This is a fantastic case of young journalists scratching their own itch. The group recently formed their own nonprofit and are discussing what they need to do to get to the next step.

Next step? They are already getting college publications off College Publisher and onto Wordpress. They are being the change they want to see in the world. They are already making waves, their next step is simply iteration and scaling.

Meet Greg Linch one of the forces behind CoPress who gives more details.

I also had the chance to catch up with Adrian Holovaty who, for many, needs no introduction. He is most known for pioneering Django, a model/view/controller framework to deploy web applications and then using that framework to create EveryBlock.com – a news feed for your block.

I asked Adrian only two questions. First – to explain a little known aspect of EveryBlock whereby the editors help explain some of the obscure aspects of city infrastructure. My take away: If you still have any doubt that aggregation is creation or that filtering is an editorial service that journalists can hone and use to make money….. you are missing a VERY lucrative bus.

The second was Adrian’s advice to a young journalist/programmer. Scratch your own itch.

Tristan is the founder of Apture. Similar to two other Stanford computer scientist, Tristan understands and wants to improve how people find information on the web. Apture allows reporters to link out easily without necessarily losing the reader to another page.

More intriguing to me, however, is Tristan’s general experience as a young journalistically minded entrepreneur.What has he learned and what is advice to those that may come after him?

The first half of this interview focuses on Apture and his experience creating it – the second half about working on a startup in general. Never quit…..and be honest with yourself.

Untitled from Digidave on Vimeo.

(For those keeping track, that’s one video using Viddler, the other two using Vimeo and Blip. Have a video platform you want me to try? Let me know).

I was able to get a brief chat in with Bill who has also provided a brief write-up below.

From Bill Densmore

Thanks for all your work on last week’s “New Business Models for News” summit at CUNY; I was unable to attend. But your on-demand video archives are a valuable fill-in.

I’d like your community to know about the Information Valet Project, which takes a cue from Jeff Jarvis’ advice to start building new business models. Our first summit to define and plan launch of the Information Valet Service is Dec. 3-5 at the new Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Univ. of Missouri. We invite participants. (To register: http://www.ivpblueprint.org)

We’re pushing a fairly specific notion of how to build a shared-user network with a revenue model baked in — the revenue model is similar to the sort of reverse syndication which Jeff talks about, and embraces the networking concepts outlined by Tom Evslin at CUNY.

“Blueprinting the Information Valet Economy” is a strategy summit designed to blueprint the law, ownership, management, marketing and technology of a shared-user network for user-centric demographics, privacy-protected purchasing and advertising exchange and compensation.

Evslin noted that the former newsPAPER industry — because of its unique content and relationship with 50 million customers who pay for information daily — is in a unique position to provide the content seed corn needed to jump start a network business — if it comes together on a platform and protocols.

We’ll put forward fairly specific ideas for doing this forward as a point of departure — and expect to hear modifications. We’ll end up after 2-1/2 days with a commitment to form a collaborative that will move forward with whatever is the consensus approach.

I hope there will be other events like IVP Blueprint — at CUNY, and elsewhere — which advance specific projects for sustaining the parts of journalism which contribute to participatory democracy.

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.

Myheimat.de combines printed magazines and an online-platform for hyper-local communities. A network of 5.000 contributors (citizen reporter) submit thousands of stories and the community picks stories for hyper-local printed freesheets (monthly, close to 100% UGC) which reach a combined circulation of 120.000.

As founder of a local monthly freesheet in 1994 Martin Huber learned and experienced the need of local media users and what service they expect of their local newspaper resp. media. Major focuses of his research at TUM (2001-2004) have been virtual communities, value-co-production and technology-platforms for integrating customers into the value-chain. (Ph.D. thesis: ”Collaborative Value creation”). 2002 he co-founded a mobile content sharing application (www.mozean.de) where users can publish and share content which is delivered via mobile phone.

2003 he co-founded gogolmedien to build a scalable publishing-platform for converged media products (print&online) and collaborative content creation, driven by users. Since 2003 gogolmedien successfully launched 17 hyper-local so called myheimat-magazines based on this platform.

