yelvington.com

Adopting a Competitive mindset

I've attended a few conferences and it appears to me that most folks in journalism hate advertising. Maybe that comes from seeing the last eight inches of their story end up on the composing room floor to make room for another two column by four-inch ad or just distrust of business. I wouldn't hazard a guess.

Regardless, it would seem some journalistic purists are using the current situation to seek wholly different business forms to fund journalism in general. While the national practice of the craft has been benefited by foundations, the idea that anything approaching hyperlocal can be funded by charitable donation alone is a pipe dream.

To me this is not a battle of nefarious forces of good and evil but rather a clear cut business reality. It is clear to me that the current crisis in journalism is based on an expanding supply of advertising opportunities that are proving both intriguing and competitive to business. As advertisers seek out those alternatives, they've withdrawn support from traditional newspapers.

The specific reasons businesses are abandoning newspapers and print are myriad but I do think those in the newspaper business ... and other traditional geo-based media ... are in a real way forgetting they are in a service business. The core of that business is communication to consumers and the means of that communication - Internet, print, broadcast, cable, point of purchase or outdoor is secondary. Advertisers pay, not for space in a newspaper or spots on a TV station, but for timely and efficient communication to the public. Advertisers are motivated in large part by reach and frequency.

The reason newspapers and other news media have traditionally had the support of advertisers is because news media provide reach.

To me it is unthinkable that those in the forth estate would even consider abandoning advertising as key source of revenue. The social and political life of every community is so closely intertwined with commerce that it is silly to consider eliminating paid placement of commercial comment.

When I walk into a local grocer, the Atlanta Journal Constitution display of Sunday newspapers advertises the aggregate dollar value of the grocery store coupons contained in that edition. Commercial comment is news.

What is at issue is competitiveness and what it takes to compete on what promises to be the premier communication utility - the Internet.

One of the advantages I've had in establishing my effort in Paulding Georgia is the fact that the local media were universally complacent of my efforts. In addition, because of my timing, the community has come to identify Paulding.com as their place on the Internet.

I've been hyped by computers and media since the days of MS-DOS but when I look around I see that newspapers in general (with many specific exceptions) are either clueless, complacent or even negative in their attitude toward the Net.

What is the source of this institutional complacency? Is it an endemic bureaucratic mindset established over decades of institutional arrogance or is it something else?

As I suspect most reading this come from the editorial side so I'll be generous and suggest there just isn't much spare time available for thinking out of the box as those in the business struggle with the next daily deadline. Is it that focus on the product actually a box that traps the industry in to failing to grasp the net or is it marketing myopia?

The mindset that the business is the product pretty much exists in every business and is legend in the business school education.

While it is almost trite to say the Internet is a game-changer; the fact is it offers a digital sister to ever analog medium from radio to direct mail. This makes the Internet the medium of mediums (and my favorite). That belief (opinion, understanding) is what informs my perspective of my little hyperlocal mediums' place in the scheme of things.

So, when I saw studies that show folks trust local TV news more than they do print journalism, I chose to create a weekly news video program modeled after a typical local market TV news show. The belief is that this production will benefit the site by increasing its credibility with the viewers more than if I were to make it more 'newspaper like' in appearance.

The choice to produce news on the TV news model was a conscious decision based in part on fending off potential competitors but the main strategic reason was to better serve the county's largest advertisers who already produce video commercials for CATV distribution. This "TV" news program is a reach vehicle for these advertisers as the AT&T's package deal bundling phone, DSL and the dish leaves a substantial gap in the cable system's reach.

This new 'product' ... video commercials inserted into locally produced programming distributed via the Internet ... is actually a service paulding.com provides to give large advertisers a compelling reason to spend money with pcom.

I am also creating are other products including a new business directory and neighborhood forums designed to enhance the service of the site to its commercial supporters. Their success is my success.

These new products are all proving synergistic and remunerative as we are increasing the number of business members on the site at the rate of at four or five per week buying in out of the blue. At least half of those purchasing business memberships also purchase banner advertisements.

Adding to this is that the site is cataloged on the search engines. This means that our competitiveness extends to Internet competitors like adwords. Search the string - west metro meat market - on Google and then read the topic that comes up (probably first) on pcom. Ask yourself if that word of mouth advertising is not absolutely priceless.

We are competing in this medium and business has never been better. Had I perceived my effort as just a 'message board' or even an online news outlet with ancillary social network; I'd not have been looking at the Net as the communication tool it is and missed these opportunities to better serve our local advertisers.

Let me close with that classic question posed in Harvard Business Review observation in their article about Marketing Myopia.

_What business are you really in? A seemingly obvious question--but one we should all ask before demand for our companies' products or services dwindles.

The railroads failed to ask this same question--and stopped growing. Why? Not because people no longer needed transportation. And not because other innovations (cars, airplanes) filled transportation needs. Rather, railroads stopped growing because railroads didn't move to fill those needs. Their executives incorrectly thought that they were in the railroad business, not the transportation business. They viewed themselves as providing a product instead of serving customers. Too many other industries make the same mistake--putting themselves at risk of obsolescence. _

I would suggest that in aggregate, newspapers are suffering from marketing myopia ... They see the Internet as something separate from their core business when in fact, it just another new tool like the typewriter or digital camera ... except better. Making it even better by enhancing the economic, and by extension the political and social life of your local community is the business and the Internet is the tool of choice.

One of the main goals of online information design is to present content in a way that allows users/readers to find what they want. Tagging, the digital extension of newspaper sections, is one technique used on just about every modern news website as a way to help users browse or search, but that isn't the only way it can be useful. Through tagging we can use computers to intelligently distribute content and enhance the media conversation. I'll take the context of a global aggregation system and go through the way I think this can be done, walking through the steps from start to finish.

Step 1: Assigning Tags
This system will have tags for location, topic, and community, but where will they come from? Relying on people to some extent isn't the end of the world so long as you are clever about it; for instance, CMU professor Luis Van Ahn turned image tagging into a game. Nevertheless, it is very important to automate as much of the legwork as possible. With this in mind I see tagging coming from four places:

• The Content - When new content is added, the program will extract and analyze any clues buried within. For a news story this might involve phrases and terms that are parsed out of the body; for instance "yinz" could be recognized as Pitssburgh-ese or maybe the author mentions a location. There are plenty of algorithms that can make predictions based on this type of data extraction.
• The Context - All new content is being added by someone or something, be it a person or a feed from a website. That content provider has contextual metadata (i.e. a history); for instance the system could get hints from the tags of previous submissions. If the source is a user the system could take that user's specified areas of interest under account. Finally, if the story is being submitted as a response to existing content then it probably shares a lot of the same tags.
• The Author - Once the system makes its predictions the author will have an opportunity to fix mistakes. This means that he/she can add or remove metadata to the new content before it is officially submitted. It is very important that there be an opportunity for this to happen, although it is also important that the system does not rely on these corrections - the author might make mistakes or simply skip this step.
• The Swarm - I've come to trust the swarm effect, meaning I believe that a system can correct itself so long as every user can suggest changes in a non-obtrusive say (and they have motivation to take advantage of this ability). If the average reader is able to push for the addition or removal of tags this would mean that even if the initial tagging was wrong it would be corrected eventually.

