Citizen Network
Community Training in the Ecosystem
Posted on 18. Aug, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.
One function that runs throughout the entire ecosystem is the role of community training — both in editorial coverage and ad sales.
The New News Organization plays an important role here as an outlet for experienced, professional journalists to train local bloggers and citizen journalists how to cover their communities with more depth, detail and accuracy. That training would then help the NNO expand its daily coverage of education, local politics, crime, business, sports, entertainment and nightlife. (See our post from yesterday on the staffing breakdown for the NNO.)
Mike Reicher, a CUNY J-School grad student, wrote about his experience at The Local this summer recruiting experienced journalists to train budding community reporters and photographers.
Also, in our interviews with several not-for-profit news sites, we found experienced investigative journalists like Trent Seibert of Texas Watchdog training everyday people around the country how to properly cover their communities. Doing so has allowed Trent and his colleagues to raise more money for their investigative news site, which will play a vital role in the future of journalism.
And as local coverage grows, there will also be opportunities for professional training in citizen sales. In the larger framework, business-to-business services like a white label email and online marketing training service — or even in-person training sessions — could provide viable revenue opportunities for a new news organization. Those services also represents the kind of broader community outreach people like Steve Buttry have been calling for in various places and in response to some of our models. As a result, citizen sales training could help independent local bloggers grow their ad revenues without the need to hire a full-time sales person.
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New York Times Trains Local Youth in Blogging Workshop
Posted on 13. Aug, 2009 by Matthew Sollars.
by Mike Reicher
What do you get when seasoned professional journalists train novice teenage bloggers in the tools of the trade? We’ve started to answer that question this summer at The Local, The New York Times’ collaborative blog covering neighborhoods in Brooklyn and New Jersey.
Ready...Set...Blog! student Kaseim Watts (Photo by Tamara Best)
Since launching in March, one of our goals at The Local has been to publish work by contributors from many perspectives in the community. But since the infants of ex-Manhattan moms are still a little too young to blog, The Local sent out word to high school teachers, community leaders, and youth groups that we wanted to recruit neighborhood teenagers interested in journalism.
We didn’t just want to give them a video camera, though, and say shoot. So, the students went through a three-day intensive workshop, called Ready…Set…Blog! Fellow CUNY Graduate School of Journalism student and Local intern Lois DeSocio and I developed the curriculum and led the workshops.
On day one, students learned the basics – how to write a news story, how to conduct an interview, how to sniff out news and a primer on journalistic ethics. The next two days they learned media tools – how to shoot photos and video – and they hit the streets.
Samples of the students’ work, which we’ve already posted on The Local, are available here, here and here. And then there’s this video of a local musician.
In total, we trained 16 students – eight in Brooklyn and eight in New Jersey. For the most part, though, we weren’t doing the teaching. Lois and I recruited volunteer professional journalists and journalism educators who wanted to train teens how to effectively cover their own communities.
Ready...Set...Blog! students taking diligent notes. (Photo by Mike Reicher)
In Brooklyn, Indrani Sen from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, who also teaches high school journalism in The Bronx, led the discussion on news values and the elements of a news story. Two local reporters, Jennifer Maloney from Newsday and Sophia Hollander, a freelancer who contributes to The New York Times, taught interviewing and ethics.
Sandra Roa, a grad student at the CUNY J-School who interns at NYTimes.com guided the students through the basics of photojournalism, and I led the video seminar.
The next phase of the program is to pair students with reporters from The Local and from The New York Times, so they can work together to produce at least one story this summer. We’re anticipating a range of topics, from youth summer employment to teen violence.
Just last week a group of teenagers allegedly beat a college student into a coma. As many stories tend to do in this neighborhood, it has evolved into a discussion of race and class. This is the type of divisive local issue we’d love to have covered both professionally and from a teen’s perspective.
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An Iranian Journalist’s Invaluable Cause
Posted on 29. Jun, 2009 by Damian Ghigliotty.
