yelvington.com

Since we announced the launch of News Mixer, a Web application developed by Medill master's students to demonstrate new ways of fostering conversations around news, the site has gotten a lot of positive feedback.

News Mixer is the final project for six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending Medill on Knight News Challenge scholarships. It melds three "commenting structures" -- question and answer, short-format "quips," and letters to the editor -- into a site that leverages users' social networks by using the newly released Facebook Connect system.

The class officially ended Dec. 12, but the students and I have remained busy. Stuart Tiffen prepared a nice video overview of how the site works. And with the students' help, I've finished editing the team's (79-page PDF) final report, which explains how the site was developed, lists additional features that the class didn't have time to implement, and includes findings and recommendations for journalists, newsrooms, media companies and journalism schools.

When my colleague Jeremy Gilbert and I were organizing the New Media Publishing Project class that created News Mixer, we had a sense that the time was right for some new thinking about news-story commenting. A few of the indicators that fresh ideas were welcome: Gawker's post in July contending that newspapers shouldn't allow online comments, Techdirt's reaction to the Gawker post, and even a story in the Onion ("Local Idiot To Post Comment on the Internet").

So it's been quite interesting -- and rewarding -- to see the reactions News Mixer has generated. Here's an overview of some of the best:

Mark Potts, an online news pioneer who now works as a consultant, wrote that "Anybody interested in smart ways to cover local news and building online communities around news coverage-in other words, anybody who wants to succeed in the news business going forward-should rush over to the new NewsMixer site. ... It crosses local news reporting with Facebook, encourages citizen participation and includes a very slick way of commenting and posing questions (for a reporter or the community to answer) about any particular facet of a story. Very neat."

"I interrupted writing this post to talk to the designer and developer of a little project I'm working on about ways that NewsMixer can inspire and influence what we're doing," Potts wrote. "Congrats to ... the team at Medill and the Gazette for a great piece of innovation. We need more like this."

Patrick Beeson, a Web project manager for E.W. Scripps Co., wrote that News Mixer could be a "a game-changing effort for news story comments," adding that "News Mixer has put together a great method of directing user participation on their site." Beeson added:

Traditional Web story comments are wrought with problems, especially when editors and content producers are hands-off in their management style. ... News Mixer seems to have solved these problems by limiting "comments" to a question/answer session on each paragraph of a given story.

News Mixer's "radical take on user participation is a great step forward for news sites," Beeson wrote. "And because News Mixer is built in Django, I plan on using their open-sourced code for my own project very soon, in fact. :)"

Editor and Publisher wrote an article about the site and followed up with a blog post praising the Knight Foundation as "the one ray of sunshine in this industry." Bloggers Mark Fitzgerald and Jennifer Saba said News Mixer is "a very cool new project ... [that] lets readers log on with their Facebook IDs and comment on the news in Cedar Rapids in unique ways."

Nick Gehring, an Ohio journalist and blogger who helps manage the Kent State University Web site, wrote that "Medill's tool takes news-story commenting out of the ghetto. You know you've seen it -- those awful, racist, and oftentimes off-topic comments made under some news articles. Newspaper Webmasters have been notoriously awful at moderating their communities."

Gehring wrote, "The icing on the cake, though, is the Facebook ID integration. This forces users to use their real identities -- although the users could fake a profile on Facebook, just like anywhere else, but I don't see this as likely as on-the-spot Web site registration." (If you're interested in Facebook Connect, check out this huge and growing list of sites that use this service.)

Gehring writes, "Perhaps Newsmixer will help end the debate over the value of story commenting. Yes, there is value! Blogs and other non-newspaper sites have proven this for the past few years." He added:

I once suggested -- and received a fantastic guffaw from an older journalist -- that we should treat stories online more and more like blogs. Does this mean dropping objectivity and providing more analysis than just-the-facts-m'am? I don't know, but I do think it means writing stories and directly engaging the people who comment below them. Aside this News Mixer system, reporters should be regularly responding to and commenting below their stories. Arguably, these same journalists, with some help, should be managing the online communities of their beats.

Ryan Sholin, who is developing the ReportingOn project funded by the Knight News Challenge, wrote that News Mixer "has a huge amount of potential as a conversation vertical, along the lines of the Guardian's Comment is Free.  I don't see Newsmixer running as a mainstream news site, but as a place to substitute for outdated message boards or underused staff blogs.  Populate it with content from your news and opinion sections, and let it stand as the forum for reader feedback, use it as your primary source for comments, letters, and other reader-authored content to run in print. Heck, if it gets big enough, print the letters and comments as a four page insert once a week, not just in a box on the opinion page."

In a comment at the Knight Digital Media Center blog, Aron Pilhofer of the New York Times wrote, "There are bits and pieces of it I'd like to steal right now." And Pilhofer is in a position to do so, because he leads a team of developer/journalists who develop applications for the Times' Web site.

Most of the reaction in the blogosphere has come from sites (and bloggers) involved with the journalism industry. That's why it was particularly interesting to discover that News Mixer got a lengthy writeup on Read/Write Web, one of my favorite technology sites and the 15th ranked blog on Technorati's list of the top 100 blogs based on inbound links. Under the headline, "NewsMixer: An Innovative Community News Framework," Sarah Perez praised News Mixer's "great features" and its use of Facebook Connect:

Instead of allowing for the creation of fake names or internet handles for use on the site, Facebook authentication means that people's real identities are being displayed. No more comments left by internet trolls hiding behind their mask of anonymity! Today's commenting systems are largely broken, as social media pundit Robert Scoble noted today on his blog. The main reason for his post was to share ideas about the state of commenting and interaction systems on the web. He wanted there to be a way that he, as the writer, could call attention to some comments as being more important than others. He had also said that he wished there was a way to see the social networks of the people commenting. As it turns out, News Mixer has introduced a great example of how that second request of his could work.

Perez urged newspapers to " borrow some of News Mixer's ideas as well. It's not too late to save the daily paper - it just takes some fresh ideas. Like Rupert Murdoch recently said, the time for doom and gloom is over - the internet is really just a huge new market ready to be tapped. We agree. Now is the time for innovation because...well, it's either innovate or die. Hopefully most will choose the former."

Gazette Communications, the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, company that sponsored the class that created News Mixer, is one local media business that seems to agree with the need to innovate. Led by CEO Chuck Peters, the company is a leader in rethinking how a local media company should operate in the digital age. The company, which owns the newspaper and ABC television affiliate in Cedar Rapids, plans to use the software that powers News Mixer to launch a site for eastern Iowa in 2009. It also has applied for a Knight News Challenge grant to continue developing the software.

International attention

News Mixer has also attracted considerable interest from outside the United States.

Richard Kendall, Web editor for a British newspaper, wrote that News Mixer shows "all the freedom and open-ended opportunity the online world bring to news media. ... Bringing the public and journalists closer - certainly not ground-breaking, but by making it the focus of the site rather than an optional element it does help to seed the sense of community?" Noting that the software powering News Mixer is open source, he added, "And if it all works out, we'll all be doing it."

In Sweden, Citizen Media Watch, a site operated by online journalists Lotta Holmström and Gitta Wilén, described News Mixer as "a great new tool for news discussion and fact-checking." Holmström described the site as "quite cleverly set up," adding:

What I like most about it is the way that any story can be scrutinized paragraph by paragraph by adding questions and answers, thus providing a tool for collaborative fact-checking and discussion about the validity of statements. It is also a social tool, letting me know when my contacts have been active on the site. And it flattens the news hierarchy ...

Also in Sweden, the CEO of Mindpark.se, a Web development business owned by several Swedish newspaper companies, also wrote about News Mixer. I don't read Swedish, and Google's translation is only somewhat helpful. But I can pick out that author Joakim Jardenberg thinks News Mixer is "hyper-interesting, well thought out and timely."

In Spain, the Web site periodismociudadano.com (CitizenJournalism.com) described News Mixer as "giving a new dimension to the usual system of comments."

