Edward Roussel – The Telegraph
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Becuase of the special election taking place in the UK , Edward is unable to attend the conference.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
We recently launched My Telegraph (www.my.telegraph.co.uk) a product that aims to give our readers dead-simple blogging, rating and news aggregating tools. It’s about introducing a new audience to blogging – 8,000 registered bloggers at the latest count. The average age of the Telegraph newspapers is 55, and many of them find the blogosphere a scary place. We also have a number of other networking tools: a popular daily debate on our website (www.telegraph.co.uk/yourview) which frequently gets several hundred posts; a daily e-poll on a polemical issue (www.telegraph.co.uk/news) and cross-media campaigns, such as our campaign for a referendum on the EU constitution (www.telegraph.co.uk/eu) – more than 95,000 signatories (2/3 in the newspaper, via a coupon, one third online).
Continue Reading
Paul Sullivan – Orato
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
After 35 years in newspapers, radio, TV, Internet and pr in Canada, I designed Orato.com as a way for people with or without credentials to tell/report/share their stories online, making room for them in the scope of the news.
The rules are simple – register, follow the guidelines, post a story, get it through the banned words filter, and it’s online. On Oct. 1, we made it possible for registered correspondents to post video and audio stories. At this point, we’re not so much worried about balanced and accuracy as we are about encouraging people to post their stories.
Continue Reading
Emily Gertz – Worldchanging.com
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism. I’m a freelance journalist and editor, working primarily with web publications. Since early 2004 I’ve been a writer at Worldchanging, a leading sustainability news, views, and information blog; currently I’m the Interim Managing Editor of our “global” site, as well as editor of Worldchanging NYC. I also work as a content strategist with groups and companies to develop and sustain blogs that build communities of interest and action. I was Producer for Environmental News at OregonLive.com for two years in the late 1990’s, where we did some fun early work in proto collaborative journalism: inviting readers to submit photos of Portland events; write training and ride diaries for a big-deal multi-day charity bicycle ride; running bboards where readers could comment on the local news, share outdoors sports info, etc. I got online in 1989 via early bboard systems Environet and Econet, and first became an online community host — helpful experience for networked journalism — in the mid-1990’s on The WELL (where I continue to host today).
What are your goals?
Environmental stories offer many untapped opportunities for collaborative or crowdsourced journalism. I’m especially interested in starting or contributing to projects that provide opportunities to use more forms of media (blogging/microlocal journalism, podcasting, photojournalism, and collaborative mapping).
What are some of your notable achievements?
At Worldchanging, I was part of what was perhaps our finest hour to date: contributors from all over the glob collaborating to cover the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Contributors in India were able to make first person reports based on what they were hearing and seeing, as well as what was coming in on their own collaborative digital networks — demonstrating how important those networks were on the scene. Those of us in other parts of the world pulled together “bigger picture” type coverage on transforming disaster relief, technology to create an early warning network, etc. I wrote about the boundary of environment and economy, connecting the condition of coastal mangroves to the degree of destruction inland. (Where the mangroves were healthiest and intact, they usually absorbed a lot of the wave’s energy; where they were degraded by ag runoff from inland, or simply destroyed to make way for farming shrimp for the export market, there was weaker or no buffering and destruction was worse).
Thus far, the single most famous article I’ve personallly written is “Naughty by Nature: Ever Thought About the Toxins in Your Sex Toys?” for Grist Magazine. It’s a funny and fun piece, but beyond that it’s notable because I successfully took unusual approach to reporting on an environmental health issue (phthlate exposure), such that people would read and enjoy the information, rather than being overwhelmed by it.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
It is usually impossible to “convince” anyone that this stuff is valuable. The knowledge about the medium and what it can do has to be in place in order to get the support and resources one needs to get it going, never mind pull it off — and if it’s not there, you probably ought invest time in educating the relevant stakeholders before you get too far into it. I’ve made the mistake of entering enthusiastically into a project without ascertaining that there was enough internal support. In these scenarios, success is elusive; existing biases against the medium are affirmed; and one does not come away having accomplished much. I have learned that I have to be more thoughtful and tactical both in taking a measure of the local climate, and judging whether to accept a project. (This can be challenging when you’re a freelancer — since gigs, not tactics, pay the bills!)