None of these tag sources are failsafe, but since the swarm will correct everything over time the main concern is abuse. Some ideas to combat this: after the submission process no one user would be able to single-handedly add a tag, making it far more difficult to spoof tags or insert irrelevant tags. Also, different weights can be given to individual voices depending on their past interactions with the system (more on this in future posts).

Step 2: Getting User Preferences
This database of tagged content can be used as a way for people to find information through browsing and searching, but once again the system should do as much of the grunt work as possible. In fact, it should actively distribute targeted content to the users who would be most interested without forcing them to dig around.

Before any targeting can happen the system needs to know what the users are interested in. In order to do this it needs to somehow get the user to share what he or she cares about. I think that a lot of people find it creepy when computers start trying to guess their preferences based on what they look at, so here are a few alternate techniques:

• Blunt Elicitation - Asking the user for a lot of information when they join is a terrible idea; the more that users have to do when signing up, the more likely they will get bored and give up. However, you can still get the information, just defer it. Have a section of their profile dedicated to what locations/communities/topics they are interested in or identify with.
• Collecting Hints - It's hard for a person to sit down and exhaustively list all of his or her interests. In order to account for this the system can collect information over time by asking for feedback about the content they read. Simply asking "Was this interesting?" could yield a lot of information to help the system better serve its audience.

Users will, at some point, specify physical regions of interest. I'm picturing a visual interface where they drag circles or boxes around the locations they care about. They will also identify communities of interest by picking from a list of the communities contained in the areas they drew in the previous step (or from a lengthy universal list). Finally, users can associate topics of interest generally or specific to a particular location or community.

Step 3: Targeting and Adding Meaning
The result of all this tagging and preference elicitation is a semantic (i.e. programmer-friendly) bond between content, people, and communities. The obvious worth of this is that content can now be effectively routed to those who care. The data can also be used in more creative ways; here are a few ideas:

• Facilitate Social Process - One of the most powerful parts of this concept is that the tagged content doesn't just have to be news articles or blog posts. It could be polls, conversations, events, protests, advertisements, classifieds, real estate listings, etc. In other words, this structure makes it possible to add meaning through localized conversation and collective insight. (It also opens up a potentially effective business model).
• Connecting Related Content - Locations are inherently related, as are common interests. Having a detailed spectrum of tags makes it more likely that users will see related stories next to one another. By allowing them to explicitly identify these relationships the system can, in the words of Ben Melançon, lower the signal-to-noise ratio even more for readers interested in a particular thread of news.
• Identifying Trends - Being able to see comparative trends between topic, location, and community could be incredibly interesting. For instance, what locations in the United States are written about most often in Environmental news? Isn't it interesting that almost 60% of the users who have an interest in California also care about the topic of avocados? Why is there so much educational news in Philadelphia? You get the idea.

Like always, these ideas don't have to be applied to a global system; local news organizations could easily use them to improve their website. Some of it might be overkill depending on the amount of content put out by these groups, but that's why the next stop on the 'system design' train is a focus on collecting and generating content.

(This post pertains to a bullet point from Tying it All Together - Geotagging)

Neil Netanel, a highly regarded legal scholar, has an interesting post on Balkinization entitled "The Demise of Newspapers: Economics, Copyright, Free Speech." Netanel, who has written extensively on copyright issues, posits that part of the reason for the decline in newspapers stems from Internet competitors that build on the content and value that newspapers create. He suggests that imposing a statutory license or levy on commercial Internet service providers and news aggregators might be a workable solution for ensuring that newspapers receive compensation for their investment in quality reporting.

While I think he gives too little credit to citizen journalists/media, equating them all with bloggers and asserting that they are largely "parasitic," his central points are mostly valid:

[N]ews and opinion blogs are largely (but certainly not entirely) parasitic on the institutional press. They copy, quote from, discuss, and criticize stories reported in the press far more than engaging in original reporting or linking to other blogs. And just like peer-to-peer traders of music and movie files, online readers copy and distribute stories from newspaper Web sites to their friends via email and social network sites. Especially for the young, trading copies of newspaper stories often substitutes for visiting the paper's Web site.

As Netanel correctly notes, news organizations (be they old media or new media) that do original reporting suffer from the classic public good problem: while they invest in investigating, reporting, editing, and fact checking their work, their competitors can simply use the finished product without making a similar investment in original reporting. One remedy to this problem proposed by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism involves having news providers create a consortia to "charge Internet providers and aggregators licensing fees for content."

But this raises a host of concerns, which Netanel points out at the end of his piece:

To my mind, giving news providers a proprietary veto over online news aggregators', Internet providers', and bloggers' referencing of news stories would impose an unacceptable burden on speech. I argue in Copyright's Paradox that, all in all, holding such referencing to be fair use or otherwise noninfringing of copyright is the best solution. But I can see advantages to imposing some sort of statutory license or levy on commercial Internet service providers and news aggregators who profit from news providers' investment. Newspapers should not have a veto over who references their stories or how. But ensuring that they receive some compensation for their investment in quality reporting might be our only hope for maintaining that investment and the vital fourth estate benefits that flow from it.

You can read the entire post here. I also recommend reviewing the comments to his post, which has, as you would expect, elicited some good discussion.

When Toyota first began to rise to prominence in this country, the company's cars were known as cheap, plasticky, not-to-be trusted imports.

Now Toyota is on pace to unseat GM as the world's auto sales leader, and is regarded as one of the most innovative companies around.

A New Yorker article by James Surowiecki gives a quick rundown on how that happened.

At Toyota, "the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps, but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis ... Instead of trying to throw long touchdown passes, as it were, Toyota moves down the field by means of short and steady gains."

The piece had a lot of resonance for me, because I've been talking lately with people who wonder where the Daily News is going, if the site today represents the culmination of our business plan or merely a first step toward a much more ambitious goal.

