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.)

As CEO and co-founder of BlogTalkRadio, Bob Charish and I have created a platform that is currently allowing over 3,000 hosts to broadcast live call in shows online. This social broadcasting platform allows anyone to have a voice and say they’re peace. You don’t have to be Rush Limbaugh to be a host on BlogTalkRadio—you just need a phone and a vision, and you get to be a citizen journalist when you speak what’s on your mind.

What are your goals?

To be the largest social broadcasting platform in existence and we’re well on our way.

Notable achievements?

Our new site has expanded our core functionality (using phones to produce live audio streams that are instantly archived and made available as a podcast) to include more community tools. Like Facebook, hosts can now add favorite shows, add friends within BTR, and leave comments on each other’s internal blogs. We’re excited to be growing our community so hosts can help support one another in their efforts.

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

You have to always be evangelizing about your vision. I’m deeply passionate about BlogTalkRadio as I see it as such a great tool to bring voices to blogs where there was only print before we came around. I think the lesson there is to never underestimate the power of any conversation you have with anyone you meet. I think a mistake might be to assume that just because you don’t make a sale of your product or have someone instantly love what you do you should feel that you
failed. If they learned about your business or heard your message, it means they walk away knowing about you when they didn’t before. That’s a big deal.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

Yes. We’re monetizing in two primary ways at this time. First, by rolling ads into our content and doing a revenue share with hosts. Secondly, we’re selling the private label version of our software (our “Business Solutions” platform) where people can either license our tools to put them in their own branded environment or build an Enterprise Station on our network to help drive unique traffic to their content.
What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?

We’ve incorporated video into our text chat and are building up that infrastructure as hosts have asked for video and we like to respond to their request as quickly as we can. To get to the next level we’ve mainly been adding staff at this time to handle all the growth we’ve dealt with in the last few months.

Charlie Beckett is doing Networked Journalism and thinking hard about it. He is an award-winning TV news and current affairs producer and programme editor who swapped the BBC and ITN’s Channel 4 News to found a new journalism think-tank called POLIS at the London School of Economics. Charlie Beckett is also the launch editor for an IPTV project which aims to create an intellectual internet news analysis platform and discussion programme for thinking people in the UK and internationally.

Networked Journalism is a key concept for POLIS. It ran a series of seminars for news practitioners that will lead to a policy report and conference in 2008 on Networked Journalism in London. Charlie Beckett is publishing a book on global Networked Journalism called Super Media (Blackwell 2008).

What are your goals?

We want to create a journalism think-tank that promotes the best kind of networked journalism internationally. POLIS is already leading the debate in the UK about the social and political role of new forms of journalism around the world. We have lectures, seminars, conferences, policy reports, fellowships, and major research projects.

I want to combine that think-tank work with my own journalism. We believe our IPTV project is a viable business model for high-quality networked journalism. I want to take the best of the journalistic values that I was part of over the last 20 years to create a new journalism. POLIS wants to provide the thought-leadership for the ‘Next Media’, but also to convince society to invest in public service networked journalism.

Notable achievements?

I am an award-winning TV news producer who has always been at the forefront of broadcasting new technology from digital editing to multi-skilling and interactivity. POLIS has already redefined the understanding of journalism’s future role. I have created the most successful academic journalism blog in the UK and brought Networked Journalism to the United Nations as well as to the London School of Economics as a series of taught courses and a research subject. Our Future of News seminars were unique in bringing different sectors of the news media together to debate Next Media, while our Media and Africa conference and report was a remarkable meeting of journalists and development activists which put new forms of journalism at the heart of movements for political and economic change.

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

The launch of POLIS has shown that thought leadership is a critical part of media literacy. We have been amazed at the appetite out there for serious discussion about journalism. People know that we need a better media. But until now, the media has been treated as a force of nature like the weather, rather than a part of civilised society that has to be shaped and supported. But for news markets to function they have to attract investment rather than altruism.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

POLIS works with a variety of partners from government to NGOs to business. We make money by creating exciting intelligent journalism courses. We provide our sponsors and partners with a product they don’t have – independent, authoritative, professionally-informed analysis of contemporary journalism. Our IPTV project has the support of a commercial backer who combines an ethical ambition with a sense that there is profit in clever online journalism.