Are you getting revenue for this? How?
I earn my living primarily via journalism, including networked journalism, as well as content strategy towards using networks most effectively. If you know any freelancers, you know that’s pretty amazing! As I work on the editorial side of this or that outlet, I don’t get into the revenue side much — but I suspect the revenue being generated varies pretty widely; in the nonprofits, there’s a lot of dependence on grants, donations, and “angels.”
What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
I need to work with outlets and projects that are committed — with “moral” support, funding, enthusiasm and openness to creativity — to exploring online/networked journalism and pushing the envelope of what it can accomplish. Potentially I need to found such an outlet myself.
Anyone you’d like to talk with, learn from, or work with at the summit
Jonathan Landman of The New York Times
Jim Colgan and Bob Garfield of WNYC
Colin Maclay of the Berkman Center
Continue Reading
Bill Allison – Sunlight Foundation
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism:
At the risk of adding to the nomenclature, we like to think of our projects as being “distributed research.” While the goal is to dig out information or link relevant information, much of which can be used to tell stories, we often leave the telling of stories to others.
Sunlight has started several distributed research projects to bring more transparency and accountability to Congress. Each project differs greatly; we’ll describe just a few here. Congresspedia, which we launched with the Center for Media and Democracy, is a wiki-based “citizen’s encyclopedia on Congress” that anyone can contribute to and edit (though we have an in-house editor to oversee it for fairness and accuracy). Our “Is Congress a Family Business” project /research/familybusiness/\u003c/a\>) \nprovided\u003c/span\> citizen researchers with an online tool that guided them to \nonline databases to look up information about spouses of House members \n(specifically, whether or not a spouse drew a paycheck from the member’s \ncampaign committee), and enter their findings into the form. \u003cspan\>The tool both guided their research and collected their \ndata, even displaying updated totals on the number of members checked and the \nnumber who had been tentatively identified as paying their spouses. \n\u003c/span\>We engaged citizen journalists an effort to find out which Senator had \neffectively blocked passage of S. 223, a bill that would require Senate \ncampaigns to electronically file their contribution information with the Federal \nElection Commission (as House and presidential candidates already do); they \ncalled all 100 Senate offices in an effort to find out, and reported what they \nlearned to us via comments on blog posts and emails. Finally, we have recently \nlaunched EarmarkWatch.org, a site that lets users connect the dots between \nlawmakers, lobbyists, campaign contributors and earmarks, plus share info and \ncomments on whether earmarks meet pressing needs, pay off political \ncontributors, or are simply pure pork. The site is at once an investigative tool \nfor finding information on earmarks, a repository of that information, and a \nsocial networking site for those who want to bring transparency and \naccountability to congressional spending.\u003c/font\>\u003c/p\>\n\u003cp\>\u003cspan\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Arial\” size\u003d\”2\”\>Additionally, we have \nprovided grants to other organizations involved in citizen journalism, including \nCapitol News Connection (\u003ca href\u003d\”http://www2.pri.org/cncnews/index.html\” target\u003d\”_blank\” onclick\u003d\”return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)\”\>http://www2.pri.org/cncnews\u003cWBR\>/index.html\u003c/a\>) for \na project that would allow citizens to have their questions asked of \nlawmakers by CNC reporters; the Center for Indpependent Media (\u003ca href\u003d\”http://www.newjournalist.org\” target\u003d\”_blank\” onclick\u003d\”return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)\”\>”,1] ); /provided citizen researchers with an online tool that guided them to online databases to look up information about spouses of House members (specifically, whether or not a spouse drew a paycheck from the member’s campaign committee), and enter their findings into the form. The tool both guided their research and collected their data, even displaying updated totals on the number of members checked and the number who had been tentatively identified as paying their spouses. We engaged citizen journalists an effort to find out which Senator had effectively blocked passage of S. 223, a bill that would require Senate campaigns to electronically file their contribution information with the Federal Election Commission (as House and presidential candidates already do); they called all 100 Senate offices in an effort to find out, and reported what they learned to us via comments on blog posts and emails. Finally, we have recently launched EarmarkWatch.org, a site that lets users connect the dots between lawmakers, lobbyists, campaign contributors and earmarks, plus share info and comments on whether earmarks meet pressing needs, pay off political contributors, or are simply pure pork. The site is at once an investigative tool for finding information on earmarks, a repository of that information, and a social networking site for those who want to bring transparency and accountability to congressional spending.
