We here at NJN Public Television are looking to add more interactivity to our site by allowing each of our in-house shows to have their own blog for posting and receiving comments. This was something that we didn’t have before but we’ve learned how popular they have become in making sites more user-friendly. We’re trying to gain more traffic and allow people to stay on the site longer.

In the short term, Why Tuesday? is pursuing our presidential candidates to respond to our candidate challenge. Driving throughout the State of Iowa until October 31st with camera-in-hand, we will air how our candidates feel about America’s low voter turnout, making election reform and increased voter participation issues that nobody can ignore. We have also submitted a video question for TechPresident’s 10 Questions initiative.

In the long term, Why Tuesday? will continue to build our constituency with the goal of becoming a megaphone for America’s election reform discussions. Each week we release a new episode about elections or election reforms. Why Tuesday? is also actively recruiting correspondents to help with the task of interviewing as many elected officials as possible about election reform and the significance of low voter turnout. Utilizing our videos, we want to educate about election reform and hold our politicians responsible for improving America’s voting system.

We at Why Tuesday?, an archetypical new media project, found the Summit to be very helpful and especially enjoyed the afternoon sessions on political coverage and news/video advocacy. We look forward to a continuing relationship with Off The Bus, AirCongress, and TechPresident. And we would like to discuss how we can more effectively utilize our Web 2.0 platform with Ellen Miller from the Sunlight Foundation, Earmark Watch, and Wiki the Vote .

Thanks,

Why Tuesday? Staff

BrooWaha.com is a citizen newspaper which focuses on local community interests. Its purpose is to be a premium source of local news written by average people, who have the fastest access to information and who are unaffiliated with traditional media sources, which are often less interested in covering smaller stories of local significance. BrooWaha seeks to become a fresh way for people to get news and interact within their communities.

Started in Los Angeles in a makeshift bedroom office, BrooWaha is now in six cities, and several more editions are scheduled to launch soon. Five hundred authors from around the U.S. submit articles and BrooWaha gets over 100,000 page views per month. The site was featured on the cover of the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times as an example of the new face of citizen journalism in an article titled “Reporting’s Mass Appeal.”

The website contains many uniquely designed features which promote participation and interaction between users. For example, BrooWaha users have access to mailboxes, a messaging system, chat-rooms, and friend lists. Also, users can track their own articles with readership statistics, popularity rankings, etc… They can also rate other users’ articles, leave comments, and review them. The culture of mass participation is new to the news industry- authors not only write cutting-edge stories about happenings in their communities, they receive feedback and make friends who share an interest in the same local activities or issues. Readers follow up with authors for more information on topics of interest and meet other readers who comment on similar issues.

BrooWaha appeals to a mass audience. At its most grass-roots level, appeals to local citizens who want to get involved in their communities and read about local issues and happenings. However, the website also has a commercial aspect. Once further developed, it will appeal to media outlets who want to surf on the citizen media wave to test the pulse of local communities, local governments and organizations who want to get local issues and events publicized, advertisers who want to target local audiences, such as retailers of all sizes, and also to individuals who want to break into the publishing industry but who lack the means to pursue traditional methods. These groups will all benefit from BrooWaha because it is uniquely tailored to the needs of people with an interest for fast, relevant, local news.

The next step in the project will be to enable users to launch their own editions, invite their friends to write, and collect advertisement revenues on the traffic they generate. Also, I would like to create a customizable citizen journalism platform which would be licensable to small town newspapers, local governments, and organizations, for use in community outreach initiatives.

The project requires financing to maximize its potential. I am also open to having people join the project and help me take it to the next step. Please feel free to contact me at ariel@broowaha.com if you are interested in these opportunities.

Everything from my response to the questions you sent in advance of the event still holds:
1) We plan to expand testing over the next couple of months to larger and larger groups.  We have the first several of these groups lined up, but will require additional partners to organize testing at a larger scale.
2) We are looking for investment to help build our organization and finalize the development of our software as quickly as possible.
3) We expect to launch publicly in January 2008.

