Introduction and Narrative: When Gannett announced its transformation from traditional newsrooms to information centers (see Jennifer Carroll writeup) The News-Press in Fort Myers, FLA. was one of the first and most successful papers to adopt the changes. The paper regularly engages in experiments to engage and partner with citizens using traditional media resources in pro-am projects.

Its first brush in citizen journalism came in 2004 during Hurricane Charely. Today setting up a forum during a hurricane might seem second nature, but at the time it was an eye opening moment. As people shared information “we realized how much knowledge there was in our community,” says Mackenzie Warren.

Next, Fort Myers took an active approach to citizen journalism, enlisting the public in a investigation into sewer expansion, where hundreds of residents mobilized and scoured through documents. Throughout this investigation the paper relied on experts within its community like accountants, lawyers, engineers, “professions that we don’t have an expertise in,” says Warren. “We found in the community those people exist and they are willing to sift through blue prints and time cards, that’s what distinguished the project.”

The third and current experiment is called “Team Watch Dog.” Relying on retired experts in the community, Fort Myers has built a team of 20 volunteers, who work side by side with the newsroom on dozens of projects.

Main Goal of Fort Myers: To fulfill the same goals that the paper has had since 1884 when it started. “Our fundamental purpose in the community hasn’t changed at all, it’s a new means to the same end,” says Marymont. The hope is that by relying on the wealth of information within the community the paper is able to do deeper and better journalism.

Notable Achievements: Fort Myers has created a network of citizen experts, including a retired FBI agent, a defense intelligence agency analyst, an education worker and more. “We have formed an alliance that our community is coming to recognize,” says Marymont. “It’s the breadth of what we are doing that is notable.” This has also had a positive effect on the papers credibility in the community.

A Surprising Realization: The immediate volume of readers’ willingness to participate. The utilities investigation racked in 6,500 pieces of user-generated content over the lifetime of the project, with a huge flow in the first week.

The paper was inundated by the number of people that wanted to lend a helping hand to monitor their government. The same occurred with the Team Watchdog project, which was originally going to be called News-Press Nine, limited to nine volunteers. But hundreds applied.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: In their experiment of crowdsourcing in the Cape Coral utilities investigation, Fort Myers originally thought the experiment would take place in forums that they would monitor and eventually use to get quotes from contributors. “That is all fine on paper until you have 6,500 people,” says Warren.

The paper was swamped and was never able to catch up. “We left a lot of leads on the table,” says Warren. “If you strike oil, you better have a pump that can collect it all before it spills out.”

Money: Fort Myers runs on a traditional business model. On the web this means getting as many pageviews and unique visitors as possible. The site did experience an increase in traffic during the Cape Code investigation, including new regular readers. “We make new believers each time,” says Warren.

Future Goals: Fort Myers wants to rework the infrastructure that it uses to perform experiments in network journalism. Having a few under their belt, they are taking a look back to see what tools were clumsy or not right for the job. “In some cases we were using a sledgehammer to bang in a nail, in others a house hammer for a railroad steak,” says Warren. With the Team Watchdog project underway, Fort Myers is looking at new technical solutions, so they won’t be held back from not having the right tools.

What do you hope to get from people attending this conference?

“We are not short on ideas, we are short on the means to do them. What we want to get out of this is new inspiration and new directions we can push ourselves and persuade our audience to get involved and get motivated. New ways to promote what we are doing, so we can expand our audience and make new believers and readers,” says Warren. “My top hope is to actually come away with progress toward technical tools that are better for supporting networked journalism, we’re ready for the next big experiment in Fort Myers and we hope this conference can help us gain clarity on what that will be.”

Introduction and Narrative: In 2004 Dan Pacheco was hired as part of the new Digital Products team at The Californian. Their job was to “look out in the future 5-10 years and see trends,” says Pacheco.

He came to the position with experience at the Washingtonpost.com and America Online where he worked on community products from the early Web. “At the time we had at least 12 million member profiles and we started to observe that people were changing their persona 3-4 times a day,” says Pacheco. Well before social networking, Pacheco had a “wealth of ideas” that The Californian, an independently owned newspaper company which includes seven print publications and nine websites, was ready to put into action. The Californian has produced:

The Northwest Voice - a newspaper with content created by readers, which began in 2004 by Mary Lou Fulton.