Michael Kowalski, who runs London-based Web development firm Kitsite and previously worked at the Guardian, described News Mixer as "an interesting spin on news commenting." He found the Facebook Connect integration "very cute. No choosing passwords, waiting around for emails, or any of that. Though it does also feel kind of terrifying."

Other international sites that have written about News Mixer:

• Andy Dickinson, who teaches online journalism at the University of Central Lancashire, linked to Sholin's post and added, "I agree that this should be a model that is explored further."
• Reffos.com, the blog of an Indian software developer, linked to the Read/Write Web post with a succinct response: "Steal the idea."
• Dirk von Gehlen, editorial director of jetzt.de (Süddeutsche Zeitung) in Germany, also linked to Potts' post.
• Anton van Elberg, a Dutch online editor, posted about News Mixer on the site www.rethinkingmedia.nl.

Other links

For the most up-to-date set of links to sites commenting about News Mixer, check out my News Mixer tag set on Delicious. Here are a few recent additions:

• Deborah Potter, executive director of Newslab and co-author of the journalism textbook "Advancing the Story: Broadcast Journalism in a Multimedia World," wrote about News Mixer under the headline of "News mixed with Facebook."
• At Journalism.co.uk, Laura Oliver interviewed Brian Boyer about the site.
• On the Society of News Design site, my new Medill colleague, Matt Mansfield, wrote about News Mixer as an example of "a brave new world of storytelling that includes programmers who understand journalism."
• Daniel Bachhuber of CoPress, a group trying to improve content management systems for college student media, posted to FriendFeed about News Mixer: "Really cool light-weight Django application that allows you to "mix up" the news. Most notable for me is that comments under 140 characters (i.e. Twitter-length) are called "quips" and those under 250 characters are "Letters to the Editor." Login is seamless with Facebook Connect, and I think the project has tremendous potential as a community building exercise (although I'm not sure how I feel only limiting myself to the comments my friends make, if that's the case)."
• Mark Briggs, a consultant and entrepreneur who formerly worked at the Tacoma News Tribune, described "identity management" as one of the three key new technologies for journalists. "See Newsmixer.us for an excellent example of how to implement this game-changing opportunity," he wrote.
• Joseph Cizek, a California-based Web producer, was concerned about the idea of associating his online comments with his Facebook identity. "The problem for me is that I've kept Facebook as my 'off-the-clock' social networking, and use Twitter, LinkedIn, et al., as my professional social networking. So, if by keeping up on the social media 'scene,' I have to use my Facebook identity professionally, I'm now concerned about the mixing of my business online presence with my personal online presence."

Tonight is literally the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, so first I want to say Happy New Year to all of you. We've learned a lot since winning a Knight News Challenge grant 9 months ago, and are extremely grateful to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for making it possible for us and so many others to continue to experiment at a time when so many companies are eliminating into their research & development budgets.

Even though it's the holidays, the Printcasting team is not slowing down. All we can think about is March 2, 2009 when we launch live in Bakersfield. We're busy implementing changes to the Printcasting publisher experience after some great feedback from alpha testers. And I'm happy to still have great things to talk about and show off.

Our next test will focus on local self-serve advertising. But don't just take my word for it -- see it in action in this video preview:

Why are we doing this? It's about meeting local businesses where they're at. If we can do that more effectively, we will secure a much-needed revenue source that will continue to fund quality local journalism.

But making local self-serve advertising work with small local businesses is no cakewalk, and it will take us time to perfect it.

I've written in the past about our goal to make it as easy for small local businesses to create print ads as it is to write an e-mail or post a blog entry. Most of these long-tail advertisers have small ad budgets of $10,000 - $30,000 per year, and that means general-interest newspapers (or general-interest anything) often aren't a good fit for them. While some may experiment with pure-online ads such as Google AdWords, the reality is that placing an ad in a global search engine isn't the best way to bring local consumers into your store. Contrary to what you may hear, locally-focused businesses depend on local consumers, not eBayers all over the planet. If they didn't, would they have brick-and-mortar storefronts to begin with?

In Bakersfield, we have found that smaller niche print publications that are fueled by online user-contributed content are a great way to serve these types of businesses. But because they have less to spend, it's hard to generate enough revenue by relying on salespeople alone. Thankfully, self-serve tools make it possible for the salesperson to do more than simply sell an ad. The salesperson can sell an ad-creation service that is self-sustaining -- teaching the local business to fish and giving them a new fishing pole, if you will.

I don't mean to bore those of you who come here to read about journalism. Hey -- I'm a trained, degree-holding journalist myself. But I've come to learn over the years that local journalism is possible today because it serves the interests of local people that advertisers call consumers. And local journalism is paid for by also serving the needs of local businesses who rely on those consumers.

I know that there are other models people are experimenting with, such as David Cohn's incredible Spot.us community funded reporting project, and that's great. But I also know that local advertising is what pays for most local journalism today.

I have also been around the block long enough to know that there is not ever just one smoking-gun solution to everything. Funding the journalism of tomorrow will require a mix of creative new solutions. Since the need for local businesses to advertise locally will never go away, it would be foolish for local media companies not to apply the same kind of revolutionary thinking to advertising as they have to consumer-focused things like user-contributed content. (And isn't self-serve advertising just another type of user-contributed content anyway?)

Thus, Printcasting's advertising tool is not just a way to make money, although that is an obvious benefit. It's also a way to begin to have a more meaningful conversation with the small businesses that newspapers aren't reaching today, but are key to their future. I'll go as far to say that the future of small mom-and-pop shops and locally focused media companies are so interlinked that one cannot exist without the other.

Written English Version:

During this holiday season, many people take the time to reconnect with their family. This is true with deaf people, too.

Yet for a large number of deaf people, their families are hearing. The majority of interaction is likely to be spoken, and the deaf individual is unavoidably left out of them. This situation is certainly true for me.

This situation is not to be pitied, but simply is. What this highlights to me is not the barriers inherent here, but the importance in getting through and overcoming them. How communication is utterly important in maintaining the most personal of bonds. And how these ties persist even in spite of such barriers.

When one looks through the lens of journalism, you can see this example writ large. Instead of family, you look at society. In this sense, Journalism is an act of communication that cuts through the barriers of society, and highlights the importance of the bonds we share in common.

Within Idealab, people are exploring upon new potentials and dimensions of the journalistic field. But for the holidays, take a moment to stop and consider those close to you. Your efforts mean as much to society as the words you give your loved ones. It is a gift, and an important one.

Have a happy holidays.

Many people today who work in social change are convinced that the typical 'top down' approach to development, where bureaucrats and international agencies design large-scale social programs and then impose them on millions of poor people, isn't working. Instead, they favor the idea of 'community-led development', in which communities themselves design the social programs, and interventions only arise from the stated needs of the communities. The goals of all these programs is the idea of eventual 'community ownership' of programs themselves and of the social change process. It means that communities won't only participate, but they will be able to drive social change in their area entirely on their own without outside intervention (except perhaps financial support.) This is seen as the most sustainable way to address poverty for millions of people.

For Video Volunteers, this is also the goal of the community video program--that the Community Video Units (CVUs) we set up will be 'owned' by the local communities, the villagers and slumdwellers in whose area the CVU is running. But what exactly does it mean for us? Here's one way to put it: when a CVU is entirely owned and loved by that community, it would mean that if anyone ever attempted to shut it down or the money dried up, local people would be banging on the CVU door saying, 'we will not let this close. This is our media, we need it, and we will do whatever it takes to keep it going.'

As Rehana, a Producer at our Community Video Unit Samvad put it recently, "I got in an auto a while back and the auto driver said, 'hey, I recognize you. You're the Reporter for the films being made for our area. Great job.'" "Right now," she said, "the communities know and recognize us. They know we are from here and we represent them. In time, we want them to need us, to know that this is THEIR media, that's what we are working towards.'

What will a CVU look like when it is owned by the Community? People will be stopping the Producers in the street saying, 'you must tell this story. Come with me now, there is something happening that must be filmed.' People will be offering to contribute financially to the running of the CVU. They will be helping the CVU expand into other geographic areas and other technologies, like running radio stations or setting up internet portals for that community. There will be continuous communication between the CVU and local people that means that the CVU provides the information that is critical to the community, and the community helps them produce the most meaningful journalism for that area, resulting in a much more informed and active local population.