Additionally, we have provided grants to other organizations involved in citizen journalism, including Capitol News Connection for a project that would allow citizens to have their questions asked of lawmakers by CNC reporters; the Center for Independent Media ) to train \ncitizen journalists and establish a Washington bureau to cover Congress; \nCitizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (\u003ca href\u003d\”http://www.citizensforethics.org/\” target\u003d\”_blank\” onclick\u003d\”return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)\”\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Times New Roman\” size\u003d\”3\”\>http://www.citizensforethics\u003cWBR\>.org\u003c/font\>\u003c/a\>) to create an Open Community \nOpen Document Review System, enabling citizens to review and annotate documents \nobtained from the government through the Freedom of Information Act; and we\’ve \nalso supported both NewAssignment.net and the Center for Citizen Media (\u003ca href\u003d\”http://citmedia.org/\” target\u003d\”_blank\” onclick\u003d\”return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)\”\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Times New Roman\” size\u003d\”3\”\>http://citmedia.org\u003c/font\>\u003c/a\>). A full list of our grantees can be found \nat \u003ca href\u003d\”http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/grants\” target\u003d\”_blank\” onclick\u003d\”return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)\”\>http://www.sunlightfoundation\u003cWBR\>.com/grants\u003c/a\>. \n\u003c/font\>\u003c/span\>\n\u003cp\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Arial\” size\u003d\”2\”\>\u003c/font\>\u003c/p\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Arial\” size\u003d\”2\”\>\u003c/font\>\u003c/p\>\n\u003cp\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Arial\” size\u003d\”2\”\>2. What are your goals?\u003c/font\>\u003c/p\>\n\u003cp\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Arial\” size\u003d\”2\”\>Our main goal is to bring transparency to Congress, \nand each project we do is designed to further that goal. Sometimes we are \ntrying, explicitly, to answer a question (how many House members were paying \ntheir spouses from campaign funds in 2006; who has the secret hold on a \ntransparency bill) that require the same steps to be repeated dozens or hundreds \nof times (calling Senate offices, looking up expenditure records for House \ncampaigns). For other projects, the goal of aggregating the distributed research \nis secondary to the task at hand (scoring each member’s official Web site for \ntransparency; evaluating the merits of individual earmarks), though we can still \nanswer big questions (how many members post their schedules on their Web sites; \nhow many earmark recipients lobby Congress).\u003c/font\>\u003c/p\>\n\u003cp\>\u003cfont face\u003d\”Arial\” size\u003d\”2\”\>”,1] ); / to train citizen journalists and establish a Washington bureau to cover Congress; Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington to create an Open Community Open Document Review System, enabling citizens to review and annotate documents obtained from the government through the Freedom of Information Act; and we’ve also supported both NewAssignment.net and the Center for Citizen Media. A full list of our grantees can be found at http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/grants.
What are your goals?
Our main goal is to bring transparency to Congress, and each project we do is designed to further that goal. Sometimes we are trying, explicitly, to answer a question (how many House members were paying their spouses from campaign funds in 2006; who has the secret hold on a transparency bill) that require the same steps to be repeated dozens or hundreds of times (calling Senate offices, looking up expenditure records for House campaigns). For other projects, the goal of aggregating the distributed research is secondary to the task at hand (scoring each member’s official Web site for transparency; evaluating the merits of individual earmarks), though we can still answer big questions (how many members post their schedules on their Web sites; how many earmark recipients lobby Congress).