Every journalist deserves to get paid for bringing new information to the public. Especially those who face direct opposition from foreign military regimes.
This morning I heard an NPR piece titled ‘Bureau Tehran,’ Live From Massachusetts. The subject of the story was Iranian journalist Kelly Golnoush Niknejad, who runs her news site Tehran Bureau from her family’s living room in Newton, a small suburb of Boston.
The story opens a new window to an area of journalism that’s quickly growing: International reporting on a do-it-yourself level. For most of her updates on what’s occuring in Iran, Niknehjad uses two laptops and often relies on emails from “contributors of Iranian descent, both in and out of the country.” As of now, those contributors provide her with information for free, and typically avoid taking bylines.
According to the NPR piece, Niknehjad started Tehran Bureau seven months ago and within the past few days her audience has grown from about 9,000 to 19,000.
Information “was coming at me like bullets,” Niknejad says in the interview. “I didn’t have time to sculpt it all into stories, so I just started posting it as fast as I could. The information was raw, so instead of going in and taking the blood out of it, I’ll just copy and paste to put out information.”
When I heard that I immediately thought of how blogging and twitter have become vital outlets for free speech in a country confined by religious despotism, political injustice and information censorship.
And then I heard the interviewer, Tovia Smith, say that when Niknejad migrated to the U.S. at 17 she had no intention of becoming a journalist, and instead coincidentally fell into a legal reporting gig after finishing law school. Smith explains that Niknejad had never intended to pursue the path of a reporter in school, but now, with the current lack of substantial Iranian news reaching the public, “she says reporting is her calling.”
That made me wonder how Kelly Niknejad values — in terms of revenue, and perhaps even profit — what she does for her country’s people and the broader global community. I went to her website and found a donations page that highlights the importance of her reader’s support to sustain ongoing coverage, since Tehran Bureau does not “accept funding from any government, religious or special interest group.”
So, I contacted Niknejad about her recent interview and asked her if she would be able to talk about the dollar/rial value she places on her and her colleagues’ coverage, especially while Iran remains conflicted and without a free press.
“When we covered the Iranian election, we were working on a $0 budget,” she says. “Ideally we would have liked to have had correspondents in other provinces outside of Tehran, so we could have captured the atmosphere throughout all of Iran. But we didn’t have enough funding for that.”
“Right now we have about 20,000 people following our coverage on twitter alone,” she adds. “If every one of those readers donated $5, we would have enough money for a full year’s budget.
“Of course there are many people who have been incredibly generous beyond donations of $5, but in terms of covering our costs, it hasn’t been enough for us to expand. We have a dedicated core of people who are working for free outside of their own jobs, so it’s been incredible so far. But if we had the funds to pay them and they were able to make a living from this, our correspondents would be able to comit that much more time and energy to reporting.”
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Rapporteur Wrap-up – Ben Wagner for Networking Group
Posted on 28. Oct, 2008 by David Cohn.
From Ben Wagner on behalf of the Networking Group.
If “the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of endpoints,” then one task as digital journalists is to scale our networks — be they organically-grown, hyperlocal blogs or corporate-driven, international communities — as quickly and effectively as possible.
In a broadly-ranging, nearly consensus-free conversation, the “Networks” break-our group explored one case study, factors necessary to support network growth, and inherent challenges.
Tom Evslin provided two key points for our discussion of Debby Galant’s Baristanet, a blog covering news specific to Montclaire, NJ.
- The best Editorial networks grow organically from the bottom up. Individual entities tend towards expertise and passion, but lack platform or ad sale expertise.
- The best Tool networks tend to form top down with standardized platform tools and metrics, plus centralized ad ops.
It stands to reason, then, that a top down initiative like Microsoft’s Sidewalk — possessing platform, metrics, and ad ops standardization lacking editorial expertise, flexibility and voice (see “The Cracks In Microsoft’s Sidewalk“) – might fail.