The CVU model is devised to allow that to happen. It works in a tight geographic area of only 25- 50 villages or slums and all research, stories, and screenings happens in that area. The producers are from those 25 slums or villages too. The villagers 'see' the producers constantly and also know that they will be coming back next month, which makes them much more likely to get involved. (this is similar to how we all are much more likely to write 'letters to the editor' of a magazine that you know will appear next month than to the publisher of a book you read.) Our NGO partners, who invest in and manage the CVUs, agree that the goal is to eventually register each CVU as an independent organization. They do not view the CVUs as mouthpieces for their NGOs; they allow the CVUs to address issues their NGO may not work on, and give the CVUs names independent of their NGOs.

As Rehana said above, we are not there yet, but we are getting there. Community members now come more frequently for Editorial Board meetings and give better and more concrete ideas. CVUs have active volunteers in their screening areas, with community members giving electricity for the screenings and even whitewashing the walls of dedicated screening areas so the producers don't have to carry a big screen. Some villages have offered to pay for screenings, and community members are often coming to ask for copies of films they appeared in or would like to show to their neighbors as part of their own activism.

After two years of work, the Producers have understood the key to having their communities 'own' the CVUs: it is only possible when the communities see it is making an impact and delivering results that improve their lives. To date, more than 2000 people have taken action in their local communities as a result of the films, and this is why we believe we will achieve some of the first truly community-owned and led media operations anywhere in the world.

Application Deadline: January 18, 2009

Rising Voices, the outreach arm of Global Voices, is now accepting project proposals for microgrant funding of up to $5,000 for new media outreach projects. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, and podcasting on their own.

As the internet becomes more accessible to more people, including mobile phone users, the so-called digital divide seems to be narrowing. In its place, however, we see a participation gap in which the vast majority of blogs, podcasts, and online video are being produced in middle-class neighborhoods in major cities around the world.

Rising Voices aims to help 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 in the developing world. Please visit our current list of grantees for project examples.

The sky is the limit, but unfortunately funding is not. Rising Voices outreach grants will range from $2,000 to $5,000. Please be as thoughtful, specific, and realistic as possible when drafting your budgets.

Successful projects will be prominently featured on Global Voices. Grantees are expected to host regular workshops to train participants how to start and maintain a weblog, upload and share digital photographs, and produce basic videos. Grantees are also required to post regular project evaluations and updates to the Rising Voices website.

Completed applications will be accepted no later than Sunday, January 18. Please submit your completed application on the Rising Voices apply page.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments section below or by sending an email to outreach@globalvoicesonline.org.

It is the end of the year and I received some questions from the TIdes Center who are doing due-diligence reports for the Knight Foundation.

I've been meaning to do a public "where is Spot.Us" post for some time and since I'm answering all these related questions I thought - why not just go crazy and blog the questions and my answers. If I have to update Knight Foundation - I should update everyone, since in the end I view this as a project owned by the community of people who take interest in it (everyone who has been following our progress).

So - here is my progress report. The only parts left out are the financial records.

1. Please list each anticipated outcome and explain your progress in achieving it.

• Spot.Us would begin branding itself as a pioneer in "community funded reporting." - I am VERY happy with our progress here.
• We would launch an open source platform upon which local Bay Area journalists could pitch the public to fund their work as independent reporters. - the site is not "finished" by any means - but it gets the job done. I am satisfied with our progress here so far - and have plans for how the platform can improve in the future.
• The platform would be used to fund 3-6 investigations before the end of the year. - We have funded eight stories - with two more only $200 away from also being funded. Of these ten funded stories only one is below-par in terms of the type of reporting I want to fund. I believe I know why this reporting was able to sneak through and have plans to stop this from happening again

2. Is the fundamental need for your project still as you described in your proposal?

Yes. I would argue that it is becoming a bigger need as we see cities like Detroit cut back their daily print. I expect to see more cities cut back in the future. While online caters very well to breaking news (it is immediate, helps increase page-views, etc), it is difficult for news organizations to do long-form journalism and for independent journalists to get work doing larger investigations.

3. Were there any major changes in the project activities and timetable? What caused them?

So far I am happy with the progress we have made. It is always difficult to estimate when things will be ready for public consumption. I had aimed for a mid-October launch and ended up going public early November. So while the site's launch was about three weeks later than I would have preferred, I consider anything within a month of the anticipated date to still be "on time" in terms of launching a website.

Due to well-orchestrated marketing and exposure on the web we've managed to get enough traffic and interest to fund a few stories. Most of these will be published in January of 09' around the same time this report is due.

4. Describe any setbacks you encountered and how you addressed them.

Starting in January of 09' is when I expect Spot.Us to have serious challenges these will be.

• Technical - the site will need to react to user-feedback and expand to new regions.
• Marketing - with the initial buzz of our launch behind us - we will have to market ourselves very effectively in a grassroots fashion. We have to make the argument that journalism is a social good worthy of people's small donations. That is an easy argument to make to journalists - difficult to make to regular netizens.

The only setback on my mind right now is that every newspaper in the Bay isn't using Spot.Us to fundraise for themselves (this is after all a platform anyone can use - it is NOT a news organization to be viewed as competition). I have presented to many of them - so they are aware of Spot.Us, but they are not experimenting with it at this juncture. In many ways this is not un-expected. I would have been pleasantly surprised if the SF Chron had a freelancer create a pitch on Spot.Us and embraced the platform with open arms. Still - the impatient youth in me wants to kick down their doors and show them just how simple it is to do "community funded reporting."

I do think the Oakland Tribune is seriously considering having a freelancer put a pitch on Spot.Us. If that does happen - it will be a great opportunity to show the other papers in the Bay Area Newsgroup (a total of 11 papers) how beneficial "community funded reporting" can be.

5. Were there any surprises on the positive side? How did you react to those?

Little surprises every day.

The most apparent - there is a serious desire for Spot.Us to expand. Just about every week I get a different journalist emailing me wondering when Spot.Us will spread to another region.

6. What other things must occur to achieve a broader impact on the students, journalists or other population you want to reach?

• I need to build out the platform more. The current site is about 1/4th of what we've envisioned/designed. Considering our budget and time limitations - I'm happy with our progress, but we need to build out at least another 1/4th before I'd feel comfortable expanding to another region. I intend to try and tackle this first quarter of 09' so that we can expand to another city (Los Angeles?) by March/April. This planning hasn't been set in stone - but it is something I'm striving for.
• Once the platform is built out more - I will try and find another young journalist to adopt and use the platform outside of Spot.Us' organization - ie: They could start their own version using our code. Hey - it's open source. I would welcome the friendly competition. That will be a blog post called "Steal This Idea and Start Your Own Business."

7. How are you measuring your progress? Are those measurements working? Please attach copies of any evaluation reports.

I'm trying to measure progress in very concrete terms. As much as possible I ignore daily traffic and prefer to look at how much in donations we get per-day and how many stories we have funded.

Through our beta period up to today (December 20th 2008) we have raised roughly:

$8,600

We started collecting money in early July - so it has been less than six months and Spot.Us is collecting, on average, $1,450 a month. In truth - our donations have increased since launching the site - so this "average" is a bit misleading. Last month for example (the month of our Launch) we raised over 5k.

Note: If we raised another 5k we will be able to fully fund the remaining nine pitches that are already partially funded as of today December 20, 2008 - bringing our total of stories funded to 19.

The real question of progress will be: When we launch in another city if the donations continue to increase - or if "community funded reporting" requires a community organizer - somebody at the helm, to spread word about each pitch. If that is the case - the overhead of Spot.Us will dramatically increase (we will need to hire a community organizer in every city). Even if we find that success increases with a community organizer - it is possible to expand Spot.Us to a city without one - but it requires more on the part of the journalist who will have to be their own marketer. This is a larger issue within journalism that I think is trending in this direction. More and more we hear that journalists need to create and manage their online brands.