Most news organizations today are well past their formative phase. The typography, logo, tone, biases, breadth and quality of coverage have been compressed by the weight of time into diamond-hard rules. While layoffs may loom, there's not much question that someone will show up to cover the City Council meeting, and the office Internet service works pretty well.

For us, it's a different picture. The Daily News, unlike any news organization I've ever worked for, is a work in progress.

Every day we try to move the ball forward an inch or two. We attract a dozen more readers, bring another talented writer on board, hone our procedures for retaining citizen journalists, wrestle with our accounting system, fantasize about lighting our non-functional wireless router on fire, tweak the site design and connect with funders. There are few gigantic leaps in this process.

Of course, we can't slap a big 'Work in Progress' sign on the front page. Readers will value us -- or not -- for what they read on the site any given day, not what they hope they'll read a year from now.

That can be frustrating. Today's news report represents the best we can do with the resources we have available. It doesn't represent our vision for what our news report should look like.

But it's also amazing to compare the site today to the site we operated a year ago. We've doubled our readership, regularly beat the Trib and Sun-Times on stories of citywide importance, and have built a crew of 45 or so dedicated volunteer neighborhood correspondents.

Likewise, it's fun to look at what we've achieved given the resources we have. I think we run one hell of a $200,000 news organization.

Surowiecki says: "Every day, Toyota knows a little bit more, and does things a little bit better than it did the day before."

When things proceed at that pace, it can be hard to tell they're proceeding at all -- until you add up the incremental gains and realize you've just toppled a giant like GM.

Today I'm publishing a guest post from Ryan Mark, one of the first two journalist-programmers attending the Medill School of Journalism on a Knight News Challenge scholarship. Ryan is a 2004 graduate of Augustana College, where he earned a BA in computer science. He later served as technology director for ZapTel Corp., a company that sells prepaid long-distance phone cards.

Ryan's guest post:

One thing I’ve discovered through talking to people, including teachers and others in education, is that the Internet is encouraging more people to contribute.

Well, obviously, right?

I think we are just starting to learn how to contribute. People are all writing and reading so much more than they used to. And the youngest generation today is growing emerged in interactive culture. I grew up watching television, as did my parents. My grandparents grew up listening to the radio. Kids are growing up today with full duplex mass media (it goes both ways). So in the discussion about citizen journalism, I think the citizenry is just beginning to learn the skills to they need to contribute.

I joke that I made a dumb career decision in going from IT to journalism. High pay and low stress to low pay and high stress. Journalism is hard. My goal as a programmer was to get the computer to do my job and make money, even if I’m not around. As a journalist I’ll be trading words for dollars. If I don’t write words, I don’t get dollars.

So I guess the goal here is to figure out how to get the computer to do my new job.

It’s really interesting to be on the creation side of IT. I’ve always been intrigued by content creation software and enjoyed dabbling in it, but it’s great to actually have a good reason and a good idea to make use of all the great tools out there. It’s been an interesting experience to be on both sides.

There are a lot of great tools out there already that make a journalist’s job easier, and this is making journalism more accessible for those who might consider doing it casually.

But like the citizens, the technology still has a way to go.

I can’t imagine reporting before the Internet, and kudos to those that did it. But beyond just information gathering that the web and the Google make so easy, data processing should get better at connecting us with sources. And pointing us in the direction of a good story.

For example, take Public Insight Journalism. I first heard about this at the Symposium on Computation + Journalism at Georgia Tech in February. The system was designed and is in use at Minnesota Public Radio, and it could almost be called a contact relationship management system built for journalists. It is a massive network of citizens who can participate by being sources or by submitting story ideas. Twitter is fine, but this is the kind of software we should be building.

And as far as the citizens go, journalism should be taught in high school. And it should be mandatory. It shouldn’t just be considered a special skill, it should be considered basic citizenship.

 

More from Ryan: Ryan is blogging at Digital Divisions, as part of Medill's introductory Interactive Techniques class for second-quarter master's students.

Ever wondered: where's the time going to come from for all these nifty open source ventures people are planning? Clay Shirky says we got plenty. He just gave an extremely useful and imaginative speech to Web heads about where we are in media time.

Shirky, who teaches in a different program at NYU, has a new book out: Here Comes Everybody ("The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.") But this speech stands alone. You can read it here, but you should really watch him here-- after reading this post. The clip is less than 15 minutes. It lets you think along with Shirky as he explains "the cognitive surplus" we developed during the age of TV.

This a huge deposit of waking hours lived in front of the tube, a vast expanse of free time occupied for 40 years by commercial television. We're at least starting to find the architecture of participation (Tim O'Reilly's phrase) that would turn some of those couch-born hours into sentient activity, followed naturally by inter-activity, as in massive multiplayer games, which can lead to public works and social goods, as with "the online encyclopedia anyone can edit."

Clay's imagery is geological: the release of trapped deposits. He thinks we can reverse the brain sink that commercial television represents for some of the people once marooned on the receiving end of a one-way system that didn't care what you thought or brought to it, since it couldn't afford the costs of usefully interacting with you. I was one of those people--1964 to 1974 were my wasted years of heavy watching-and Clay was one them. We both watched Gilligan's Island. So I took his talk very personally. I would love to have those hours back for something a little more constructive. But where does that love go?

A "cognitive surplus" means the total amount of unoccupied free time available (think of it as "screen hours") after the basic needs of society have been met. Television swallowed up most of the surplus American society produced during the period of relative affluence after World War Two.

Clay figures it took 100 million hours of people around the world writing, checking, editing, gathering, and talking it over (fighting!) to make all versions of Wikipedia. "And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year." Therefor if 99 percent of the TV watching in the US remained as is, and we broke off just one percent for the information commons and other cool stuff we could have 100 Wikipedia-class projects per year.

All you have to do is convince one kid in 100 that participation in media is more fun. That's good news for Idea Lab writers and readers.

What we need are lots and lots of different projects that try to deploy this existing surplus-- and "fail informatively." So the kid in the basement, the developers at the Web 2.0 conference, the Knight Challenge winners and others with new media ambitions should go forward with their best ideas.

Someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn't have imagined existing even five years ago.

Q. Where do people get the hours to participate?

A. From the de-commercialization of their time!

Q. Yeah, but people like to consume their media. Sometimes they just want to sit there... Right?

A. Of course they do! They also want to produce (sometimes) and share what they made (some of those times). They want to be audience, producer, distributor... at different times. Deal with it or die!

They also expect to operate their media. At least more and more of them do. Clay illustrates this beautifully with a story about a four year-old girl who wanders around behind the DVD player as its playing her show. When her parents ask her what she's doing, she pokes her head out and says, "I'm looking for the mouse."

