Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.

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.

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Introduction and Narrative: Howard Weaver has been involved with the interactive efforts of newspapers for his entire adult life - the editorial pages. “Even in the old analog world there was a kind of interactivity, I think it’s natural to come to this stage where we have better tools to try and extend that umbrella,” says Weaver. Today, Weaver is vice president for news at the McClatchy Company, a publisher of 31 daily newspapers, 50 community papers and many more websites.

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.

Introduction and Narrative: In the past year Gannett has undergone the largest transformation in the company’s 102-year history. All 86 papers across the country, except for USA Today, have changed from traditional news centers to 24-hour, local, multimedia “Information centers.” The blueprint for the change cited seven areas that each Gannett paper would be required to embrace, such as databases and “Community Conversations.” The News-Press in Fort Myers (see post on Mackenzie Warren and Kate Marymont) was one of the company’s test papers and it was while flying down there that Jennifer Carol picked up a cover story in Wired on ‘crowdsourcing’ “and we said, that’are talking about.”

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.

Introduction and Narrative: In 2004 Dan Pacheco was hired as part of the new Digital Products team at The Californian. Their job was to “look out in the future 5-10 years and see trends,” says Pacheco.

He came to the position with experience at the Washingtonpost.com and America Online where he worked on community products from the early Web. “At the time we had at least 12 million member profiles and we started to observe that people were changing their persona 3-4 times a day,” says Pacheco. Well before social networking, Pacheco had a “wealth of ideas” that The Californian, an independently owned newspaper company which includes seven print publications and nine websites, was ready to put into action. The Californian has produced:

The Northwest Voice - a newspaper with content created by readers, which began in 2004 by Mary Lou Fulton.

Bakotopia - a social networking site.

Bakomatic - a software platform that handles user-generated content, classifieds and social networking, which transformed Bakersfield.com and other of the Californian’s website properties.

This and other products have pushed the paper into the edge of citizen journalism.

Main Goal: To engage an audience around a brand identity. The Northwest Voice, about 30,000 readers, is penetrating a community that is predominately suburban, neighborhood, and family oriented. People go to the website to submit their story and hope it will get printed in the Northwest Voice for neigbors to read. It becomes their paper. “And that’s what that brand is about,” says Pacheco.

For Bakotopia, a social networking site, it’s all about “me.” says Pacheco. Creating a space where individuals can express themselves, meet people and find interesting local bands.

The Californian has nine different websites and several papers, each with their own brand identity that caters to different audiences, says Pacheco.

Notable Achievements: The Californian had a lot of firsts. They created the first U.S. newspaper-managed Craigslist competitor, Bakotopia, according to Pacheco. The first citizen journalism newspaper product, The Northwest Voice and on Bakersfield.com one of the first newspapers to offer social networking and blogging in the community “so we could compete with Myspace and Facebook as part of our brand. Today Bakersfield.com is about 20-30 percent user-generated content.

A very large achievement was creating “Bakomatic” an in-house content management system that has since been adopted by other newspapers like the Arizona Republic.

Bakomatic was a fortunate byproduct of trying to create social networking features, blogging and classifieds for Californian newspapers. But since completion several newspapers have called wondering if it was for sale — and Pacheco has since

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Introduction and Narrative: In February of 2005 Lisa Willaims started H2OTown (www.h2otown.info). She had recently left her job and wanted to get to know Watertown Massachusetts better, but decided to do her learning process in public. H2OTown also allowed others in the area to blog, creating a townhall atmosphere. It is what Williams calls a “placeblog,” which focus on the lived experiences in that geographic area. “And if we are lucky, most lived experience is news,” says Williams. A placebloger doesn’t “report” the news, they share news that happens in their lives.

Placeblogger.com is the largest index of placeblogs which can help anyone find local bloggers in their community. It was motivated by a desire to find out just how many placeblogs there really are. At BloggerCon IV a bet between Williams, Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen broke out about this very topic. Rosen wondered how many placeblogs like H2OTown existed, to which Williams guessed 1,000.

Within the first day after its launch, January 2007, Placebloger.com was indexing placeblogs from 55 different countries. To date Placeblogger.com has indexed 3,500 placeblogs. Williams won the bet three times over.

Main Goal(s):

H2OTown: “To make Watertown a less boring place to live.” The blog network is not journalistic in nature. Civic participation and being a conduit of newsworthy information is a byproduct, not the motivating factor, of H2OTown. The real goal of H2OTown is to highlight the aspects of the community that make it unique but are hidden from people, says Williams.

“Placebloggers have a rock and hammer and are breaking through that and sharing that information in a group activity.”

