From Current TV – We’ve re-branded our citizen journalism program as “Collective Journalism,” emphasizing the collaborative nature of our work, and we’ve begun to focus our efforts on producing group investigations from different contributors around the world.

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.

 Since the Networked Journalism Summit:

Global Voices created a new website called Voices Without Votes together with Reuters. It’s a pretty massive task to undertake an overview of what world bloggers are saying about the US presidential election, but we are doing it bit by bit with the help of volunteers and colleagues at Global Voices. The project launched on super tuesday, and new content is added around the clock. Reuters are going to be using the RSS feeds on their website election pages, and we welcome anyone (everyone!) else to do the same too.

Details here and here.

I think our most interesting development right now in Bakersfield is the digital revolution happening in our newsroom.

As of a few weeks ago, the 80-some person newsroom in the Calfornian reorganized to focus on around-the-clock online coverage. Any story that ultimately appears in print (and a lot more than that) is blogged first, with updates going up throughout the day. That’s a huge change from how things used to work, with only a few reporters posting live updates at all and most stories not showing up online until 11 p.m. (before appearing in print the next day).

It’s a truly interactive experience for the audience because they can post comments to talk to the reporters as they file updates. I’ve noticed that they sometimes ask for more details which the reporter then investigates and reports back on. This really takes the concept of “news as a conversation” to a new level, because the conversation does impact the focus of the news coverage. At the end of the day, the “final” version of the story is created for print and posted online.

You can watch this happening in real time on the “Bakosphere” page.

I love that the newsroom is using the blogging engine that we created for the community 18 months ago, and that they started doing this on their own with no prodding and very little consultation with my team. I think the lesson there is that if you provide tools that lets ANYONE participate and contribute content whenever they want to, your traditional newsroom will eventually get involved and create something that is far more interesting than technology. The relationship between reporters and readers is evolving all on its own — a true revolution rather than something that was forced or mandated.

Here are a few recent examples of reporters posting news and updates to stories online as users converse with them:

• Live coverage and audience commentary on a wrestling competition.
• Commentary on a video depicting drama in Bakersfield’s minor league hockey games.
• Report and discussion on post-housing-slump development plans for Bakersfield
• Story about how immigrants don’t commit the most crime, and some discussion (which is a little disturbing — but it does accurately depict the “water-cooler” debate about this going on in Bakersfield).

From Brian Kroski who was interviewed at the Networked Journalism Summit here.

“Observer Media Group, the parent company of The New York Observer, is launching a project covering local politics through a distributed network of reporters, editors and columnists. This project will put reporters on the ground in all 50 states of the US, covering local politics news and national stories with a local perspective. This distributed network of reporters will be provided with tools to allow them to file photos, stories, and videos immediately - directly from their locations. These individual states will be their own news media sources and also contributed to a national aggregated, built from the bottom-up politics news site. This project was recently profiled in the New York Times.”

So it seems the New York Observer’s parent company is moving into networked journalism in a big way: Politicker.com

“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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