This is a great, insanely useful, honest, and detailed autopsy on a startup. Thank you for writing it, Paul. You've done a lot of people a valuable service in sharing this information and your experiences.

I have to admit, a small piece of me is dancing a little jig, not at their demise, but because they ran into the same walls and hurdles I ran when I started WindyCitizen two years ago. I can't tell you how cathartic it is to read all this stuff. So much truth here.

Example: Working with journalists is tough because almost all of them overvalue their work to an extreme degree, especially older ones who wrote for print. Longtime print journalists were paid solid salaries to fill space in between ads in their papers. They figured if the paper's circulation was X, that a good portion of X was reading their stuff. In fact, it's quite possible no one was reading their stuff and their value wasn't in producing good journalism so much as it was in being able to write something vaguely coherent reliably and safely to fill up space between ads.

Try explaining THAT to an old hand print journalist. Those are fighting words.

But young journalists today understand this. They know that you're only as good as your audience so they're out building them. Check out my friend Tracy Swartz: http://twitter.com/tracyswartz She covers transit for the Chicago Tribune's commuter paper and is a rock solid reporter. I respect her work very much, but moreso I respect how aggressive she is in building a real following and brand around her work so that no matter where she goes after this job, she's got an audience to take with her. Older journalists don't get that. They were used to thinking the audience just magically appeared when they committed an act of journalism.

Anyhow, reading that stuff was like having a weight lifted off my shoulders. Thanks.

Background: My original idea (fresh out of journalism school) was to do a Huffington Post for Chicago. I was doing it solo and sans funding however. I was able to sign up about 20 writers, and they were the good hungry ones who want to stir stuff up, but as a solo founder I wasn't able to recruit writers, direct them, edit their stuff, post the stories (we went with Drupal and the posting ui is really terrible so our writers would e-mail me their stories), promote the stories to get eyeballs on them, then find advertisers and sell ads to them....etc etc

It just was a no-go. So after 8 months of that, I replaced our front page with a Digg knock-off and invited our readers and bloggers to start sharing and voting for their favorite local stories. Traffic slowly picked up to where we were hitting 100k uniques/month, I found someone to work on ad sales, and we eventually reached a shaky ramen profitability as a local Digg-clone with often-spotty tech.

Through this all though, a handful of our writers kept blogging and over the last year we have a few who've managed to build small but regular audiences for their stuff.

Two years later, we're starting to recruit writers and bloggers again and its fun to watch.

It took 24 months longer than I expected and there's still lots to happen, but Windy Citizen is definitely a worthwhile read for a certain segment of Chicago due to the ingenuity of our writers and community members.

Anywho, I'm sorry to hear NewsTilt didn't work out but thank you for your honesty and candor in sharing this. Cheers.