Bakotopia - a social networking site.

Bakomatic - a software platform that handles user-generated content, classifieds and social networking, which transformed Bakersfield.com and other of the Californian’s website properties.

This and other products have pushed the paper into the edge of citizen journalism.

Main Goal: To engage an audience around a brand identity. The Northwest Voice, about 30,000 readers, is penetrating a community that is predominately suburban, neighborhood, and family oriented. People go to the website to submit their story and hope it will get printed in the Northwest Voice for neigbors to read. It becomes their paper. “And that’s what that brand is about,” says Pacheco.

For Bakotopia, a social networking site, it’s all about “me.” says Pacheco. Creating a space where individuals can express themselves, meet people and find interesting local bands.

The Californian has nine different websites and several papers, each with their own brand identity that caters to different audiences, says Pacheco.

Notable Achievements: The Californian had a lot of firsts. They created the first U.S. newspaper-managed Craigslist competitor, Bakotopia, according to Pacheco. The first citizen journalism newspaper product, The Northwest Voice and on Bakersfield.com one of the first newspapers to offer social networking and blogging in the community “so we could compete with Myspace and Facebook as part of our brand. Today Bakersfield.com is about 20-30 percent user-generated content.

A very large achievement was creating “Bakomatic” an in-house content management system that has since been adopted by other newspapers like the Arizona Republic.

Bakomatic was a fortunate byproduct of trying to create social networking features, blogging and classifieds for Californian newspapers. But since completion several newspapers have called wondering if it was for sale — and Pacheco has since

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Introduction and Narrative: FireDogLake is an unabashed liberal blog that started in the wake of the 2004 election. Jane Hamsher, a movie producer, created a simple blogspot blog to collect the posts she had written on her personal Daily Kos blog. “That was all it was supposed to be,” says Hamsher. Today, however, her blog is used “as a means to organize the left.” Over time FireDogLake picked up a strong audience, specifically around its coverage of the Plame Affair, which would later involve Scooter Libby.

As the blog picked up readers Hamsher added Christy Hardin Smith, a former legal prosecutor, and the two began doing traditional reporting. This included live-blogging the Scooter Libby trial from inside the courtroom with full press credentials. Online sponsors paid for travel and rent expenses, as FireDogLake continually provided coverage of the Scooter Libby trial.

Today FireDogLake has a team of close to 20 part-time bloggers in addition to Hamsher and Smith, who continue to do on-the-scene reporting. Hamsher also published a book with Vaster Media, a company she has in partnership with Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos. The book, “The Anatomy of Defeat,” was written by Marcy Wheeler, who did the actual liveblogging of the Libby trial. Today, FireDogLake pulls in between 80,000 to 100,000 readers a day according to Hamsher.

Main Goal of FireDogLake: To combine online organizing with media criticism, activism and original reporting. “We are trying to influence the political process, promote progressive values and candidates,” says Hamsher.

Notable Achievements: FireDogLake received huge accolades for their coverage of the Libby Trial. New York Times reporter Scott Shane noted “With no audio or video feed permitted, the Firedoglake “live blog” has offered the fullest, fastest public report available.” FireDogLake also raised $550,000 last election cycle and has produced commercials that were adapted by over thirty candidates for their district. FireDogLake also has a regular “Book Salon” where the blog gets behind a specific book, often driving it to the top of Amazon in 24 hours.

A Surprising Realization: When Hamsher first got involved in blogging it was on the Daily Kos community where she regularly argued with people in the comment section. “That was fun to me,” says Hamsher.

This continued on FireDogLake, but after it received a critical mass of readers people accused Hamsher of indulging in a power imbalance. “I didn’t recognize that things had changed,” says Hamsher, but as the head of the FireDogLake community, she learned that she could not engage people in the same manner that she could when she was a regular participant in the Daily Kos community.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: “That you can’t create the news — you have to stay responsive to it,” says Hamsher.

An example Hamsher gave on the day of our interview: (August 27th): Today a small headline is that a man, Kenneth Foster, is going to be put to death in Texas. “There is no way I can get anybody to pay attention to that,” says Hamsher. So FireDogLake has to work with what is already in the news cycle, shaping it and providing alternative interpretations. “We have to ride the news.”

