I have been blessed to attend the last two national Online News Association conferences, one in D.C. and last year’s in Boston.

This year, the celebrated, 13-year-old organization will host its annual event of more than 5,000 members in San Franciso to offer some geographical balance to the affair. There is some call for a Midwest event in 2013, which might make sense, but whether it’s next year or in 2014, the conference, expo and meeting of the minds of news innovation should happen in Philadelphia.

Updated: Apparently Philadelphia is booked for 2014. So, uh, 2015?

I’m part of a small group in Philadelphia lobbying for the effort, which includes a formal application process, and that application is being submitted. Still, I felt it worth sharing what appears to me to be the clear reasons why this would be an easy decision.

Here are 10 reasons:

1. ONA has never had a national convention in Philadelphia, even though the national student and black journalist society’s have convened here.
2. Philadelphia is actually a city people will want to visit, having one of the most walkable downtowns, a vibrant restaurant community, history, culture, music, neighborhoods and impact. Oh, and it’s cheaper than all those other big cities.
3. It has a major convention center, in addition to several major hotels, like the Center City Marriot, both of which can handle an even larger conference space.(And hey, the notoriously overpriced Convention Center has cut a major part of its labor costs recently.)
4. Supportive major media, including representatives of Philly.com (and a need for new newspaper ownership to be close to anything innovative), TV representatives from NBC 10, staff from public media WHYY and the country’s largest entertainment company Comcast.
5. Supportive institutions, like the William Penn Foundation, major journalism program Temple University, and their new spinoffs the Center for Public Interest Journalism and PPIINN.
6. Vibrant independent media, both in print, online, in communities and otherwise. see BCNIphilly.com
7. Active, growing technology and innovation community, which has impact and interest in media, see phillytechweek.com and the local Hacks/Hackers community.
8. ONA leadership has relationships here, in addition to Philly.com’s Wendy Warren, the founding CEO of the new PPIINN initiative Neil Budde is a former ONA board member.
9. It’s near a lot of people and members, considering that Philadelphia is within a train or bus ride of the densest hub of markets in the country, where a good chunk of ONA members are.
10. Active local ONA chapter, though it was revived relatively recently, see here for membership.

My colleagues Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and I learned plenty at the 2011 Online News Association conference in Boston, but we also did more touring and connected more with old friends and colleagues than last year. We even sneaked out to use the city's new bicycle sharing program and visit Fenway Park, among other sights. We were in Boston for the conference from Sept. 22-25. Photo by some lady who took the camera from her elderly father.

Sometimes, if not most times, what happens outside of the sessions can be what’s most valuable about a conference.

I learned plenty the traditional way at the 2011 Online News Association national conference, held in Boston this weekend Sept. 22-25, but I surely got more out of reconnecting with friends and colleagues from other markets, even more than I remember doing at past professional events. It also didn’t hurt that I dove more into Boston than I have while visiting elsewhere for work travel.

ONA has been a national convener among news innovation conversations for more than a decade, and more locally, I’ve been involved with reviving the Philadelphia chapter of the group.

Full disclosure: this year, I was able to attend thanks to the very generous support of the Center for Public Interest Journalism at Temple University and the Wyncote Foundation. I was able to attend last year with similar support from the William Penn Foundation, which has additionally funded the Transparencity reporting project I have led.

After a few years co-running a sustainable niche news site, participating in the online discourse around news innovation and attending events like ONA and others from the Aspen Institute, the University of Missouri and, yes, our own BarCamp NewsInnovation, I felt like attending the event was just as important to talk shop with others doing similar work across the country as it was to catch up on a lot of in-session conversations that felt less relevant to where we are professionally.

Tourism and good, smart friends aside, below I share what I learned in a conference’s traditional way.

A Morning Conversation with Vivek Kundra

Kundra, who served in the Obama administration as the first federal Chief Innovation Officer, kicked off the conference.

Tweets and Takeaways:

• Shorter @vivekkundra: Let’s get the government out of the re-inventing wheels business. @eyeseast
• Why the cloud makes sense for government now: “In the 1960s the greatest innovation in tech was happening in government. In 1980, innovation moved to enterprise. In 2005, something big happened — all innovation moved to the consumer side.”
• Being able to, say, scan baby crib and see if it’s recalled only benefits parents w/access to that tech. $$$ creates tech divide  @AmyZQuinn
• Will data.gov survive the election? “It’s a one-way street,” he said.
• On @WikiLeaks, @VivekKundra cites “inherent risks,” but says “it shouldn’t have happened,” security was insufficient.  @EricCarvin

You Can’t Duck the Math: Entrepreneurial Journalism

B. J. Roche, Jeremy Caplan, Laura Frank and Jennifer Lord Paluzzi get set to start the session.

I was a little disappointed by this session and don’t think it much pushed forward the conversation, with little actionable advice or experienced details. That said, there were some small takeaways.

