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.

Data, context and engagement were the themes of the Hardly. Strictly. Young. event at the University of Missouri Reynolds Journalism Institute this week, says Michael Maness, the Knight Foundation Vice President of Journalism and Media Innovation.

Also read a Columbia Journalism Review overview from fellow attendee, new friend and total asshole Craig Silverman, who takes the opportunity to poke fun at me. (I forgive him.)

The two-day conference meant for brainstorming alternative recommendations to implement a 2009 Knight Commission report was something of an idea-hackathon.

Though I arrived on Saturday to couchsurf in St. Louis first, the confab kicked off with a welcome dinner Sunday night and was made mostly of rotating groups of us 30 members discussing implementation ideas Monday and presenting those ideas Tuesday. The goal was to create real ideas for implementation.

The Knight Commission Report on Informing Communities, released in September 2009, was the broad culmination of a year of hearing testimony and collecting insight, featuring 15 recommendations on ensuring American communities are better informed and engaged.

This  week’s invite-only event was led by leather-jacket adorned, Spot.Us founder and current RJI fellow David Cohn, after he attended an Aspen Institute roundtable of media executives discussing how to implement the initiatives. Cohn felt perspective from a group of largely younger journalists, who are ‘creating their own centers of power,’ could be valuable. Despite the largely journalism-focused attendee list, it’s important to note that the Knight Commission report is more broad, including curriculum-based media literacy and universal broadband access.

Monday group sessions, this one led by Daniel Sinker and Greg Linch. Photo by Lauren Rabaino

Here are the primary nuggets from some of the proposals that came from the four rotating groups for each of the four recommendations that the event focused on:

‘Media’ Education at Various Levels

• Orange Team (led by Linch and Sinker): Report for America initiative — a year-long intensive fellowship for post-undergraduate students of various academic disciplines
• Red Team (Silverman and Lewis): Adopt a Wikipedia page — Have high school classrooms adopt relevant Wikipedia pages and update and monitor them for an academic year

Presentation room. Photo by Lauren Rabaino

Increase the sources of news providers

• Green Team (Boyer and Bachhuber): Create local best practices fund — Bolster a fund for (1) events that connect entrepreneurial journalists together to develop and share best practices; (2) digitize local government documents and services, perhaps in partnership with Google, and (3) develop software solution to use Knight’s community information needs assessment guide.

Matt Thompson and myself fielding C.A.T. Signal-related questions. Photo by Lauren Rabaino.

Expand Local Media Initiatives to Reflect the ‘Full Reality’ of Communities They Represent

• Blue Team (Thompson and Wink): C.A.T. Signal — Within a narrow test-case neighborhood or town, create a networked coalition of civic groups that will respond to a one-time-only request — a C.A.T. signal — granted to all residents. The scarcity and direct action will increase buy-in and solving problems will grow involvement. Yes, there is a website. Peep the slides here. Our rather smilingly self-indulgent trumpeting brought quite a bit of interest in the idea.

Ensure that Every Community has at least one Local Hub

Presenting the Webabago idea with Kim Bui. Photo by Lauren Michell Rabaino

• Red Team (Rabaino and Yada): Local government publishing dashboard — Create a low-cost or no-cost open source toolkit of services that can be provided to local governments to create workflow and publish relevant data, information and local news. There are concerns around transparency, but this is a start.
• Green Team (Bui and Wink): The Webabago – Using partner anchor institutions for promotions, credibility and location, launch an initiative of rurally-focused mobile internet-connected computer centers that offer (1) computer access, (2) media literacy and (3) media production training for an online hub that starts with a community calendar and moves toward news coverage. This is an expansion of rural book-mobiles and university extension services, as recommended by the Knight Commission. The foundational assumption here is that we cannot develop online hubs without in-person hubs first.

Webabago slides


• (Amico and Lee) Expand Wiki tools — Like the famed Davis Wiki, local wikis can help smaller communities develop their own institutional memory and essential hubs. Chris Amico’s ideas of what an online hub is.