Placeblogger: To find and index as many placeblogs as possible, so they can connect and learn from each other.

Notable Achievements:

H2OTown: “That the blog is still around,” says Williams. Sixty-six percent of all blogs are abandoned in the first month. Today, people feel a sense of ownership over the site, which has a life of its own, and that’s the hard part for a hyperlocal site.

Placeblogger: Placeblogger has been successful, incorporating a larger global community than expected spanning 55 countries and 3,500 blogs. Recently Placeblogger won a Knight News Challenge grant and will expand from there.

A Surprising Realization: The statistics from Placeblogger.com. There were more placeblogs than Williams expected. Comparing census data alongside that Williams found that almost a third of the U.S. lives in a town with a placeblog.

In terms of placeblogs, Williams is astounded by how complex and different they all are from each other. They haven’t settled on a convention, there is no common theme or vocabulary, “yet the format and overarching idea is pretty much the same — they are going to cover the mayors office, elections, school budgets, etc.,” says Williams. Despite similarities, to date there is no community for placebloggers.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: The assumption that a community will pop out of thin air instantly because you’ve started a website. One has to be ready to commit six months to a year before they can expect results. “You can’t speed up the process of creating an organic community,” says Williams. If participation is not instant, one shouldn’t feel as if they failed.

“But I don’t think of any experiment as a failure — they all produce data — “this doesn’t work” is a useful piece of data. My strategy has been to experiment a lot and keep the cost low.”

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Introduction and Narrative: Jonathan Weber came to the University of Montana as a visiting professor after the bankruptcy of the Industry Standard where he was editor in chief. While there he became interested in the ongoing story of the Rocky Mountain region’s booming development. Local papers were covering specific stories and towns, but Weber thought they were too close to see the larger narrative. Capturing that missing link was the editorial inspiration for NewWest.Net, which launched in March of 2005. “I was involved with new media and I thought maybe there was a new way to approach this kind of story that might be effective in that context.

NewWest.Net was born as an online publication that would tackle regional issues through a network of local sites. The front page is regional but is supported throughout by a combination of locally focused news organizations. “I think that was a very key innovation,” says Weber.

NewWest.Net has sought to develop a new style of story telling that marries aspects of traditional reporting with blogging and citizen media. The traditional reporting on the site is very open and has a conversational tone that avoids the pyramid style of newspaper reporting. “We care about fairness and accuracy — we care about real reporting — not just opining about this and that — but we are not so caught up in the ‘he said, she said,’ and somewhat un-useful ideas of objectivity that are part of the conventional media conversation,” says Weber.

NewWest.Net writers span the gamete from paid professionals to citizen contributions.

Main Goal of NewWest.Net: To help facilitate a positive and informed conversation about growth and change in the region and provide people with a dynamic source of information and a place they can go to be part of that conversation.

Notable Achievements: Just six months after NewWest.Net launched it won the Online Journalism Award for enterprise journalism for a six-part series “Sex, Money and Meth Addiction: Inside the World of the Dasen Girls.” Beyond the accolades, this series is an example of long form journalism in an effective online format.

NewWest.Net has also been both a source of news on environmental issues including wild life management, wolves, grizzly bears and global warming it has been an active forum of conversation. While Weber admits they can result in shouting matches at times, “they do add up to an interesting and helpful conversation. We have brought in a lot of voices and perspectives, the Pro-Am model has worked well for us and we are proud of our ability to have facilitated that,” says Weber.

A Surprising Realization: There is a gap between what people say they want to do in terms of contributions and the amount of hand holding and management that NewWest.Net editors have to actually do to get that contribution. A part of NewWest.Net is completely unfiltered, where people can blog stories that and it is less utilized than NewWest.Net originally thought it would be. “You can’t just say: ‘Come on in. You should really write something.’ There is an amount of hand holding that you need to engage in to get good contributions from non-professionals. “That is a consistent experience.”

On the flip side, the quality of the photo contributions has been extremely high according to Weber. There is a very active photo community at NewWest.Net. “It doesn’t surprise me that they want to share, but the quality does surprise me.”

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Introduction and Narrative: Mark Potts began sketching the idea for Backfence while working for Washingtonpost.com. Potts was trying to imagine what a local newspaper product would look like on the web. “Newspapers have trouble doing news down to the town level or below that, they are too big, and it is too expensive to staff,” says Potts. Backfence, however, would eventually use citizen journalism to cover that kind of minutia by creating sites for individual towns, where the knowledge from within the community would provide all the journalism. The company was formed in August of 2004 and launched in May of 2005. By October that year Backfence raised around $3 million in capital. Fast-forward to 2006 and there were 13 Backfence communities centered around three metropolitan areas (Chicago, Washington D.C. and San Francisco) and organized into a network. But by January of 2007 internal issues that Potts cannot discuss resulted in a 2/3rds staff layoff followed by an announcement in July of Backfence’s eventual shutdown.