Tweets and Takeaways

• @Laura_Frank: try to be an ‘intrapreneur’ before you’re an entrepreneur. Now’s the time to pitch ideas within legacy orgs. @McKennaEwen
• “Be revenue promiscuous.” @meghannCIR
• When you start one site people pat you on the head and say, “Isn’t that cute.” When you launch six at a time, they take notice. @eyeseast

Below watch a video chronicling ‘five minutes in the life of ONA 2011.’

Five minutes in the life of ONA11 from Curt Chandler on Vimeo.

New Platforms for Longform Journalism

Panel (L-R): Tim Carmody, Mark Armstrong, Evan Ratliff, Joshua Benton

I’ve been interested in the movement to use tablets and even more read-friendly smartphones to return to longform roots, celebrated by this session.

Tweets and Takeaways

• Longform content movement is in some ways a rebellion to the shortening and speed of content online, says @jbenton
• Already an emerging vocabulary, in which #longform fits for 1-5k word mag-style pieces and ‘short books’ for longer, I think
• Mac Lion @arstechnica tutorial was free on site, still sold 3k in 24hrs at $5 Kindle ebooks, says @tcarmody
• We make ‘short books’ not ‘longform journalism,’ because offering something LONG isn’t a good sell says @ev_rat of @theatavist
• And how many of those are really read later? MT @alicyp: Pieces saved online to “read later” are only between 250-2k words. @hbillings

A Conversation on the Front Lines of the Arab Revolution

Friday ONA 2011 keynote 'A Conversation on the Front Lines of the Arab Revolution' panel, from left: moderator New York Times reporter Jennifer Preston, NPR social media star Andy Carvin, former Egypt Today editor Rehab El-Bakry, noted Middle East freelance journalist and blogger Issandr El-Amrani and American Islamic Congress outreach director Nasser Weddady.

The lunchtime session was timely and interesting, hearing from those involved with the coverage of the Arab Spring.

Tweets and Takeaways

• It’s good to be reminded how relatively small my contribution to the world of journalism. ….Remarkably small. ….Inconsequential, really.
• At #ona11, in session on Arab Awakening, @acarvin warns of not romanticizing a “hot mess” of political transition. @paufder
• @acarvin sometimes the best sources are also the biggest activists @VOAHutch
• “I think of my Twitter feed as a sort of an open-source newsroom,” @acarvin

B.S. Detection for Digital Journalists

My buddy and strangely proud Canuck Craig Silverman presented with Huffington Post star Mandy Jenkins drew me to this session, which had some small takeaways of value and for which you can find their notes and slides here and coverage of the presentation here.

• New users w/o photos, dated updates and few or spam-centric followers are easy signs of less credible Twitter users: @mjenkins
• Image verification tools like errorlevelanalysis.com and regex.info/exif.cgi and tineye.com shared by @CraigSilverman
• “The best verification tool a journalist has is still the telephone,” says @CraigSilverman
• If you get tricked into spreading a hoax or false information ‘it is your responsibility’ to do your best to contact every person online who is continuing to spread that falsehood, said Silverman.

Making It Work with a Small Staff

Silicon Prairie Insider Managing Editor Danny Schreiber and my colleague Sean Blanda presenting at ONA. Yes, notice the local Harpoon beer we gave out.

My colleagues and I submitted three sessions to present at ONA and one was accepted, this one on working with a small staff, which Sean led on our behalf, with Danny Schreiber, who is the managing editor of Silicon Prairie Insider, not unlike a Technically Philly for the Midwest. They shared this sheet (bit.ly.com/small_staff) of their takeaways from their experiences.

Yes, we gave out beer, as depicted above, to note that small staffs have to develop good environments, and the people loved it.

Tweets and Takeaways

• Check out their brain dump sheet here.
• Video Sean Blanda handing out beer from local Boston brewery Harpoon

• best panel ever @harpoon_brewery
• Content departments and scheduling evergreen resources and features can make staff time more efficient, says @seanblanda
• Video of their ‘How large is their editorial staff’ quiz
• How much do you work? @seanblanda notes @technicallyM now limits to 40-50 hrs to fight burnout, @dannyaway says 70+ but says he loves it
• @AmyZQuinn @jerseyshorejen are understandably nervous for freelance rates. @siliconprarie pays $50 & we’ve limited freelancing due to costs
• Screenshot of @dannyaway @siliconprarie 400+ feed Google Reader account for leads, a ‘time suck’ that leads to insight, he said

I Screwed Up (And You Will Too)

My friend David Cohn, of Berkeley and Spot.Us fame, led this session and shared, with Denise Change of the Grand Rapadian, professional failures they had encountered and what they learned from it. Grab their notes here.