Likewise, though Debby’s Baristanet is a local success, her network value is less than it could be. Moreover, she is forced to spend resources on platform and ad ops, instead of pure content creation.
Baristanet, then, would benefit from a broader, hyper-local site-supporting platform.
Outside.in’s Mark Josephson and NowPublic’s Merrill Brown contributed valuable insight from a platform perspective on incentivizing network engagement:
- Egos: We’ll make you a star!
- Revenue: My ads on your page.
- Reward/Reputation
In the waning minutes of our conversation, Harvard’s Thomas Eisenmann connected the conversation to a key question as news organizations continue to decline: If a city’s primary paper disappeared, would hyper-local coverage replace the centralized, enterprise-journalism oriented newsroom?
In the end, Thomas’s question lingered alongside a number of others:
- What are the best examples of journalism networks?
- Are journalism networks fundamentally niche?
- Can niche networks serve investigative journalism?
- How does a historically corporate, top-down infrastructure grow a network?
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Ed Sussman: Fast Company Launches Social Networking Bonanza
Posted on 18. Feb, 2008 by David Cohn.
“When editors are going to assign a story we typically think about different elements that go into it; who is the writer, who is the photographer, do we want a video or a podcast or any kind of poll? Now we ask an additional question: what is the community aspect?”
I met Ed Sussman briefly at the Networked Journalism Summit where we talked about Drupal, a subject I’m fond of. I didn’t know it at the time, but Ed, along with Lullabot, was working on a massive relaunch of FastCompany.com using the open source content management system Drupal.
If you haven’t checked out the site – you should. It is one of the most sophisticated implementations of Drupal I’ve seen. The NY Observer, for example uses Drupal in a very sleek manner – and while the site looks great, the social networking capabilities aren’t there. Fast Company, however, is trying to leverage the networking aspects of Drupal in every way possible – from user-generated content blogs, to bookmarking, crowdsourcing questions and letting people make business contacts. They’ve spread their arms out pretty wide in the hopes that they caught something interesting for everyone. I think they are about 3-5 years ahead of their time in terms of internet publishing with a major magazine.
I caught up with Ed briefly to talk about the new site and what lessons there might be for beat bloggers. I think Fast Company is moving more and more in the direction of beat blogging – and their website is about 3-5 years ahead of their time in this respect. If you have any doubt about their intentions – just consider their recent contract with Robert Scoble, one of the original great bloggers period, who today literally broadcasts moments of his live in streaming video via Qik, Twitter, Facebook and whatever means he can, to connect and chat with viewers in real time.
So, without further adieu – here’s the interview.
This site is more than just “beat blogging” – it’s creating a network for your site. You have dived head first into the deep end. Why?
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Gannett’s Story
Posted on 10. Oct, 2007 by juliana.bunim.
Gannett’s Story with Jennifer Carroll of Gannett and MacKenzie Warren and Kate Marymount of the Ft Myers Press
CROWD SOURCING — Ft. Myers enlisting their community in their journalism. Explored how FEMA distributed aid. FEMA was forced legally to turn records over. FMP has the infrastructure to enter the records into their database and turn it immediately over to the public. In the first 48 hours it was up there were 60,000 searches of the database with user feedback indicating what the key elements were.
Sewer project that had something fishy going on. Turned it over to readers to explore, investigate and report. Turned over all their documents to the public for them to try and solve as much as they can.
“Pocketbook issues” hit readers exactly there, in their pocketbooks. So when talking about network journalism, people have a real incentive to go in and dig through documents. But is it possible with non pocketbook issues?
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International developments
Posted on 10. Oct, 2007 by Matthew Sollars.
10:32 Moderator Neil McIntosh of the Guardian kicks the panel off with introductions of panelists:
Adrian Monck of City University of London’s journalism education program. He has launched a collaboration with Sky News developing a group of citizen correspondents and a resource that allows the public to track their FOI requests.
