I think our most interesting development right now in Bakersfield is the digital revolution happening in our newsroom.

As of a few weeks ago, the 80-some person newsroom in the Calfornian reorganized to focus on around-the-clock online coverage. Any story that ultimately appears in print (and a lot more than that) is blogged first, with updates going up throughout the day. That’s a huge change from how things used to work, with only a few reporters posting live updates at all and most stories not showing up online until 11 p.m. (before appearing in print the next day).

It’s a truly interactive experience for the audience because they can post comments to talk to the reporters as they file updates. I’ve noticed that they sometimes ask for more details which the reporter then investigates and reports back on. This really takes the concept of “news as a conversation” to a new level, because the conversation does impact the focus of the news coverage. At the end of the day, the “final” version of the story is created for print and posted online.

You can watch this happening in real time on the “Bakosphere” page.

I love that the newsroom is using the blogging engine that we created for the community 18 months ago, and that they started doing this on their own with no prodding and very little consultation with my team. I think the lesson there is that if you provide tools that lets ANYONE participate and contribute content whenever they want to, your traditional newsroom will eventually get involved and create something that is far more interesting than technology. The relationship between reporters and readers is evolving all on its own — a true revolution rather than something that was forced or mandated.

Here are a few recent examples of reporters posting news and updates to stories online as users converse with them:

• Live coverage and audience commentary on a wrestling competition.
• Commentary on a video depicting drama in Bakersfield’s minor league hockey games.
• Report and discussion on post-housing-slump development plans for Bakersfield
• Story about how immigrants don’t commit the most crime, and some discussion (which is a little disturbing — but it does accurately depict the “water-cooler” debate about this going on in Bakersfield).

Participants:

Dan Pacheco, Northwest Voice, John Wilpers, Boston Now; Jarah Euston, Fresno Famous; Dan Barkin, Raleigh News and Observer

Moderator: David Cohn

The panelists talked of their development of user-generated content on the local level, involving those who Barkin called “people formerly known as the audience.”

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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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