• Rule of the Internet: It is faster to try something than debate about trying something, says @digidave
• “The journalism community has begun to recognize failure as something positive. The journalism industry hasn’t.” @moniguzman

Below, watch a video interview collection around challenges various conference attendees felt were the most daunting for the industry, including what looks like a less than thoughtful addition by this reporter.

Other #ona11 Tweets and Takeaways from other conference sessions

• Journalists who add analysis to FB postings about stories get 20% better response. @kmingis
• Twitter doesn’t take down parody accounts like @BPGlobalPR. But will take down impersonators. @lheron
• 40% of Twitter users are just listening, using Twitter as a wire service – @EricaAmerica
• About 200 million tweets are sent every day, @ericaamerica said. @lheron
• General consensus in the room is you never delete a tweet, even if it is wrong. Clarify, be transparent. @PoppedCulture
• I attended briefly an un-conference called Tango with Django, which was a small kick-in-the-pants in us non-developer journalists about trying to learn some basic programming languages.
• The candidate voting guide is one of the dullest yet important things news orgs do. Could really use spicing up online. @kev097
• Some question came out of the annual awards show about whether enough independent and niche sites are being honored. I didn’t want to dive into that mess, though I did not that we at Technically Philly have never even thought about applying, despite doing some pretty substantial journalism projects.

Online journalism has seen advances editorially, technologically and, more recently and perhaps more importantly, in sustainability, but the industry has yet to efficiently mature its methods of replication, according to my experience last week at the 2010 Online Journalism Association conference.

In spring 2009, major conversations were still focusing on what direction anyone should be headed, as the inaugural BarCamp seemed to suggest, and by last spring, the BarCamp conversation had grown enough to have presenters narrowing onto funding. Last fall, Jeff Jarvis held the Hypercamp conference at CUNY which largely focused on business models for niche sites, and, at the beginning of the year, the William Penn Foundation was focused on create an editorial investment in local Philadelphia public affairs news.

ONA 2010, in Washington D.C., showed another march in the broad conversation of those interested in the future of news, seeming to correlate a connective maturation in those three issues of primacy — editorial, technology and business — but there felt like a lack of real shared and collaborative best practices.

Last Thursday, Oct. 28, offered me the chance to attend a pre-conference called ‘Fund My Media’ held by J-Lab, which was cheerily focused entirely on the sustainability of news products, but, like the ONA conference that followed, it showed dozens of groups, organizations and individuals who were doing innovative things, on their own.

I left nearly all of the sessions I attended feeling that there were fewer best practices to garner than I had in past high-level journalism conversations. It seemed as though, as we had always wished, 1,000 flowers had gone to bloom, but had done so differently so we aren’t sure how to work together now.

The splits between nonprofit and for-profit, topical and geographical, regional and local, and others, seemed to make communication and relevancy more difficult.

What we need now, I left feeling, were more conversations focused on demonstrating specific editorial, technology and business innovations that we can call copy, tweak and push forward.

Online journalism doesn’t need inspiration anymore, nor does it need incessant innovation, it needs the maturing, connecting, growing and sustaining what we have all brought forth over the past half-decade or so.

All that said, in two day’s worth of sessions, there were tens of small, important lessons garnered. Many I shared in the #ona10 stream, which I’ve collected below.

FRIDAY, OCT. 29, 2010

TBD.com breakfast conversation

• Erik Wemple says @TBD isn’t “messianic” in striving for “civic journalism” but wants to be a place where you’d go if you hear sirens.
• Laura McGann asks @mjenkins good question about whether “social media is about publicity” and not really engagement. Jenkins answered that there are different uses, one of which is ‘publicity,’ to be sure.
• “Social media is the police scanner of the 21st century” says @jimbradysp
• @mjenkins is hitting on hard that @TBD creating this network of bloggers and other community contributors gives them a bigger voice in the region. Partnerships and collaboration, that is, grew their voice.
• “Broadcast people already move at web speed,” said @jimbradysp of @TBD so it helps to have those partnerships
• “Twitter is like a tip line, not like a reporter,” says @mjenkins on checking social media sources despite its value
• Interesting that the @TBD crew is noting its full tagging and aggregation of region by way of dozens of partner blogs is what sets it apart. That’s a big change from the past.
• I spent time thinking about the @TBD crew talking a lot about mobile advertising being a real contender with the loss of display ads as revenue

