Possibilities for public support of news media are clustering in some key areas – foundation grants, member donations, targeted micro-payments, and government support.

Our group discussed how some forms of public support can threaten a news operation’s independence, either by funding coverage of certain topics to a degree that can skew the overall news agenda, or by subjecting the newsroom to corporate or political influence.

By far, the Holy Grail for public support is to raise an endowment big enough to generate the annual revenue needed to run a news initiative, be it a newsroom or a Pro Publica project.  This liberates news projects from continual fundraising and lets them concentrate on the journalism.
NPR-like drives for donor support have sustained public radio, but can contribute to tensions between the national programmers and local affiliate.

Several experiments are just now underway that involve soliciting micro payments from individuals.  Len Witt’s Representative Journalism project asks people to support a reporter.  David Cohn’s Spot.us project asks people to fund a particular story.  And Harvard’s Berkman Center has developed software, Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), that aims to engage vendors and customers in new ways.
Should government support the news media in a BBC-like model, possibly with an Internet tax?   Such ideas met with cautions of recent influence peddling by executives the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Could the cost of producing news content be supported by those who aggregate it, much like the cable companies support CSPAN? Or could major universities like Harvard shelter news projects? Perhaps.
Should philanthropic foundations be catalysts for what news media ought to  do, rather than simply funders of the status quo?

As important is the question of whether news organizations would be more successful attracting public support if they reframed their mission, less as an act of information, and more as an act of community building.

“Can you make the case that you are filing a need?” asked Jay Rosen.

Can you show that news media exist not just to cover community, but to build it as well?

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?

One of our editors at Fast Company print magazine used Facebook to network and track down a source and even used it to conduct part of the interview. It was a little gimmicky but he just wanted to see what it would be like to do it through Facebook.

What we are doing now is not a gimmick. It’s more profound. It will allow people to ask journalists questions and they can answer directly back on a daily basis

Fast company is a business magazine which focuses heavily on innovation. I think not only do we have more license to be experimental on our site, there is an expectation that we will be on the cutting edge. That’s been the case since the site launched in 1995.

We start with that – that there is an expectation that we will be innovative. Also, we are preaching to our readers that they should be innovative. We are not a ‘just the facts’ type of publication, we have a point of view. It’s not political, it is in favor of innovation and people taking risks in business, so it just follows that we should do the same.

I think this is where media companies that have websites will all get to pretty soon anyway, in the next 3-4 years. I think we are a little ahead of the curve – the idea of heavily involving your community, if you truly are a website that attracts a readership of a common interest — then you have a community and you should listen to them. Letters to the editor are not enough, that’s very old fashioned.

What’s the history of this?

We’ve had community on our website for a long time. This isn’t going from 0-60 for us. It’s more like 35-60. We had a bolt-on community since 1997.

I refer to it as a bolt on community because it was a fully functional social network but it was not integrated with the rest of the website. It was a place where the rest of our audience could meet, greet and see each other and make friends.

That took us to 100,000 members and they were pretty passionate and they still are. They had 200 groups around the world that would meet every other month or so. They came together because they liked to talk about business, they used the web of friends to learn about each other and make friends. It is like an early version of meetup.com but limited to business and discussion about technology and innovation.

But we didn’t know who they were and we weren’t capturing what they were saying and doing at their meetings either. Here are all these people that are meeting because they love Fast Company and there was no way for us to capture that. We had somebody on the road who would go from meeting to meeting, but that doesn’t scale very well. There are only so many cities you can absorb with one person taking notes. It’s not a bad thing to actually meet people in the real world but we wanted to hear what they had to say and capture the content they had on the website too. So we are first and foremost giving the community a lot of tools.

We also were thinking; there are a million people on average that come through the site, that’s from our internal logs, so there are at least 900,000 who don’t participate in our community aspects at all, because it might be too much for them to join a local group. But those people might still have something interesting to say that we are interested in hearing – so we wanted to recognize that they are part of the community and find a way to include them in an easy way.

Turning the light on for the invisible community that is already there. Excellent. But tell me, how does this change the journalism? What’s the relationship between journalism and reader or source.

We started thinking about journalism as we were building it.

We made a commitment in 2003 in Fast Company that we were going to have the voices of outside experts in significant numbers, so we created FC experts to blog and we got about 60 of them now.

But there are lots of people who want to contribute and had something to say. We didn’t have the capacity to treat everyone as op-ed contributors. Right now, with only four days since we launched, there are 353 blogs from readers. I spend a lot of time reading through these and a lot of them are great, we are pleased to include them.

We had something like 12,000 people sign up in our first few days in addition to the people that were already members. The level of participation is pretty high, but I think the larger number of people don’t want to make a commitment to do a blog. But we have lots of people who are microblogging. They are answering questions and participating in the discussion that way – the “fast talk” microblogging is becoming really popular

[Fast talk is an aspect of the site where questions are posed such as:
Q: Can a business publication blend journalism and online community to create something better than either by itself?". All answers are accumulated in your profile.]