What are your goals?

Myheimat.de tries to provide a service that helps people make the communities they live in better places. Our service combines online, print and mobile for the lowest possible threshold to participate and the highest reach in the local community.
In Germany there are over 1.800 small cities (between 10-50K inhabitants) which perfectly match myheimat. We want to cover these cities with monthly/weekly freesheets. Therefore we will partner with media-companies and traditional newspapers.
In addition we plan to offer the platform behind myheimat as an innovative tool for media companies to serve their customers on a hyper-local level and to enable networked journalism on a local or regional level. Our goal is to further develop the technology platform of myheimat to give professional journalists a tool for seamless collaboration with an open community of citizen reporters.

Notable achievements?
Back in 2003 myheimat was the first community-to-print initiative (at least we know of). At least in Germany no media company (start-up or traditional newspaper) managed to roll-out successful 17 local free-sheets in 3 years.

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

We regard Organisation/People and Information (Systems) as the key to networked journalism and think that networked journalism is driven and enabled by strong technology platforms specifically designed for networked journalism.
Organisation/People

Our journalists had to learn to moderate the conversation and not to write content themselves. This was (in the beginning) much easier with employees who are not trained in traditional newspaper production, but we now also see a lot of traditional trained journalists who enhance their abilities in moderating and animating user(-communities).

From our experience since 2003 I can only confirm and emphasize how Jeff Jarvis put it: “How does the role of the journalist change? Journalists must now augment their traditional and valued roles of reporter, watchdog, questioner, vetter, investigator, editor. In the conversation, they need to take on new roles, as moderator, enabler, organizer, talent scout, even journalistic evangelist and educator.” (from: http://www.buzzmachine.com/2007/10/05/how-do-we-teach-the-conversation)
To adapt the media application/the media format quickly to user needs or user feedback, cross-disciplinary teams and co-location helps a lot. We learned to put an editorial designer, a programmer and a moderator together in a team, to deliver fast results the user wants.

Information system

In the beginning (2003) we underestimated how important an agile development process and an agile platform architecture is. We (naively) specified and started coding our Version 2.0 of the platform in a half-year project, but we stopped this project, because we realized that we ran into an architecture which was not agile enough, and the (time-) gap between user-feedback and implementation was too big. Time-to-market of the next feature/version hast to be < 1 month.
We know have a much more agile piece of software where we can react instantly on user feedback, have fast development iterations (“continuously beta”) and can embed experience and user feedback every 2-3 days in our platform.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?
Ads in our printed freesheets generate 99% of our revenues. This will change in the future shifting to online-ads (but slowly!). We have a team of 17 full time employees. The sales-team has 6 full-time employees (80% outbound sales) and we have additional 6 part-time sales-agents in the field.

Myheimat is expanding its reach and plans to publish hyperlocal myheimat freesheets nationwide. Therefore it

1. developed a franchise system, where the myheimat-publishing-platform is provided via ASP and individuals can run their business as publisher of a printed freesheet
2. provides myheimat as a decentralized collaboration platform for existing media companies who restructure their newsroom to do networked journalism

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
We want to speed up our growth and the licensing of our solution. Therefore we plan to finish a round of strategic (venture) capital financing by the end of 2007.

We will add new features (vote for print, geo-tagging, rss-input) and develop an interface to have an even more agile platform, where our moderators can change and add media formats/apps without involving a coder.

Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit
Travis Henry – YourHub: to share thoughts about the franchise business model

Howard Weaver – McClatchy, Jennifer Carroll – Gannett, Dan Pacheco – Bakersfield.com, Lisa Williams – H2OTown, Placeblogger

Myheimat.de combines printed magazines and an online-platform for hyper-local communities. A network of 5.000 contributors (citizen reporter) submit thousands of stories and the community picks stories for hyper-local printed freesheets (monthly, close to 100% UGC) which reach a combined circulation of 120.000.