I heard that and thought: Yes. That's what I've been doing for 20 years or so. Looking for the mouse in American journalism. Many other people have been seeking the same thing in their separate but interrelated domains.

To the really young people any device that ships without a mouse is "broken." It happened a long time ago, of course, but the modern professionalized press, the mainstream journalism we have now shipped without a mouse because it was built for overlay on a broadcast--one to many--system.

"We're going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience." Dig: Those are the trapped deposits. Watch Shirky explain them... and then get to work!

My favorite moment, because it was the most personal: Clay's response to the television reporter who asked... "where do people find the time?"

Related Content will provide an easy way for people visiting a Drupal-powered newspaper site to connect articles to past reports, opinion pieces, letters to the editor, or feature stories- to relate any piece of content on the web site to any other piece. This engages readers with the lowest barrier to participation while providing to other readers and the news organization the value of deep links. A plug-in interface for other modules to suggest related content to be connected and a data architecture that could allow relating content between sites has been completed, and work continues on the user interface.

Some of the most interesting discussions and demonstrations at last week's NewsTools2008 conference Silicon Valley centered around making the changing news landscape sustainable. Here are some of the ideas I heard, along with a few of my own:

1) News Consultancies: Leveraging local information channels & relationships to connect average people with local influencers and experts.

Examples:
-An online/offline service which people pay journalists to help them navigating local political/business channels. i.e, the fastest way to get a building permit approved or knowing which local developer to talk to about a project.
-recommending a trustworthy plumber of mechanic.
This idea has some interesting potential, particularly on creating local communities of trust via social networking, but it also might disadvantage journalists who are no longer viewed as objective reporters but as knowledge brokers for hire.

2) Paid reporter access: News organizations offering a "premier access package" that allow the buyers to participate in a group or one-one-one session with a well known journalist. Certainly there are people (particularly publicists, marketers, and PR firms) who would pay for this kind of access, but it also raises some nasty ethical questions aound journalistic access going to the highest bidder.

3) Micropayments: The notion that people would be willing to pay small amounts (a few cents) for a good piece of journalism. The idea here is that good news takes $ to produce and and that people will actually pay for top quality reporting. My sense is that while it is true in theory, we are already too far down the "information is free" road to make this a viable and sustainable model in and of itself. Perhaps the more important questions are how much are people willing to pay (ifn anything) and what is a simple enough distribution/payment mechanism that could effectively put this model into play?

4) Joint Subscriptions: The notion being that large and small news outlets combine forces and offer a kind of a la carte menu of options that add greater value than the current walled garden model. This could either involve the "packaged subscriptions" where you get 2 or more news offerings at a discounted price, or the recombination of selected large and small news/media into a single offering (i.e., The New York Times international business section +My local news/sports). I sense there might be an appetite for the latter, as online news custom aggregators like DailyMe and Netvibes suggest, but getting various outlets to collaborate and share revenue could be a beastly undertaking.

5) Small is Beautiful. A number of local, community-driven models at the 30,000 residents level seem to be working here. Look at Village Soup and Paulding.com. There are also a number of local community building experiments that go beyond local news aggregation, small business advertising, discussion forums and community portals to offer social networking and community reporting - like www.everyblock.com, www.i-neighbors.org, and SocialChord. One interesting idea that was floated (does anyone have an example?) was the notion of small communities of geography or interest banding together to fund particular reporting and specific stories - a sort of community underwriter news model. I believe David Cohn of NewsTrust is cooking up a marketplace model along these lines.

6) The convergence of journalism and "do gooderism". Some wondered out loud if people would be willing to subscribe to a news outlet if it is taking on a particular community service project like a neighborhood cleanup or supporting a particular local/global cause? This is simply applying corporate social responsibility and the "good by association" model to news. Not sure if anyone has successfully attempted this?

7) Non-financial exchange models: The idea here is news organizations creating a different kind of currency besides $ for their services - like getting free or discounted news access/subscription in exchange for donating time or offering a particular service to the community or the news outlet itself. While I am skeptical that this model would get much traction (not to mention it sounds challenging to organize and denominate) businesses might be willing to sponsor volunteers and pay for their news access as part of a corporate social responsibility campaign. Anyone have any examples of this one?

8)Information and journalism is FREE. Isn't it already if you have a computer and Internet connection? Enough said...

9) Benefactorism: Similar to the notion of community of interest supported news mentioned above, this involves individuals or organizations (outside of the news media, public broadcasting, etc.) funding a particular news item, reporter, or project. Isn't this already happening too?

10) The single journalist (or small group of journalists) as news outlet. The idea here, leveraging the free and easy distribution network of Web 2.0, is to avoid large and bloated news bureaucracies in favor of disaggregated journalists that work and distribute on their own. Isn't this what we call blogging? I guess the real question is whether or not a journalist or small grouping of them can earn a living off of this type of Go-it-your-own-way or Union of hotshot journalists model? Google Adwords won't put your kids through college, so why not try...

11) The eBay model: I heard this idea raised a number of times in varying formats, that you can create a market that matches reporters with distribution outlets. See Reporterist as one example. Again, I wonder if anyone can make a living off of it (assuming you want to)...and how one determines who qualifies as a reporter? Also wonder if this type of model ends up pushing compensation for reporting below "fair market value"?

12) National consortium/union of local news organizations, dailies, etc. : With the relative stability of local dailies and the rise of citizen journalism, some suggested the time is right for a large, representive organization that could provide a better array of support and credentialing for small journalism. Such ideas as pooled advertising distribution (along the lines of Federated Media or Adify) were part of this discussion.

Lots of interesting ideas and models discussed, along with some wonderfully creative approaches. Just wish there were more hard-core entrepreneurs present to take a steely-eyed look at these and other business models. I also missed hearing the voices of youth and the next generation of media creators/consumers. The latter, in particular, need to be a more integral part of the conversation moving forward.

I've been terrible about blogging...it's just not in my daily routine...so I've been letting others on our Knight grant team take up the slack. But now I really do have something to share that I hope spurs some comments and feedback (it will be very helpful as we grapple with these challenges.)

I'm going to be speaking on a panel on Games and Journalism at the Games for Change conference in New York on June 5th. In coordinating the panel, the moderator asked us to send in a little bit about what our angle would be. Here's what I wrote up...

"I've been doing some eyetracking and usability research on different games that have been created for news organizations. One is Budget Hero by American Public Media / MPR. (It hasn't launched yet.) Others are ones on the Discovery Channel, made by a former news graphics guy who is now a professor of multimedia at UNC.