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Mike Orren – Pegasus News
Posted on 08. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your Work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
President and founder of Pegasus News, which launched in DFW in 2006. We’re a “panlocal” site, meaning that we deliver hyperlocal news and data on an entire metro area. We then customize that content for each individual user via a mechanism called “The Daily You.” We use a hybrid of staff, content partner (professional and blogger) and community-contributed content, and don’t distinguish between the three. (more…)
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John Oppedahl
Posted on 08. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
My experience has been in the newspaper business as a reporter, editor and publisher (Detroit Free Press, Dallas Times Herald, L.A. Herald Examiner, Arizona Republic, San Francisco Chronicle) so the closest I’ve come is in helping to develop two websites, AZCentral.com for The Arizona Republic in Phoenix and SFgate.com for the San Francisco Chronicle.
(more…)
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Emily Gertz – Worldchanging.com
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism. I’m a freelance journalist and editor, working primarily with web publications. Since early 2004 I’ve been a writer at Worldchanging, a leading sustainability news, views, and information blog; currently I’m the Interim Managing Editor of our “global” site, as well as editor of Worldchanging NYC. I also work as a content strategist with groups and companies to develop and sustain blogs that build communities of interest and action. I was Producer for Environmental News at OregonLive.com for two years in the late 1990’s, where we did some fun early work in proto collaborative journalism: inviting readers to submit photos of Portland events; write training and ride diaries for a big-deal multi-day charity bicycle ride; running bboards where readers could comment on the local news, share outdoors sports info, etc. I got online in 1989 via early bboard systems Environet and Econet, and first became an online community host — helpful experience for networked journalism — in the mid-1990’s on The WELL (where I continue to host today).
What are your goals?
Environmental stories offer many untapped opportunities for collaborative or crowdsourced journalism. I’m especially interested in starting or contributing to projects that provide opportunities to use more forms of media (blogging/microlocal journalism, podcasting, photojournalism, and collaborative mapping).
What are some of your notable achievements?
At Worldchanging, I was part of what was perhaps our finest hour to date: contributors from all over the glob collaborating to cover the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Contributors in India were able to make first person reports based on what they were hearing and seeing, as well as what was coming in on their own collaborative digital networks — demonstrating how important those networks were on the scene. Those of us in other parts of the world pulled together “bigger picture” type coverage on transforming disaster relief, technology to create an early warning network, etc. I wrote about the boundary of environment and economy, connecting the condition of coastal mangroves to the degree of destruction inland. (Where the mangroves were healthiest and intact, they usually absorbed a lot of the wave’s energy; where they were degraded by ag runoff from inland, or simply destroyed to make way for farming shrimp for the export market, there was weaker or no buffering and destruction was worse).
Thus far, the single most famous article I’ve personallly written is “Naughty by Nature: Ever Thought About the Toxins in Your Sex Toys?” for Grist Magazine. It’s a funny and fun piece, but beyond that it’s notable because I successfully took unusual approach to reporting on an environmental health issue (phthlate exposure), such that people would read and enjoy the information, rather than being overwhelmed by it.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
It is usually impossible to “convince” anyone that this stuff is valuable. The knowledge about the medium and what it can do has to be in place in order to get the support and resources one needs to get it going, never mind pull it off — and if it’s not there, you probably ought invest time in educating the relevant stakeholders before you get too far into it. I’ve made the mistake of entering enthusiastically into a project without ascertaining that there was enough internal support. In these scenarios, success is elusive; existing biases against the medium are affirmed; and one does not come away having accomplished much. I have learned that I have to be more thoughtful and tactical both in taking a measure of the local climate, and judging whether to accept a project. (This can be challenging when you’re a freelancer — since gigs, not tactics, pay the bills!)
Are you getting revenue for this? How?