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

We want to get serious international Foundation funding to create a major centre of research in to Networked Journalism in Europe to balance the excellent work happening in the US. Journalism is now global and so we have to understand more about its effect and potential around the world.

The POLIS director’s blog is at: www.charliebeckett.org

The POLIS website is: www.lse.ac.uk/polis

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

Everyone looks great but here are some names that caught my eye:

o Ariana Huffington – HuffingtonPost
o Amanda Michel – NewAssignment
o Jeff Burkett — Washington Post News Interactive
o Jay Rosen – NewAssignment.Net
o Donica Mensing – Reynolds School of Journalism
o Steve Grove – YouTube
o Tom Rosenstiel – Project for Excellence in Journalism
o Sreenath Sreenivasan – Columbia University
o Bill Mitchell – Poynter
o Chris Anderson – Columbia
o John Bracken – MacArthur Foundation
o Brian storm
o Dale Peskin – iFocos
o Chris Tolles – Topix

Andrew Fitzgerald runs the citizen journalism program for international cable/satellite TV network Current TV. Robin Sloan is the online product strategist there (i.e. he figures out what we should do on the web). Both of us have been deeply involved in Current’s ongoing efforts to create an open, community-driven news system capable of powering a 24/7 TV network. They are efforts that have already yielded some really amazing programming (and we can share examples with anyone that’s interested) but even so, we feel we are still at the VERY beginning.
What are your goals?
Our goal is to massively expand our output of networked journalism — primarily in video but also in other formats, too — created by and targeted to global young adult audience. We think we’re doing good things now but we want to do much, MUCH more.

Notable achievements?
By using different kinds of media than other networks will contemplate, we’ve been able to assemble much more personal, authentic coverage of some of the major news stories of the past year. For instance: Instead of sending reporters and satellite trucks to Virginia Tech in the wake of the shootings there, we put together a piece combining webcam reactions from students with news footage and stills. It made for a fairly gripping & intimate account of the event.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
If you build it, they will not necessarily come. We have, a number of times, assumed that if we built the web architecture for citizen journalists to send in their reports, they just would. Early on, we focused too much on theory and systems, and not enough on finding ways to let people know we existed

Are you getting revenue for this? How?
Yes! Current, like other cable TV networks, is supported by its ad revenues and subscription fees.
What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
We want to expand & decentralize our news-gathering using our new site, current.com — and, in the spirit of the perpetual beta, we’ll be figuring out exactly what that means as we go.
Anyone you’d particularly like to talk with.
Neil McIntosh from the Guardian, Micah Sifry, Huffington Post
people, the Sunlight Foundation folks… lots more (it’s a great
group!) but those stand out.

What are your goals?

Small World News is a collaborative between a small American team and journalists in Baghdad and Mexico City. We partner our skills and know-how in editing, video-blogging, dsitribution, and knowledge of journalism, accuracy, bias, etc. with teams of local citizens and journalists, trained to use small DV cameras and shoot for the web. In this way we’re able to produce powerful local content that has a global impact. We hope to continue building bureaus around the world and change the way we learn about different parts of the world, providing windows on as many under-served locations as possible.

Notable achievements?

We have produced a weekly program on life in Baghdad for over a year, covering stories such as the Adhamiya Wall, visually and more fully than done in the media before, and the plight of refugees in the Al Waleed Camp on the Iraq-Syria border, which had previously been seen nowhere else. We have also taken the time to look carefully at the plight of Iraqi civilians in a way not possible in the current TV news climate. We swept the first awards show for Video Blogs, the Vloggies, taking home seven awards. We were also nominated for a Webby in 2007. We co-produced a documentary for BBC Newsnight and SkyNews solicited five of our episodes for broadcast.

