In all of regions, there is a great need to envision the future of the metro newsroom, which feature smart, engaged reporters on a variety of beats able to work together to better inform other residents and keep government honest.

In a fractured media ecosystem, the newsroom of the future is coworking for independent media. Reporters and editors together — freelance, niche sites and more — sharing and pushing forward the coverage and conversation among news creators in a given market.

I submitted a Knight News Challenge grant application on that very subject. See it here or on Google Docs here.

It wasn’t accepted, so that may slow the implementation of this, but I’ll work on it regardless.

I’ve been turned down by the News Challenge before.

In 2009, my colleagues and I submitted a business services pitch that was, though well founded, too large and convoluted to carry much weight. By the time it was re-formed as News Inkubator, it included something like this new pitch. Then again in 2010, we submitted a pitch for a shared community director called Cobblestone.

The third time just gives things a more rounded edge.

For news coworking, while others have talked about the idea, no one appears to be taking on the broad collaboration conversation with it. Launching an effort like this could tie into local chapters of ONA and Hacks/Hackers, it could bring the famed Pen & Pencil Club onto a more national stage and could be a chance to tell the long-tail story of Philadelphia journalism — maybe a historic directory like this and a museum of great work.

More to come on this.

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.

Meet Ph.ly, the local URL shortener and the curated weekly email that will make you a better Philadelphian.

Try the tool and add your email here.

Last week, we at Technically Media announced that we launched Ph.ly, which has two primary features.

1. URL shortener with a Philly focus — Try ph.ly/connect to see how domains can be shortened more beautifully and more relevantly.
2. Weekly curated email of the three biggest pieces of local journalism — If enough people add their emails to the list, we will curate the three most meaningful pieces of local news and information to allow more Philadelphians to more easily consume the best of all the region’s content creators. It’s a hope to create a common set of facts for Philadelphians. Perhaps it’s a model for other markets.

MinnPost CEO Joel Kramer has dinner with a collection of Philadelphia journalism stakeholders.

A small group of journalism practitioners in Philadelphia were treated with the chance to have dinner and throw questions at MinnPost CEO Joel Kramer Tuesday night. Kramer is the former publisher of the Minneapolis Start-Tribune and a frequent example of success in growing public affairs journalism online.

I was blessed to be among them and certainly took the chance to ask an array of questions about his efforts of building a statewide public policy news nonprofit that I haven’t seen answered in the considerable coverage of his efforts.

Among the celebrated local news representatives there was the newly named CEO of the local journalism institute at Temple, Neil Budde.

Though much more was handled in the 90-minute conversation that followed a public Q&A session that I heard was well-attended and lively, I wanted to share some notes I took out of this more intimate, though on-the-record, setting.

• “Quality journalism can’t be done in for profit because it’s a public good not consumer good. A journalism outfit can no more than a museum turn a great profit in the future.”
• MinnPost uses Acceptiva as its CRM to collect and manage donations.
• 20 percent of revenue comes from foundations, and at least a quarter comes from memberships, part of a diverse revenue stream that put them in the black in 2011. MinnPost offers no membership benefits at all because, as Kramer put it, “fulfillment is a huge pain.” He added that Minnesota public radio has more membership staff than his entire 18-person operation.
• Being on the MinnPost board requires ‘significant financial support,’ he said, and is a sought after board title. “Buzz is important, and that’s something that other efforts have failed to garner in their markets,” he said.
• Kramer has a rule of thumb: one-sixth of Minnesota’s adult population is the audience goal for public affairs news.
• For readers who come more than four times a month to a site there is a big jump in memberships, though most users don’t donate across in all categories, even ‘intense users,’ he said.
• Commenters don’t want solicitations, and they’ve accused MinnPost of spam when they confused those channels of email signups.
• Donors (of all kinds, including members, presumably), are added to their email newsletters, as an opt-out feature. They are solicitated consistently.
• MinnPost has 3,000 donors, compared with 120k at their NPR affiliate. “Those 3,000 may likely donate to both.”
• “We don’t negotiate with advertisers,” he said. . They sell ads on a per week basis, on a per-share of the site audience (i.e. six sidebar square ads running and being served in rotated basis), not based on CPMs, but basically $12-$15 CPM rate.
• MinnPost is still having success with its real-time ads that made a lot of buzz a couple years ago.