Content partnerships through API

• An API is a “technical solution for practical problems,” says @delynator
• An API “creates structured way for content and information to be distributed to any platform” says @daniel_jacobson
• APIs have “unpredictable benefits,” either through mashups with other open APIs or just new ways of thinking says @delynator
• If you have to eat the dog food, it’s going to be tastier, so when groups depend on their own open API it will be more helpful says member.
• @NPR API keys are being mostly used by developers, but mostly consumed by NPR. That’s “dog food”
• API metrics are still new and being developed but so necessary because without traffic it’s all subjective says @delynator.
• Three keys to good API: good API documention, developer support through a forum and clear, “generous” terms of use, says Dan Choi
• “Developers are customers when you open an API” says @delynator so keep it responsive. What’s the value proposition? There are 2,000 APIs available, so it’s easy to be forgotten.

Power of Knight News Challenge grant funded DocumentCloud.com

• @pilhofer says Document Cloud is powerful for three reasons: creating search functionality of scanned docs, annotating them and publishing to the web
• Using your mouse, sometimes you can recover docs that were redacted online, notes Chi Tribune rep
• @pilhofer says @wikileaks should use @documentcloud software but wouldn’t be part of their community because no “custody chain”

Keynote Lunch with Tim Armstrong from Aol and Vivian Schiller from NPR

• “Users need curated experiences” says Tim Armstrong. “Distribution is changing… But content is what people do online” This was in reference to Aol’s expansion in the content game.
• You need great talent, great product and a great business plan in news like any industry, says Tim Armstrong
• Business models online still favor big portal sites but local niche sites fill the gap, says Vivian Schiller of NPR.
• “Would you pay for this content?” Advertising can be valuable but “you better have a data plan,” Armstrong said.
• I appreciate when people talk about mobile being a different platform than the web and social media also different fabric, which is something Armstrong did.
• More than platforms, “brands are powerful” from niche markets to TV devices, says Tim Armstrong.
• AOL is distribution lane and niche sites are exits based around community, says Tim Armstrong
• “If you don’t want to work hard, you’re in the wrong industry,” says Tim Armstrong of criticisms that Patch staff are overworked.
• “The consumer says tell me what I need to know” says Tim Armstrong. He and Vivian Schiller both say vary types of content and revenue
• The average @Patch staffer has 6.6 years exp., 75 percent are paid same or more as last job, says Tim Armstrong. “We aren’t evil”
• Armstrong says his wife uses Apple TV as a carrot/stick: behave or you’ll have to watch cable!

Power of Niche

• The model for NPR’s Project Argo: “find the conversation, filter it, extend it” says Matt Thompson
• “Niche sites do best when they are part of something,” says @jwkealing

Future of Traffic and Search

• Very important in local sales that @danachinn says give advertisers only the data they need and nothing more, like offering a graph of traffic growth.
• No matter how you monetize it’s relevant that Dana Chinn said have content that your audience will pay any amount of money for.
• I left early to attend the simultaneous Coders versus Designers session

Coders are from Mars, Designers are from Venus

• “There are degrees in success for design, not for coding,” says Tyson Evans. If it’s ugly, OK, but if it breaks, it breaks.
• “A well written piece of source code should read like an essay” said Jeremy Ashkenas at the session, which had beer!
• “Code is really currency” says @davewrightjr. If you’re a design & know code, it can inform your decision and vice versa.
• Take small goals and not deadline-focused projects to improve collaboration and get things done right, says Tyson Evans

Keynote: Jonathan Harris

• Leaving things unfinished makes people come closer to them, be more intimate, said Jonathan Harris

I had to leave Harris’s keynote early, which was disappointing because it was riveting, but, fortunately, it was for a good reason. The William Penn Foundation brought together a couple dozen representatives from Philadelphia who were at the conference. It was a wonderful chance to develop even more community around a quickly growing journalism scene in Philadelphia.