I would add to this that we’re currently wrapping up our largest test to date, in which 30 simultaneous users are crafting a collective response to the question of whether the US government is ever justified in using torture.  It’s gotten quite heated, as you might imagine - we’ll publish the full story on our blog.  While we continue this cycle of testing and iteration, we’ll begin demoing our tool for potential clients and partners who have already expressed an interest in seeing it - a good number of which came out of the networked journalism summit.

Just before the summit, AirCongress and BlogTalkRadio (we were both there) agreed to a content-sharing partnership. The goal is for the many political talk-show hosts at BTR to send me brief summaries of their shows whenever they interview members of Congress or other key players in federal policy in politics so I can promote the shows at AirCongress.com. We are in the process of finalizing the details.

– Since the summit, I have included content from Why Tuesday? at AirCongress. I met the folks from Why Tuesday? in the afternoon discussions.

– AirCongress also is now a sponsor of the 10Questions online presidential debate arranged by techPresident. The initiative was announced days after the summit.

– I also plan to meet with Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation in Washington. She is interested in discussing partnership opportunities with AirCongress.

What’s next at The UpTake?
We’re doing a video citizen journalism class this Saturday.   Thirty people have already signed up.  It’s meant to give people an overview of purpose, ethics, and basic technical skills.   This one is free.  Future classes will have a nominal charge ($25 -$50) to cover costs  and will delve deeper into technical issues.

Here’s what GroundReport is up to:
We’re putting the finishing touches on our mini-publication functionality– this enables any group to instantly create a professional, branded online publication with their own dynamic front page. Groups customize with their logo, title, description and website link. They add contributors who can post content to the publication, and appoint editors who can revise and delete reports. Each publication gets its own RSS feed and an unchanging web address. To encourage communication within the community, members can post comments to a bulletin board and see a feed of recent activity from their friends.

This had been in the works, but at the Summit I was inspired by Dan Pacheco’s response to the idea. He convinced me that there is a need for the tool. I love small-town newspapers and don’t want them to die. And since the tools to publish online are so affordable that there’s no reason for these publications to disappear. GroundReport’s mission is to democratize the media by removing barriers to participation, so this is a natural next step.

Update: GroundReport launched the Group/minipublication functionality inspired in part by the Networked Journalism Summit, specifically in a conversation with Dan Pacheco.  Example.

I’m working on a lot of stuff next at TrueHoops, some of which started long before the conference, and some of which was a direct result of it.

* Getting smarter and more organized about enlisting the help of the artists formerly known as TrueHoop readers. Along this line, I already (inspired by JerseyTV) started a YouTube group that at the moment has more than 500 members.
* I’ll be working with Jay Rosen on his beat writer project.
* I’m working with ESPN to figure out setting up and selling ads across a blog network.
* I have various topics in mind — New Orleans for the All-Star game in February, and Beijing for the Olympics next summer — where I think a network of volunteer reporters on the ground could be a powerful antidote to the press release control of information.
* ESPN does a pretty rigorous job of comment moderation already, but the conference has also sparked some conversations about how we might do even better.

I am working on www.ShelfMade.net. We just put our first page up and we are looking to let people know about our upcoming beta. The ShelfMade concept allows users to create a personalized magazine from Internet content.

On the flip side, we are building a network of bloggers from which our users can Shelv articles that will then be included in their magazines. Every time a a user Shelves an article and includes that article in a magazine, the author is paid a royalty. We think that bloggers, independent authors and journalists will want to be part of the content network for 3 reasons.

1. Additional revenue when users Shelv articles
2. Writers can spread their ideas in a medium that has been so far unavailable to independent authors, print magazines.
3. With the pass along effect of print, a new audience will read these authors and traffic to the blog should increase.

I am very excited about seeing what other people are working on.If you have any feedback for me regarding ShelfMade, I would love to hear.

The event got me thinking once again about the role of professional journalist in a world where the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. I’ve resolved to deal with the issues raised by this problem in my research for Jupiter next year.

I’ve also resolved to open up Coastsider to even greater community participation. This was already on my agenda for 2008, but NJS has given a renewed sense of urgency to solving the problems this raises.

It has given me new enthusiasm for an idea I raised at the “Local” BOF: to figure out how to create (or get someone else to create) an ad network for the region that includes Coastsider. And, it has increased my interest in organizing a conference about these issues in the Bay Area in 2008.