I call it a microblog because it’s not just an answer to a question, you can click on their profile and anything they answer whether it’s a question or a comment or a blog post. If all they do is answer a couple ‘fast talk’ questions a month, in essence, they are blogging in a guided way, answering questions which our journalists are posing to the community. In fact, you can subscribe to their feed externally or internally, so you can follow all the content on our site. There are people already who are answering every single question and they seem to like that a lot more than blogging. I also like the fact that our editors are in there mixing it up with them.

So we intend to do a whole bunch of projects that are based on what our users are contributing to the dialog, a dialog that we are provoking. It can be as simple as testing the waters with these questions and it can be more subtle, such as sourcing via our own membership, looking for people who have interesting ideas and expertise – using our membership because we are drawing on a community that thinks innovation and business is important and I’m pretty impressed with the level of expertise of those who are participating.

It’s all very visible too. We are very transparent to the outside world. Everyone can now tell who our readers are in great detail. This is something that media companies might have to grapple with. For the advertisers and readers its a very open approach as to who is on the site, which is pretty different. I know social networks do it, but media sites don’t. But it can be a pretty amazing resource for our journalists to source our own readers.

What were we going to do before? Put a link on our home page “do you want to participate in a story about next generation automobiles?” That was the extent of what we could do before. But now, if we want we can search for people who have good credentials in a field, put up questions about the topics we are writing about and follow through with them directly on the site. We are just beginning to think about larger scale projects that we can coordinate with the magazine as the membership gets bigger and more robust.

So what were any issues along the way?

We had to think through some issues. First, we identified the eight main topics that we cover. Everybody that sets up a profile has to let us know which of the eight topics their content fits into and then do some free form tags. If a member doesn’t choose one of those eight topics, then their content and their profile isn’t going to bubble into the directories for each topic. There is no chance. You could submit something way off topic, but you’d have to actively be disingenuous to tag it as something to be in technology or design. And we have a team of people who are filtering for bad content and will send gentle reminders ‘please don’t tag that it’s about something when it is not.’ The organizational framework allows us to align our professional content and our member content in a way that makes sense to the readers and keeps things still ‘Fast Company’ in terms of what people are writing about. And then we select the best to highlight on the home page.

The fear is that readers will create content that is inappropriate or unrelated to the brand – we are pretty pleased so far. It’s really self-tagging and the members are regulating it themselves.

How does the journalist’s job description change?

For some it doesn’t change at all, for others it changes a lot. There are some people who are long-form feature writers, who will remain long form feature writers. They are not going to be moderating groups, but they will probably answer a lot of questions and messages about the stories they write and engage in more personal conversations. Some of our journalists, like Charles Fishman, write six or seven features a year and turn out a book every year and a half. Thats still what he is going to do – but he will engage with our audience in a much more direct way.

Other people have totally new jobs: The senior editor at the website became senior editor / community director. She is in there answering as many questions as she can that need to be answered. She is working full time with the community, so it really runs the spectrum – some people participate with the community full time – and others who are doing long form.

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? Are we going to form a group? Are we going to ask a question of the audience? Are we going to have the journalists within the groups doing live discussions (which hasn’t launched yet, but will). It’s something that has to be considered in every major package now — how is the community going to participate? It could be an all out group – Green should be a big initiative so we should hire green bloggers in the group ahead of time and monitor the group to see what companies they suggest? Community is just one of those parts that editors have to consider along with thinking about the photography for a big package.

It makes it less of a one shot deal, but a continuing work and discussion that is going to have a life for months or years because of the community.

What advice do you have for beat bloggers?

I have very specific advice – they should set up groups right on FastCompany.com, announce what they are doing and tap into our membership so they don’t have to build this platform themselves. They should try us the same way they are trying Twitter or Facebook. They can blog in the group for all members to see and they should keep opening up discussion topics and move around the site and invite members who they think might be appropriate for their stories — and try to invite them into their group. The platform is there and it’s free. It carries our branding on it, but so what, if you are using it to gather information.

So what’s the bigger idea?

The platform is in pretty good shape and we’ve started discussions with four different media organizations about using our platform to power community on their sites. You wouldn’t be able to tell it was FastCompany, the only condition is that people search and the group search has to link everybody together and the signup has to be the same across all websites. We could make something significant like Facebook and LinkedIn – those don’t have to be the only networks people participate in.

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.

Panelists:
• Scott Karp–Publish 2
• Jim Marcus–AOL Propeller (Netscape)
• Travis Henry–YourHub
• Melissa Baily–New Haven Independent
• Ed Sussman–Fast Company and Inc.