SATURDAY, OCT. 30, 2010

Breakfast over Wikileaks

• Of the participating countries, reporters and others from the United States contributed the least, says Gavin Macfadyen
• Wikileaks is responsible for uncovering 15,000 additional civilian deaths from US involvement in Afghanistan, says Gavin Macfadyen
• The winners of war will no longer write history said him

Open data applications

• Cleaning public data to match standardized categories is a hurdle, says @RufusPollock
• “Open data is a platform that we build on,” says @rufuspollock but a lot of time is spent on getting data and cleaning data
• “Use the eye candy” and other buzzy ways to grow attention to attract help building, checking and use data says @rufuspollock
• Don’t forget that the very point of data visualization and using open government data is to make more accessible says @bill_allison
• U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services is one of the better federal agencies for openly sharing relevant data says @bill_allison
• “Government should do a much better job keeping data,” if only so legislators can make data driven decisions says @bill_allison
• “The priority for government to make the data available.. and journalists can do things with it,” says @bill_allison
• When groups build an apps, they often don’t want to share the data says @rufus_pollock so keep government out of app building

Tech trends with Amy Webb

• Webb’s company has a script that tracks submitted patents to the U.S. patent office in specific tech, mobile and social media areas that interest her work, Webb says.
• Find her full notes here.

Knight News Challenge grant lunch

• “Don’t try to game the system by guessing what the @knightfdn wants because I assure you that they don’t know,” says Aaron Presnall of the Jefferson Institute.
• “How actionable is that open data?” asks @ericg saying municipal data dumps aren’t necessarily helpful
• Write blog posts, get in the community, talk to judges about your @knightfdn app says @ericg
• “Do you have the partners to make your idea work?” asks Amanda Hickman.

After the lunch, I skipped out to briefly see the mass that was the Rally for Sanity from Jon Stewart and the Daily Show.

Don’t call it UGC

• @robinsloan had panelists introduce each other’s projects, which I think is interesting and effective
• Constraining prompts for contributions is important, says @robinsloan
• New things don’t often neatly and completely replace old things says @robinsloan
• I left this session early to attend the simultaneous Onion session

The Onion:

• “Feel free to applause at any moment,” says Baratunde Thurstdon of @TheOnion Apps are like kids so be ready to give them attention
• Some, but they don’t have many journalists on @TheOnion staff says Marc Lieberman, but they study the form, says Baratunde Thurstdon
• Video is expensive but brings in most traffic and revenue for @TheOnion says Marc Lieberman
• Some, but they don’t have many journalists on @TheOnion staff says Marc Lieberman, but they study the form, says Baratunde Thurstdon
• @webbmedia And @baratunde did a great job, but, without taking anything away from @TheOnion, what they do takes fewer people, no? Tweet
• ONA photo presentation on the Onion’s presentation

I had the pleasure of meeting in person a handful of people who I hadn’t yet or hadn’t in a while:

• NYU Professor Jay Rosen, NPR producer Elaine Heinzman, TBD.com social media chief Mandy Jenkins, Suzanne Yada and my old buddy TBD.com’s Daniel Victor TWEET
• Philadelphia Daily News photographer Sarah Glover, who made the great point that there was a strong Philadelphia presence everywhere you turn except on the panels themselves
• 10,000 words blogger and multimedia journalist Mark S. Luckie, albeit very briefly.
• Dana Bauer of Azavea and freelancer Jason Fagone TWEET
• John Paul Titlow of Review Publishing
• Certainly among many others

There were some other more nuanced roundups of ONA:

• Demographic breakdowns
• Tweeting breakdowns
• Top Three design takeaways from 10,000 words
• Five Personal ONA Highlights

In addition to sharing all the failures we’ve had at Technically Philly, I spoke with founder and editor Shannon McDonald about the progress we’ve had with Northeast Philadelphia hyperlocal NEast Philly, including most prominently the breakdown of where our content was coming from.

See here the notes from our 2009 BarCamp presentation on being an online news startup in a print-heavy community.

Below find the notes and slides from this year’s BarCamp presentation entitled: Twitter is stupid…and other foundations of our content strategy.

Our notes:

Twitter is stupid…and other foundations of our content strategy.

I. Community vs. Niche: there is a difference — We’re not here just to report news, we’re here for interaction and support in the community.

II. Leave the journalism to the journalists — It’s OK to run press releases, as long you’re transparent about doing so and let the readers do the feel-good stuff. People seem most interested in the content breakdown, which I first shared in a post here.

III. “What is this Twitter thing?” — Our Twitter followers consist mostly of other news orgs, politicians and teenage girls, so go to where your readers are, not where you think you should be.

IV. Make yourself (physically) present — You better be out at as many community events as possible

V. Where it’s gotten us and Where we hope to go — Content partnerships, branding, known in communities, hoping to grow advertising (education!), merchandise and hosting more events.