Blogs don’t determine the news, but stay responsive to readers, they determine what they want to focus on.

(See post script)

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Introduction and Narrative: Inspired by user-generated sites like Flickr, NowPublic is a citizen journalism news network with contributors from across the world. As other legendary startups, it was founded in a garage by Michael Tippett, Leonard Brody and Michael Meyers in 2005. At the time the group believed there was no space on the net to empower citizen journalists. Today NowPublic is one of the largest networks of participatory news-gathering in North America. In spring of 2006 Merrill Brown was brought on board as a consultant for strategy issues. His relationship with NowPublic grew until he was part of the board and eventually elected chairmen.

Recently NowPublic has gone through significant growth in contributors and financing, raising $10.6 million in venture capital. The crowd-powered media site is looking to expand on its range of tools that allow citizens to upload content to their site, whether it’s photos, videos or even audio reports from their cell phone.

Main Goal of NowPublic: “To become the largest citizen news agency in the world and the foremost home through NowPublic.com of citizen traded content,” says Brown.

In a recent move towards this goal, NowPublic brokered a deal with the Associated Press that allows the wire service to purchase and syndicate content that NowPublic users create. “What we are trying to do is empower members of the public to create news content of all forms and provide them with the capabilities to distribute that content to millions of people,” says Brown.

Notable Achievements: NowPublic has registered over 100,000 members in 140 countries. Today, NowPublic has relationships with various news organizations, including the Associated Press, brokering its citizen journalism content to a wider audience. NowPublic is growing “faster than anyone else and I think we’ve added a lot of visibility to citizen journalism,” says Brown. Despite major success in covering stories and rapid expansion, Brown is quick to point out that NowPublic doesn’t claim to have “figured it out in some ultimate way.” The young organization admits it still has a lot of learning and growing to do.

A Surprising Realization: How people all around the world have surfaced, since the launch of the site in 2005, with some level of interest in contributing. Over 10,000 people have sent in content at one point or another. “The numbers are exciting, surprising and really encouraging — that this obscure little thing was able to get this much traction, not just from financiers and media but from people around the world,” says Brown.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: The critical component that NowPublic has yet to figure out is how to make the entire process incredibly easy and seamless. The consumer or creative experience is not as easy or intuitive as many other popular user-generated sites like Flickr. “Our site is complicated,” says Brown. But NowPublic is currently working to make the process of contributing as simple as sending an email or posting a photo.

Money: NowPublic just finished a round of venture capital financing that raised $10.6 million. By the end of the year the site will also be selling advertising and sponsorship. Another revenue stream is through business customers for its services and access to content, such as the deal with the Associated Press. NowPublic helps news organizations at a number of geographic locations spot and cover breaking stories. Contributors get compensated and credited for their work.

Future Goals: To be successful in terms of audience and profit growth in addition to becoming a global brand, says Brown. To be part of people’s news diets when they want a citizen’s view of the new news. The venture capital money will be used to hire new people and invest in software development for building better tools and a tighter site experience. “The big focus is on technology and building a world class team,” says Brown.

What do you hope to get from people attending this conference?

The key thing for me and the company is figuring out how to best utilize citizen contributors. We figured out how to grow a big network and get them to contribute frequently, but how do you engage with people so they will be frequent, satisfied, contributors? I don’t think anybody has figured that out. Brown is also interested in discussing the larger issues of journalism in relation to citizen media, such as: How j-schools should teach journalism in the online world? What is an approach to citizen media that makes sense for different businesses? How is the profession’s job description changing? These are important to the future of traditional news organizations, says Brown. “They need to engage their audience in a way that they haven’t in the past, and if they don’t figure it out, they will suffer.”

Introduction and Narrative: In February of 2005 Lisa Willaims started H2OTown (www.h2otown.info). She had recently left her job and wanted to get to know Watertown Massachusetts better, but decided to do her learning process in public. H2OTown also allowed others in the area to blog, creating a townhall atmosphere. It is what Williams calls a “placeblog,” which focus on the lived experiences in that geographic area. “And if we are lucky, most lived experience is news,” says Williams. A placebloger doesn’t “report” the news, they share news that happens in their lives.