As founder of a local monthly freesheet in 1994 Martin Huber learned and experienced the need of local media users and what service they expect of their local newspaper resp. media. Major focuses of his research at TUM (2001-2004) have been virtual communities, value-co-production and technology-platforms for integrating customers into the value-chain. (Ph.D. thesis: ”Collaborative Value creation”). 2002 he co-founded a mobile content sharing application (www.mozean.de) where users can publish and share content which is delivered via mobile phone.

2003 he co-founded gogolmedien to build a scalable publishing-platform for converged media products (print&online) and collaborative content creation, driven by users. Since 2003 gogolmedien successfully launched 17 hyper-local so called myheimat-magazines based on this platform.

What are your goals?

Myheimat.de tries to provide a service that helps people make the communities they live in better places. Our service combines online, print and mobile for the lowest possible threshold to participate and the highest reach in the local community.
In Germany there are over 1.800 small cities (between 10-50K inhabitants) which perfectly match myheimat. We want to cover these cities with monthly/weekly freesheets. Therefore we will partner with media-companies and traditional newspapers.
In addition we plan to offer the platform behind myheimat as an innovative tool for media companies to serve their customers on a hyper-local level and to enable networked journalism on a local or regional level. Our goal is to further develop the technology platform of myheimat to give professional journalists a tool for seamless collaboration with an open community of citizen reporters.

Notable achievements?
Back in 2003 myheimat was the first community-to-print initiative (at least we know of). At least in Germany no media company (start-up or traditional newspaper) managed to roll-out successful 17 local free-sheets in 3 years.

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

We regard Organisation/People and Information (Systems) as the key to networked journalism and think that networked journalism is driven and enabled by strong technology platforms specifically designed for networked journalism.
Organisation/People

Our journalists had to learn to moderate the conversation and not to write content themselves. This was (in the beginning) much easier with employees who are not trained in traditional newspaper production, but we now also see a lot of traditional trained journalists who enhance their abilities in moderating and animating user(-communities).

From our experience since 2003 I can only confirm and emphasize how Jeff Jarvis put it: “How does the role of the journalist change? Journalists must now augment their traditional and valued roles of reporter, watchdog, questioner, vetter, investigator, editor. In the conversation, they need to take on new roles, as moderator, enabler, organizer, talent scout, even journalistic evangelist and educator.” (from: http://www.buzzmachine.com/2007/10/05/how-do-we-teach-the-conversation)
To adapt the media application/the media format quickly to user needs or user feedback, cross-disciplinary teams and co-location helps a lot. We learned to put an editorial designer, a programmer and a moderator together in a team, to deliver fast results the user wants.

Information system

In the beginning (2003) we underestimated how important an agile development process and an agile platform architecture is. We (naively) specified and started coding our Version 2.0 of the platform in a half-year project, but we stopped this project, because we realized that we ran into an architecture which was not agile enough, and the (time-) gap between user-feedback and implementation was too big. Time-to-market of the next feature/version hast to be < 1 month.
We know have a much more agile piece of software where we can react instantly on user feedback, have fast development iterations (“continuously beta”) and can embed experience and user feedback every 2-3 days in our platform.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?
Ads in our printed freesheets generate 99% of our revenues. This will change in the future shifting to online-ads (but slowly!). We have a team of 17 full time employees. The sales-team has 6 full-time employees (80% outbound sales) and we have additional 6 part-time sales-agents in the field. 

Myheimat is expanding its reach and plans to publish hyperlocal myheimat freesheets nationwide. Therefore it

1. developed a franchise system, where the myheimat-publishing-platform is provided via ASP and individuals can run their business as publisher of a printed freesheet
2. provides myheimat as a decentralized collaboration platform for existing media companies who restructure their newsroom to do networked journalism

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
We want to speed up our growth and the licensing of our solution. Therefore we plan to finish a round of strategic (venture) capital financing by the end of 2007.

We will add new features (vote for print, geo-tagging, rss-input) and develop an interface to have an even more agile platform, where our moderators can change and add media formats/apps without involving a coder. 

Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit
Travis Henry – YourHub: to share thoughts about the franchise business model

Howard Weaver – McClatchy, Jennifer Carroll – Gannett, Dan Pacheco – Bakersfield.com, Lisa Williams – H2OTown, Placeblogger