Find the presentation online here or see it below.

Author, blogger and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis begins his Hypercamp on Nov. 11, 2009 at the College University of New York's graduate school of journalism.

Highly localized news and its intersection with profitable, sustainable news is already starting to dominate conversations about the future of news in the United States.

The numbers and business plans, relationships with each other and with legacy news organizations and who will be written into history for leading the movement seemed trending themes of the  New Business Models for (Local) News Hypercamp summit at the modern, sleek and sexy (read: expensive looking) midtown Manhattan home of the College University of New York’s graduate school of journalism.

Held two weeks ago today, the invite-only affair was blasted the world over by way of social media, notably a wildly active Twitter hashtag, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth sharing my experience at the Nov. 11 event.

Outside of the impressive digs and killer eats (breakfast, lunch and open bar with great nibbles to close!), the Hypercamp, a brainchild of Buzzmachine blogger and CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis, was unsurprisingly packed with about 150 big name players in the news future conversation, admittedly with an East Coast bias — damn near half the staff of the New York Times and a heavy presence from the Washington Post, Baltimore and New Jersey news outlets (Chris Krewson of the Inquirer, a philly.com executive and humbly Technically Philly held it down for Philadelphia).

The morning was devoted mostly to Jarvis and students showing off updated versions of their New Business Models for News, underwritten by the Knight Foundation and chock full of enough detail, estimation and exploration to be both decidedly important and wildly baseless.

Those numbers focused on for-profit entities of somewhat varying sizes, though many seemed unfulfilled by what was available, including folks interested in nonprofit roles.

“It’s a flag in the ground,” Jarvis said. See his slides here, or watch his morning presentation below, and, yes, see my fat head and Phillies cap on my knee in the bottom left of the screen.

After the morning discussions of these models — and quibbling over the CUNY team’s numbers — and a lunch break, three tracks gave attendees nearly a dozen sessions stuffed with high-profile panelists.

See the full schedule here.

SELLING, WEST COAST VS EAST COAST

Perhaps my favorite session was was on selling for the hyperlocal news site. That afternoon session was hosted by Greg Swanson, a crunchy Portland, Oregon sales executive with Prism, and Mel Taylor, an independent Philadelphia sales consultant with the look, feel and sound of a power seller. It was delightful to see our country’s coastal stereotypes personified so clearly — the aggressive, big East Coast city chap, tall, with perfect hair and a thousand-dollar suit standing beside the more reserved, earth-tone, sweater-wearing father figure.

There wasn’t enough time for either to really finish his presentations fully, but their tempos were set. While I felt both were directing their thoughts far more for established brands launching sites or someone with the chance to launch their product fulltime to start — say, a former newspaper reporter with a severance package to spare — I found value in both.

Swanson left me with two powerful take aways:

• ‘Unique visitors‘ is a broken metric — I already have beef with the unreliability and variables with Web metrics, but Swanson made this bigger still by highlighting just how the cookies-based unique visitor count are always inflated by newspaper dot coms, devaluing monthly page views and wrongly suggesting the loyalty of online readers.
• Localized coupons work — Using the example of Forkfly, Swanson caught the attention of others, by detailing how hyperlocal news sites could recoup business sponsorship support by using social media to push out coupons and other local business deals and bring value.

Taylor’s presentation, the slides from which can be seen below, was challengingly motivational to Swanson’s conversational.

Solid take aways from his truncated speech:

• News has always been about enabling commerce
• Talk in language your local businesses can understand when selling Web metrics
• Sell video commercials on your front page
• Sell 300 x 250 above scroll display ad
• Sell cheaper-sounding weekly rates, rather than monthly figure
• Host an advertiser seminar
  

OTHER PANELS AND CLOSE

Afterward, I dropped in on the Practicing Quality Journalism session, which was mostly just a conversation on new media best practices with innovative staffers from the New York Times, including David Carr. Interesting, but I remain confounded by anyone who seems to think that still notably international newspaper has any real business or precise lessons for bloggers, hyperlocal news sites or even traditional big metro dailies.

I also sat in on a Community Engagement and Marketing panel, hosted by Mary Ann Giodano, editor of New York Times Local news confab, and featuring one of her reporters, David Cohn of Spot.Us and Debbie Galant, the founder of baristanet.com — the kingpin of profitable, hyperlocal news site. I was interested in seeing Giodano, Galant and Cohn, the last of whom I was happy to have finally met in person, but found the subject matter mostly directed at those perhaps in a bit more of the beginning stages of promotion.