Take Aways

• Great big thanks to Cohn, RJI, Jeff Beeson, Knight and everyone else who came: it was a great privilege, experience and opportunity
• The Hardly. Strictly. Young conference name is a play off the annual Hardly. Strictly. Bluegrass outdoor concert in San Francisco and that while our cohort of mostly 20 and 30 somethings was younger than the Aspent Institute summit, that wasn’t the rule, says David Cohn.
• Work with anchor institutions, bring the journalism to the people, don’t have the people come to the journalism.
• What a great event for RJI to host, bringing 30 innovative journalism leaders to see its beautiful facilities, campus and its interest steps forward
• ‘Nobody ever creates a cocktail at full bar” says Brian Boyer
• It’s tough to do so with such a busy crew, but I think we all would have been more productive had we all fully read the Knight Commission report (I did on the plane there) as I believe there was some duplication
• St. Louis rocks and Columbia, Missouri is a nice college town
• David Cohn likes living there because there is a ‘nice, little bunny’ that lives under his porch

I’m late.

I’ve been invited to the Hardly. Strictly. Young.  conference on alternative ways to implement Knight Foundation recommendations at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri [More on that later]. One of the fun precursors to the two-day event later this month has been participating in the Journalism Carnival of blogging, shepherded by conference organizer, Spot.Us founder and leather jacket-wearer David Cohn.

In January, I wrote about the role universities should play in creating journalism,  and in February wrote about two ways to grow the number of news sources. In March, I was supposed to write on what the Knight News Challenge should do next and how the RJI fellows program could be a part of curating that innovation.

Fortunately, in being late, I can point to others who already did it better than I would. No, Cohn, this isn’t a cop out, this is cutting my losses. The undercurrent on both of these questions for me is that I’m not worried about the craft as much as I’m worried about sustaining the craft.

For the first prompt, Dan Gillmor has having already hit on exactly what I would suggest for the future of the Knight News Challenge:

If I were to change any single element of the News Challenge it would be this: I’d put at least half of the money not into grants but into equity investments in for-profit companies. To make this happen, the foundation would partner with a small group of highly qualified angel investors — people who cared at least as much about the future of news as returns on investment. Together we’d raise a fund that could offer seed and angel capital to digital media entrepreneurs whose projects showed the kind of promise that could lead to serious returns.

In fact, back in November, I wrote something somewhat similar, in highlighting what the News Challenge could learn from venture capitalists.

For the Reynolds question, Steve Outing nailed that the best, from what I saw:

Because the program is small, I’d narrow the focus significantly. In fact, for each fellowship year, I’d pick a theme and find fellows who all wanted to work on complementary aspects of the theme. Let’s say for the next crew of fellows, select all of them because they want to focus on variations on a theme of “business models for journalism in the digital age.” Next year, I’d pick a different theme. The key would be that the theme is the most important challenge or opportunity facing journalism at the time. Business models for journalism addresses solving a big problem for the news industry and for journalists who want to make a living. A theme that could address an opportunity instead of a problem would be best utilizing emerging mobile technologies in the news realm.

Focus, yes, something I noted was my goal for 2011 and one I thought the future of news conversations could take on.

Yes, that is George Michael. There are three clear steps to increase the number of news sources to the level that, say, surrounded Singer George Michael in May 1985 when this photo was taken by Ann Clifford for Life magazine.

To increase the number of news sources in a community one needs to do two things: (1) grow audience and/or (2) grow revenue.

In a followup to a prompt that ushered in a post last month, Spot.Us founder David Cohn again opens the Carnival of Journalism, in which a handful of media makers and molders opine a subject of his choosing. This session, the question focuses on the role that we all play in increasing the number of news creators.

As organizers put it:

What can you, as an individual or employee, do to increase the number of news sources. Everyone has a different set of circumstances. Some work at universities (which we found out last month) others work for public media, for independent media or for-profit media entities large and small. Take a moment to reflect on your unique skills and circumstances. Then answer: What specific things can you do to increase the number of news sources for a local community.

We can figure that out by doing building audiences and revenue.

First, an important distinction is made by carnival organizers in saying this: “Certainly the number of news sources is increasing due to the very nature of the Internet,” so what the interest here is in localized action.

Second, it should be further clarified that the carnival specified that while the number of news organizations is of interest, the primary end goal here is the increase in the number of news sources. With the growth of social media and other free or low-cost online publishing tools, everyone person, organization and group is a content creator. So how do we get them to play and add to news.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, there are two and only two ways we pay for news: with money and with audience. That means news organizations get paid to create news with money — either by advertising or selling services or through philanthropic support or otherwise leveraging readership. Alternatively, bloggers, social media users and other non-news organization spread news and create content for audience — either for respect or comradeship with friends or growing authority through audience size or quality.