These efforts by news organizations demonstrate the real challenge for news on two fronts - game play and news / information content:

-- If you make the game too simple, gamers are bored or distainful and won't play (or they say, "This would be fine for little kids" -- and little kids aren't a real target audience for most news sites.)
-- If you make the game too complex, non-gamers don't get it and won't play (and the real gamers still won't think it is complex enough...there's lots of "I don't really play online games / Flash games.)
-- If you make the content too "fun", it makes serious topics (like federal spending) seem trivalized and people really interested in the topic get huffy (one long-time MPR listener played the Budget Hero game and said "The responses to my budgets choices were insulting.")
-- If you make the content too serious, it won't appeal to those mostly likely to be drawn to a "game" approach to the news. There was a lot of "Well, the game is ok, I just won't want to spend any time with this topic / I don't know anything about this topic." (Which is, of course, precisely, and admirably, what MPR's trying to overcome.)

Throw in the challenge of "objective" information presentation and you really make news gaming tough.

The eyetracking / usability research we have been doing scares me as a news issues game grantee / developer, but has also opened up my eyes to potential ways around some of these issues. We are exploring several of these options.

My other angle will be the need for assessment of the effectiveness of these approaches to creating an informed and engaged citizenry and the need, if they are found to be effective ways to inform, to make their creation easy enough for a newsroom to unplug one set of content and plug in new information about a new issue that people should understand deeply."

We have our work cut out for us...and we thank those who are boldly going forward with exploration in this area of media content development. It is a real challenge -- thus the name of the grant program. ;>)

Nora Paul

I've been terrible about blogging...it's just not in my daily routine...so I've been letting others on our Knight grant team take up the slack. But now I really do have something to share that I hope spurs some comments and feedback (it will be very helpful as we grapple with these challenges.)

I'm going to be speaking on a panel on Games and Journalism at the Games for Change conference in New York on June 5th. In coordinating the panel, the moderator asked us to send in a little bit about what our angle would be. Here's what I wrote up...

"I've been doing some eyetracking and usability research on different games that have been created for news organizations. One is Budget Hero by American Public Media / MPR. (It hasn't launched yet.) Others are ones on the Discovery Channel, made by a former news graphics guy who is now a professor of multimedia at UNC.

These efforts by news organizations demonstrate the real challenge for news on two fronts - game play and news / information content:

-- If you make the game too simple, gamers are bored or distainful and won't play (or they say, "This would be fine for little kids" -- and little kids aren't a real target audience for most news sites.)
-- If you make the game too complex, non-gamers don't get it and won't play (and the real gamers still won't think it is complex enough...there's lots of "I don't really play online games / Flash games.)
-- If you make the content too "fun", it makes serious topics (like federal spending) seem trivalized and people really interested in the topic get huffy (one long-time MPR listener played the Budget Hero game and said "The responses to my budgets choices were insulting.")
-- If you make the content too serious, it won't appeal to those mostly likely to be drawn to a "game" approach to the news. There was a lot of "Well, the game is ok, I just won't want to spend any time with this topic / I don't know anything about this topic." (Which is, of course, precisely, and admirably, what MPR's trying to overcome.)

Throw in the challenge of "objective" information presentation and you really make news gaming tough.

The eyetracking / usability research we have been doing scares me as a news issues game grantee / developer, but has also opened up my eyes to potential ways around some of these issues. We are exploring several of these options.

My other angle will be the need for assessment of the effectiveness of these approaches to creating an informed and engaged citizenry and the need, if they are found to be effective ways to inform, to make their creation easy enough for a newsroom to unplug one set of content and plug in new information about a new issue that people should understand deeply."

We have our work cut out for us...and we thank those who are boldly going forward with exploration in this area of media content development. It is a real challenge -- thus the name of the grant program. ;>)

Nora Paul

As disturbing as the recent numbers on declining print circulation and plunging advertising revenue at newspapers have been, less attention has been paid to ominous signs of a slow-down on the online side as well:

- Most newspaper chains reported online revenue growth in single or low double digits this quarter, compared with growth rates of 15-20% or more a year ago.

- The amount of time the average visitor spent at most newspaper web sites declined in February compared with a year ago, according to an Editor & Publisher report on Nielsen Online data. E&P reported similar data for January.

The stagnant economy and the tailspin in the housing market no doubt contributed to the deflated online revenue numbers. And there's the statistical reality that sustaining high percentage growth rates becomes more difficult as the base number gets larger.

But that doesn't account for all the sluggishness in online revenue, and newspapers appear to be losing ground to other web sites that advertisers prefer. And if growth in online revenue is slowing, at best that means stretching out any projections about when online advertising at newspapers will finally make up for the decline in print ads.

The drop in average time spent at newspaper web sites may be the result of success on another front: newspapers are expanding their overall online audience, bringing in new visitors who aren't staying at a newspaper's website as long as regular readers.

But can newspapers effectively sell advertising if many readers just dive bomb in and skim a story? Will advertisers, especially local ones, be interested in such readers, many of whom may be arriving from afar via a search engine or news aggregator?

Which leaves me with several questions:

- Are there national advertising networks that are proving effective in selling ads for only casual readers of newspaper web sites?

- What newspapers are effectively selling ads to local businesses and still showing robust growth in online revenue?

- Or is there some other explanation for the dip in time spent online at newspapers and the tapering off of online revenue growth that yields some light somewhere in this tunnel?

I've been thinking a lot about just how "local" most people want to be online. The greatest myth about the Internet is that people only want to go to world online. That they only care about creating social networks with friends or people like themselves with similar interests from thousands of miles away. It is as if the cross-dressing organic gardener from Sweden connecting with those like themselves on the other side of the world (someone I met once who shared his tipping point experience with the power of the Internet) has more virtue than enabling a plant swap online among neighbors.

I do not buy it. Increasingly I see more and more people who want to connect locally online. They want two-way online spaces that help them not just consume local news, but also get to know those who live near them even if they aren't like-minds.

People want to come home online. Unfortunately, while local news sites could be a connecting point, most are allowing the divisiveness of unaccountable anonymous reader comments to poison the sense of community. Or for some reason people think regional Craiglist topics show with their politics and local news that public spaces online are simply dumping grounds of conspiracy and obscurity not worth developing.

Through E-Democracy.Org I've been trying something different in my own Standish Ericsson neighborhood of Minneapolis. A couple hundred of my neighbors have come together to talk about local development along the new light rail line, local schools, potholes, and I even started a plant swap. Our real names, civility required model is working in the Seward neighborhood as well and it complements our 1,000 person city-wide Minneapolis Issues Forum quite well. Interestingly our growing interest very local online public spaces was encouraged by our neighbourhood forums in the UK (left).

