Laporte said he charges $70 CPMs for ads. Some questioned the $12 CPM we included in our New Business Models for News, though we went with a conservative middle-ground based on the experience of existing local businesses. If we had – as we will – instead forecast a new kind of local news business – highly targeted with a highly engaged public, like TWiT’s – the CPMs and bottom lines would have been exponentially higher. The companies are still small but they are profitable. Laporte said he has costs of $350,000 a year with seven employees now but revenue of $1.5 million and that revenue is doubling annually. It will increase more as he announces new means of distribution (to the TV; he believes that podcasting is too hard for the audience).

Rather than nickel-and-diming current business assumptions, we need to have the ambition of a Laporte and build the new and better media enterprise.

(The video is after this link; it unfortunately plays automatically, so we wanted to get it off the front page).

(Note: Our models were funded by the Knight Foundation.)

[The video is a bit shaky but clears up after a minute].

Click To Play

I tried to find some positive near the end of the interview (tunnel) but Alan didn’t want to add any obvious silver lining.  From his view this really is a time to hold on tight, because we are going down a steep hill for at least 6 months. After the interview he jokingly said that as a depressing person “this is his time to shine.” That may be true – but if you need a positive jolt after this video interview I still go back to my recent blog post “Why We Should Feel Bullish About the Future of Journalism.”

(Mark Josephson – Outside.In)

The main thing is that it gives people a sense of belonging that is greater than themselves

To help people who wants to be stars to become stars
To help people make money with Ads
To provide tools to make you better
To provide huge audience for you
And a market if you decide to sell.

Also, to meet local publishers needs
To give access to more inventory

What you need to be part of the network:

Scale & Inventory

What are your goals?
The basic task of journalism is to create order out of the chaos of raw information, and we believe that remains our overarching mission in the connected era. Our goal is to provide tools and a framework for Houston and its communities to cover themselves. We want to enable everyone – the garden group in the suburbs; the high school football team with dreams of making state; the neighborhood association struggling with revitalization issues near downtown; the backyard philosopher with an idea she thinks can change the world – to tell their story. As journalists, we ultimately want to collaborate with all these voices to paint a clearer picture of what Houston is, and what it’s becoming.

Notable achievements?

Chron.com was one of the first major newspaper Web sites to embrace blogging both by staff and readers, launching our first blogs in early 2004. We’ve been careful to emphasize comments as much as what our staffers say in our blogs, creating rich and loyal communities around each blog. We were named the Best Blogging Newspaper by Jay Rosen and his NYU students in March 2006 as a result, and several of our bloggers – in sports, entertainment and news – have received national media and peer recognition for their work.

We’ve also built a substantial, vibrant and growing community around reader content, and are utilizing it in our day-to-day coverage of Houston. Photos and news stories submitted by readers now are published regularly in our newspaper, particularly in our neighborhood sections.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
I think we’ve learned that, just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come. Simply inviting collaboration isn’t enough – we’ve found you must actively recruit for it, and give people reasons to collaborate with you. Our most successful experiences have come where producers, editors or reporters have taken ownership of the concept and worked hard to engage and develop their communities.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?
Yes. The bulk of the incremental revenue has come from the growth of advertising inventory that has accompanied the overall growth of the number of pages people are viewing on the site. The biggest impact has come from blogs and reader comments, both of which have increased the average pages per visitor significantly in the last year.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
Two things in the near term: (1) using reader interaction effectively in building communities around the site’s topical and geographical niche sites and (2) further developing a model for news coverage that turns sources into authors and readers into sources, potential putting our beat reporters in the position of conductors of this public symphony.

To do this, we will need further improvements to our reader interactive technology, the continuing willingness of the newsroom to try and to fail and some new compensation models for both our staff and their community collaborators.

Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit

Dwight Silverman’s list:

Dave Winer

Peter Rojas (Engadget)

Steve Rubel

Robin Sloan (Current TV)

Jay Rosen

Jonathon Dube (CyberJournalist)

Steve Grove (YouTube)

Lydia West (About.com)

Jeff Jarvis

Scott Clark’s list:

Jay Rosen

Lydia West

Jeff Jarvis

Jennifer Carroll

Travis Henry

Robin Sloan

Derek Willis

The first pilot is a new local activity and events directory website for Los Angeles that fuses user submitted content, LA Times-appointed guide content, and LA Times newspaper content to neighborhood directories. It’s similar in some ways to Citysearch, though it was built for L.A. from the beginning and it will include a great deal more editorial content and more social features. The beta version of this site will be launching in December.

The second pilot is a new entertainment industry news section of latimes.com that integrates LA Times content, user-generated content, and third party web content submitted by users. Content items are presented in an integrated display and are prioritized based on recency of the post, total number of user votes, and total number of user comments.

At the heart of both products is a user reputation system that is designed to help the reader qualify content submitted by site users and LA Times staff alike to make a judgment about which content on the site to put stock in.

What are your goals?

Based on additional user testing of the new designs, our goal is to deploy the concepts that resonate well with consumers across the broader latimes.com website.