The final session was what Jarvis dubbed a ‘reverse panel,’ in which a handful of representatives from big-name news organizations listened to hand-wringing from bloggers about how they might better work together. What came out of it seemed that all agreed they should work together and communication was necessary, but both sides thought the other needed to do a better job of initiating that.

To close the day — before the open bar — Jarvis brought everyone back to CUNY’s newsroom to seek suggestions on what steps should be taken forward, what universities might build and how such events could be done better in the future.

I offered my interest in seeing more research in the world of metrics. I also would have liked to seen more dialogue about how hyperlocal startups — not backed by existing brands — can get from start to the rather optimistic numbers in traffic and profit that Jarvis’s group has estimated.

As this hyperlocal movement takes hold, we need serious education around the idea that more traffic doesn’t always mean more value for advertising, sponsorships and other partnerships.

That education will likely have to happen in a lot of ways, too, if news is to find foothold in profitable sustainability anytime soon.

Community newspapers in Philadelphia remain wary of the Web, if any stock is to be paid to a morning panel from a journalism innovation conference held this month at Temple University.

Technically Philly was a partner in hosting PhIJI

Their thoughts just might be relevant to community-focused news gathers across the country.

Hosted by Temple’s journalism department, the Philadelphia Initiative for Journalistic Innovation was a day’s worth of smaller sessions focusing far less about the plight of big newspapers and more about smaller, more entrepreneurial ventures. Yes, the future of news just might be a series of conferences about the future of news, but I was happy to see a greater focus on the business side of the industry.

With the help of supportive chair Andy Mendelson, Temple journalism professor George Miller put together one of the first future of news conferences I’ve seen that tried to really pay attention to sustainability through profit. There’s incredible value in that, so I was thrilled to be a part of it.

Along with my two fellow co-founders of Technically Philly, I presented twice a session called ‘Be a Publisher Now’ on free tools that news-organizations and bloggers could make use of to create become more efficient and better prepared. See our presentation slides here.

I also got the opportunity to sit in on a session focused how community newspapers were dealing with the 21st-century’s dramatic paradigm shift in news-gathering. That’s where I was left more than a little puzzled.

“Would you like to know how much money I am making with the Web site?” asked Hernán Guaracao, the founder, editor, publisher and CEO of Al Dia, the 40,000-circulation Spanish-language power player on Philadelphia’s community news scene. “Zero.”

Despite that and fairly modest traffic, Al Dia, which is also the name of an unrelated Latino newspaper in Dallas, has built an altogether sexy Web presence, complete with active Twitter and Facebook accounts.

More after the video. Below watch Miller, the Temple professor who organized PhIJI, describe the conference to Al Dia.

Guaracao was the major player on the panel, which also included former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Tyree Johnson, who founded West Philly’s 10,000-circulation Westside Weekly, a business manager from Cambodian bilingual Khmer Post, which has a Los Angeles parent paper, and moderated by Heshimu Jaramogi of the Neighborhood Leader, which gets circulated in North and West Philly.

From left: Tyree Johnson, founder of Westside Weekly; Hernán Guaracao, the founder, editor, publisher and CEO of Al Dia; a representative of Cambodian newspaper Khmer Post, and moderator Heshimu Jaramogi of the Neighborhood Leader.

So it seemed Guaracao largely set the tone. And that tone was decidedly uninterested in the Web.

For four journalists serving communities that are likely less connected online than general interest dailies, that tone makes sense for today. But the question I wanted answered — and meant to ask before leaving early after becoming frustrated by a long, vague and, to be blunt, fairly trite digression into the state of big metro dailies — was whether any of the four had thought much about building Web platforms for the future.

• Had any thought about the power of using mobile technologies now or in the future to bring their audiences to their online presences?
• What lessons were they drawing from general interest daily newspaper struggles with Web erosion of core business models?
• Were there any partnerships, relationships or lessons to be learned from the city’s two alternative newsweeklies, which have similar publishing schedules and missions, but far more Web-centric audiences?

Both Johnson of the Westside Weekly and the Khmer Post representative made repeated references to their aging audience. It was their primary reason for not putting much stock into the Web. But shouldn’t any product with an aging audience be looking to find replacement consumers?

Jaramogi, the session’s moderator who spoke of a 20-year career filing radio reports for WHYY among others and mentioned utilizing Twitter for reporting, gave in too to the idea that the Web isn’t right for everyone,

I readily understand that these community news-gathering businesses don’t call for Web presences at this moment. Their core audiences pick up their print copy, as they have for years. But I fear these community mainstays — like the Northeast Times — are ignoring the potential for their next generation of readers to find a new place to find news and community online.

