The Networked Journalism Summit brings together the best practices and practitioners in collaborative, pro-am journalism. It's about action: next steps, new projects, new partnerships, new experiments.
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.”
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
I publish Coastsider, a news and community site for coastal San Mateo County — a community of 30,000 people, 30 minutes from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Although I helped build Mercury Center and CNET News.com, I had never practiced journalism before I started Coastsider in 2004. During the daylight hours, I cover online media and publishing, especially the news business, for JupiterResearch.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
I’ve spent the last year and a half bootstrapping Faneuil Media, an online news startup. Initially, my partner Theo Burry and I focused on creating content for news sites using public data and open applications like Google Maps. Last year we broadened our scope with Atlas, a mapping tool that simplified map and data work for news sites.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
Myheimat.de combines printed magazines and an online-platform for hyper-local communities. A network of 5.000 contributors (citizen reporter) submit thousands of stories and the community picks stories for hyper-local printed freesheets (monthly, close to 100% UGC) which reach a combined circulation of 120.000.
As founder of a local monthly freesheet in 1994 Martin Huber learned and experienced the need of local media users and what service they expect of their local newspaper resp. media. Major focuses of his research at TUM (2001-2004) have been virtual communities, value-co-production and technology-platforms for integrating customers into the value-chain. (Ph.D. thesis: ”Collaborative Value creation”). 2002 he co-founded a mobile content sharing application (www.mozean.de) where users can publish and share content which is delivered via mobile phone.
2003 he co-founded gogolmedien to build a scalable publishing-platform for converged media products (print&online) and collaborative content creation, driven by users. Since 2003 gogolmedien successfully launched 17 hyper-local so called myheimat-magazines based on this platform.
What are your goals?
Myheimat.de tries to provide a service that helps people make the communities they live in better places. Our service combines online, print and mobile for the lowest possible threshold to participate and the highest reach in the local community.
In Germany there are over 1.800 small cities (between 10-50K inhabitants) which perfectly match myheimat. We want to cover these cities with monthly/weekly freesheets. Therefore we will partner with media-companies and traditional newspapers.
In addition we plan to offer the platform behind myheimat as an innovative tool for media companies to serve their customers on a hyper-local level and to enable networked journalism on a local or regional level. Our goal is to further develop the technology platform of myheimat to give professional journalists a tool for seamless collaboration with an open community of citizen reporters.
Notable achievements?
Back in 2003 myheimat was the first community-to-print initiative (at least we know of). At least in Germany no media company (start-up or traditional newspaper) managed to roll-out successful 17 local free-sheets in 3 years.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
We regard Organisation/People and Information (Systems) as the key to networked journalism and think that networked journalism is driven and enabled by strong technology platforms specifically designed for networked journalism.
Organisation/People
Our journalists had to learn to moderate the conversation and not to write content themselves. This was (in the beginning) much easier with employees who are not trained in traditional newspaper production, but we now also see a lot of traditional trained journalists who enhance their abilities in moderating and animating user(-communities).
From our experience since 2003 I can only confirm and emphasize how Jeff Jarvis put it: “How does the role of the journalist change? Journalists must now augment their traditional and valued roles of reporter, watchdog, questioner, vetter, investigator, editor. In the conversation, they need to take on new roles, as moderator, enabler, organizer, talent scout, even journalistic evangelist and educator.” (from: http://www.buzzmachine.com
To adapt the media application/the media format quickly to user needs or user feedback, cross-disciplinary teams and co-location helps a lot. We learned to put an editorial designer, a programmer and a moderator together in a team, to deliver fast results the user wants.
Information system
In the beginning (2003) we underestimated how important an agile development process and an agile platform architecture is. We (naively) specified and started coding our Version 2.0 of the platform in a half-year project, but we stopped this project, because we realized that we ran into an architecture which was not agile enough, and the (time-) gap between user-feedback and implementation was too big. Time-to-market of the next feature/version hast to be < 1 month.
We know have a much more agile piece of software where we can react instantly on user feedback, have fast development iterations (“continuously beta”) and can embed experience and user feedback every 2-3 days in our platform.
Read the rest of this entry »
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
Myheimat.de combines printed magazines and an online-platform for hyper-local communities. A network of 5.000 contributors (citizen reporter) submit thousands of stories and the community picks stories for hyper-local printed freesheets (monthly, close to 100% UGC) which reach a combined circulation of 120.000.
As founder of a local monthly freesheet in 1994 Martin Huber learned and experienced the need of local media users and what service they expect of their local newspaper resp. media. Major focuses of his research at TUM (2001-2004) have been virtual communities, value-co-production and technology-platforms for integrating customers into the value-chain. (Ph.D. thesis: ”Collaborative Value creation”). 2002 he co-founded a mobile content sharing application (www.mozean.de) where users can publish and share content which is delivered via mobile phone.