While city-wide online townhalls called Issues Forum are our signature model (over a decade), neighborhood exchanges starting with plain old working e-mail list are under the radar all over the place. Next week I am convening a discussion on Neighbors Online and the problem with sharing lessons to help all local people connect like this is that no one who does this is connected with others doing it as well. Those who might be inspired to start something for their area are not likely to seek out such forums in other communities. So we have no idea how big the neighbors revolution is online.

We do know that in addition to our embryonic efforts, the academic I-Neighbors project continues, the Front Porch Forum is taking Vermont by storm, and some neighborhood exchanges act like Freecycle, Craigslist, and an Issues Forum all in one like the 6,000 member Cleveland Park e-mail list on YahooGroups can no longer be ignored. Sites like Placeblogger also include neighborhood blogs such as the Coconut Grove Grapevine blog in Miami.

While I am skeptical of unfacilitated online spaces that are technology driven like Topix's forums where they don't have partners and Outside.In's message boards at the extreme local location, at least lots of communities (small towns and cities) have online spaces to try out. I am watching Outside.In's aggregation of local blog posts (I'm not sure that relying on geo tagging by bloggers will get you much local content) to see if that actually builds local community. What saddens me was discovering the JuicyCampus-style anonymous gossip site has made its way to public life with RottenNeighbor.com. Boo. At least these projects help crystallize why it is worth building local online spaces with real community ownership and a sense of responsibility.

In our discussion next week, I hope we identify a number of research questions that would be useful to help us spread neighbor to neighbor networking online. Perhaps you have some answers you can share to the following questions or a comment or a link to your own local neighborhood online.

Questions

What percentage of Internet users:

1. Have e-mailed those who live nearest them on their block or just down the road?

2. Have traded an e-mail address on paper with a neighbor.

3. Are aware of or a member of a neighborhood e-mail newsletter (one way)?

4. Are aware of or a member of a neighborhood e-mail discussion list/web forum/neighborhood blog (I'd ask each separately)?

5. Would sign-up for 3 or 4 if one existed for their area?

6. If interested, what topics/uses interest them most?

7. Are aware of or have visited the website for their neighborhood association (only applies in cities)?

8. Are interested in secure online spaces to connect specifically with those on their block for crime prevention, baby sitting swapping, and the kinds of group communication you don't want everyone to see on Google?

9. Add your question in a comment.

Steven Clift
http://stevenclift.com

At EveryBlock, where my main role is to work with municipal governments to uncover new data sets, we're experimenting with a new form of journalism where we treat freshly updated public records as block-level news. It's a big job to acquire ongoing feeds of government data, and we have a broader goal of spreading the gospel of open data.

The two objectives:

• Get more datasets for EveryBlock so it can be a better Web site
• Convince governments to share that data with everyone, not just us

can lead to some cognitive dissonance in the minds of government leaders. They have two dominant templates of interaction for a project like ours, and neither of them fit very well.

First and foremost, we're a journalism project. The template for government dealings with media usually revolves around a particular document or dataset that is frozen in time. The data will most often lead to a single exclusive article or series of articles for a single publication or media company. When I tell them that we want all of the data, everyday, forevermore -- preferably published somewhere over the Web so that others can use the data as well -- this message just doesn't compute.

The other template that governments bring to EveryBlock is that of a technology vendor. They see our site and immediately grasp its utility. They naturally begin to think in terms of EveryBlock serving whatever technology or public communications goals they're currently working. When they start applying this template to us, I have to steer them back to our fundamental nature -- that we're journalists executing on a long-term project, not software vendors looking to lock them into a long-term contract.

This is a lot of heavy lifting, so it's a good thing EveryBlock is just one of many projects that seek to make government data more available, useful and usable. Here's a few of the efforts we've made recently with others:

• In December of last year, we met with a couple dozen other organizations to brainstorm the 8 Principles of Open Government Data. The principles attempt to define "open" in the context of the principles and lay down some fundamental definitions for primary terms like "public" and "data". I've been able to use this set of principles in my work with municipalities as we seek to get more data for EveryBlock. It's a very powerful message to tell them that I am not there just as an EveryBlock person. I tell them that it's not about us, it's about the data
• Last month, I participated in a panel for the Open the Government and Sunshine Week called, Citizen Self-Help: Finding the Information You Need. We shared a number of tips & tricks on gathering information and talked about the challenges in presenting large data sets in ways that make sense. Sheila Krumholz (Center for Responsive Politics/OpenSecrets.org), David Moore (OpenCongress.org), and Sean Moulton (FedSpending.org) were the other panelists. One of the best questions asked by moderator Greg Elin of Sunlight Labs was, "what if all government data was suddenly made open? would your work be done?" See the entire panel discussion here.
• EveryBlock is the local host for the Independent Government Observer's Task Force, a "non-conference" structured around 3 sets of working group activities: Case Law, Municipal Governments, and Government and Copyright Issues. We're looking forward to having a wide mix of people inside and outside government who want to make civic data more useful. I am helping organize the Municipal Government Working Group, so if you have some ideas and want to attend, let me know at at danx at everyblock.com or 773-321-8146.

More on the IGOTF as the summer wears on.

In an ideal world, I suppose, all information would be free and widely accessible. Maybe not credit records, health stats or income information -- but certainly journalism would be. Alas, though, we're not in an ideal world. On-line publications need readers (hits) to survive. In the case of a small independent site like Gotham Gazette, we need hits to attract funders and advertisers and to build our reputation and credibility. And we need to maintain control over our material to preserve our integrity.

So it was distressing when our technical director, Amanda Hickman, using Technorati, found many sites using our material. These were not links -- we are delighted when people link to Gotham Gazette stories. Instead these sites simply took the full text of our article and put it on their site in some cases, with little or no attribution or credit, even to the extent of making it look like their own original material. Needless to say, none of them had requested information or permission (in most cases, we do allow other publications, particularly non-profit or educational ones, to reprint our stories with proper credit).

In the past, other sites have not only reprinted our material but deliberately distorted it. In a particularly egregious case, a neo-Nazi site reprinted an article we had written about a group of Israeli furniture movers who had been detained immediately after the 9/11 attacks on suspicion of having been involved because they were Middle Eastern in a appearance and had a truck. Our story was about the legal labyrinth these men found themselves in; the neo-Nazis reprinted parts of it in an effort to argue that Jews were responsible for 9/11.

This was obviously an extreme case. But my sense (though I'll bow to he experts at the Citizen Media Law Project on this) is that all of this unauthorized reprinting is not legal. Practically, though, what can Web sites do to protect their content? And should we even bother or is this the price we pay for having so much access to so much information all the time?