......We will find out.

**8. What is the average number of unique monthly visitors to your web site and any project-related web site? **

I only recently got Google Analytics working (long story, don't ask). I only have one month's data to look at - but I received 11,000 unique visits. I can only assume that this is "average." 11,000 unique turned into roughly $5,000. I never sold advertising - but I imagine this is a high return on investment so far. It might also be because of the initial launch.

9. If you were publicizing the single most important outcome of your work, what headline would you write for your news release?

Excellent question!!!

"Marketplace for citizens, freelance journalists and news organizations created"

Hopefully in January I could have a headline like.

"Oakland Citizens Fund Reporter to Hold Police Department To Task."
Pitch: http://spot.us/pitches/35

And every month thereafter I could have a big headline on how some community came together to to fund a reporter to do some meaningful piece of journalism that would benefit the greater community.

10. What did you do to market the project? Was it successful? What would you do differently next time?

Stage Two consulting helped me market the project pro-bono (because they are so rad and Jeremy Toeman is a longtime friend and advisor). I think our marketing has been successful in terms of spreading the word about Spot.us and the concept of "community funded reporting" throughout the general blogosphere/internet. I have been working very hard to make Spot.Us as open as possible and respond to as many questions, emails, phone calls as I can.

Where we have to improve is in our marketing to specific groups ie: news organizations, freelance reporters, civic organizations. Starting in the new year we will be focusing on reaching out to civic organizations and nonprofits. Again: The hard part is making the argument to them that "journalism" is something that will benefit their communities. It is a surprisingly difficult argument to make.

11. Please provide a census of program participants. What percentage were women and people of color? How does this participation measure up to your diversity goals and plans?

While we are an equal opportunity employer we have not set any specific diversity goals. At the moment David Cohn is the only full time staff member. I am a scrawny white Jewish boy.

Contractors to build the site have included: five males and two females.

Starting in January I will be hiring two part-time community organizers. Both are minorities (one is female Latina and the other Indian).

Reporters for Spot.Us span the gambit from White men to Asian women. Spot.Us does not exclude anyone from creating a pitch. At the same time - we can't "hire" anyone to create a pitch - so this is really up to word of mouth. Overall I am comfortable with the diversity of people that seem engaged with Spot.Us. We have a large international audience - despite the fact that they can't donate via PayPal (we can only accept U.S. Credit cards at the moment).

Questions 12-16 were about my spending habits for Spot.Us - these required spreadsheets and don't really translate well for this blog. But hey, at least you know I'm being held accountable for how the money is spent. I'll add this: David Cohn is the least well paid person on this project. I'm not doing this for money.

17. Did you collaborate with other organizations, particularly Knight Foundation grantees, during the course of this project? How?

No, but I have every intention of doing so next year. I would love to work with the Mercury News (technically no longer a Knight organization) and have spoken with Chris O'Brien about this - but I also know it is a hard time to approach a large organization like that with anything new, especially during these times.

The Maynard Institute is also based here in the Bay Area and I would love to work with them on a project. I'm sure the two of us together could fundraise for a very meaningful investigation here in the Bay.

If I am able to expand to other regions - then the number of potential collaborations will increase ie: in Chicago I could work with Chi-Town, MinnPost in Minnesota, Voice of San Diego in SoCal, Gotham Gazzette in NY - etc.

I do find that nonprofit news organizations are much more open to using Spot.Us than for-profit. Perhaps because the latter automatically look at online startups as competition despite my constant explanation that Spot.Us is a platform (a tool anyone can use... like YouTube) not a news organization to compete with.

**18. Please describe your interaction with Knight Foundation staff. What was most useful and what changes would you suggest? **

You guys kick ass. Don't change a thing. Just keep the ass-kickery alive.

**19. Was Knight Foundation able to facilitate contacts with experts in the field, professional peers and similar organizations? **

The gatherings that Knight has organized have been very stimulating. At the very least it is nice to meet other people who are trying risky, new ventures.

Also the name "Knight Foundation" commands a lot of respect. I sensed several times that I was being shown the door until I mentioned Knight Foundation and all the sudden people want to listen.

The shame is: How many other people are being shown the door and can't say "Knight Foundation" despite the good ideas they may have been evangelizing.

20. What else would you like Knight Foundation trustees and staff to know about your experiences with this project?

What an experience it has been! The world looks differently when you are in the eye of a storm.

I earnestly am happy with my progress so far. While I am an impatient youth, I also believe strongly in taking small executable steps and iterating. I originally thought that funding four stories before the end of the year would be an accomplishment. Now it looks like we are on the brink of funding ten.

But - as you all know, this is NOT a silver bullet and there are still LOTS of obstacles in the way.

When people ask me if this is the "future of journalism" - I tend to respond cautious optimism.

Which is to say: I have nothing convincing me that it ISN'T part of journalism's future. I have only been encouraged to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. I still have a flashlight on - and I'll try and let everyone know what I see.

...it is hard to imagine what America would look like without the small and shrinking number of people who engage in painstaking, firsthand research in order to separate the truth from the body of supposed facts, and who keep the rest of us honest.

That's what David Samuels wrote about John Coster-Mullens, the author of a book-length work on the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

You know what's surprising about this? The man who's being accorded this respect is not and never has been a journalist: he's a truck driver.

2009 looks to be a year of involuntary adventures for so many in the newsroom and out of it. And as Ellen's post, Couch Potatoes and Journalism Culture points out, an army of volunteers is unlikely to replace what we're currently losing as newspapers shrink or fold.

Yet the strange tumult keeps turning up buried treasure. When I started Placeblogger, I really never thought we would find so many placeblogs, and yet, there they are, and we're still finding them. Yesterday we got thousands of items from over 3,000 placeblogs. And we discovered more placeblogs (and got a bit of spam, too). What you can see at Placeblogger is not a replacement or a substitute, but I remain astonished each day as I watch the feed go by -- of cat pictures and storm reports and writeups of town politics. I'm astonished that they are there at all, and that they are there in such glorious profusion and variety.

No, it is not a substitute or a silver lining. It will not put journalists to work and it does not have a dental plan. I am sorry that we have no cures to bring from the undiscovered precincts of the Internet. And though I would love to conclude on an upbeat note, it seems to me that 2009 will have quite a few people out of work.

What do you think 2009 will bring for journalism?

A project billed as the "first-ever online network of ethnic citizen journalists" was launched last week in Los Angeles. Called LA Beez, the effort is a project of New America Media with support from the Ford Foundation. It brings together six L.A.-area ethnic media outlets with the goal of providing a more diverse representation of views. The participating local publications include: Arab-American Affairs Magazine, Asian Journal, Carib Press, Impulso, Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, and the Los Angeles Watts Times.

Despite a healthy appetite in general for locally relevant news and information in ethnic communities across the U.S., it will be interesting to see if such online citizen journalism sites and networks produce results. Which communities will respond to citizen journalism and will they respond differently than mainstream communities have responded? Will they attract new, diverse voices to the field of journalism and will they create entirely different forms of community journalism?

No doubt projects like the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia and the globally oriented Rising Voices, among others, can offer some important pointers for this work.

And lots to learn here from groups like New America Media and others already experimenting in this space. Most importantly, we need to listen carefully to communities themselves and not just throw new tools in their direction to see what sticks. Speaking of learning and listening, here are a couple of California-specific factoids worth considering when pondering the future and tools of online ethnic citizen journalism in the U.S.:

1) Nearly 8 million Latinos in California (approximately 60% of the total) do not have a computer and Internet at home.

2) At the same time, more than 80% of Latinos in California own a cell phone.

Deaf people can participate in citizen journalism through written language tools. Given this, why do I believe that using American Sign Language videos are an essential tool to provide them access to journalism? For those who are confronted by the 'digital divide' there are often seemingly hidden elements that cause their lack of access.

With any technology or system, there are built-in usability assumptions, including those that are taken for granted so much that they are not even acknowledged. For deaf people, most digital technology remains accessible to them as sound is rarely used as a primary interface element. Yet they still have issues with technology. This harkens back to one often unacknowledged element for access - language.