Placeblogger.com is the largest index of placeblogs which can help anyone find local bloggers in their community. It was motivated by a desire to find out just how many placeblogs there really are. At BloggerCon IV a bet between Williams, Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen broke out about this very topic. Rosen wondered how many placeblogs like H2OTown existed, to which Williams guessed 1,000.

Within the first day after its launch, January 2007, Placebloger.com was indexing placeblogs from 55 different countries. To date Placeblogger.com has indexed 3,500 placeblogs. Williams won the bet three times over.

Main Goal(s):

H2OTown: “To make Watertown a less boring place to live.” The blog network is not journalistic in nature. Civic participation and being a conduit of newsworthy information is a byproduct, not the motivating factor, of H2OTown. The real goal of H2OTown is to highlight the aspects of the community that make it unique but are hidden from people, says Williams.

“Placebloggers have a rock and hammer and are breaking through that and sharing that information in a group activity.”

Placeblogger: To find and index as many placeblogs as possible, so they can connect and learn from each other.

Notable Achievements:

H2OTown: “That the blog is still around,” says Williams. Sixty-six percent of all blogs are abandoned in the first month. Today, people feel a sense of ownership over the site, which has a life of its own, and that’s the hard part for a hyperlocal site.

Placeblogger: Placeblogger has been successful, incorporating a larger global community than expected spanning 55 countries and 3,500 blogs. Recently Placeblogger won a Knight News Challenge grant and will expand from there.

A Surprising Realization: The statistics from Placeblogger.com. There were more placeblogs than Williams expected. Comparing census data alongside that Williams found that almost a third of the U.S. lives in a town with a placeblog.

In terms of placeblogs, Williams is astounded by how complex and different they all are from each other. They haven’t settled on a convention, there is no common theme or vocabulary, “yet the format and overarching idea is pretty much the same — they are going to cover the mayors office, elections, school budgets, etc.,” says Williams. Despite similarities, to date there is no community for placebloggers.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: The assumption that a community will pop out of thin air instantly because you’ve started a website. One has to be ready to commit six months to a year before they can expect results. “You can’t speed up the process of creating an organic community,” says Williams. If participation is not instant, one shouldn’t feel as if they failed.

“But I don’t think of any experiment as a failure — they all produce data — “this doesn’t work” is a useful piece of data. My strategy has been to experiment a lot and keep the cost low.”

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Introduction and Narrative: Jonathan Weber came to the University of Montana as a visiting professor after the bankruptcy of the Industry Standard where he was editor in chief. While there he became interested in the ongoing story of the Rocky Mountain region’s booming development. Local papers were covering specific stories and towns, but Weber thought they were too close to see the larger narrative. Capturing that missing link was the editorial inspiration for NewWest.Net, which launched in March of 2005. “I was involved with new media and I thought maybe there was a new way to approach this kind of story that might be effective in that context.

NewWest.Net was born as an online publication that would tackle regional issues through a network of local sites. The front page is regional but is supported throughout by a combination of locally focused news organizations. “I think that was a very key innovation,” says Weber.

NewWest.Net has sought to develop a new style of story telling that marries aspects of traditional reporting with blogging and citizen media. The traditional reporting on the site is very open and has a conversational tone that avoids the pyramid style of newspaper reporting. “We care about fairness and accuracy — we care about real reporting — not just opining about this and that — but we are not so caught up in the ‘he said, she said,’ and somewhat un-useful ideas of objectivity that are part of the conventional media conversation,” says Weber.

NewWest.Net writers span the gamete from paid professionals to citizen contributions.

Main Goal of NewWest.Net: To help facilitate a positive and informed conversation about growth and change in the region and provide people with a dynamic source of information and a place they can go to be part of that conversation.

Notable Achievements: Just six months after NewWest.Net launched it won the Online Journalism Award for enterprise journalism for a six-part series “Sex, Money and Meth Addiction: Inside the World of the Dasen Girls.” Beyond the accolades, this series is an example of long form journalism in an effective online format.