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

I’ve learned that, as always, patience is a virtue. Also, it is important to consider the business model and sustainability of a project, as well as its importance to society. We’ve also found that unfortunately, video on the web is not paying for itself yet, and there doesn’t seem to be a clear model for monetization. The hardest part has been dealing with companies’ fickle interest in our content, and trying to simultaneously leverage our blog status, while promoting our journalistic credibility.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

We have had a variety of revenue sources over the last two years. They have ranged from donations from our viewers, to small grants, as well as speaking fees, and the largest contribution has been by licensing our content to old media institutions. We hope that by putting together a solid plan for continuing to license content, we can build a sustainable company. Our latest plan for ongoing revenue has been to offer voluntary subscriptions to our viewers, we are now making around $200/mo in contributions of 5, 10, and 20 dollars.

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

We are looking for mentoring in journalism, as we have mostly learned this by the seat of our pants and reading books. We are also looking to train news companies looking to make the transition to video in how to do it. We’re hoping to make contacts with companies that need this help, but also with entrepreneurs who may want to collaborate in order to find the funding/financing/horizontal income to make our work sustainable. We’d be excited to speak with anyone looking to collaborate.

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

David Cohn, Michael Rosenblum, Jay Rosen, Arianna Huffington, Tom Rosenstiel, Bill Mitchell, Andy Solomon, Emily Gertz, Lila King, Bill Densmore, John Bracken, Rory O’Connor, Brian Storm, Chrys Wu, Blake Eskin, Donica Mensing, Tom Whitwell, Mark Lukasiewicz, Robin Hamma, Edward Roussel, Jeff Burkett, I gues we should just say there are many people I want to meet at this thing, I hope there are enough hours in the day…

My work in citizen journalism includes the film “Blogumentary,” the community videoblog Minnesota Stories, correspondent reports for Rocketboom, and work on various political campaigns. Currently, I’m helping launch a video-based networked journalism project called The Uptake.

What are your goals?

Our motto is co-opted from Thomas Friedman: “Will journalism be done by you or to you?”

The Uptake aims to (1) Train video citizen journalists to cover political people and events, (2) Develop an innovative calendar that enables citizen journalists to choose and rank event coverage, and (3) Aggregate CJ video stories and create a show highlighting the most interesting CJ video.

We’re focussing specifically on the 2008 election, including the RNC in Minnesota and the DNC in Colorado.

Notable achievements?

The first presidential YouTube announcement, for John Edwards, was uploaded from my laptop.
Minnesota Stories is the winner of two Vloggies awards.
Blogumentary has screened at festivals and universities around the world.

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

I recently used the phrase “anti-peace” in a vlog post title documenting counter-protesters at a peace march. Although there’s some truth to the phrase, it was inflammatory and upset the conservative blogging community. We quickly changed the title and apologized for the characterization. Perhaps the lesson is, “bias is often unfair.”

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

We are a 501c(4) non-profit in fundraising mode. On the small scale, we’re having a fundraising party sponsored by Drinking Liberally and getting some income licensing and syndicating our video. On a larger scale, we’re presenting our business plan to a number of large organizations and potential investors.

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

We’re looking for funding to help us recruit, train, and equip citizen journalists. The “next level” is empowering our citizen journalists to create stories you won’t see anywhere else.

What are your goals?

My goals are to build an original interactive programming production company, videoblog for a Presidential campaign and essentially, make a good living at producing original online video.

Notable achievements?

The ability to document my life and community online. Launched production company with partner, Liza Persky, development deal with Discovery Channel, featured in the Democratic You Tube debate in July 2007.

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

A) Don’t give it away. Even if you are struggling, just because it’s online video doesn’t mean it should be grossly undercompensated. I am making original content for an innovative medium and should be compensated for that.

b) You don’t always have to be the face of a project just because it’s your project. For something to work, it has to be received in the right way, and you may not be the right way.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

Not really. We’ve been approached for small distribution deals here and there, always from countries outside the U.S., but nothing that we’ve signed on for yet. We’ve done lots of work for very little money just to get a project rolling with the promise of better funding down the line. Still haven’t seen that better funding.

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

We will continue to create original programming online. To not just throw ideas around but execute them, post them online, try them out. For the next level, we need to meet people who will pay us to create, try things out, take risks, be bold in a new place, in a new way.

Anyone you’d particularly like to talk with.