“We’re gonna use user generated content to get started,” says Scott Karp, the social group leader and author of Publish2.

Scott immediately passes on the introduction torch to Travis Henry. Henry describes his site YourHub.com based in Colorado.

Next up, Melissa Baily one of the few women here and managing editor of the New Haven Independent (a not-for-profit), talks about her efforts to better cover her community in Connecticut.

James Marcus of AOL Propeller says, “For us one of the big challenges is to get into the inner or even the outer circle of participation.”

Ed Sussman of Fast Company and Inc.com is the final panelist. He gives a brief summary of his work.

Scott Karp leads into a topic about Community Make-Up
Travis Henry, YourHub– “The number one reason people post or contribute on my site is because…they want to see themselves in print. Then they start caring about how many hits they get.”

Melissa Baily, New Haven Independent–“We have these junkie types who crave more information about the town.”

Jim Marcus, AOL Propeller– “At Propeller, there’s a lot of interesting politics. It’s the single area of fixation on our site.”

Ed Sussman, Fast Company and Inc.—“After several years, things began to evolve into a social thing.”

All panelists agree that their users enjoy networking and the ability to be published. And often, users become almost addicted to interacting with the sites.

Challenges the Panelists Face/Growth Dynamics
Ed Sussman, Fast Company and Inc.–“Our challenge is to bring the technology up to speed [for Fast Company].”

Jim Marcus, AOL Propeller– discusses the difficulties of moving form Netscape onward. “This has been the source of a lot of change and identity issues.”

Travis Henry, YourHub– tells how many smaller papers purchased syndication rights and thought they could simply turn it on without any staff. “You have to have somebody that cares about the site behind it.”

First question from the audience: Describe the roles of the people that work for you—how does it work?

Travis Henry, YourHub– says there are about 25 people working on the site [YourHub]. “They answer phones, go to rotary boards to evangelize and even make the coffee,” he says. “They do everything—there are no assistants.”

Melissa Baily, New Haven Independent–“We’ve done zero marketing. We’re just now having some business students working on it.”

Baily says they spend a lot of time weeding out the irrelevant comments. “We don’t take user generated information—We use trained journalists.”

Ed Sussman, Fast Company and Inc.–“Each site has an editor and a monitor.”

Jim Marcus, AOL Propeller—explains that Propeller does have moderators of sorts and that they play a substantial role in the community with their viewers.
“We pay them a $1,000 a month. Most of them are pretty serious news junkies.” Marcus says that the youngest moderator is 14-years-old.

A discussion about site construction and development comes into play. The audience and panelists agree that taking and expanding from current models such as Facebook is a good idea.

And we end right on time!

What are your goals?
The basic task of journalism is to create order out of the chaos of raw information, and we believe that remains our overarching mission in the connected era. Our goal is to provide tools and a framework for Houston and its communities to cover themselves. We want to enable everyone – the garden group in the suburbs; the high school football team with dreams of making state; the neighborhood association struggling with revitalization issues near downtown; the backyard philosopher with an idea she thinks can change the world – to tell their story. As journalists, we ultimately want to collaborate with all these voices to paint a clearer picture of what Houston is, and what it’s becoming.

Notable achievements?

Chron.com was one of the first major newspaper Web sites to embrace blogging both by staff and readers, launching our first blogs in early 2004. We’ve been careful to emphasize comments as much as what our staffers say in our blogs, creating rich and loyal communities around each blog. We were named the Best Blogging Newspaper by Jay Rosen and his NYU students in March 2006 as a result, and several of our bloggers – in sports, entertainment and news – have received national media and peer recognition for their work.

We’ve also built a substantial, vibrant and growing community around reader content, and are utilizing it in our day-to-day coverage of Houston. Photos and news stories submitted by readers now are published regularly in our newspaper, particularly in our neighborhood sections.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
I think we’ve learned that, just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come. Simply inviting collaboration isn’t enough – we’ve found you must actively recruit for it, and give people reasons to collaborate with you. Our most successful experiences have come where producers, editors or reporters have taken ownership of the concept and worked hard to engage and develop their communities.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?
Yes. The bulk of the incremental revenue has come from the growth of advertising inventory that has accompanied the overall growth of the number of pages people are viewing on the site. The biggest impact has come from blogs and reader comments, both of which have increased the average pages per visitor significantly in the last year.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
Two things in the near term: (1) using reader interaction effectively in building communities around the site’s topical and geographical niche sites and (2) further developing a model for news coverage that turns sources into authors and readers into sources, potential putting our beat reporters in the position of conductors of this public symphony.

To do this, we will need further improvements to our reader interactive technology, the continuing willingness of the newsroom to try and to fail and some new compensation models for both our staff and their community collaborators.