What are some of your notable achievements?
Using the Web in innovative ways to make the distributed research process user friendly and even enjoyable: We launched “Congress’ Family Business” at 3:30 p.m. on a Friday of a holiday weekend, and expected the research to take three or four weeks. Within 40 hours, the project was completed—citizen journalists found that 19 spouses were paid by a member’s campaign committee in the 2006 election cycle, totaling more than $636,000. The amazing thing about the project was that our researchers found that doing the research was almost addictive. Most participants researched multiple members—anywhere from 10 to 100. And remember, this project involved searching through campaign committee expenditure reports—the sort of task that normally causes eyes to glaze over.
Designing research projects around available data sources: One of the most important things we do is to steer our volunteer muckrakers to reliable data sources they can use to find information for our projects, providing enough instructions to familiarize them with their use. Our hope is that by making them aware of these resources, they will check them again when they need government information in the future.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
We’ve learned a lot as we’ve gone along, largely through making mistakes. Our first effort in this field, after Sunlight broke the story of then-Speaker Dennis Hastert personally profiting from a $207 million earmark for a highway project, we asked our readers to investigate their own member’s personal financial disclosures, and let us know what they found. We had about 100 eager volunteers, but no way to train them and, except for email, no way to communicate with them. There was also no methodology, no set of questions we were trying to answer, just a suggestion that people take a peak at their lawmaker’s financial disclosure form and report back to us on anything that looked odd. While a lot of people did a lot of work looking, only one story emerged from it (and that one on the Web site of Harpers, as one of our citizen researchers tipped off a reporter there to what he had found). Our second effort, a 2006 project called Exposing Earmarks (conducted jointly with a coalition of other groups) similarly suffered from a lack of thought on the front end: While a lot of people looked at individual earmarks, there was no means of collecting and correlating that information at one site, so that we ended up with a scattered effort. Since that time, we have learned that there is no substitute for having a research tool that helps guide research and collect information. Our newest effort, EarmarkWatch.org, also allows for interaction among researchers–a research, publishing and social networking tool.
Are you getting revenue for this? How?
No, we don’t get revenue for this. The Sunlight Foundation is a 501(c)3.
What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
What we need most of all is more transparency from Congress! Beyond that, we’d like to develop means of distributing tasks like fact checking, we’d like to be able to create a network of volunteers who would take on more responsibility for running the projects we create. We’d also like to come up with more cool tools using data from other sources while allowing others to make tools using our data.
Continue Reading
Martin Huber – Myheimat.de
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
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.
[…]
Continue Reading
Robin Sloan, Andrew Fitzgerald – Current TV
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
Andrew Fitzgerald runs the citizen journalism program for international cable/satellite TV network Current TV. Robin Sloan is the online product strategist there (i.e. he figures out what we should do on the web). Both of us have been deeply involved in Current’s ongoing efforts to create an open, community-driven news system capable of powering a 24/7 TV network. They are efforts that have already yielded some really amazing programming (and we can share examples with anyone that’s interested) but even so, we feel we are still at the VERY beginning.
What are your goals?
Our goal is to massively expand our output of networked journalism — primarily in video but also in other formats, too — created by and targeted to global young adult audience. We think we’re doing good things now but we want to do much, MUCH more.
Notable achievements?
By using different kinds of media than other networks will contemplate, we’ve been able to assemble much more personal, authentic coverage of some of the major news stories of the past year. For instance: Instead of sending reporters and satellite trucks to Virginia Tech in the wake of the shootings there, we put together a piece combining webcam reactions from students with news footage and stills. It made for a fairly gripping & intimate account of the event.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
If you build it, they will not necessarily come. We have, a number of times, assumed that if we built the web architecture for citizen journalists to send in their reports, they just would. Early on, we focused too much on theory and systems, and not enough on finding ways to let people know we existed 🙂
Are you getting revenue for this? How?
Yes! Current, like other cable TV networks, is supported by its ad revenues and subscription fees.
What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?