Al Dia founder Guaracao, to me, is an outlier. He seemed a very proud man, emblazoned in his newspaper’s logo, a sponsor of the day’s events and carting along a half dozen or more reporters and staff.

He repeatedly deflected a question from Pew Charitable Trusts project manager Thomas Ginsberg about traffic and future plans for Web monetization. The very Web presence that Al Dia has today shows a clear realization that those relationships with future generations of readers need to be met.

Yet, he downplayed the Web, with three representatives from significantly smaller operations. Whether this is a common dialogue among community newspaper publishers elsewhere in the country, I’m not entirely sure.

I had my hand up for the first few minutes of a 10-15-minute question session but soon felt my answers weren’t going to come. Three-quarters of the panel didn’t seem to take seriously any push online — even still, in 2009 and with clear signs of what has happened to others whose audiences forced them through an earlier Web push — and the fourth appeared far more protective of his intentions.

Inquirer lifestyle editor Deirdre Childress, Ginsberg and others quietly filed out early. With a speaker from Temple’s business school upstairs due to start speaking about proft planning, I soon joined them.

Below, watch a report on the PhIJI event by TU Update, the university’s student broadcast club.

A portion of the PSPA conference guide.

Today I’m in State College, Pa. perhaps making a fool of myself at the 76th annual Pennsylvania School Press Association conference.

I was thrilled when someone asked me in December if I’d like to speak to high school kids about multimedia storytelling and online publications. (Apparently people do read this thing!) I thought it even neater when I was e-mailed a draft of the conference guide.

Then I saw just below the first-page biography of keynote speaker Tim Harrower, an author and newspaper designer, two speaker highlights. The first is of Steve Manuel, a Penn State professor, former Department of Defense spokesman and, um, apparently a buddy of comedian Dane Cook.

The second name? Well, it was this young freelancer. I’m humbled and excited. See what I’ll be covering after the jump. If you’re there, well, gosh, let’s do lunch.

The conference actually began yesterday but because of some prior engagements, I couldn’t make it. I was genuinely disheartened to miss yesterday’s writing contest, for which I was to be tapped as a judge. Instead today, in addition to two lectures,  I think I will also be helping judge student publications, I’m told, beginning at nine a.m.

At both lectures, I will be unveiling what I hope to make a bit of a resource point for high school newspapers: ChristopherWink.com/Improve-Student-Newspapers. I’d like to talk to any of those interested in creating an extended method for crowd sourcing methods and means for doing just that, improving student newspapers. The development, I think, will largely come after this conference, though.

But, first, you know, the lectures.

From 10 to 11 a.m., I will be leading “Eleven Ways to Improve Your Student Publication Today.” I always think the best value of a conference like this, particularly for high school kids (I remember being bored out of my mind at these), is immediate take-away. I’ve collected some awfully simple, but delightfully practical items a student newspaper or magazine might implement right away and improve the product. I’m focusing on online promotion and dissemination, multimedia organization and Web presence.

Then from 11 a.m. until noon, I’m hosting “An Online Media Empire in a Day.” Now if that doesn’t sound like me, I don’t know what does. Narrowing in on a couple of my suggestions from my first session, I am planning on detailing how to create a fully-functional, self-sustaining student publication with the two most important aspects of all: easy upkeep and next-to-nothing costs. I’ve led high school newspapers and almost a decade ago I was in a number of school groups. I remember how it rolls.

So that’s what I feel like I am bringing — solid professional experience that pales in comparison with other speakers, but a recent and genuine sense of what works for student publications.

I’ll be sure to post my reflections on the conference once I return.

If you’d like me to speak or work with your school group or media conference, contact me here. See my other speaking work here.

Mike Levin speaks on a panel about young reporters, with Dorothy Gilliam moderating, and Acel Moore, me, and Prime Mover participants looking on at fall 2007 JEA conference.

On Nov. 9 2007, one year ago today, after founding and leading a student newspaper at the Franklin Learning Center for a school year and a half, I was asked to present and take part in a panel discussion on youth journalism at the Journalism Education Association conference held at the Marriot in Center City, Philadelphia Nov. 8-11.

The panel was called “Building Journalism Programs Outside the Curriculum.” See the program here [PDF].

Among others, I was proud to speak alongside Pulitzer-Prize winner Acel Moore, among the journalists I most respect, and Philadelphia Inquirer photographer Mike Levin.

I mostly focused on the challenges I faced, contrasted with the effect it had on the small stable of loyal participants I found.