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

Dwight Silverman’s list:

Dave Winer

Peter Rojas (Engadget)

Steve Rubel

Robin Sloan (Current TV)

Jay Rosen

Jonathon Dube (CyberJournalist)

Steve Grove (YouTube)

Lydia West (About.com)

Jeff Jarvis

Scott Clark’s list:

Jay Rosen

Lydia West

Jeff Jarvis

Jennifer Carroll

Travis Henry

Robin Sloan

Derek Willis

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.

Last week we launched our newest project, 9 Neighbors. 9 Neighbors is a local news filtering service for several Boston-area communities. The site uses social data — primarily relationships and browsing histories — to determine which bits of content are most useful to members of a community.

What are your goals?

We have two goals:
(1) To build a healthy, growing business.
(2) To make it easier to find quality, relevant information on a local (town and neighborhood) level.

Notable achievements?

The launch of 9 Neighbors is our most significant, concrete achievement. More broadly, we are proud to have enabled and been responsible for lots of online news experiments. Our mapping and and data projects on Boston.com, NYTimes.com and other sites were some of the first of their kind published on major news sites. Atlas, our mapping tool, made it possible for dozens of major newspapers and local news sites to begin experimenting with Google Maps and data. Our business has also been an important experiment, demonstrating one more approach to independent online news.

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

We’ve learned that today it is very, very hard to build an independent business when your primary product is content. Content is abundant, and therefore cheap. Attention is scarce, and therefore valuable. This is why we’re now focusing on filtering tools, which help people use their valuable attention more efficiently.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

We’re earning money from advertising, right now primarily from our mapping tool, Atlas. In the future, we expect 9 Neighbors to generate additional advertising income.

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

We just launched 9 Neighbors, so right now our focus is on getting feedback from users in our Boston communities, then iterating on the product. We’re also beginning to look at how we can partner with local publishers.

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

I’m interested in speaking with people who are producing local content.

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.

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

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

A Surprising Realization: I was surprised that people in the Northwest Voice community wanted their content to be edited. Pacheco always assumed people wanted to express themselves freely. But he found that once you are putting citizen work in print, to distribute it through the community, citizen journalist get mad if there is a typo that the editors didn’t catch. “It ties back to people’s persona and reputation – if you are printing or broadcasting, you have an obligation to make them look good,” says Pacheco.

But it differs from brand to brand. If you go to Bakotopia, a youth oriented brand, people don’t want anything to go through editors. “Its all about them taking control back,” says Pacheco.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: “Everything is live market research — like opening a theme park and seeing what ride people want to go on,” says Pacheco. With new brands like the Northwest Voice, which people didn’t realize was tied to the 140 year-old newspaper company, people were accepting of new tools and forgiving for small mistakes.

But when the traditional papers moved from Typepad blogs to the new Bakomatic software the focus shifted from discussion to social networking, which irked the traditional readers. “The old readers were complaining, ‘where can I find out where the comments are’” says Pacheco. Before putting in a new feature you have to ask “who is the community you are trying to reach and what are their expectations? Each brand we have is unique — on Bakersfield.com its about news as a conversation,” says Pacheco.

Technology lessons: Anybody who wants to create their own technology — make sure you have a developer who is involved in your technology. Pacheco’s team built everything through outsourcing, and admits that it is easy to get in a situation where, as it grows organically the more you have to support — but outsourcing firms have no interest in support. Pacheco worries that without a developer on staff, it’s difficult to scale and support everything that has already been done and still look 5-10 years out.

Money: The Californian has made a surprising revenue by licensing Bakomatic.

Most of the advertising sales are still in print, admits Pacheco. “Where we need to do a lot more work is getting beyond a few hundred big advertisers in town and getting to the 26,000 other businesses.” Pacheco is currently working on the “Inside Guide,” which he describes as “Myspace meets the Yellow Pages.” Taking free data from AT&T, which is un-categorized, Pacheco is creating a taxonoy for local businesses, giving the hair salon or pizza store a webpage. Then the team will contact the local business to let them know about their wepage to see if they want to purchase advanced options.

Future Goals: The “Inside Guide” described above is Pacheco’s next big project – in an attempt to diversify the newspaper’s advertisers.

Pacheco is also interested in the increasing power of niches. “Print isn’t going away, but one size fits all is becoming less appealing,” says Pacheco. Is it possible to build an instant brand network, so people can create their own networks around topics in their community. Perhaps they are networks the paper wouldn’t put resources into, but the paper would be interested in empowering local citizens in creating a hub about fishing or biking.

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

People who run their own technology. I’m interested to learn more about their editorial process. I’m interested to know what success people have had and how people are actively growing revenue, particularly online. We are just moving into that area — we intentionally spent a couple years just growing the audience — and now we need to monetize –

I know a lot of sites have content rating capabilities — I’d be curious to know if that really works, how people use it — what kind of goals does it drive?

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.”