Computer users require both conversational literacy and technology literacy. Without such, the mere use of a computer is confusing and daunting. While modern computers do have an astonishing number of language modes, not all languages are covered. Nor does this help when the text is on an un-translated website.

Thus those who use English as a second language, the barrier is in attempting to grasp first the language, then the technological meaning behind the language, and then finally the technology itself. All that needs to be done before even attempting to peruse and comprehend information presented in a secondary language.

For such secondary language users, one good solution is as simple as providing them with information in their own primary language. This does not only provide the benefit of increasing comprehension, but the simple fact that it exists removes the perceived barrier. Using a person's primary language also increases comfort and sense of connection towards the material. This is especially true when considering languages that are poorly served otherwise. The lack of primary language material often increases its personal importance to the user.

Deaf people can be considered part of this group of secondary language users, but their inclusion is oddly expressed. Most Deaf Americans have grown up with exposure to English, but this is a limited exposure. By definition an auditory system is restrictive towards those who do not have full access to it. And written English does not provide the same level of exposure to the language as the constant conversational interactions expressed in speech. This, combined with educational system that was historically poor in confronting their language barriers, has kept a significant percentage of Deaf people using English as an incompletely understood secondary language.

The same solution of providing primary language use should also work for Deaf people. Yet there is an additional problem in that the primary language of American Sign Language has no written equivalent. It is solely a visual language, which means providing communication in this language requires video. A task that is more complex than providing alternative language access within the same medium of writing. This is the challenge I wish to confront. Can it truly be possible to provide the same level of participation and access that citizen journalism entails within the medium of video? Even more critically, can this access be provided when there already exist barriers to using these tools?

The last time we checked in with Iran Inside Out, project leader Shaghayegh Azimi had just finished a trailer video to whet our appetite for what was to come.

As she details in a two-part project evaluation, Azimi intended for Iran Inside Out to become a full-time venture to spread awareness about and raise the profile of young Iranian filmmakers by introducing their works to an international audience. The project has encountered several obstacles, but it has also made important progress over the past six months, including an attractive and interactive website.

Iran Inside Out has also managed to publish two videos by filmmakers Hossein Rasti and Hamid Najafirad which exemplify the power of film to convey human emotion. Najafirad's "Silent Screech" offers an insider's view of Tehran's underground heavy metal scene.

Recent comments by US President Elect Barack Obama about Iran make Hossein Rasti's intimate meditation on the future for his young nephew, Parsa, all the more relevant. Will Parsa's generation see an era of prevailing peace or increasing conflict?

Looking toward the future, Azimi says another video will be posted to Iran Inside Out shortly. She also hopes to form partnerships with the online film festival "Culture Unplugged" and with journalism, communication, and film departments at local Iranian universities. Keep your eyes on Iran Inside Out for more great content.

The A.Q. Miller School of Journalism hosted an informational meeting with local elected public officials on Wednesday, November 19, to showcase VoxPop, an interactive tool for civic engagement, developed by journalism students through the Knight News Challenge grant. The school is collaborating with the Manhattan Mercury to launch and research VoxPop. The software innovation allows area citizens to contact elected officials regarding local issues in the news.
The AQ Miller School of Journalism at Kansas State University was among a consortium of universities awarded a $235,000 grant by the Knight Foundation to develop new ways and technologies that can help community newspapers to better engage citizens in local issues. Students developed a web-based software that helps citizens contact public officials using news sites. The software is embedded in news stories and once citizens read a story, they can automatically contact a public official regarding an issue mentioned in the story.
The informational meeting was held at the Union Pacific Train Depot, 120 Fort Riley Boulevard, on November 19 at 5 p.m. Elected public officials in the Manhattan, Kansas, community were invited to learn more about this civic engagement initiative. They were also asked to fill out a questionnaire on civic engagement which will be used for researches purposes.
About 50 people attended the event. Dr. Angela Powers' opening remarks were as follows:
Tonight we will hear a brief report from one of our students who helped develop Vox Pop, Matt Sundberg. We will also see a demonstration from the Manhattan Mercury conducted by Brian Rempe. What you will hear is the result of 2 ½ years of work, and I would like to tell you how this project came to be.
About three years ago, Dr. Dianne Lynch, Ithaca College had an idea that students should challenge one another to come up with a better model of community journalism. At the time, deans and directors from journalism programs around the country were participating in a leadership fellowship program. One evening 7 deans and directors met in Dr. Lynches' hotel room to brainstorm about writing and submitting a grant to the Knight Foundation. You must realize these activities are time-consuming and often burdensom because we're all really busy with administration, teaching, research and day-to-day running of our programs. However the potential to benefit our students and our communities was too hard to resist.
We submitted the proposal and received a reward $230,000. Our next step was to select faculty members to take on the project and recruit students and mentor them over the following year. I presented the idea to my faculty and asked for interested parties. Dr. Sam Mwangi stepped up to the plate. Again, you have to realize that as a new tenure-track faculty, Sam is extremely busy prepping classes, getting used to the community, working on his tenure and promotion, advising student organizations and doing research. There was no guarantee that this project would help in get tenure or result in anything positive... except that it would benefit students. But that's all Dr. Mwangi needed to know.
Sam's challenge was to find good students; each program was allowed seven. He solicited our best, and 7 stepped up to the plate. Incentives for the students included course credit, stipends, travel, networking possibilities and the change to make a difference. Once they were brought on board, they had to promise they would not quit. And it took a great deal of effort on their part to participate over the next year.
Seven groups of 7 students traveled over the summer, brainstormed, discussed ideas, agreed and disagreed with each other, and finally they developed 7 prototypes for digital media. Three of the projects were chosen for presentation at ONA in Toronto.
The last phase was to implement the projects and conduct research on impact, which brings us here tonight. Our students and Dr. Mwangi had the vision and General Manager Ned Seaton at the Manhattan Mercury had the intelligence and courage to try it out. What started as an idea in a hotel room was nurtured and then bloomed into something that would impact a lot of students and give them experiences they would have never had otherwise and result in a project that would change the way that media and the community would interact in Manhattan, Kansas. I can see this going statewide and even national in no time.
As of this writing, almost a month after the meeting with public officials, VoxPop is live. As Brian Rempe wrote, "Hey guys, I just wanted to let you all know that VoxPop is now live and working on The Mercury's site! Let me know if you see or hear of any problems. I am excited to hear the response!" So are we. Stay tuned.

After a year of study, countless meetings, and at least two conferences, a team of researchers at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society have released a series of papers exploring the potential and challenges of the emerging networked digital media environment (note: I played a small role in this work). If you are sitting there thinking that this is a BIG topic rife with thorny questions about the future of journalism, you're right.

Which is why the papers' authors conceived of the project as a conversation, facilitated by a series of papers that look at different facets of these issues. The series includes a fifty-page overview, News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age, followed by seven issue papers:

• International News: Bringing about the Golden Age by Ethan Zuckerman;
• Principles for a New Media Literacy by Dan Gillmor;
• Public Broadcasting and Public Affairs: Opportunities and Challenges for Public Broadcasting's Role in Provisioning the Public With News And Public Affairs by Pat Aufderheide and Jessica Clark;
• Digital Media, Democracy and Diversity: an Imperfect Discourse by Ernest Wilson III;
• Pride of Place: Mainstream Media and the Networked Public Sphere by John Kelly;
• Editors -- the best is yet to come? by Tom Stites; and
• A Typology for Media Organizations.

And four case studies:

• iReport: Participatory Media Joins a Global News Brand;
• The Gothamist Network: Gateway to Local News?;
• The Forum, Deerfield, NH: Seeking Sustainability in Hyperlocal Journalism; and
• The Chi-Town Daily News: Creating a New Supply of Local News.

The project was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and was led by Berkman Fellow Persephone Miel and Berkman Research Director Rob Faris who spent a year talking to journalists, bloggers, citizen media creators, public broadcasters, publishers, advertising networks, researchers, technologists, lawyers, and many others.