We want to expand & decentralize our news-gathering using our new site, current.com — and, in the spirit of the perpetual beta, we’ll be figuring out exactly what that means as we go.
Anyone you’d particularly like to talk with.
Neil McIntosh from the Guardian, Micah Sifry, Huffington Post
people, the Sunlight Foundation folks… lots more (it’s a great
group!) but those stand out.
Continue Reading
Jason Oberfest – Los Angeles Times
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
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.
Continue Reading
Martin Huber – Myheimat.de
Posted on 05. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
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.
[…]
Continue Reading
Howard Owens – GateHouse Media
Posted on 04. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
As far back as East County Online (San Diego) in 1995, I’ve been working to create collaborative online communities. At ECO we didn’t have the tools to do it easily, so we invited key community members to contribute to our site and asked readers to e-mail us their opinions on things. We also formed a community group to meet regularly about topics in the community. Later, I started the RVClub.com, which I positioned as a virtual community. At the Ventura County Star, we were among the first to use comments on stories and were the first as far as I know to invite any member of the community to blog for us. At The Bakersfield Californian, I pushed for combining Bakotopia with Bakersfield.com. At GateHouse Media, we are developing a whole new participation platform.
What are your goals?
To create the new town square for the small communities we serve.
Notable achievements?
– Launching East County Online in 1995, the first group of US weekly papers on the web
– While at the Ventura County Star, we won best news site awards from E&P, NAA and ONA (I was director in 2004 when the site won ONA‘s General Excellence Award). In those six years, the site won awards in several other categories.
– Creating Bakersfield.com as we know it today, which has been nominated for a Digital Edge Award, as well as winning the first-ever Inland Press Association General Excellence Award.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
– Move faster. Resist the temptation to have all the right things in all the right places before taking action.
– In a newspaper organization, be honest with staff — we have to do this and online is just simply more important to our potential for growth than print (in the past, I was soft on this message).
– Blog. You’ve got to walk the talk if you want your organizations to change.
– There are a number of things I wish I had done differently over they years. I wouldn’t call them mistakes so much as lessoned learned. For example, in Ventura, we should have been more aggressive about inviting key community leaders to blog for us. There is a whole host of things I wish we could have moved faster on in Ventura.
Continue Reading
Travis Henry – YourHub
Posted on 04. Oct, 2007 by David Cohn.
Your work in networked/citizen/collaborative journalism.
I am the editor of YourHub.com at the Rocky Mountain News. I helped launch one of the nation’s most ambitious citizen journalism projects in the spring of 2005. I came from a traditional newspaper background, working as a city editor, editorial page editor and reporter at dailies and a managing editor at semiweeklies. Since launching YourHub.com, I have helped other newspapers launch YourHub.com franchises and consulted with other newspapers and Web site operators launching hyperlocal citizen journalism sites. I don’t pretend to be an expert in this arena, there is no such thing. We’ve just figured out a way to make it work with what we have and I’m happy to share that knowledge with others.
What are your goals?
My goal is to have people in our community find YourHub.com a value to them. I want them to look forward to logging on to the Web site and receiving their print section every Thursday. I run YourHub.com in Colorado, so it’s important to me that Coloradans participate and find value in YourHub.com.
Notable achievements?
YourHub.com has registered over 34,000 members in the Denver metro area alone. We have 18 print sections just in Colorado. YourHub.com is now live in 8 states and poised to launch in more, admittedly with varied results. In Colorado alone we have more than 3,000 stories posted a month and more than 3,000 events a month.
Our biggest achievement has been the creation of an awesome online community that has become a large family of sorts. User gatherings we have held have been powerful and prove that this is an experiment worth going forward.
Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)
One of our biggest mistakes I believe was launching too fast with a product not robust enough to do what we wanted. We should have launched a beta site first and got our feet a wet before diving in. Bells and whistles aren’t as important as being a site truly dedicated to citizen journalism, but it helps to have a site that works. We then tried to introduce functionality too fast while in a bad situation with our vendors. It would have been better for us and our vendors if we would have taken it a bit slower.