During its run, however, Backfence was poised to form the largest network of hyperlocal news blogs in the United States.

Main Goal of Backfence: To create a national network of sites that would allow people to talk about their towns and learn about what was going around them. The kind of information you see exchanged over the literal backyard fence.

Integral to the operation was to build this network as a business, says Potts. Many hyerplocal sites can cover server costs and a few expenses, but the objective of Backfence was to scale nationally and create a strong business around it.

Notable Achievements: During the height of its operation, Backfence had over 400 advertisers in three metropolitan areas. “It was a real accomplishment, it proved local advertisers were looking for a space in online media,” says Potts. Backfence was able to raise money and establish itself in 13 cities. Its fall was not from a lack of interest or advertisers, but from internal turmoil.

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Introduction and Narrative: Fresno Famous launched April 1st, 2004 when Jarah Euston moved back to Fresno from New York. In her early 20’s and feeling alienated from her home town Euston had no idea what Fresno had to offer in terms of night life or a music scene. That was the imputes of Fresno Famous, a user-generated catalog of entertainment listings including music, film, shows, art galleries, etc. Fresno Famous eventually became a centralized location for anyone in the Fresno community looking for something to do.

The original site, a labor of love, was updated by hand every week in static HTML. Eventually, Fresno Famous switched over to Drupal which allowed everyone to post directly to the site and enabled forums, comments and blog posts. It has also become a hub for people to get informed about city council meetings, school board decisions and local politics in general. Today the site is totally user-driven.

Main Goal of Fresno Famous: To make Fresno a better place to live. As small farming communities, Fresno and Modesto have reputations of being “the armpit of California and that’s not really true. There is a lot of great talent there — but the community is very fragmented they might not know about local politics, music or events,” says Euston. “Fresno Famous provides one place for everyone to feed on everything that we thought was good about the town.”

Notable Achievements: As a community center Fresno Famous has played an active role in the discussion of downtown Fresno’s redevelopment. In one particular instance, plans for a project on Broadway Row were released on Fresno Famous to a hailstorm of complaints that eventually convinced the city government to cancel the plan.

“Fresno Famous has influenced how the city thinks about the issue…which is a perennial topic of conversation if you live in Fresno,” said Euston.

A Surprising Realization: The first surprise with Fresno Famous was the general timidity of users in the beginning. Euston found that it’s not easy to get people to promote themselves or friends. “We thought once we had Drupal going people would be positing all the time about how great some event was,” says Euston. She found that as community manager she also had to play the role of cheerleader, encouraging and supporting people who were too nervous to post to the site. “Being a blogger, I don’t have a problem with that [postings thoughts online], but a lot of people weren’t sure what to do.”

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Introduction and Narrative: BostonNOW, a free metro paper, launched in April of 2007 after Russell Pergament, most recently from AM New York, hooked up with Dagsbrun, an Icelandic media company, for financial backing. John Wilpers, former editor of the Washington Examiner, was brought on board to help shape the emerging free metro as its editor.

Wilpers had the idea of running excerpts from local Boston blogs on both the website and in the actual print newspaper at a Media Giraffe conference. Slowly Wilpers began to introduce himself to local bloggers in Boston and eventually organized two open meetings. The first gathering was somewhat confrontational, filled with critical and suspicious questions: “Will you edit us? Will you pay us?” etc., but by the second meeting bloggers brought constructive ideas and began to give suggestions for the young paper, says Wilpers.

BostonNOW has become the first US print paper to run content from local bloggers, making the paper “fun, intriguing and reflective of the Boston community,” says Wilpers. The first blog post appeared in the paper May 1st, a few weeks after the initial launch. Since then BostonNOW has registered over 500 Boston bloggers to appear on their website and their paper.

Main Goal of BostonNOW: The goal of the company, as a free daily newspaper, is to grab a healthy market share of readers. BostonNOW, like other free metro papers, serves the market of people that want to consume the important news of the day, but can only spare 20 minutes during their daily commute.

But BostonNOW is also a laboratory to test how a community can be involved in the creation of a print product. That includes everything from the articles that the paper runs to the daily news meetings, which BostonNOW webcasts. “If we don’t involve the community in the direction of the paper, print journalism will become less and less relevant,” says Wilpers.