On balance, the papers present a cautiously optimistic picture. There is enormous potential to expand the reach of journalism and to bring it closer to the people who need it. The tools that enable new kinds of reporting, flexible ways to combine information, and networks that connect people to information and to each other are getting better. Tough challenges remain, but it's great to see such smart and dedicated people focused on these issues.

If I haven't convinced you yet that it is worth your time to download the papers, take a minute to watch the video trailer (it's literally a minute long):

For more information, visit the project's website, Media Re:public, or join the conversation on their blog.

(Note: I am a fellow at the Berkman Center and the project I direct, the Citizen Media Law Project, is hosted there, along with Media Re:public.)

Journalism requires not only a business model, but a culture. At the Center for Future Civic Media, we sometimes take a moment to reflect on the online news experiments begun in the pioneer digital media days in the 1990s, to keep a clear head about how journalism and social networks intersect. But perhaps we shouldn't use the J-word.

The precipitous slide of journalism from iconic cultural power status to cultural irrelevance during the past decade is stunning. When the Shorenstein Center's Prof. Tom Patterson told his board last month that the nation's premiere think tank of, by and for top-notch news media was going to think less about journalism and more about public policy, it was a real wakeup call. The Harvard students just aren't as interested as they used to be in journalism, he explained.

It's hard to find anyone these days who promotes the notion of the journalist as public hero. With the exception of George Clooney's "Goodnight and Good Luck," the popular culture has written off the MSM as just so many hacks brought to you by corporate imperialists or libertine liberals.

Now even citizen journalists are also falling into ill repute. Jeff Howe of Wired, who created the term "crowdsourcing," assailed at a Nieman Foundation talk this fall the "flawed assumption that people want to do what journalists do." His Assignment Zero six-month experiment, which invited the open source journalism world to do its own fact-checking, was not a success.

He concluded that people connected virtually could not build up communities "interested in covering a certain subject." What he found instead was that not only were people "not good at" hyperlocal coverage, but what came in from them was "press releases and a lot of hate speech." Local websites that are all UGC are not the news about City Hall, he concluded, even though that is what people actually need. "You go to the website from your hometown to keep up with things, not to see everyone's prom pictures."

Rise of Online Community Journalism

Enter Jack Driscoll, former editor of the Boston Globe, former editor-in-residence at the MIT Media Lab, and now advisor to MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, to turn this around. Jack dedicates his new book, "Couch Potatoes Sprout: The Rise of Online Community Journalism," to reporters "of every variety," saying "their role is more vital to democracy than ever."

If Clark Kent isn't there to cover the city council because he's been laid off, then perhaps volunteer citizen reporters can step in, Jack says. To be sure, he isn't about to throw the professionals overboard. He agrees with Persephone Miel of Harvard's Berkman Center, who said at a conference earlier this year, "The old media are broken. Bloggers didn't break them. Bloggers won't fix them."

Jack isn't swooning over the notion that anyone off the street can do investigative journalism in a sustained and focused way and he isn't carried away by the random dramatic tweets, YouTube videos and Flickr photos from people who happened to be in the right (or wrong) place when something like the Indonesian tsunami or the Mumbai terrorist attacks took place. He's talking here about something in between: group-generated community journalism by people in Melrose, Mass., Rye, N.H., and elsewhere who are finding new excitement and power through organized community news efforts. They are offering some hyperlocal watchdogging that local newspapers seem increasingly unable or unwilling to perform. And despite Jeff Howe's complaints, some of them are covering local government where none of the professional journalists are bothering to look.

Jack has written about what he has learned through three citizen journalism experiments he started: The Melrose Mirror Silver Stringers, a group of over 100 senior citizens working over the past 12 years to publish their online news and cultural site; the Junior Journal, which began 10 years ago at the MIT Media Lab and engaged more than 300 teenagers from 91 countries to put out a global news service; and The Rye Reflections, where Jack currently leads a band of 15 neighbors.

Jack agrees with Persephone Miel that the technology isn't the hard part. It's the people. Jack's book is full of enthusiasm for how journalism can revive old people and empower young ones. He's also full of practical advice about interviewing, writing, and editing. He has lived the pro/am model and now shares his secrets of success. If anyone can make citizen journalism work, it's Jack.

It is great for more citizens to become engaged in their communities and commit acts of journalism. Yet even Jack agrees that they cannot replace entirely the professional journalists who are disappearing. This does not seem to be a concern for the public, particularly those under 40, who appear content to get their news through social networks, for free -- and may not notice, at first, if the local newspaper or even The New York Times has withered to nothing.

Who out there is working on the issue of building a culture that supports best practice reporting, editing and dissemination of journalism? Renee Hobbs from Temple University was at MIT today for a conference with students and teachers about media literacy, which is part of the solution. She, Erin Reilly and Henry Jenkins are thinking creatively about how to build out the new media practices for civic engagement. But they and Jack can't do it alone.

Who is innovating the business models that will pay for good investigative journalism -- the hard kind, the unpopular stories that nevertheless are essential to accountable governance? There are experiments galore, but no one seems to have cracked the economics nut. Not micropayments (such as Spot.us) nor pro/am models (like the Chi-Town Daily News) nor even the new GlobalPost experiment in foreign news, has solved the structural issues bedeviling the professional press corps.

Philanthropy (ProPublica) is nice for a while, but it is not enough to sustain over time this check-and-balance function that is key to a successful democratic culture. Every time someone touts citizen journalism, look closely at what made it work: virtually every time, it is the moment that professional journalists organized or picked up the citizens' work and offered it to the world. And Jack fulfills that model himself.

What are you reading, and thinking, and watching that might advance our collective thinking about these questions? Please tag as "civicmedia" articles in Delicious that might help build this exploration. And don't hesitate to share your thoughts, or those of others that you think relevant, at our Center for Future Civic Media discussion forums.

We will be hosting some face-to-face discussions at the Center in 2009 that attempt to make progress on these issues. We will podcast these conversations and invite the virtual civic media community to participate. Two rules: no MSM end-days hand-wringing, and no inordinate new media faith in technology alone. Join us to build a positive culture and practice with these exciting new tools, as Jack has illustrated in his new book, to support the flow of information and engagement that real geographic communities need.

Freedom Fone's technical director, Brenda Burrell, was recently interviewed by Digital Planet, the BBC's weekly world technology update. Read the article, or listen to Brenda speak about Freedom Fone, and the potential of mobile phones as a vehicle for voice based information services.

Last week, after 6 months of planning and hard work, we officially launched Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project, in alpha. We're still busy finishing up the remaining functionality while responding to the excellent feedback and ideas we're getting from alpha testers. And we are going full speed ahead toward a March 2 launch of Printcasting in Bakersfield, California. Thanks to those of you who have helped us out so far! If you would like to be an alpha tester, there's always room for one more.

But I have to say that I can't think of a more ironic time for us to be putting the finishing touches on a new print project.

Based on what you may have read (or even seen on The Daily Show), Newspaper Armageddon is in full swing. In just the last two months, the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy, the Christian Science Monitor announced plans to end its daily print edition, Scripps announced its intention to sell the Rocky Mountain News, and Detroit's two newspapers planned to move to three days a week. Next year, blogger Mark Potts predicts more big changes, and I think he's right.

The immediate temptation is to assume that print is going away completely, but it's more complex than that. What's really happening is that economic conditions are accelerating changes in consumer and advertiser behavior. This is forcing companies of all types, including newspapers, to finally make radical changes to stay afloat. And unlike some Eeyores out there, I find this invigorating. This is actually one of the most exciting times to work at a newspaper because it means that the barriers to change just fell by half.

To paraphrase a character in the recent remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, history shows that humanity doesn't evolve until it's standing at the brink. Right now that's exactly where newspapers are. Next year, expect to see smart newspapers moving quickly away from the status quo -- huge overhead, one size fits all, poorly targeted ads -- and toward a new model that is more efficient, community-driven and personalized than ever before. And expect advertising to be more highly-targeted, measurable, and self-serve.

