Pause the video.

In that two-minute segment, the kid’s research project morphed into a cross-fertilization of Scripps content. (Even Appeal TV got in.)

While Ray cooed over Matt’s “reporting,” the star of Food Network (Scripps owned) neglected to mention that Matt’s mom’s site, Midsouthmoms.com, is run through Scripps Entrepreneurial Ventures, a division of the E.W. Scripps Co., which owns The Commercial Appeal. Matt’s mom, Ann Sharpsteen, is the site’s “head mom.”

Connecting those dots, the “Rachael Ray” segment could be viewed as a bit of corporate flexing that two other moms, Deirdre Oglesby and Aisling Cordon Maki, have experienced firsthand since 2007. The sisters charge that Scripps has been pilfering ideas from their site, Memphisloveskids.com, a popular local parental resource that began in 2005.

The latest exhibit: the “kid reporter.”

Before Matt hit daytime TV, Oglesby’s 7-year-old daughter Hannah had already done several kid-friendly videos, including a light-hearted interview with Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton. Oglesby and Maki never thought Midsouthmoms would copy their kid reporter idea.

In a Sept. 11 E-mail to Mediaverse®, Oglesby and Maki wrote:

Nobody was doing anything like this, so we thought at least this feature was safe from MidSouthmoms. Today we heard that Sharpsteen’s 8-year-old son is Midsouthmoms.com’s new "kid reporter" and they’re producing a series of kid-friendly videos for their site.

They filmed their first video right around the time Hannah appeared on Live at 9 to discuss being an online kid reporter. Do they have no ideas of their own? They continue to blatantly steal from us. To make matters worse, the CA did a story about the kid reporter today, he was on Rachel Ray, and he was on the radio this morning. The nerve of these people!

Soon after Midsouthmoms launched in March, the sisters said they complained to Sharpsteen about the similarities and she denied even knowing about their site. (Sharpsteen did not respond to a Mediaverse® E-mail.)

In a Sept. 13 E-mail response to Mediaverse®, Barbara Shipley, chief executive of iMoms, the burgeoning network of Scripps moms sites, wrote:

Our goal is to provide a great service to our mom community and we strive daily to do just that and are committed to ensure we are always changing, improving and growing. We remain focused on our efforts, looking at what other sites are doing, including making statements of who was first, does our audience no benefit and not a conversation we wish to participate in, other then to wish. every one well.

In other words, this is business.
___

At first glance, neither Memphisloveskids.com nor Midsouthmoms.com is entirely unique.

One can’t patent kid reporters or lists where kids can eat free. Both sites exist as part of a constellation of local online resources, including private message boards, geared toward providing information for parents, particularly moms.

And considering all that moms do, catering to their needs makes for a lucrative market, though Oglesby and Maki do not get paid for the hours that they spend interacting with moms on private message boards and taking active roles in the community, especially on children’s issues.
Both women work other jobs and are currently saving money to repair their crashed computers, which is why Memphisloveskids.com hasn’t been updated since August. The site has never earned a profit, even though the sisters claim they averaged 300,000 to 500,000 hits a month (good placement in Google searches) before their computers went kaput.

That kind of traffic draws attention.

Indeed, the site arguably came on the Commercial Appeal’s radar soon after it launched in 2005. The CA featured it in its M section. (Aisling Maki is married to Amos Maki, the CA’s city hall reporter.) Early this year, according to the sisters, a CA editor, Peggy Winburne, met with them at a Starbucks to talk about a partnership, including a column.

Yet, Winburne apparently wasn’t too familiar with the developments in Knoxville, where the tech folks were building their own mommy sites for Scripps newspapers. (How Scripps got that idea is unclear.)

That Starbucks meeting happened on Feb. 26. Midsouthmoms.com launched on March 1.

“Mid-South Moms was given our promised newspaper column, and they were all over the local moms boards,” the sisters wrote in an E-mail, noting that Winburne later called them and apologized. “We were dumbfounded to see a site that looked so similar to ours and listed the same resources. We couldn’t believe a big corporation would do that to two local moms.”

To be sure, that is naive. For many startups, it’s only a matter of time before a well-financed and larger competitor enters their market like Wal-Mart enters a small town and changes everything.

Hopefully, by the time that happens, the startup has had enough of a head start to establish a strong reputation and customer base, which Memphisloveskids.com has done. Their niche is that Memphisloveskids is not corporate and attracts more than just moms.

But that does not seem to matter to Scripps, which envisions building a “MySpace” network for moms. It’s called iMoms—like iDiva, the site for women that the CA started a few years ago.

(In case you haven’t noticed lately, iDiva features ‘Memphis’ in its name, which means that Scripps will likely spread that idea nationally too. There are domain names registered for idiva in Boulder and Denver, CO, Evansville, IN, Ventura County, CA, Naples, Fla and Knoxville. None appear to be active.)

Midsouthmoms is one of four iMom sites that Scripps has launched since its first one in Knoxville in 2007. The others are in Evansville and Ventura County. By the end of this year, Scripps is expected to have 14 sites—all identical in design except for the name on the logo—and even more are planned for 2009, according to the iMoms’s Web site.

(For the record, there is a site called iMom, which isn't run by Scripps.)

Each Scripps site is staffed with local moms. Sharpsteen is one of six or more “local” moms at Midsouthmoms; it’s unclear if the staff gets paid. Midsouthmoms.com has more than 1,100 free mom profiles and growing database of mom-friendly information.

Some kinks still need to be worked out from a recent redesign. Also, there is no banner advertising, though Midsouthmoms promotes itself as a partner of Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center.

Is the site profitable? In her E-Mail, Shipley wrote:

Midsouthmoms is doing very well and are very excited and encouraged by the user base, traffic and adoption by the entire Memphis community.

...Being part of the EW Scripps company provides us many benefits, including a powerful web application, professional design and amazing reach. Since our sites are completely run by local moms the important part - the information and interaction is all memphis moms in action.

She did not respond to a follow-up E-mail.

Nevertheless, Deirdre Oglesby and Aisling Cordon Maki might as well serve as cautionary tales for moms in other markets that Scripps enters.

Those encounters likely won’t be pleasant as the sisters discovered in March when Shipley sent Maki an E-mail after someone forwarded Shipley comments that Oglesby made on a private mommy board called Memphis MidSouth Mommies. (The sisters shared the E-mails with Mediaverse®.)

An excerpt from Oglesby’s March 3 Memphismommies’s post:

The Commercial Appeal's parent company is launching a web site that is very similar to mine. We were pretty upset because they just offered us a column in the CA last week and told us that their web site was no competition to us. When I saw the thread on this board about it, I was shocked to see that it is very similar to mine. I was crushed because I have put my heart & soul into memphisloveskids.com for the past 3 years. Anyway we went back and forth with the Corporate people running the site and I believe that we have resolved our differences with them.

Shipley E-mailed Maki on March 6:

Aisling,

I need to you correct a few things on this post as it is not accurate and misleading.

1. Commercial Appeal along WITH it's parent company E. W. Scripps is launching the Midsouthmoms.com site - we are part of Commercial Appeal

2. Corporate people do not run this site, we have a team of over 6 moms all from this area.

If you would let me know when the correction has been made I would very much appreciate it.

Best regards,

barbie

To which Maki replied on March 8:

I did not write this. This was on a private mom board and obviously you feel the need to spy on my sister who belongs to this board.. Please mind your own business. Stop e-mailing me.

That same day, Shipley replied:

Please get it corrected