[With apologies to Wallace Stevens.] If you decide to venture beyond talking about how your news organization's site should work into actually changing how it does work, there's one essential skill you'll have to learn: how to talk to a programmer.

Most nonprogrammers have no idea how to communicate their idea for a new feature or a whole new website in a way that's going to be useful to the person who's actually building that site. Here are thirteen tips to get you started on the road to fluency:

1. Learn how to write a spec. One of the biggest frustrations for a coder is working up a version of something and then hearing from you, "No, no, that's not what I meant." Writing down what you want -- in detail, and feature by feature -- is a mark of your respect for a coder. Having a written spec will let you work with a better class of coder, and, more importantly, it will force you to really think through your idea. Don't use anybody's preprinted form for this, but do read Painless Functional Specifications, a series of four short essays from noted software guru Joel Spolsky on how and why to write up your ideas.
2. View and Do. Once you start writing up your idea, you might find that the end result feels distressingly like an unrelated laundry list of features. One of the best ways to give your list of features some structure is to break them out by user role, and then, by asking, what can the user view and do on this page?
3. Clip, Clip, Clip. Use a screen capture program to let you make images of parts of websites you like. Programs like SnagIt for the PC and Snapz Pro for the Mac let you draw a box around anything on your screen and save it as an image.
4. The World's Worst Wireframe. You probably think wireframes are something done only by people with very fashionable glasses and the word "designer" on their business card, and you'd be right. You're not going to make wireframes, you're going to make Very Bad Wireframes. You should be able to draw a picture of what a page or a dialog box looks like on your site, and these should be included with your spec. You can do these by hand, but you'd probably get a lot out of using a wireframing tool like AxureRP for Windows or OmniGraffle for the Mac. These are like specialty drawing tools where the clip art contains things you'd expect to see on a web page or in an application.
5. Self-Enclosed. Your idea must have a beginning and an end. If you start hearing yourself say the word "platform" and begin to believe that it could do an infinite number of things, stop and take two weeks off.
6. Modest. Keep your initial projects small. A project that adds one feature to pages on your site -- say, a thumbs-up, thumbs-down rating for restaurant reviews or articles -- is bigger than you think.
7. Code Freeze. Once your coder starts working, resist the temptation to add more features.
8. Land of the Mashups. One good place to get ideas is the list of APIs at Programmableweb.com. API is short for Application Programming Interface. Many sites on the web have APIs that let you pull data or even features from another site on the web onto your site. If your site is commercial, be sure to read the terms of use carefully; if you want to try something as an experiment, contact the site whose API you plan to use and ask if you can use their service on a limited basis while you're experimenting.
9. Communicating Without Calendars. Scheduling meetings is a pain. Decide up front on a fixed weekly time to talk with your coder and stick to it, even if you talk between meetings.
10. What's Interesting to a Coder? Ask your coder what tools and programming languages interest them; ask about any side projects or previous projects they've done, even if they don't seem related. Whenever possible, let your coder use tools and techniques that are of interest to them within the context of your project.
11. Code on the cutting room floor. Most of what a coder produces in their lifetime will end up being thrown away, either because poorly organized projects mean they write code that is never released, or code that is used is eventually decommissioned. Think about how you'd feel about this situation. If possible, consider licensing terms that allow the coder some degree of continuing ownership over what they wrote, as long as it doesn't interfere with your project or your business.
12. How it works vs. how it looks. In general, the person who will define whether your sidebar boxes have rounded corners, or whether you should use a light or dark background on the page is not the same person as the coder. Talking about the "look" of your application will waste a coder's time if that's not part of their job. As part of writing your spec and making your wireframes, you should be able to keep how your site or app looks and what it does separate in your own mind.
13. Hello, World! Being able to write even the simplest program in virtually any language will help you understand and communicate with a coder better. Pick up Chris Pine's short and delightful Learn How to Program and try a few of the exercises for yourself.

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, in collaboration with the Open Society Institute Public Health Program's Health Media Initiative, is now accepting project proposals for the third round of microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects focused especially on public health issues involving marginalized populations.

Rising Voices and OSI aim to bring new voices from new communities and speaking new languages to the conversational web, by providing resources and funding to local groups reaching out to underrepresented communities. Examples of potential projects include:

• Working with a tuberculosis or HIV clinic or local drop-in center with the offer of training health workers, local harm reduction or sex worker outreach workers, patients, and their families to blog and upload video, in order to document their work, their experiences, and their community.
• Use blogs, podcasts, and online video to help give voice and representation to LGBTI communities and advocate for their rights.
• Distribute mp3 recorders to a local NGO working on palliative care issues, and help them produce monthly audio testimonials and/or interviews featuring stories and experiences of participants, for uploading to the NGO's website.
• Organizing a regular workshop on blogging and photography at a legal aid center representing the rights of people living with mental disabilities. Part of the budget could be used to purchase affordable digital video cameras and internet café costs, so that participants can describe their challenges and life experiences to a global audience.
• Purchasing an affordable digital video camera and teaching a group of local Roma community outreach workers how to produce an ongoing video-blog documentary about their work, which could then be posted to the organization's website and linked to other networks' websites.

Rising Voices outreach grants will range from $1,000 to $5,000. Special consideration will be given to proposals from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucusus. Grantees will be announced on June 28 at the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest, Hungary.

For more information on how to apply, please visit the official announcement on Rising Voices.

Related Content: If you're in California's bay area, don't miss Drupal Day on Friday May 3, a special open session of NewsTools2008's mixing up journalists, technologists, entrepreneurs.

Journalism's charge is to increase the signal to noise ratio.

Some commentators on stuff, including my favorite marketing guru, say the irrelevant noise has begun encroaching on the signal that matters, after some years of improvement driven by online tools.

I wish I could tell you the easy answer. I can't. I just know that the faltering signal is a problem.

As mentioned by IdeaLab bloggers and elsewhere, solving this problem is a key opportunity for people doing journalism.

With original investigation and with editorial discretion, real reporting serves to increase the signal and filter out the noise.

However, most ways of generating revenue from journalism come from the editorial role, and news organizations are losing control of this role. Yet the real issue isn't whether Google, Inc. or the New York Times Company does the filtering, it's how whoever has this power uses it.

Ultimately, we can trust controlling the flow of information to no one but ourselves. The future of journalism (and consequently democracy, and humanity, and all that jazz) depends on not allowing private interests to monopolize the lifeblood of human organization, communication.