That's where Printcasting and similar customized-print initiatives fit in. The Seybold Report recently interviewed me for a story about customized newspapers. In addition to Printcasting, it summarizes other custom print projects. Most notably, in February MediaNews Group plans to launch a customized newspaper in Los Angeles called I-News. What they're doing is personalization or individuation, which is slightly different from what the democratized publishing focus of Printcasting. But their approach is so similar that I regularly get together with project brainchild Peter Vandevanter to share ideas.

IFRA Magazine also recently printed a four-page spread on Printcasting that puts it in the larger context of custom print content.

Of course, some of you are surely asking, "Why even bother with print? Why not just go completely digital?" 

It comes down to a simple truth that even the most hard-line digerati will admit to. Physical stuff matters when it's personal to you. Just as one analogy, how do you feel when you get a holiday card in the mail? Do you throw it in the trash, or happily stick it on the fridge or mantle? Even though you may have seen the same exact same photo on Facebook, getting a hardcopy is special as long as the content is targeted and meaningful to you.

This feel-good effect of "stuff" only increases the more local and niche-focused it becomes. I think this is why an advertiser is quicker to buy an ad in a printed niche magazine than an ad on a Web site -- ironically, even a Web site with the same brand and content as the magazine.

We experienced this first hand in Bakersfield with Bakotopia, a social networking site I started for the Californian in 2005. Despite high traffic and audience engagement, it wasn't embraced by advertisers. But in 2007, we created a print magazine that carried the same content as the Web site (sort of a "Best of the Blogs" index).

In that year, Bakotopia more than doubled its number of advertisers, with 78% of them unique -- meaning they were new and not just carryovers from The Bakersfield Californian. Young readers also like the Bakotopia print edition, with Scarborough surveys showing a doubling of readership since the print edition started -- a fact that is at odds with the assumption that young people don't like print. We find that they use the print magazine and online social network interchangeably. Why? Because together they form one brand that speaks uniquely to them and their interests, and even includes their content.

There's a great lesson in there that you won't see reflected in any punditry-filled story about the supposed "death" of newspapers. Most people aren't unsubscribing from newspapers because they're printed, but because the content isn't as relevant to their unique interests as what they read online. This begs the question of what happens if you make more relevant, local, printed and printable content available. Will we see the opposite effect that we see in newspapers today? Printcasting will test that theory by allowing anyone to be a local niche print publisher.

As my colleague Mary Lou Fulton said recently, consumers have been telling us for years (as evidenced by declining newspaper subscription numbers) that one-size-fits-all isn't working for them. Now newspapers are finally forced to confront that issue head-on.

That's a big challenge to be sure, but don't confuse it with the idea that print as a medium will disappear. As I play with our Printcasting alpha, I can already see a future where print is just one of many valuable expressions of digital content. What one person reads online, another may read as a printout, and yet another reads on an Amazon Kindle or E-Ink Reader. And the producers of the content and publications themselves will run the gamut from newsrooms to local organizations to blogger co-ops. Is that exactly the same as what we're used to in the daily printed newspaper? Of course not, and that's what makes it interesting. Local newspapers are now in a position where they have to change or potentially die. Let the evolution begin!

The Crunchberry Project -- six graduate journalism students, including two "programmer-journalists" attending the Medill School on Knight News Challenge scholarships -- set out this fall to solve two challenging problems: Improving conversations around news, and building news engagement among young adults.

Here's what they came up with: News Mixer. It melds three "commenting structures" -- question and answer, short-format "quips," and letters to the editor -- into a site that leverages users' social networks by using the newly released Facebook Connect system.

News Mixer is already getting some positive buzz thanks to some Twittering last week after Team Crunchberry presented the site to Medill faculty and to the class's sponsor, Gazette Communications in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Patrick Beeson, a content manager for E.W. Scripps Interactive Newspaper Group, wrote that News Mixer "could be a game-changing effort for news story comments." Blogger Nick Gehring wrote that News Mixer "takes news-story commenting out of the ghetto."

What's online now is a demonstration site. Log in with your Facebook ID and you can see how it works (and help us load-test the software). Invite your Facebook friends to use the site and you can get a sense of the interesting possibilities. Here are some of the highlights:

Facebook Connect. Using a Facebook ID means you don't need to establish a new login and password to use News Mixer. Beyond that, Facebook Connect allows the site to display comments from your social network, meaning that every user has a different -- and personalized -- experience. We're thinking that this will stimulate more intelligent discussion than generally occurs via the open-ended comment box that appears at the end of articles on most news sites. Also, every time you post to News Mixer, you are given the option of cross-posting that comment to your Facebook feed, which exposes it to friends not using our site and potentially draws them to participate as well.

Three options to comment. Team Crunchberry decided to offer three very different options for reader response:

• Questions and Answers: Displayed like annotations in the margin of an article, readers can ask a question about any paragraph of the article -- or answer questions left behind by other people.

• Quips: Displayed as a small talk-bubble in a live feed on the home page and on article pages, quips are short-form comments that allow people to leave feedback in a quick, to-the-point form. They're modeled after Twitter and instant-messaging.

• Letters to the Editor: A very old idea, but with a few new twists. News Mixer calls on letter writers to "Add your voice to the marketplace of ideas. Offer a thoughtful point of view in 250 words or less." Once written, letters are treated equivalently to articles in News Mixer. Each letter gets its own page, and people are allowed to write letters in response. When a letter is particularly insightful, an editor can use the News Mixer content management system to designate it as an "editor highlight." The "editor highlight" letters are given prominence on the main Letters to the Editor page, and also appear on the home page, intermingled with news articles. The idea is to encourage and reward the most thoughtful responses.

User profiles. All users of News Mixer get their own profile page. On News Mixer, users are allowed to follow each other's activity on the site, and view the activity in their news feed. Along with your own contributions, recent comments from your Facebook friends and people you're following on News Mixer are aggregated and quantified in your user profile, which serves as the nexus for the News Mixer social community.

A personalized home page. The News Mixer home page highlights recent comments and "quips" from your social network. It also highlights a question that has recently generated a lot of activity.

Gazette Communications is interested in launching a version of the site, geared to young adults in eastern Iowa, in 2009. The code that powers the site is available on Google Code, and we've already gotten some interest in using it for other sites.

I'm really proud of the student team that developed this site in just 11 weeks (about six weeks of hard-core coding): Andrea Nitzke, Joshua Pollock, Stuart Tiffen, Kayla Webley and "programmer-journalists" Brian Boyer and Ryan Mark. We've never done original software development in a Medill "innovation project" class before, so the students (and their instructors, me and Jeremy Gilbert) learned a lot. And I think it really does offer some provocative new ideas for approaching conversations around news.

If nothing else, I think News Mixer is "proof of concept" that enrolling programmers in journalism schools -- and teaming them up with journalism students to develop an innovation relevant to the future of journalism -- is a good idea. We're still looking for applicants for the remaining Knight News Challenge scholarships -- if you're a coder interested in applying your skills to inventing the future of journalism, please check us out.

In the coming weeks, I'll be writing more about the lessons learned from the News Mixer project, and about other features that Team Crunchberry would add if they had more time. We welcome your feedback on News Mixer.

Hey folks,
I wanted to tell you all about a study I am wrapping up with Peter Funke, Dan Berger and a few other folks in Philadelphia. We received a grant from the Social Science Research Council's (SSRC) "Necessary Knowledge for Public Sphere" initiative to study the Media Mobilizing Project(MMP) and their use of new media and digital inclusion to promote civic engagement in disenfranchised communities across Philadelphia

To offer some background, MMP was launched in 2005 as a strategic initiative to partner with local organizations, facilitating grassroots media production to advance socio-economic justice through the (self) empowerment of disenfranchised communities. MMP has four goals:

• Build community media infrastructure that results in concrete gains for groups.
• Innovate and implement new tactics for use of media in organizing campaigns.
• Assist organizations to build capacity, providing documentation and dissemination of audio/visual materials highlighting their issues.
• Develop leadership in new constituencies who are strengthening and expanding the focus of the media reform movement

The basis for MMP's work is a belief that we have entered a new era of participatory communications, where people are increasingly called into the media production process through the ascendance of a range of technologies from blogs and podcasts to video cameras and cell phones. Paradoxically, while people have increased access to media making, we live in an increasingly undemocratic society plagued by structural inequities. This is illustrated by a media sector, which is rapidly consolidating, resulting in fewer communities having access. The root is not embodied in the media system alone, but rather in a highly stratified economic order.

