For those of you who don't masturbate to Bay Area blogs/journalism, let me quickly fill you in: The Bay Citizen is a non-profit project that some rich guy dumped $5,000,000 into with the goal of creating a solid Bay Area news source.  Of course, they hired a CEO for $400,000/year, which raised a lot of concerns and criticism.  Further, they pissed off some local journalists by not investing in pre-existing projects in favor of starting from scratch.  That said, print in this town sucks, SFist/SF Appeal/Mission Loc@l isn't for everyone, and we need good journalism.  AMIRIGHT?

Anyways, their site isn't supposed to launch until Wednesday but using our professional internet skills, we found it today.  To sum it up, it looks like a tame SF Appeal targeting people in Marin who pretend that SF is still part of their lives.  That said, there is almost NO content on their site.  In fact, the homepage is completely empty, so we cannot fully judge it hate.  Even most of their editor's profiles are blank.

I expect they are going to have a very tough time launching Wednesday.  The site is beyond buggy.  I was able to register for an account, but I couldn't edit my profile (white screen of death), there are broken images in the welcome email, many of the links don't work, there are no content RSS feeds, and their admin area isn't secure (it's going to be easy for anyone with a laptop to own this site).

ANYWAYS, Let's talk features:

This site heavily pushes user-generated content and participation.  They have an entire “community question and answer” section, prominent calls for users to suggest stories and submit tips, and they are even letting users start their own blogs on the Bay Citizen (rather than use their own site/platform, like Wordpress, Drupal or Tumblr).  No word yet if Bay Citizen bloggers will be paid the $25 per post that other Bay Area bloggers will be paid to repost their content on TBC.

Finally, they have some sort of twitter/facebook-like status update.  I don't see anywhere else on the site that this feature integrates into… maybe it is a way for contributors to tell the public about their Bushmill's hangover?

Anyways, there you have it people: THE BAY CITIZEN.  See y'all Wednesday!