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Introduction and Narrative: Debra Galant began her journalism career in 1977 and by 1998 was a New Jersey columnist for the New York Times. After the Times gave her column to someone else, Galant received the URL Debragalant.com as a birthday present from her husband. The next three months Galant spent starting a personal typepad blog, “Debra Galant Explains the Universe.” At a meetup for NJ.com to recruit bloggers for their website, she decided to dive straight into the blogosphere. At that meeting she heard the idea of hyperlocal blogging from Jeff Jarvis. Within a few months, she gave up her personal blog and started Baristanet.com, which she was going to turn into a hyerplocal news site that would eventually cover the areas of Montclair, Glen Ridge and Bloomfield New Jersey.

By May of 2004, Baristanet launched its beta. Today Galant and co-founder/partner Liz George employ four people working part-time as reporters, graphic artists and technology experts for Baristanet, which is one of the leading placeblogs in the country. The site has gone from 200 to more than 7,000 visits a day and has been recognized as the inspiration for hyperlocal blogs across the country. “For people who live here this is something they become addicted to,” says Galant.

Main Goal of Baristanet: To provide a new model for local news and discussion that is fast, fun and can support itself through online advertising. “Sometimes we refer to it as ‘your local weekly newspaper meets the Daily Show.’” Baristanet is a hybrid of media news and entertainment. The goal is to provide fun coverage of local issues that are important and includes the community that has gathered around the site while creating a sustainable business model at the same time.

An example of hyperlocal coverage: Last summer there was a microburst (like a tornado) in Montclair which devastated 100-year-old trees and “we covered it like crazy…. coverage that we are very proud of” says Galant.

Notable Achievements: Since launching, Baristanet has become a major competitor in the local market, with a bigger circulation in unique visitors online than the Montclair Times, according to Galant. It was named the #1 placeblog in American by Placeblogger.com last January. It has been referenced more than once in The New York Times, which culls its page for story ideas, says Galant.

During a fire induced blackout last summer Baristanet’s traffic increased 50 percent (despite the lack of electricity in many areas). During the emergency situation the site became a powerful resource for the community. In 100 degree weather Baristanet has provided info to the city that even the town website and police weren’t giving says Galant. Whether it’s a manhole explosion, murder or blackout, people come to Baristanet to see if they are covering it, “and if it isn’t covered already, readers send in tip to make sure it is.”

Aside from traditional reporting, the size and local focus has given Baristanet opportunities to experiment in online journalism. From using a Google mash-up to chronicle local development, to using a national polling company to perform hyperlocal polls in each of the three towns it covers (providing a uniquely statistical view of community feelings about specific town issues), Baristanet has set the tone for what hyperlocal news blogs can do.

A Surprising Realization: Even though you may own a publication or an online site, once you open it up to comments it really is an interactive space, says Galant. “Its personality develops on its own. You can set a tone, but it has become something bigger and different.” Strong personalities emerge and have shaped Baristanet into something that Galant never could have envisioned. “The community inhabits it in a way that is strange, sometimes beautiful and sometimes disturbing,” says Galant.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: On a practical level: If Galant could have done it again, she wouldn’t have set up Baristanet to blog on weekends. Unsure when people would read the site during the initial launch, Baristanet had fresh content all week long. She didn’t find out until months later that people tend to read the site Monday through Friday. “But now our readers are spoiled, so we keep up the weekends.”

In her guest post at PressThink Galant also wrote about the lessons learned while working in an immediate medium.

“There’s also the real-time aspect of what can be accomplished by instant publishing. Like telling readers about kids selling lemonade to raise money for Katrina right now, or reporting a high school bomb scare minutes after it happened-– or even just providing an up-to-date community resource for closings and cancellations in the case of snow.”

Money: Baristanet and its four part-time employees are supported by advertising and has been operating in the black for the last two years. Baristanet also pays people to write and do graphics for the ads. Glanat says they often receive five local business advertising inquiries a week and has around 30-40 regular advertisers right now including Realtors, Montclair State University, a local hospital, retailers, services, restaurants and other city institutions.

Future Goals: Conversations with two separate people/organizations are on the table about expanding Baristanet into new cities. Nothing has been decided, but it is something Galant is looking into. Baristanet is also interested in forging alliances with other placeblogs to form ad networks and to share certain content.

What Are you Hoping to Get from other People at the News Innovation Conference?

“We are open for strategic partnerships in terms of expansion. We have an expertise and ability to make the model work and we are looking for capital to make it expand and looking for the right partners.”

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Extra Reading: Galant’s guest post on PressThink (Good personal history)

Liz George’s guest post on PressThink (Her review of Backfence)