Two clear, actionable steps toward that goal and my role in doing so:

1. Help grow audience — There are two groups of new news sources that fit in this category that I define by not bringing in revenue (profit, philanthropic or otherwise) as a direct result of news:
   • Independent bloggers and other social media users — These contributors are motivated by training, help with audience growth and the like, which is aided through better trafficked news sites that engage and share. I do this actively by linking and engaging in my role with Technically Philly and influencing how other legacy news organizations operate.
   • Nonprofits, businesses, groups and other organizations — Other organizations need to understand the rational self-interest in growing their own audiences by delivering content and news, something I am doing professionally with Technically Media and see as a fundamental shift in the news ecosystem.
2. Help grow revenue — Offer backend services like sales, event planning, fiscal agency, accounting and the like for independent news sites and foster collaboration to cut costs for legacy news sites. Both can grow output then.
   • I am actively involved in this by pushing forward investment here.

I want to note clearly that a clearinghouse, like one I described here and is somewhat being discussed here, that gains authority through reputation and work should serve both of these roles, by offering incubation, housing money, cross-platform directory connectivity and engagement-focused and audience-driving curation.

Dozens of other mechanisms can be help this goal be attained, but I might be willing to bet that most could fit into these two categories. Am I missing any? What do you think about that Cohn?

Universities should host the newsrooms of their neighborhoods, towns and counties. If a university has a journalism department, college media and audience, this seems like a foregone conclusion.

Picture Temple University. It is a big, diverse, robust, public research university with a clutch of respected professional schools and an expansive undergraduate population that has been slowly and controversially expanding into at least four different, distinct, overwhelmingly black neighborhoods around it.

When you drive south on I-95 east of Philadelphia at night, look off to your right while only the tallest skyscrapers are yet in view a few miles in the distance, the blur of bright lights made of a dozen square blocks and a cluster of high-rise buildings among a swath of stout two story row homes is the university’s main campus.

Halfway between those stadium lights and Philadelphia’s iconic City Hall is another beacon of light, that old White Lady, 400 North Broad Street, the legendary location of the Philadelphia Inquirer and its sister paper the Daily News.

Mood lighting isn’t the only lesson Temple should take from the investigators of the Inquirer.

Every few months, Spot.Us founder David Cohn revives the Carnival of Journalism, in which a handful of media makers and molders opine a subject of his choosing. This session, the question focuses on the role that universities should play in covering our communities.

As Cohn put it:

One of the Knight Commission‘s recommendations is to “Increase the role of higher education…..as hubs of journalistic activity.” Another is to “integrate digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels through collaboration among federal, state, and local education officials.” Okay – great recommendations. But how do we actually make it happen? What does this look like? What University programs are doing it right? What can be improved and what would be your ideal scenario?

I can’t imagine there is a better example of how and why this situation should work than with Temple and North Philadelphia. Namely, there is an underserved collection of neighborhoods, which have a deep connection (in some ways bad – gentrification – and in some ways good – jobs) to Temple, and an entire crew of student journalists, professors and other smart people.

Why universities generally should give a hoot about covering its community:

• Relationships: Big universities have a long history of lacking support from the communities that surround them, despite being important jobs creators, covering surrounding neighborhoods can go a long way to sure up its connections with local leaders and residents.
• Communication: With faltering college newspapers, shrinking region-wide media coverage and in some colleges neighborhoods and towns (like for Temple), coverage is not being answered by the market. Universities want their stories told though, and, with journalistic oversight, they can be.
• Student Development: You want to get your students the best real-life experience you can? Don’t ship them down to a newspaper, walk them into a vibrant, hybrid journalism experimentation lab on your campus.
• Faculty Development: Keep them in the game by giving them resources to stay involved in the evolving conversation by consulting, working, reporting, editing or otherwise overseeing your initiative.
• Mission: Connecting with its community, educating and informing and all that good stuff surely fits a university’s mission.
• Funding: Between public affairs grants, foundation support, private philanthropy and everything that can come with incubating journalism, news and journalism can make money.