If we expect to pay for aggregation and filtering services through attention, loss of privacy, and lack of control, and the work of hard reporting is not paid directly, then journalism truly is in trouble.

Subverting this expectation will help build an environment where people sustain hard journalism. We can and should do aggregation ourselves. Investigation we should expect to pay for.

At NewsTools2008 (Journalism That Matters, the Silicon Valley sessions) this week I will be talking to anyone who will listen about mass communication for collaboration with moderation by the many, not the few.

But the reason I have the privilege of a blog at PBS.org/idealab is a less ambitious, more practical project: Related Content.

From before proposing this tool and in the time since, developers have released dozens of modules relating to relating content in Drupal.

What will set the Knight News Challenge-funded Related Content project apart from others is the focus on using computer-suggested relations to make it easier for people to establish human-vetted connections.

So far the project has its information architecture - URI (web address) based, rather than Drupal node-based - and a plugin system to use other modules for related content suggestions. The first public release is coming soon.

The goal is to greatly lower the barrier people's participation in increasing the signal to noise ratio. And yes, to prove we can do it ourselves. Not as opposed to journalistic editorial decisionmaking, which will always have a role in journalism, but as opposed to the overarching aggregators (online and off) that tempt us to exchange control of communication for convenience.

Are all the good Internet domain names already owned by someone? No -- only the obvious ones are taken.

Every new enterprise, whether for-profit or not-for-profit, needs a domain name -- the identifier that shows up in a brower's address field. For example, the MediaShift Idea Lab blog lives inside the Public Broadcasting Service's pbs.org domain.

The absolutely perfect name for your new project or company, or at least the simplest one, may well be owned by someone else. In fact, it probably is. The odds are definitely slim that you'll get a domain name that a random person would guess by typing it into the browser, such as ford.com or dowjones.com or other such domains.

But that's not the same as saying you can't find a good name, because you almost certainly can. (And even if it's not instantly guessable, modern search engines will soon find it if what you're doing has any value. The Idea Lab URL -- already in the top five items in a Google search on "Idea Lab" -- demonstrates that point.)

I've worked on a bunch of new projects in recent years. Each time, we've had little or no trouble finding a useful domain name. In almost every case, the name was available for sale from one of the many registrars that are in this business; domain registrars charge different prices for this service but . On several occasions when someone else did own the name, we were able to buy it for an affordable amount.

We encountered the domain issue in creating a website for our new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. Should we just put it under the Arizona State University hierarchy, such as asu.edu/kcdme (which does not exist)? Or should we find a unique domain name that more reflected the center's basic idea and mission? The latter made more sense.

But what name? I asked my students to help find one, with the single proviso that I was leaning toward a .org domain, reflecting the not-for-profit reality of the center and its university parent. I suggested they use several Web-based tools for the purpose, including:

• MakeWords is a "name generator" -- essentially, you plug in keywords and it gives you suggestions. The flexibility is impressive. You can tell it how the domain name should start or end, and you can get refinements from a long list of keyword themes, as well as affixes by theme. For example, I searched on "California" and refined it with a "travel" theme, and got a list or allegedly available names that included farescalifornia.com, flightcalifornia.com, getawayscalifornia.com and tripscalifornia.com.

• NameBoy is another generator. In my experience it's simpler to use, but much less nuanced. You type in a primary and (optional) secondary word, and it spits out results. None, in the example above, looked very interesting.

Like MakeWords, NameBoy's results of available domains should be treated as possibilities, not definitely open names. You always have to check with a registrar to find out if a domain is actually available or not; sometimes these sites say something is open for the taking when it isn't.

My students and I came up with a bunch of interesting domain possibilities for the Knight Center. They included mediadevelopment.org, newmediadevelopment.org, smartmedia.org, digitalstartup.org, mediyum.org, digitalfuture.org, startupmedia.org and many, many more.

In the end, we picked startupmedia.org, which we all thought captured our purpose and, happily, had several meanings. Most happily, it was available, and I grabbed it.

Which leads to a final issue, and an area of caution in this process: If you're looking for a good domain name and check to see if it's already registered, be prepared to jump if you find it's available. I've seen believable suggestions that some registrars engage in a practice called "front-running," in which they grab domains themselves after people check availability, or that hackers have somehow interjected themselves into the search process to do the same thing.

The IdeaLab bloggers have spent four months talking about technologies, roles, and rules surrounding journalism and digital media. Now it's time to take some of the insights from those posts and design a system that will allow citizens and journalists alike to inform the media conversation, connect with their communities, and democratically drive the social agenda. I'll give an overview of one possible system here; over the next few weeks I'll explain each piece of it in more detail.

System Elements

• Geotagging - by tagging content to physical location it is possible to personalize it without losing the benefits of contextualization. The tagging can be done through intelligent algorithms and/or by humans during the content submission process. Consumers can then define regions of interest and receive a customized information feed.

• User aggregated/moderated content - the content on this system will be provided by users and democratically moderated. This means that although anybody will be able to propose new content through submission, it will only become a part of the media conversation if the members of the relevant communities deem it worthy.

• User roles - we hold these truths to be self evident that all users are created equal, but that doesn't mean that everyone will do the same thing. Users will naturally gain status within the role that they tend to fill. This means that journalists and citizens in real life will naturally become journalists and citizens on the system as they gain more clout within their areas of expertise.

• Incorporating multimedia - multimedia can always add meaning to a story and transparency is a vital part of trust. Being able to see the pictures, watch the videos, read the documents, see the full interview transcript, and hear the audio clips that informed the author of an article will enable the critical ability of a reader. It also makes it possible for a new reporter with no track record on the system to convincingly break a story. Mobile technology will allow users to have content uploaded directly to their accounts.
• Globally local scope - this system will contain a global array of content that is collected and presented at a local level. This method of organization makes it possible to adjust the granularity of any type of information and present different content to each user or group as appropriate.

Final Thoughts

When someone creates an account on this system they will have the potential to start, participate in, or simply observe the living breathing media conversations that are going on in their communities. Best of all, I think that it will play well with the industry. The moderation process will naturally reward quality journalism and properly identify opinion pieces as separate from genuine reporting. Just as important, though, is that it will complement rather than overthrow existing local media. I suppose this last point is something worth dedicating a post to as well!

Here's a short sampling of some of the ways that mainstream media in integrating locative (location-based) technology tools - some of which already been discussed on this blog. The folks at LoJoConnect are also conducting a survey of how newsrooms are using locative media. Take the short survey here and pass it along...they will be sharing the results.

For folks intersted in locative media and news, it will be one of the topics covered at this weeks NewsTools2008 conference Silicon Valley. Hope to see you there!