I earn my living primarily via journalism, including networked journalism, as well as content strategy towards using networks most effectively. If you know any freelancers, you know that’s pretty amazing! As I work on the editorial side of this or that outlet, I don’t get into the revenue side much — but I suspect the revenue being generated varies pretty widely; in the nonprofits, there’s a lot of dependence on grants, donations, and “angels.”
What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
I need to work with outlets and projects that are committed — with “moral” support, funding, enthusiasm and openness to creativity — to exploring online/networked journalism and pushing the envelope of what it can accomplish. Potentially I need to found such an outlet myself.
Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit
Jonathan Landman of The New York Times
Jim Colgan and Bob Garfield of WNYC
Colin Maclay of the Berkman Center
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Robin Sloan, Andrew Fitzgerald – Current TV
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
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.
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Howard Owens – GateHouse Media
Posted on 04. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
As far back as East County Online (San Diego) in 1995, I’ve been working to create collaborative online communities. At ECO we didn’t have the tools to do it easily, so we invited key community members to contribute to our site and asked readers to e-mail us their opinions on things. We also formed a community group to meet regularly about topics in the community. Later, I started the RVClub.com, which I positioned as a virtual community. At the Ventura County Star, we were among the first to use comments on stories and were the first as far as I know to invite any member of the community to blog for us. At The Bakersfield Californian, I pushed for combining Bakotopia with Bakersfield.com. At GateHouse Media, we are developing a whole new participation platform.
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.
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Travis Henry – YourHub
Posted on 04. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
I am the editor of YourHub.com at the Rocky Mountain News. I helped launch one of the nation’s most ambitious citizen journalism projects in the spring of 2005. I came from a traditional newspaper background, working as a city editor, editorial page editor and reporter at dailies and a managing editor at semiweeklies. Since launching YourHub.com, I have helped other newspapers launch YourHub.com franchises and consulted with other newspapers and Web site operators launching hyperlocal citizen journalism sites. I don’t pretend to be an expert in this arena, there is no such thing. We’ve just figured out a way to make it work with what we have and I’m happy to share that knowledge with others.
What are your goals?
My goal is to have people in our community find YourHub.com a value to them. I want them to look forward to logging on to the Web site and receiving their print section every Thursday. I run YourHub.com in Colorado, so it’s important to me that Coloradans participate and find value in YourHub.com.
Notable achievements?
YourHub.com has registered over 34,000 members in the Denver metro area alone. We have 18 print sections just in Colorado. YourHub.com is now live in 8 states and poised to launch in more, admittedly with varied results. In Colorado alone we have more than 3,000 stories posted a month and more than 3,000 events a month.
Our biggest achievement has been the creation of an awesome online community that has become a large family of sorts. User gatherings we have held have been powerful and prove that this is an experiment worth going forward.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
One of our biggest mistakes I believe was launching too fast with a product not robust enough to do what we wanted. We should have launched a beta site first and got our feet a wet before diving in. Bells and whistles aren’t as important as being a site truly dedicated to citizen journalism, but it helps to have a site that works. We then tried to introduce functionality too fast while in a bad situation with our vendors. It would have been better for us and our vendors if we would have taken it a bit slower.
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Tristan Louis – TNL.Net
Posted on 03. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
I’ve been a proponent of networked journalism since 1999, when I founded Moveable Media as a company that would allow for licensing user-created content to mainstream media. The model was, dare I say, a little to early and didn’t take. Since then, I’ve worked as a networked/citizen reporter using TNL.net as my main platform for discussion of such things. Last try, I tried (and failed) to launch a scholarship program that would underwrite costs associated with bloggers doing investigative journalism.
What are your goals?
A very tough question. My goals in terms of attending the summit is to listen and broaden my understanding of how we could move this forward.
Notable achievements?