Andy Carvin – NPR
Ariana Huffington – HuffingtonPost
Fred Graver – VH1

What are your goals?
To learn what others are doing, and share and improve upon ideas.

Notable achievements?
Worked on Pulitzer Prize-winning interactive project
Formed large discussion communities online on BBSes and CompuServe (yes, I’m ancient in Internet years…)
Created user-friendly elections information websites for public radio

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
“You’re never really finished, you just run out of time.”

Are you getting revenue for this? How?
Revenue in some cases was for ad exposures, in other cases, was for number of visits and time spent on site.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
I’d like more opportunities — and the necessary resources — to develop projects and stories that engage readers/users.

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

Leigh Behrens – New York Times Regional Media Group
Neil McIntosh – Guardian Unlimited
Mandi Albright – Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Brian Storm – MediaStorm
Bob Garfield – On the Media
Paul Sullivan – Orato
Peter Rojas – Engadget
Dwight Silverman – Houston Chronicle
Scott Clark – Houston Chronicle
Jeff Howe – Wired Magazine
John Bracken – Macarthur Foundation
Blake Eskin – The New Yorker
Rick Burnes – Faneuil Media

Executive Producer for The UpTake. I draw upon my 30 years of TV producing experience to shape stories and train video Citizen Journalists.

What are your goals?
To network. Find good collaborative video tools and best practices.

Notable achievements?
Minnesota’s First Political Podcast – Inside Minnesota Politics. In early 2004 it had the first “multi-podcast” that let people listen to just the issues or candidates they were interested in from a US Senate candidates forum.
Founded TVCitizen.com – a website that is a bridge between independent and legacy media. It syndicates independent video content to Radio, TV, Magazine and Newspaper websites. Prior to working in citizen journalism for 13 years I ran All News Channel, a national 24-hour TV news channel that was on DirecTV.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
Many smaller advertisers are not ready for online video advertising. However, they do understand banner advertising and are willing to purchase it. Video content drives up page views, which increases revenue form banner ads.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?
Right now, TVCitzen and The UpTake are in the development stages and have not officially been launched. Revenue model for TVCitizen is a combination of syndication fees and advertising revenue. The work I have been doing to help generate content for several niche national magazine websites has been making money. My company (TimeScape Productions) is paid for production. The client is making its money through advertising (banner and video ads) and is turning a profit on the venture. We are working on a user generated video site for the magazines as well.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
Help with video flash development. Introductions to local ad networks.

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

I’m interested in working with anyone who is involved in video and some folks who are probably going to want to do video.

Web Video
Will Coghlan – Hudson Street Media (Political Lunch)
Kenyatta Cheese – Rocketboom
Dorian Benkoil – Digital Media Consultant/Columnist/Teeming Media
Steve Grove – YouTube
Ariana Huffington – HuffingtonPost
Danny Glover – Air Congress (
Amani Channel – My Urban Report
Michael Meyers – NowPublic
Merrill Brown – NowPublic
Brian Conley – Alive in Baghdad
Brian Storm – MediaStorm
James Kotecki – Video Blogger, The Politico
Rachel Sterne – GroundReport
Michael Rosenblum – Rosenblum Associates

Legacy Media doing video
David Ryan – LJ World (Mediaphormedia -Lawrence Journal)
John Wilpers – Boston Now
Howard Weaver – McClatchy

TV
Robin Sloan – Current TV
Andrew Fitzgerald – Current TV
Lila King – CNN i-Report
Andrew Heyward – Marketspace LLC

Not video…

Jay Rosen – NewAssignment.Net
Leonard Witt – Public Journalism Network
Rex Hammock – Hammock Publishing
Howard Owens – GateHouse Media
Paul Sullivan – Orato
Ariel Vardi – Broowaha
Chris Tolles – Topix -
Amanda Michel – OffTheBus

The puzzle is how best to plant a democratic, spoken, wide-ranging, welcoming, lively and fairly serious conversation into the vastly expanded architecture of the Internet, where it can be instantly global, accessible by Skype (live) and also archivally, and open to listener prodding by text messages before and after the live
conversation.