What the Temple situation might look like:

• As I’ve written before: It’s a bottom line-focused nonprofit that houses, supports and promotes for-profit ventures in news and information, in addition to public affairs-oriented nonprofit journalism. It has branding and a major landing page focused on data warehousing and partnerships.
• Though fiscally housed at a Temple institute, great pains would need to be made to differentiate and protect it from administration oversight.
• North Philadelphia newsroom: In addition to housing and bolstering news from throughout the region, Temple would host an editor and a paid reporter or two focusing on its part of the city, North Philadelphia, among Philadelphia’s poorest and blackest. While talking about incubating news and growing community coverage, I always thought Temple would be the tool to grow news-making in a commercial-poor (and therefore revenue short) section of an urban environment.
• Cross-departmental institute: This year, a journalism department-housed, cross-discipline institute will be funded by the William Penn Foundation to consolidate valuable resources, incubate other news programs and host educational and training events. That institute would fit house its North Philly newsroom.
• Hyperlocal reporting: Right now, Temple’s noted Philadelphia Neighborhoods program puts its students throughout the city. I’d propose two options for these students: work with existing niche or hyperlocal news sites or join the university’s robust North Philadelphia reporting team for a semester, before making it a year-long program to keep the students on for a bit longer to get to know the neighborhoods.
• College Newspaper as Vehicle: Like every newspaper should, Temple would sit down with The Temple News and have some real talk. When I was there, I talked about our paper having five audiences: (a) students, (b) faculty (c) staff (d) alumni and (e) community members. I wanted our paper to read more like a community newspaper, covering a part of the city. As TTN and other print college newspapers fight with the reality, its resources should be used as a mechanism to reach non-web-literate communities. Some sort of distribution model would be made, in which the university’s North Philadelphia newsroom content would run in the existing college newspaper.

The J-Lab Institute for Interactive Journalism held a pre-conference called ‘Fund My Media’ before the launch of the Online News Association annual conference Thursday.

Building on last year’s pre-conference before the ONA national event in San Francisco, the morning of discussions, speakers and panels were decidedly focused on keeping online editorial products alive: from foundation support, to events to other for-profit revenue. The event preceded the ONA conference held today and tomorrow.

You can watch the archived livestream of the morning’s sessions here.

Full Disclosure: In conjunction with the J-Lab Networked Journalism Collaborative project and funded by the William Penn Foundation, the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning has generously sponsored and supported my attendance here.

Yesterday’s ‘Fund My Media’ morning series of sessions were inventive and practical. Jan Schaffer and crew put together a rich, insightful, varied and fast moving event. It was a pleasure.

I shared a slew of thoughts, which I think will be updated, but here are some first thoughts for those who weren’t as fortunate to attend, and perhaps even those who have:

Legal Heads Up: What you need to know to start a nonprofit news site.

David Ardia – Director, Citizen Media Law Project, Berkman Center, Harvard University

• There was an even split between the couple hundred of those in attendance between those of whom were running for profit and those running nonprofit news sites, with hands raised.
• “Nonprofit law is finding its way in a new media world,” said David Ardia of Citizen Media Law Project.

Launching With Little: Building A News Site from Scratch

Susan Mernit – Founder, Oakland (Calif.) Local; Tom Ferrick – Founder, Metropolis, Phila., Pa; David Boraks – Founder and Editor, DavidsonNews.net, Davidson, N.C.

• More user interaction happens on Facebook than site, said Oakland Local’s Susan Mernit. Same as NEast Philly.
• Big investigative stories and quick posts are trafficked, not “middle layer” of longer, single or limited source features, said Oakland Local.
• In 2002, former Inquirer columnist Tom Ferrick wrote a memo to the then-web team suggesting a “How do I…” section of Philly.com, he said.
• The Philadelphia Inquirer had 624 editorial employees in 2000 and 330 now, said Tom Ferrick.
• “If you don’t ask, they won’t give” said David Boraks of DavidsonNews.net. Eight to ten percent of readers donate.
• DavidsonNews.net brings in $5k-$10k a month in revenue after four years. Looking for investment to grow into other cities, Boraks said.
• “Journalism is an entrepreneurial venture,” said David Boraks.

Breaking into the World of Foundation Grants

Jim Cutie – Chief Operating Officer, CT Mirror; John Mooney – Founding Editor, NJ Spotlight

• Foundations and corporate backers give money and credibility to niche, hyperlocal and other online sites, said John.
• CTMirror.com has seven reporters, an editor, a board and management. That means great editorial wall but lots of overhead, I thought.
• CT Mirror has a $700k annual budget with one editor and seven reporters and NJ Spotlight has a $400k annual budget with three full-timers and other staff, they said.
• Foundations look for serious diverse revenue model by year three, said Jim Cutie of CT Mirror.