TNL.net has been followed by the mainstream media on several stories (from calculating the size of the Google supercomputer to analysing data about the growth of Second Life). In a way, the investigative piece I’ve done on the site have helped expose several stories.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
The first, and probably saddest, lesson I’ve learned is that few people are interested in investigative reporting because it’s hard work. The vast majority on both the press side and the blogosphere side prefers to hew to neat story lines and has trouble dealing with complexity.
The second one is that long pieces do not seem to work online. While I’ve taken to writing 1500-2000 words pieces on my site, generally shorter bits seem to work better. I am still probably mistaken in my belief that there is room for longer pieces.
Are you getting revenue for this? How?
Revenue come in two forms: advertising and freelancing opportunities. However, most of my work is more related to thought leadership than revenue generation (the thought leadership allows me to generate revenue from other, indirect, sources)
What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
For starters, I need a better understanding of direct revenue sources and what appeals to a broader audience. I’ve failed in breaking out of a core audience and need to understand how to properly effect a transition.
Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit
The overseas crowd (like the guys from skynews or The Telegraph) will probably be interesting to meet in that another venture of mine (blognation.com) is more international in nature. I would also like to talk to some of the wire people (I see there are some people from AP) to see if there is any correlation between the speed of news in the blogosphere and on wires. Last but not least, I’ll be delighted to spend more time face to face with a number of other attendees I’ve met along the way.
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Micah Sifry – Personal Democracy Forum
Posted on 02. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Introduction and Narrative: Personal Democracy Forum is an annual conference and ongoing weblog that focuses on how technology is changing politics. Personal Democracy Forum was founded by Andrew Rasiej, who has a background in music, education nonprofits and advising politicians. Micah Sifry worked on the first conference and was soon taken on as a partner. Personal Democracy Forum does not have a political partisan bias, “we have a bias towards celebrating the most innovative uses of technology that open up the process and make it more participatory, accountable and transparent,” says Sifry.
Main Goal: To serve two communities that are colliding with each other: technologists who are interested in hacking politics and political hacks who realize that they have to understand how to adapt to and make better use of this new networked environment. Personal Democracy Forum is a space to help these groups better understand each others needs and potentials.
Notable Achievements: In January Personal Democracy Forum started another side blog – Tech President, that focused on how the candidates are using the web and how the web is using them. It recently won a Knight Batten Award. Personal Democracy Forum has also become “an interpreter for lots of mainstream news reporters that are trying to understand this arena,” says Sifry.
A Surprising Realization: “The thing that never ceases to amaze me is when you combine hypernetworks and search, the result again and again is that the right like-minded people find you,” says Sifry. Often the people that PDF hears from are exactly the people Sifry is looking for, “they have their own really interesting experiences and insights.”
Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: “I’m a great believer in always making new mistakes,” says Sirfy. As for the conferences, the biggest mistake has typically been over-programming. In running the organization as a whole it has probably been not knowing exactly where to focus, says Sifry. The lesson has been to only do a few things, but do them well.
Money: After four years the conference itself is modestly profitable and helps drive the editorial engine, though Rasiej who is the prime backer of the whole thing still has yet to recoup what he has put in.
While the editorial is running at a loss, Personal Democracy Forum does make a bit of money back in private consulting and hopes to eventually find a new revenue stream through content syndication.
Advertising is not looked at as a plausible model “I don’t think honestly there is enough demand for this kind of specialized content,” says Sifry.
Future Goals: “A partial answer to that, we own the URL techcongress.com.” But the main focus is on the yearly conference and based on the success of last year’s conference PDF is headed towards expanding it to a two day event with a third day unconference.
What do you hope to get from people attending this conference?
I’m interested in knowing where the cutting edge is in online journalism that effects politics. The media system is a more open and dynamic and whether that’s changing the political discourse is one big subject. There is a lot of possibility to open up the political process through the use of technology and more people participating in what their representative are up to, monitoring them, giving feedback. The question is, now that the media has opened up how citizen journalism can move in and add to the role of watchdog that was formerly done by corporate sponsored media.