2003 he co-founded gogolmedien to build a scalable publishing-platform for converged media products (print&online) and collaborative content creation, driven by users. Since 2003 gogolmedien successfully launched 17 hyper-local so called myheimat-magazines based on this platform.
What are your goals?
Myheimat.de tries to provide a service that helps people make the communities they live in better places. Our service combines online, print and mobile for the lowest possible threshold to participate and the highest reach in the local community.
In Germany there are over 1.800 small cities (between 10-50K inhabitants) which perfectly match myheimat. We want to cover these cities with monthly/weekly freesheets. Therefore we will partner with media-companies and traditional newspapers.
In addition we plan to offer the platform behind myheimat as an innovative tool for media companies to serve their customers on a hyper-local level and to enable networked journalism on a local or regional level. Our goal is to further develop the technology platform of myheimat to give professional journalists a tool for seamless collaboration with an open community of citizen reporters.
Notable achievements?
Back in 2003 myheimat was the first community-to-print initiative (at least we know of). At least in Germany no media company (start-up or traditional newspaper) managed to roll-out successful 17 local free-sheets in 3 years.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
We regard Organisation/People and Information (Systems) as the key to networked journalism and think that networked journalism is driven and enabled by strong technology platforms specifically designed for networked journalism.
Organisation/People
Our journalists had to learn to moderate the conversation and not to write content themselves. This was (in the beginning) much easier with employees who are not trained in traditional newspaper production, but we now also see a lot of traditional trained journalists who enhance their abilities in moderating and animating user(-communities).
From our experience since 2003 I can only confirm and emphasize how Jeff Jarvis put it: “How does the role of the journalist change? Journalists must now augment their traditional and valued roles of reporter, watchdog, questioner, vetter, investigator, editor. In the conversation, they need to take on new roles, as moderator, enabler, organizer, talent scout, even journalistic evangelist and educator.” (from: http://www.buzzmachine.com
To adapt the media application/the media format quickly to user needs or user feedback, cross-disciplinary teams and co-location helps a lot. We learned to put an editorial designer, a programmer and a moderator together in a team, to deliver fast results the user wants.
Information system
In the beginning (2003) we underestimated how important an agile development process and an agile platform architecture is. We (naively) specified and started coding our Version 2.0 of the platform in a half-year project, but we stopped this project, because we realized that we ran into an architecture which was not agile enough, and the (time-) gap between user-feedback and implementation was too big. Time-to-market of the next feature/version hast to be < 1 month.
We know have a much more agile piece of software where we can react instantly on user feedback, have fast development iterations (“continuously beta”) and can embed experience and user feedback every 2-3 days in our platform.
Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
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.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
(The Voice is new. These observations are drawn from two months of publishing.)
I founded and publish a two-way issues and ideas magazine and community publishing platform for the island of Martha’s Vineyard, The Vineyard Voice. Martha’s Vineyard is undergoing a profound change which could force many of its year-round residents off-island. The Voice is way for people to enter into new conversations about the issues that impact them. The community defines the issues — affordable housing, local food, energy, climate change — and I focus them into a monthly format. Community editors and producers generate some of the content, and I assist in audio & video recording and with photography and writing in-depth articles. It’s a lot of work and an opportunity to be completely immersed in the issues affecting the community.
What are your goals?
One goal is to become a deep content site that will, over time, be a broad connector and community resource for both the issues effecting islanders and the people who are effected. In this way people can research issues that effect them and can find out about the people in the community. Over time The Voice will become a live cultural repository. Another goal is to refine The Voice as a distributable magazine and community publishing platform, then share it with other individuals and communities that would benefit from our journalism, technology, design and community-building experience.
Notable achievements?
My notable achievements are modest, but pleasing nonetheless.
Launching is one. The vision of a simple-to-use community publishing site (just click “publish”) has been an infectious one for some time. Focussing the initial topic and research was another achievement. The complexities of the Affordable Housing issue here are vexing, and lot of effort was put into links, interviews, and podcasts and into making the in-depth article a cross-referencable resource. There is tremendous support in the community for this kind of site, and the connections made with people have just taken off. One example is that the second issue on “Local Food” is being co-produced by a community member and writer with deep connections, knowledge and experience.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
I have learned from others that you cannot take the “build it and they will come” approach. Relevance is key. We are driving community involvement through immersive reporting. The community connections are created through interviews, and subject videos real-time. Every connection forms a deep bond within the community and acts as an outreach program of sorts. I have also learned that in-depth reporting and high standards are key to build meaning in our community. People are highly communicative, and they expect clarity, honesty and even proofing. It’s demanding, but rewarding.
We are too young to know our mistakes. I hope they will not be disastrous. One mistake I have made thus far is being so buried in my own work that I miss the tremendous work done by others — as exampled by searching all of the attendees sites…
Are you getting revenue for this? How?
As yet, no. We are half-launched, really. The component that will drive revenue is our Find feature — to be launched by the end of the year.
You are currently browsing the archives for the hyperlocal category.