 
Notable achievements?

We launched a very modest pilot project in our travel section to begin experimenting with the directory product concept. Only about 75% of the functionality has been built for that section, but already we are seeing page views up 300% over the previous section design.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)

It is very difficult to launch a new front end of a site and a new underlying CMS at the same time.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

Since we launched the travel pilot we have seen national advertising dollars in the section turn from a year over year decline of 26% to a 156% year over year increase.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?

We need to ramp up our new Ruby on Rails tech infrastructure to allow us to launch product iterations more smoothly and A/B test more effectively.

Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit 

It looks like you have created a fantastic list of attendees– I am excited to speak with everyone on the list.

What are your goals?
To create the new town square for the small communities we serve.

Notable achievements?
- Launching East County Online in 1995, the first group of US weekly papers on the web

- While at the Ventura County Star, we won best news site awards from E&P, NAA and ONA (I was director in 2004 when the site won ONA‘s General Excellence Award). In those six years, the site won awards in several other categories.

- Creating Bakersfield.com as we know it today, which has been nominated for a Digital Edge Award, as well as winning the first-ever Inland Press Association General Excellence Award.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
- Move faster. Resist the temptation to have all the right things in all the right places before taking action.
- In a newspaper organization, be honest with staff — we have to do this and online is just simply more important to our potential for growth than print (in the past, I was soft on this message).
- Blog. You’ve got to walk the talk if you want your organizations to change.
- There are a number of things I wish I had done differently over they years. I wouldn’t call them mistakes so much as lessoned learned. For example, in Ventura, we should have been more aggressive about inviting key community leaders to blog for us. There is a whole host of things I wish we could have moved faster on in Ventura.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?
At GHS, we’re still building our revenue products. In Ventura, we were as successful as anybody in the newspaper industry at growing revenue (we really expanded the idea of Top Jobs, which is now an industry standard recruitment up sell). In Bakersfield, let’s just say revenue-wise, I left Bakersfield.com MUCH better off than I found it.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
More time. More people. The ideas are all out there. The path is pretty clear. At GHS, we just have SOOOO much work to do.

Also, please list anyone you’d particularly like to talk with, learn
> from, or work with at the summit (see a list of attendees here:
> < http://newsinnovation.com/list-of-attendees>

Lisa Williams
Chris Tolles (simple question: why won’t Topix obey our robots.txt
exclusion file?)
Dave Winer
JD Lasic
Ariana Huffington (I met her just before she launched HuffPost, but I
would really like to review with her again her start up model)
Scott Karp

And I’ve never met Jeff Jarvis …

I have a journalism degree from NYU, and consider myself a fairly serious journalist who worked at CBS Network Radio News, at WIBA-AM in Madison, and as a freelance writer for magazines like Men’s Journal, HOOP, Inside Stuff, etc. (I hate the idea that blogs are a lesser form of journalism.) I started the basketball blog TrueHoop in 2005, and in early 2007 it was purchased by ESPN where it is my full-time job.

At TrueHoop, I get offers from readers (college students, other bloggers, researchers, journalists, etc.) to help with projects all the time. For the longest time, I simply turned them away, not knowing how to responsibly integrate their efforts in a way that would make everyone happy and serve the readers of TrueHoop.

What are your goals?
To learn from other’s experience, to make some connections, and to get the ball rolling for a pretty cool collaborative project that I have in mind — the NBA has an All-Star Game coming up in New Orleans. It’s a massive undertaking in a broken city. I don’t want to rely on press releases to determine how the event might impact the city (last year’s event in Las Vegas featured a fair amount of mayhem). I would love to have smart people on the ground in New Orleans giving us a sense of what New Orleans is like in the lead up to the event and during.

What are some of your notable achievements?
I was once named NYU’s best broadcast journalism student! And at WIBA I was the lead reporter in a newscast that was named the best in six states. I don’t really care about any of that crap, though. I’m all about TrueHoop, which was nothing in May 2005, and then was named Best of the Web by Forbes shortly after it was launched. Since then it has been mentioned more than once in The New York Times. It has been linked to by all kinds of great blogs. I have been a guest on NPR, and dozens of radio shows from Portland to Philadelphia. And now I think I am the first person ever to publish freely on ESPN.com.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
Oh man. You know what? I make mistakes all the time. My biggest lesson, I guess, is to do everything as well as possible and not put anything off. The projects that I don’t complete are the ones I don’t start. I know, duh. But that’s the truth.

I have more ideas than I know how to handle, and I need to find ways to integrate more people into my work.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?
I get a salary from ESPN.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
Smarts about managing citizen journalists.

Anyone you’d particularly like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit

I’m a big Steven Rubel fan. Jay Rosen is doing fantastic things at my alma mater, and I would love to have a relationship with him. And who doesn’t want to meet Jeff Jarvis? But honestly, I expect to have great experiences learning from just about any of these people.