NewWest.Net has also been both a source of news on environmental issues including wild life management, wolves, grizzly bears and global warming it has been an active forum of conversation. While Weber admits they can result in shouting matches at times, “they do add up to an interesting and helpful conversation. We have brought in a lot of voices and perspectives, the Pro-Am model has worked well for us and we are proud of our ability to have facilitated that,” says Weber.

A Surprising Realization: There is a gap between what people say they want to do in terms of contributions and the amount of hand holding and management that NewWest.Net editors have to actually do to get that contribution. A part of NewWest.Net is completely unfiltered, where people can blog stories that and it is less utilized than NewWest.Net originally thought it would be. “You can’t just say: ‘Come on in. You should really write something.’ There is an amount of hand holding that you need to engage in to get good contributions from non-professionals. “That is a consistent experience.”

On the flip side, the quality of the photo contributions has been extremely high according to Weber. There is a very active photo community at NewWest.Net. “It doesn’t surprise me that they want to share, but the quality does surprise me.”

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NOTE: As of September 24th, Bass is no longer able to attend the conference. The New Haven Independent’s managing editor, Melissa Bailey, will take his place.

Introduction and Narrative: Paul Bass was a reporter at the New Haven Advocate for 15 years when he took a year off to write a book. Upon finishing Bass decided not to return to the Tribune owned paper, at the time awash in layoffs and budget cuts. Unhappy in corporate media, Bass began the Online Journalism Project, promoting not-for-profit business models for journalism. Through the Online Journalism Project Bass was promoting journalism done as a social utility, not as the product of a company. Touring the state, Bass was able to raise $80,000 to start the New Haven Independent, a five day a week online paper that just celebrated its two year anniversary this September. Today the New Haven Independent has three staff writers and others on contract.

Main Goal of New Haven Independent: “To cover the communities in New Haven that aren’t already covered by the media,” says Bass. The New Haven Independent has become a place where people from all walks of life come to discuss civic issues. Bass wanted to create a journalistic commons, where the public sets, or helps to set, the news agenda. To give the people of New Haven the raw material for Democracy and “let them run with it.”

Notable Achievements: From the traditional journalism perspective, the New Haven Independent has covered everything from a police raid of undocumented workers, zoning board decisions that were taking place in secret and the local board of education’s horrible attendance record. Their coverage has had a real impact on city policy says Bass.

For the community, the New Haven Independent has become a forum for people from various races and income levels. When a 13-year-old boy was shot by stray bullets, the friends and family of the victim were openly debating with city officials and wealthy people in other neighborhoods.

The New Haven Independent continues to expand — recently creating a partnership with the largest Spanish speaking newspaper in the state, creating a youth media group to teach kids video and starting a Podcast, all under the guise if not-for-profit journalism that is answering community demands.

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Introduction and Narrative: My Football Writer started when Rick Waghorn read a piece in MediaGuardian on his 40th birthday (16/01/06) quoting Clay Shirky. Shirky drew an analogy between journalism and the music industry; people still want to listen to good music, just not on CDs. By the same token, people still want to read good writing, just not on a traditional newspaper. Ergo, this should be a golden age for both musicians and journalists alike. At the same time, Waghorn’s newspaper employer was cutting a third of the sports desk where he and his wife worked. The layoff compensation was used to build the first version of MyFootballWriter.com, a generic hub of soccer news in the United Kingdom.

Main Goal of MyFootballWriter: To take a print press off a journalist’s back and Google out of local advertisers’ loop, by putting locally-sourced and respected sports reports in the palm of everyone’s hand, whilst at the same time giving local advertisers the chance to put their brand in front of their neighborhood audience. The advertising and editorial product then becomes both a league and nation-wide network offering further opportunities for syndication fees for all our fresh, organically grown quotes and copy; all of which is equally applicable to any sport out of any town or city.

Notable Achievements: “Still being here 14 months later and taking my first proper wage packet out of the business.” Since launching, Waghorn has been invited to attend a POLIS seminar at the LSE on the future of online journalism and has been described as ‘a threat’ by the head of BBC Online, according to Charlie Beckett from POLIS. So far Waghorn remains optimistic - he has even received advertising queries from his former employer. Today MyFootballwriter.com uses no Google advertising and is looking to expand its network to Ipswich and Colchester. Waghorn’s former employer, the Evening News, Norwich, is even advertising on the site, promoting its GoingOut supplement.

