John Oppedahl

Posted on 08. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn in Big Media, Citizen Network

Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
My experience has been in the newspaper business as a reporter, editor and publisher (Detroit Free Press, Dallas Times Herald, L.A. Herald Examiner, Arizona Republic, San Francisco Chronicle) so the closest I’ve come is in helping to develop two websites, AZCentral.com for The Arizona Republic in Phoenix and SFgate.com for the San Francisco Chronicle.

What are your goals?
To bring online some of the best things that traditional newspapers can do and invent new ways of reporting and presenting news and developing advertising revenues online.

Notable achievements?
Helping to partially convert two traditional newspaper news operations to presenting material online. Also, I recently have been a strategy consultant to the National Conference of Editorial Writers, which is made up of editorial writers and editors at mainstream newspapers and local television stations. They will launch shortly something called the “Opinion Pool,” a networked effort involving 8 to 10 newspapers to experiment with taking their institutional opinion journalism to new forms on the Internet.

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
A great number of traditional print journalists are unable or unwilling to adapt to the Internet.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?
I have not started my online business yet, although I have a business plan mostly completed.

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
Journalism has an economic value so the big question is: How to make money from advertising, how to monetize journalism online.

Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit
Anyone who knows about developing advertising revenues online.