Recent examples of networked journalism at McClatchy include the recent acquisition of Fresno Famous (see writeup) and a part of the News & Observer in Raleigh North Carolina is a community site called the Share Triangle. McCaltchy’s networked journalism efforts can be as simple as an Alaskan paper asking for pictures of the biggest fish caught, to their upcoming ambitions to create a participatory journalism project through their DC bureau.

Main Goal: It’s a new space with the same goal, to practice community journalism. “Journalism that empowers people, creates better citizens to participate in a democracy,” says Weaver.

A Surprising Realization: I’ve been more surprised by the pace of change than by its direction,” says Weaver. “To me the basic imperatives have been clear for some time, but I feel like there is an accelerating pace.”

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: The biggest thing we’ve learned is having an integrated news staff and not walling off the online staff from the print staff. In some places the staffs were literally in different buildings and now we are largely integrated and encouraging people to become more integrated, including content ad-sales and management. It is a big lesson not to think of the delivery medium, but trying to serve the customer – putting the information how the consumer wants it rather than how we produce it, says Weaver.

Money: To begin Weaver had a disclaimer: “The revenue side is not my area of expertise, I’m a news guy and always have been.”

According to Weaver, McClatchy is finding revenue models online and should have $180-200 million in online revenues this year. The company has investments in cars.com and Career Builder that are promising and while the initial opportunity was in the classified it is finding that retail online is growing quickly.

Future Goals: “We think of ourselves as a mission driven company,” says Weaver. The main goal will not change and it remains the future goals as well. “For 150 years we have been trying to make the communities where we serve better places, the animating principle is public service journalism.”

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

We are, like everybody else, between infancy and adolescents in this process. Its an opportunity to be exposed to a lot of ideas in a short time and meet a lot of people whose names I only know from reading their blogs.

Main Goal: Last October the changes were implemented across the country and as of May this year – all Gannett’s papers have fully transitioned. The shift to information centers has many layers – including the willingness and capabilities to work with members of the community on investigations. “This is not rearranging furniture – this is a shift in how we do our jobs,” says Carroll.

Notable Achievements: Carroll and Ganett have been encouraged on several fronts since the change. Using crowdsourcing along with database analysis Gannett has broken stories faster and working with communities has drawn conclusions that would have gone otherwise unnoticed, says Carroll. A new tool called “Get Published” let’s anybody upload content and many of Gannett’s papers have between 100-200 hyperlocal sites that are the result of pro-am reporting. “We provide the backbone and the tools and we welcome community involvement,” says Carroll.

The Cincinnati Enquirer recently launched The Data Center, allowing readers to search thousands of databases based on lifestyle and content information linked through home addresses. For example, readers can search records of crime in their neighborhoods, review trends and compare statistics throughout the metro area.

In another example: Florida Today received an email tip by way of the “Blow the whistle” button. It was from an appraiser who said thousands of local homeowners were getting ripped-off by insurance companies that inflate the replacement value of homes on paper and, consequently, overcharge for hurricane insurance. Insurance policies are not public record, and there would be no way to report that story authoritatively without asking as many residents as possible to share private documents. So the paper posted an item to the Brevard Watchlist asking readers to “join the investigation” by doing just that. The countywide investigation yielded a front-page Sunday newspaper story and an online report on how to estimate a home’s replacement cost.

Gannett is reporting traffic increases across the board, from visitors to time spent on sites, frequency in visits and pages viewed per visit.

A Surprising Realization: The biggest surprise is that we didn’t do this earlier, both in the company and in the industry, says Carroll. If journalism at its core is to serve the public, then it has not been taking advantage of all the new tools that can help perform this function, says Carroll. “But if we think about how to use them creatively, we can get back to the things that those of us who grew up in the business in our hearts truly believe in – that we can work with readers to inform and engage and shine light on wrongdoing,” says Carroll.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: Carroll admits that Gannett underfunded not just research but technology and infrastructure. Many of Ganett’s papers responded to the changes from headquarters not with disdain – they were behind the changes, but didn’t have the technology or infrastructure to make it happen. It requires more than just talk – but capital investment in laptops, video equipment, trios, the ability to transmit digitally, etc.

Money: The editorial changes are working in tandem with revenue teams at Gannet that are exploring new ways to monetize the product. An advance data team is not only exploring content – but also how to engage readers online with mapping software and other areas that traditionally hasn’t been explored in advertising.

“We will only move forward and build on what we have done.” Gannett is very encouraged by the possibility of becoming sustainable, says Carroll. Many of these concepts have been tested at the 12 original Gannett papers to make the shift and they have developed over the past year and Gannett is seeing strong results.

Future Goals: There is no endpoint in Ganett’s transformation. “I see us only building on the research and reaction that we’ve gotten,” says Carroll. There is still an imperative to be nimble and invest in the types of technology that is needed, from social networks and beyond, but right now Gannett is ready to pounce on what is next. “We as an industry have not been as serious as being early adapters — and now I see us positioned in the front row so we can react quickly,” says Carroll.

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

I am very very interested in all the experimenting that is going on across the industry — We need to do more R&D. I spend as much time as I have looking at experiments that people are involved in — That’s what I want to get out it.