A Surprising Realization: How a journalist’s traditional contact book can yield all manner of fruit in terms of potential investors, advertisers, legal advice, etc. Waghorn has also found:

1. The benefits of blogging - or rather responding on blogs
2. The confusion among local advertisers as to just what do with their internet ad dollars; where do they go next to get the most bucks for their click - or most clicks for their bucks - if its not to a fading newspaper?
3. The ease with which traditional reporting practices switch to the web
4. The freedom of having no print press deadlines to worry about
5. The fun it is to work from home
6. The way that for the punters it makes their lives so much easier - ie I bring their football news to them; they don’t have to look for me…

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Introduction and Narrative: Mark Potts began sketching the idea for Backfence while working for Washingtonpost.com. Potts was trying to imagine what a local newspaper product would look like on the web. “Newspapers have trouble doing news down to the town level or below that, they are too big, and it is too expensive to staff,” says Potts. Backfence, however, would eventually use citizen journalism to cover that kind of minutia by creating sites for individual towns, where the knowledge from within the community would provide all the journalism. The company was formed in August of 2004 and launched in May of 2005. By October that year Backfence raised around $3 million in capital. Fast-forward to 2006 and there were 13 Backfence communities centered around three metropolitan areas (Chicago, Washington D.C. and San Francisco) and organized into a network. But by January of 2007 internal issues that Potts cannot discuss resulted in a 2/3rds staff layoff followed by an announcement in July of Backfence’s eventual shutdown.

During its run, however, Backfence was poised to form the largest network of hyperlocal news blogs in the United States.

Main Goal of Backfence: To create a national network of sites that would allow people to talk about their towns and learn about what was going around them. The kind of information you see exchanged over the literal backyard fence.

Integral to the operation was to build this network as a business, says Potts. Many hyerplocal sites can cover server costs and a few expenses, but the objective of Backfence was to scale nationally and create a strong business around it.

Notable Achievements: During the height of its operation, Backfence had over 400 advertisers in three metropolitan areas. “It was a real accomplishment, it proved local advertisers were looking for a space in online media,” says Potts. Backfence was able to raise money and establish itself in 13 cities. Its fall was not from a lack of interest or advertisers, but from internal turmoil.

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Introduction and Narrative: Fresno Famous launched April 1st, 2004 when Jarah Euston moved back to Fresno from New York. In her early 20’s and feeling alienated from her home town Euston had no idea what Fresno had to offer in terms of night life or a music scene. That was the imputes of Fresno Famous, a user-generated catalog of entertainment listings including music, film, shows, art galleries, etc. Fresno Famous eventually became a centralized location for anyone in the Fresno community looking for something to do.

The original site, a labor of love, was updated by hand every week in static HTML. Eventually, Fresno Famous switched over to Drupal which allowed everyone to post directly to the site and enabled forums, comments and blog posts. It has also become a hub for people to get informed about city council meetings, school board decisions and local politics in general. Today the site is totally user-driven.

Main Goal of Fresno Famous: To make Fresno a better place to live. As small farming communities, Fresno and Modesto have reputations of being “the armpit of California and that’s not really true. There is a lot of great talent there — but the community is very fragmented they might not know about local politics, music or events,” says Euston. “Fresno Famous provides one place for everyone to feed on everything that we thought was good about the town.”

Notable Achievements: As a community center Fresno Famous has played an active role in the discussion of downtown Fresno’s redevelopment. In one particular instance, plans for a project on Broadway Row were released on Fresno Famous to a hailstorm of complaints that eventually convinced the city government to cancel the plan.

“Fresno Famous has influenced how the city thinks about the issue…which is a perennial topic of conversation if you live in Fresno,” said Euston.

A Surprising Realization: The first surprise with Fresno Famous was the general timidity of users in the beginning. Euston found that it’s not easy to get people to promote themselves or friends. “We thought once we had Drupal going people would be positing all the time about how great some event was,” says Euston. She found that as community manager she also had to play the role of cheerleader, encouraging and supporting people who were too nervous to post to the site. “Being a blogger, I don’t have a problem with that [postings thoughts online], but a lot of people weren’t sure what to do.”

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