We went on the air on Memorial Day in 2005, an independent production company broadcasting live out of WGBH in Boston, networked by Public Radio International, funded by the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and private angels. We’d still be doing a daily show if UMass Lowell hadn’t withdrawn its support in a political shift of chancellors. Suddenly we had a major cash-flow crisis, and we didn’t resolve it in time to stay on air uninterrupted. But for that, as Mrs. Lincoln might have said, it was a great time.

Main Goal: We work with an image in our heads of a new feedback loop: with that inexpensive, penetrating, revealing radio sound of the human voice (the fabulous instrument that Studs Terkel calls “vox humana”) on the outbound track, and a world-wide fishnet of suggestions, digressions, second opinions, links and other commentary on the Internet as the inbound track. That remains the basic idea, but how to develop it sustainably?

Notable Achievements: We got “proof of concept” in the demonstration that if you build a clubhouse for smart talk about a “stretched” menu of subjects, people
will come in good numbers and with a fabulously constructive spirit. They come not just to listen but to join a “conspiracy of the curious” in a consistently non-commercial, non-imperial, authentic — we said “Emersonian” — circle of inquiry. I think you can judge this yourself by our site: we did too many shows about the Web 2.0 revolution, but many great ones about passions (candy, poker,
knitting), about Iraq and Iran, about big minds and themes (Spinoza, Samuel Beckett, Thucydides), about music (live with the Dresden Dolls, a punk cabaret duo, and with the mid-point between J. S. Bach and
Thelonius Monk: a pianist named Donal Fox).

We took the show to 40 stations around the country, including New York, Washington, Seattle, Salt Lake City. We were on the verge in Chicago when we took our break… We had listeners and correspondents in 150 countries; about 150,000 on-air listeners, and about 150,000 Web downloads a month.

A Surprising Realization: The happiest discovery was that we actually formed a community of listeners: guardians and keepers of the hearth in the comment sections, wits and strays always entering with suggest-a-show ideas, critics and a few spoilers now and then. But the place became, as many people observed, a sort of big neighborhood tavern with regulars, irregulars, some noisy folk but an astonishingly big spread of thoughtful writers. See the comments, for example, on Norman Mailer; on the movie “Groundhog Day”; on the rise of “shuffle” culture on people’s iPods. See the more than 1000 comments on the natural vs.
religious roots of morality — most written before we did the show! See the heartbreak thread on “Endings,” when we announced that we were going off the air for a while.

Biggest Mistake/Lesson: Clearly we had one crucial turn of bad luck, but more generally we failed to figure out the business model. In hindsight, I would say we made the production too expensive, at something just under $1-million for staff, offices and broadcast services at WGBH. The work can be done more simply, with a leaner staff, in my humble opinion. And still there’s a lot of introspection and other work to be done in figuring who’s baby this is to feed. How can the responsible burden be put where it belongs in the end, on the listener? What role should educational institutions play? (I’m now working on the re-launch from Brown University at the Watson Institute for International Studies). Which foundations with a lively interest in the global conversation can be counted on for long-term support? Our biggest failure was not anticipating the crunch, and not finding a timely cure.

Money: Toward the end we asked our listener base for contributions — on our website and by email, not over the air. Within a few days we raised $165,000, including a substantial anonymous foundation grant. It helped, but wasn’t enough. We’d also won a MacArthur grant of $150,000 recognizing the value of what we were learning and demonstrating about new democratic media. But it, too, ran out.

Future Goals: I remain a believer in the many promises of online media, in the spirit and detail of Jay Rosen’s original celebration of citizen journalism. “The terms of authority are changing,” as he told me at the first “BloggerCon” at Harvard in 2003. By now, with the extended failure of institutional media to address an American — and universal — catastrophe in Iraq and an appalling tailspin in our democratic process, the terms of authority have changed decisively. The essentially “republican” citizen spirit (“of the people, by the people, for the people”) of an open argumentative peaceful democracy will be restored only by the many confident free voices the Web can harmonize — voices that we heard aplenty, voices that are still writing regularly in reponse to our podcasts continuing on Open
Source. See you on the radio, then, and in the meantime on the Web.