Building on this vision in three years MMP has become a thriving network of 10 organizations across the region from students groups and immigrant rights organizations to taxi driver and hotel worker unions. Together this network of groups, aims to use new media to break our isolation, creating new networks to tell and share stories and build the power necessary to create a more just Philadelphia. One of the projects of the MMP network is Our City Our Voices: Immigrant Newscasts in the Digital Age, which is a 21st Century News Challenge Project. Through this project we have trained over 100 immigrants and low-wage workers in basic video and Web production while finding innovative avenues for getting people Internet access. The aim has been to offer the skills, access, and platforms for new communities to share stories in order to organize and make both personal and collective change.

Building on Our City Our Voices and other projects, the basis of the SSRC study is to analyze the linkages between issues of new media and civic engagement in impoverished communities. Through this study we are beginning to show new ways that new media and social justice can be twinned with organizing to overcome the digital divide and defy the economic obstacles underlying it.

One of the goals of the study is to produce a toolkit. This will be a 100-page book, which both analyzes the problems and possibilities of the information age, while offering practical lessons on how MMP has used new media as a tool for social change. We are now beginning to write this toolkit and we are thinking of organizing the toolkit in three sections: Part I would look at the history, strategy and present make-up of MMP; Part II would be stories from the field from folks in the network that have used new media in innovative ways and Part III will be a glossary of key terms.

Scholars of contemporary poverty tell us that the central aspect of impoverished communities is their political and civic demobilization. This study is an examination of how new technologies and the possibility of community media can offer new venues for those same communities to speak, engage in the democratic process and create the vision for a city which speaks to their concerns.

Last week, members of the Beanstockd Team participated in the inaugural Beanstockd internal beta test of the Beanstockd Game. Members of the Beanstockd Team spent one week taking environmental actions and getting credit for it through the Beanstockd interface in order to brainstorm ways to make it better, find any bugs, and compete for a team prize: organic sweets from Manhattan's finest green bakery.

After a 5-day, head-to-head battle between Team Apley and Team Wigglesworth (we arbitrarily split into two teams), only one winner could remain. Congrats to Team Wigg! They will be handsomely rewarded at the Beanstockd Holiday party later this month.

In the meantime, we are surveying the players to get detailed information on what worked, what didn't, how the game affected them, any strategy they employed, what was fun, and what could be more fun.

Preliminary comments have included:

1. The desire for a recent activity summary on the dashboard

2. The ability to chat/converse with the OTHER teams ("I really really want to let them know how superior my actions are")

3. And the desire for an archive tab of all past actions/winners/prizes, etc.

Stay tuned for more results!

DIY development, design, community management, and marketing isn't for me (this year).

This is an update about what's going on with ReportingOn, which is to say, there's not much going on with ReportingOn. For now.

My Knight News Challenge-funded project to connect journalists on the same topical beat with their peers launched on October 1. I continued development work on it through the month of October, and then was completely tackled by a pack of wild bears known as my day job, life at home, and a need for some brief moments of sanity in between the rest.

Now that it's time to circle back around and write a few reports about the site's launch and progress, the way forward is obvious:

I can't do it all myself.

I'll be hiring a development/design team to do the initial work on rebuilding the site to meet my specifications, and frankly, I can't wait.

Although interest in using ReportingOn is high, return visitors are few, and much of that, I think, is due in some extent to the lack of certain obvious features that the service needs to have in place to bring users back. Notifications, replies, messaging, and tie-ins to other, widely-used networks.

Networks like Twitter, of course.

The meteoric, eye-popping growth of Twitter in the 13 months since I first submitted my proposal to the Knight Foundation has been a wild variable in the formula for ReportingOn. The massive (compared to a year ago) adoption of Twitter by journalists should really change the way I think about building a platform for journalists to connect. The "not-made-here" syndrome I talk about sometimes appears to be losing its viral powers, as evidenced by the dozens of news organizations using Twitter to connect with their community and beyond.

So I'm changing the way I think about ReportingOn, and I'll be working through writing a refreshed and refined spec with my development and design team soon.

For more "lessons learned" along the same lines, check out Susan Mernit's "Waist deep in the Big Muddy, or, we're moving on" and Chris O'Brien's recent Idea Lab post about the Next Newsroom project's pitfalls.

It's the one that got away. With many Knight News Challenge projects using Drupal, the dedicated Knight Drupal Initiative (reopening after DrupalCon in March), and Drupal sites for the Knight Foundation's own community, David Cohn must just be deficient in groupthink to have chosen to develop Spot.Us in Ruby on Rails.

Despite my bias, the "Why Spot.Us Should Have Used Drupal" title is tongue-in-cheek. I'm pretty sure David Cohn (who is smarter, better looking, and always better dressed than me) and the Spot.Us development team will get the following enhancements in place quickly. Especially since, when it comes to winning friends and influencing people, there is nothing like a polite, personal, respectful, and massively cross-posted note (but hey, I couldn't find an issue queue).

For what it's worth, here's the list of features that the Spot.Us site lacks that would be automatically or easily provided by a Drupal-based framework:

• Instant log-in when registering (LoginToboggan)
• Better workflow when registering in general: Currently, you are left on the registration screen after registering, and clicking on the "check your e-mail message" happens to lead to a 404 file not found error (featuring LOLcats, so it's worth registering just to see this.
• One-click email confirmation instead of cut-and-paste your temporary password (Drupal core functionality)
• Ability to be alerted when pitches are added to selected categories (core Taxonomy module and Notifications). Update: The site has categories, but despite signing up as interested in everything I've yet to receive notice of anything.
• Donations to the site in general, not just specific pitches (ECommerce or Ubercart. These could be added as matching funds to others' donations. (Lots of traffic was generated in news articles about the site, and people enthusiastic about the idea with no stories matching their interests should have been able to donate, indeed set up recurring donations, to support the site and the stories chosen by others).
• Integration with other Drupal sites. Not really automatic, but if written by Drupalers there would already be a Spot.Us Drupal module (and probably a Wordpress plugin and a generic drop-in widget) for sites with a stake in a pitch on Spot.Us to solicit donations to that pitch. Drupal sites like the Bay Area's Public Press or, on the other side of the country, Open Media Boston, could pull information from Spot.Us and have one click to get their readers and members involved in crowd-funding a story.
• RSS feeds! Also related to promotion, a Drupal Spot.Us would have built-in RSS for listing of tips and pitches and every category.
• Turn-key local Spot.Us groups (Organic Groups). Instead of only encouraging other people to download the free software (though that is great), Spot.us could allow selected people to curate or manage regional editions beyond California's Bay Area. (Furthermore, people who do install the software themselves could draw on the huge Drupal ecosystem of modules to plug in all this functionality and much more.)

There, I hope that's lit a fire under some Ruby/Rails folk! Now, with all that said -- and with only the dedicated few still reading -- here's the real point of this post:

None of the above matters.

Just as the code language (PHP) and even quality of Drupal is secondary to its amazing community, the technology of Spot.Us is a distant second in importance to its passion, purpose, and the energy that flows from its reason for being.

As readers of Idea Lab know, Dave launched this thing with a wiki (oh, and a Drupal site of about three pages, which was undoubtedly the critical factor in Spot.Us' success).

Technology can certainly help or hinder the development of community -- that is, after all, the premise of the Knight News Challenge -- but tools matter far less than a sense of purpose and a drive to see it through.

Of ideas whose time has come, community-funded reporting is definitely one. Please, just to spite me, go make Spot.Us a resounding success without a drop of Drupal. The new breed of local, independent, and smart news sites it will help flourish are as likely as not to be built in Drupal anyway!