We’ve been working in earnest to put several Networked Journalism ideas into effect; foremost has been getting our “Parade Partner News” pipeline off the ground.

Parade’s print pub is distributed by more than 400 newspapers nationwide. We’re working to deepen those partnerships online, as well. “Parade Partner News” is a chance for us to promote our partners’ reportage
and brands, help us better surround our stories on parade.com, and give our readers a deeper, localized well to draw from.

Our first foray was with our All-America High School Football coverage: Parade’s been picking and promoting top high school athletes for 45 years. In addition to our own coverage of these players, we invited our papers to share their local stories about our All-America players, coaches or program.

We then let our readers read, vote on and comment on those stories using tools from our sister site at reddit.com.

This “pipeline” is exclusive to our partners; that allows us to get them more attention then they might otherwise in the general Reddit, Mixx, or Digg story queues.

The next editorial features for which we’ll request partner input on are “What America Eats” (inviting partners to provide links to their healthy recipes or other features regarding healthy diets [or desserts, if
Janice K. decides to go that way, instead, with her in-book story], and “What People Earn” (inviting partners to provide links to their features re the job market in their area, career advice, etc.).

It¹s very much a process: we’re working closely with our Newspaper Relations Group, finding the appropriate contacts within our partners’ organizations, and addressing issues and inertia as we find them. In my mind, this is Win-Win-Win for our partners, our readers, and ourselves, so we’ll keep on working at it and getting better with each iteration.

We’ve got other distributed tools for the ProAm set in the works ­ and in Production ­ as well. I’ll be happy to share more if you’re interested in hearing about it.

“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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After a late finish during the morning events at the New York Times Auditorium, the nearly 200-participants walked next door to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism for a quick lunch break and more informal panels.

The Social Information Session is just starting. The approximately 45-participants take charge by rearranging their black foldout chairs to form a circle, a more ‘social’ setting for conversation.

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Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
At chron.com, the Web site for the Houston Chronicle, we began engaging readers in our coverage several years ago, sharing their photos and experiences in Houston’s flood of 2001, their opinions during the 2004 political conventions and election and their live experiences from the ballpark during the Houston Astros World Series games.  Since early 2006 we have given readers a more consistent voice with featured blogs on everything from local sports teams to parenting and birdwatching. More recently, we have expanded that interaction to include social networking features, story comments, photo galleries, group blogs and more in an area we call the chron.Commons (http://commons.chron.com).

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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.

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Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.We have two social media pilot projects underway.

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

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

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

What are your goals?

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

 
Notable achievements?

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

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

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

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

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

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

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

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

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

Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.

I started blogging, RSS and podcasting, and have worked with various organizations to level the playing field so that anyone can participate in gathering news.

What are your goals?

Better information flow so we can have richer lives and solve the big problems before us.

Notable achievements?

I’ve created several award-winning products, open standards, and developed new technologies. I was one of the first bloggers, podcasters, online publishers.

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

Progress comes slowly.

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

I’d like to see open newsrooms so bloggers can start working together collaboratively. I think the local professional news organizations should host this.

Anyone you’d particularly like to talk with, learn from

I wrote up the two ideas I’d like to discuss at the conference here…
http://tinyurl.com/3xpkmo

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: Inspired by user-generated sites like Flickr, NowPublic is a citizen journalism news network with contributors from across the world. As other legendary startups, it was founded in a garage by Michael Tippett, Leonard Brody and Michael Meyers in 2005. At the time the group believed there was no space on the net to empower citizen journalists. Today NowPublic is one of the largest networks of participatory news-gathering in North America. In spring of 2006 Merrill Brown was brought on board as a consultant for strategy issues. His relationship with NowPublic grew until he was part of the board and eventually elected chairmen.

Recently NowPublic has gone through significant growth in contributors and financing, raising $10.6 million in venture capital. The crowd-powered media site is looking to expand on its range of tools that allow citizens to upload content to their site, whether it’s photos, videos or even audio reports from their cell phone.

Main Goal of NowPublic: “To become the largest citizen news agency in the world and the foremost home through NowPublic.com of citizen traded content,” says Brown.

In a recent move towards this goal, NowPublic brokered a deal with the Associated Press that allows the wire service to purchase and syndicate content that NowPublic users create. “What we are trying to do is empower members of the public to create news content of all forms and provide them with the capabilities to distribute that content to millions of people,” says Brown.

Notable Achievements: NowPublic has registered over 100,000 members in 140 countries. Today, NowPublic has relationships with various news organizations, including the Associated Press, brokering its citizen journalism content to a wider audience. NowPublic is growing “faster than anyone else and I think we’ve added a lot of visibility to citizen journalism,” says Brown. Despite major success in covering stories and rapid expansion, Brown is quick to point out that NowPublic doesn’t claim to have “figured it out in some ultimate way.” The young organization admits it still has a lot of learning and growing to do.

A Surprising Realization: How people all around the world have surfaced, since the launch of the site in 2005, with some level of interest in contributing. Over 10,000 people have sent in content at one point or another. “The numbers are exciting, surprising and really encouraging — that this obscure little thing was able to get this much traction, not just from financiers and media but from people around the world,” says Brown.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: The critical component that NowPublic has yet to figure out is how to make the entire process incredibly easy and seamless. The consumer or creative experience is not as easy or intuitive as many other popular user-generated sites like Flickr. “Our site is complicated,” says Brown. But NowPublic is currently working to make the process of contributing as simple as sending an email or posting a photo.

Money: NowPublic just finished a round of venture capital financing that raised $10.6 million. By the end of the year the site will also be selling advertising and sponsorship. Another revenue stream is through business customers for its services and access to content, such as the deal with the Associated Press. NowPublic helps news organizations at a number of geographic locations spot and cover breaking stories. Contributors get compensated and credited for their work.

Future Goals: To be successful in terms of audience and profit growth in addition to becoming a global brand, says Brown. To be part of people’s news diets when they want a citizen’s view of the new news. The venture capital money will be used to hire new people and invest in software development for building better tools and a tighter site experience. “The big focus is on technology and building a world class team,” says Brown.

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

The key thing for me and the company is figuring out how to best utilize citizen contributors. We figured out how to grow a big network and get them to contribute frequently, but how do you engage with people so they will be frequent, satisfied, contributors? I don’t think anybody has figured that out. Brown is also interested in discussing the larger issues of journalism in relation to citizen media, such as: How j-schools should teach journalism in the online world? What is an approach to citizen media that makes sense for different businesses? How is the profession’s job description changing? These are important to the future of traditional news organizations, says Brown. “They need to engage their audience in a way that they haven’t in the past, and if they don’t figure it out, they will suffer.”

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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