Building your Site Through Other Revenue

Ben Ilfeld – Owner and COO, Sacramento Press; David Cohn – Founder and Director, Spot.Us

• “The advertiser always loses” said Ben Ilfeld, if a site that is part of their SLOAN ad network writes something that turns off a sponsor.
• David Cohn and Ben Ilfeld both talked about their projects being a small part of partner site revenue
• Adify is “the only solution” for a true ad network, said Ben Ilfeld, but it is only justified if making $10k monthly.

Keynote Speaker: Evan A. Smith, CEO and Editor of Texas Tribune

• “The for profit model won’t pay for public interest journalism,” he said.
• “Hire great people, use great technology and get ‘dem boots on the ground,” he said.
• Finally, he shared a revenue and content partnership with the New York Times, sharing a screenshot before it ran today.

News-gathering can be profitable — there are oodles of examples of them. The challenge is taking those dollars to create the most efficiently-produced local journalism.

The big solution and sure trend of the future is fostering a community that covers itself.

So I’ve been thrilled to see that NEast Philly, the year-old, hyperlocal news site for Northeast Philadelphia to which I contribute and handle Web operations, has been slowly receiving more reader submissions. Lately, Editor Shannon McDonald tells me she’s receiving an item or two a week from readers.

We’ve been encouraging readers to send in photos, brief write-ups of their community events and any other kind of reporting that anyone can do. It’s coming, but still most comes from McDonald tracking down information, submissions and contacts.

I’m one to describe this as ‘UGC‘ — user-generated content — and have been known to use the phrase “citizen journalism.” After doing so once more, I was pointed to a few dated conversations about just how dated that phrase might be, and I have some thoughts on why it’s a concept that still has value.

That older, yet still interesting conversation from this summer came from the always insightful Spot.Us founder David Cohn and was predated in 2006 by Amy Gahran.

WHY WE’LL LOSE ‘CITIZEN JOURNALISM’ THE PHRASE

The take is this: ‘citizen journalism’ the phrase is like ‘horseless carriage,’ which described cars in their nascence.

As Cohn writes:

Our culture was so fixated on the horse for transportation that when we found something that got us from place A to place B, we had to define it as something that did a horses’ job – without the horse. The “horseless carriage” term was perfect for that transition phase [Source].

Likewise, the thinking goes, we are so used to using the word ‘journalist’ for people who are paid to investigate, report and write our news full-time that as the Web reduced publishing costs and opened up opportunities for anyone to be a journalist that we needed a new term.

Citizen journalism was born, but, as most speculate, like ‘horseless carriage,’ we’ll soon enough probably drop the qualifier. It will just be journalism.

Bright and young Cody Brown made a wonderful case for the future of news being largely handled by the public — someday. There were once professional drivers handling the once complicated work of using the new technology of driving. It was a position that was lost, and now most everyone is his own driver. So, soon, the professional journalist and citizen journalist distinctions will be lost, we say, and we’ll have just have journalists.

I can agree with all of this, that the public will play a larger and larger role in covering itself and that ‘citizen journalism’ will be seen soon enough as an awfully silly phrase.

MY BEEF WITH THE ARGUMENT

But there is a tendency in future of news conversations to race to the future. Whoever can guess what news will look like 2015 wins, er, unless you get to 2023, and anyone left behind loses.

The public will play an enormous role in the future, and this will make ‘citizen journalists’ probably just ‘journalists’ or perhaps something else.

But that’s not now.

McDonald from NEast Philly and others who specialize in their trade — whether they had any formal training or not doesn’t matter, if I focus my time plumbing then I am a damn plumber — still have to curate this conversation on news sites or through social media. They are collecting, selecting, editing, and normalizing how this will happen in the future.

We can mock CNN’s iReport or other vaunted phrasings of ‘citizen journalism’ but people outside this conversation on the future of news don’t all understand our expectations for the future, just like folks didn’t understand what an automobile was in the early 20th century.

We still need the professional drivers, so we still have horseless carriages.

Yo, the video below from a San Francisco trolley in 1905 has all sorts of horseless carriages, which interact with actual horse-driven carriages. We had both, so we had to make the distinction. Similarly, today we have plenty of professional and plenty of independent journalists, so we need the distinction now.

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.