I will be publishing a book on Networked Journalism with Blackwell US next Spring and POLIS will be publishing a policy report on Networked Journalism in 2008 as well. We will continue to look to build links with companies, individuals and education institutions interested in developing research concepts around the future of journalism.

We just launched our new Facebook application, which allows Facebook users to create collaborative rich-media greeting cards for their friends within Facebook.  It’s the first time we’re taking the Kaltura group-video-making technology beyond the Kaltura.com portal and we’re looking forward to doing so more and more.

I made a video blog of my “video notebook” for the summit.

What I’m working on next:

- Producing online video stories for Baristanet.com
- Collaborating with Chuck Olsen of The Uptake.com on
political coverage of the upcoming RNC.
- Producing video coverage of political events &
issues for Huffington Post.com
- Producing online video series on Transgender rights
and protections for The Human Rights Campaign

I’m definitely working on an open micro-blogging platform. Two things that I found people interested in were instant messaging and a way to create a cross-domain social network among all the sites. In other words, a standard way to share and contribute to media in an open, collaborative way. An “IGA for news sites” was the way one person put it.

To all the participants in the Networked Journalism Summit,

We have one more very important favor to ask:
We want to know what you’re working on next.

Please respond to this post with a quick description. Or a long description. But please do tell us. (Check the “What’s Next” category of blog posts to see some responses already).

We think the most important benefit of the Summit was sharing best practices and lessons. We vow to keep sharing that with all of you. But for us to follow up, we have to know what you’re up to.

This doesn’t need to be anything grand and glorious. It needn’t have come from the Summit. It can just be something you want to look into, experiment with, play with. As I posted today at the Summit blog, I was delighted that one of our number was inspired by WNYC’s beer survey and plans to ask readers to find the price of a Bud six-pack. That may seem small but it’s not, for it’s a step toward mobilizing the audience to collaborate; it’s a cultural shift; and it’s something that can actually get done. So whatever you’re looking to do next, big or small, please let us know.

We’ll post what you tell us on the Summit blog at www.newsinnovation.com. And we will follow up in a few weeks or months, whatever is appropriate, so we can share best practices and lessons again. We’ll also post this letter on the Summit blog; please feel very free to share and converse in the comments there. The more you continue to share with everyone, the
better.

That was the favor. Now the New York question (paraphrasing Ed Koch): How’d we do? Please be blunt. This was our first such event and we need to learn from this. Tell us what you didn’t like as much as what you liked. What do you wish we’d done more of or less of? How were the sessions? Was the hall time useful? Anything.

And finally, the thanks: Speaking on behalf of me, David Cohn, CUNY, and I’m sure the MacArthur Foundation, I can’t thank you enough for participating in the Summit. What impressed me most about the day was the spirit of collaboration among all of you — your generosity sharing your experience, lessons, questions, and dreams. I’ve heard this from many people who were there — they were gratified to find other people swarming around the same topic.

It is our mutual challenge to keep that collaboration on collaboration going.

We’ll also let you know when we post video and audio from the event.

And soon I’ll start posting some thinking and discussion leading up to our next event on new business models for news. Please do join in on that urgent topic as well. We’ll let you know the date and details when we know them.

Again, thank you all.
Jeff Jarvis
David Cohn

Working with Kyle Redinger of TheMediaAge.com in trialling our self-service, local text advertising system, Addiply, through a small site in Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as finding further trial partners here in the UK; preparing to launch the second of our networked sites from the ‘mother’ myfootballwriter.com hub; recruiting a professional journalist to help launch the third; recruiting a part-time ad salesperson to service both new sites; to tie up an affliate advertising deal with the local railway company pulling 10% revenue back from all rail tickets bought through our site; to try and promote the message that, to survive, we need to be both big and small, both micro-brewery and Budweiser; preparing to put together a second and final round submission for this year’s Knight News Challenge; to broaden our range of podcasts; to ponder whether to make comment free for all; to liase with a freelance national ad buyer to cascade national ads through the mother hub; to recruit new monthly columnists to service just the mother hub; to work with a CNYU grad student on both a social mapping function for myfootballwriter.com and a feasibility study on the US prospects for a mybaseballwriter.com; to liase with the MBA student body at the London School of Business over a marketing stragey for the roll-out of Addiply.

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Leonard Witt continues to blog at PJNet.org on his new journalism business model called Representative Journalism. At the conference he met Barry Parr from Coastsider.com and they submitted a Knight News Challenge grant proposal using the RJ concept. More good news is to come on the RJ front, but it is just a bit premature to talk about now. Read all about it at: RepresentativeJournalism.org

“I talked to Mackenzie Warren from Florida about the shared requirements of our projects and his, and we realized we both have the same kind of software needs. We had the idea to put out a call for a developer/s to design some software that could be used by any media organization looking to do this kind of project. I bounced the idea off Jay at the conference and he seemed to think it was something NewAssignment could take on. Just thought you’d be interested in it as something that was born at your event.”

Having never organized a conference, I was nervous about so many things before the Networked Journalism Summit we held at CUNY on Wednesday (thanks to the MacArthur Foundation). I think it went off well. Scott Anderson of Tribune put together a good collection of summary bullets. The students blogged the sessions at NewsInnovation.com and we’ll put up video and audio when we can. Robin Hamman called our event “stonking.” I sure hope that’s good.

What matters most to me coming out of this is inspiration and ideas turning into action. We will follow up on that action to see what really happens. But I was delighted to hear Jay Rosen say that at the Summit he signed up five partners for his next effort in beat reporting backed by social networks. Henry Abbott said: “I made stars in my notes when I heard an idea that made me think: I should do that on TrueHoop. There are about 40 stars in my notes. Cool!” Here’s the first of those stars in action: collaborative curation of video. Debbie Galant called to say that she has new things to do to try to fix comments. Dan Pacheco is still processing. One local organization was inspired by Jim Colgan’s experiment in crowdsourcing at WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show and also plans to ask its audience to find and compare the price of a six-pack of beer in their market. That might sound small but I think it’s big because it is about mobilizing the people formerly known as the audience to join in and prove that together, we can learn more than we could on our own. That’s a major cultural shift in news and I am confident it will lead to bigger ideas and more collaboration. That’s what counts. Enough talk, now it’s time for working together to expand journalism. More followup when we poll the participants on what they’re up to next. We will keep sharing lessons and best practices. That, I hope, was is the value of the day.

Some of my thoughts after we cleaned up the guacamole:

* BUSINESS MODELS: When I asked Backfence’s Mark Potts what he/we most need to get to the next level, he replied, “a business model.” No one has a good business model for this stuff — let alone for the future of news. But as Jay Rosen points out, the crowd was oddly calm given our presence in an overcrowded, leaky canoe headed up the creek with no paddles in hand. I didn’t intend this, but the business discussions at the Summit certainly lead straight into the next event we’re holding out of CUNY’s News Innovation Project — a session exploring new business models for news. This is urgent work.

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Here’s Bob Garfield’s report on the Summit on On the Media.