• They have a $1.6 million annual budget, about $400k of which comes from ads. They started out with more than $1.2 million in capital before ever writing a story. It helped that Kramer was the former publisher of the Star-Tribune, so he came with considerable credibility and business acumen.
• MinnPost Has one FT adsales and just brought k another. 90 clients, the new one will take smaller 65
• Kramer and his wife do not take salaries, though Kramer says they are building into the model enough revenue that his successor would be able to be paid.
• They have a handful of editors and three staff writers, but the majority of their site content is created by contract writers who take on weekly contracts, allowing for their flexibility and MinnPost to keep them off benefits.
• “Beginners can’t do things the MinnPost way,” he says. “We want quality not comprehension,” so their site only covers what it has the staffing expertise to cover.
• In terms of output: 20 items a day, 8 real stories, others are wire and short items
• Sustaining memberships that have opt-in recurring charges are more than 70 percent retention and are what they pursue.

Ownership concerns be damned, the publisher of the largest news organization in one of the largest markets in the country needs to make a major shake up in company structure and output or face a continued decline.

The Philadelphia Media Network, owners of the city’s two daily newspapers and most trafficked news site, announced almost 40 more editorial layoffs and buyouts this month, prompting speculation of another sale. The perception of leadership at the paper has been seriously damaged with a growing number of reports of editorial interference, particularly around coverage of the potential sale, though they’ve happened before.

Fears have risen that an investor group led by former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell could be a biased fifth owner in six years for the company. News of what damage bias could do the organization has clouded the root frustration that the company is failing.

While ownership bias has dominated the coverage, I’m most concerned that no one whose news innovation vision garners much contemporary respect is at the organization’s helm. That’s what is most keeping rhythm to the slow drumbeat of expectations for failure that has been heralded for a decade.

Below, find some initial, broad thoughts on how the organization might be reshaped.

Remarkably in the less than a decade I have been in Philadelphia, I have watched four ownership structures come with brief periods of excitement and no bold change. Anything that has been announced this go-around has either been underwhelming — a sports-focused weekly edition, a suburban hyperlocal — or has looked not much more than a good press release — a stalled tablet initiative or a foundation-subsidized incubation effort.

[As always with Philadelphia media, there are too many disclosures to offer here. Just assume I have close relationships with people involved in all of these organizations I mention here.]

Even with more layoffs and further brand decline, institutional structure keeps PMN’s properties as among the most important in the region, but it cannot be overstated that without a dramatic shakeup, their relevance can and will continue to lessen.

Looking elsewhere in corners of the media landscape that have always been an afterthrought to the dominant daily newspapers, innovation stirs.

At public media outfit WHYY, its editorial team is trying to build a collaborative and hyperlocal space with its 18-month old NewsWorks initiative. At Philadelphia magazine, the century-plus-old city glossy is bolstering its web presence with the Huffington Post model — as many high profile contributors as it can manage. At the local NBC affiliate, its web and mobile strategy has earned it the largest online audience shy of philly.com. Circling its wagons in suburbs surrounding the city is the digital first effort at the Journal Register Company, and so a major partnership there could impact the region profoundly. Most other city-wide efforts fall far short of innovative, particularly among the local TV affiliates, though the co-ownership of CBS3 and news radio KYW has always been an opportunity.

In short, the ecosystem is evolving and no one can bet on the existence of a robust daily newspaper here forever.

The reason why Rendell’s PMN bidding-rival developer Bart Blatstein’s plans to launch a news organization to combat PMN seems a short-term fight, if plausible at all, is because with so much else already happening, the real strength of the daily papers and its dot com is longevity. Even if he already bought the building, Blatstein would not only have to compete with the daily newspapers but — lest he forget — the growing list of region-wide news efforts. PMN’s properties stay out front because they’ve been here so damn long that inertia alone has kept them relevant.

But that can’t be PMN’s defense forever.

In 2006, the Inquirer had an editorial staff of roughly 400. The Daily News was always considerably smaller, perhaps fewer than 100 at that time, and they went through another recent round of buyouts in October, with increasingly small perks. Staff numbers are hard to come by today, but with the continue decline, it may be fair to suggest that the two share a combined staff of fewer than 300. For comparison, the Inquirer alone, I’ve been told, had more than 600 reporters and editors as recent as the late 1990s, though I allow for some exaggeration.

There’s some understandable hand-wringing about the impact of these falling numbers and an imploding company, but the reality remains that sheer legacy will sustain this company’s properties for a time. And other efforts abound.

Without a dramatic change, it is without question that the organization will eventually die, or, to be more precise, cease to be the clear news leader in Philadelphia.

To shift that course, this is what the Philadelphia Media Network should publish:

• Philly.com: Run a lean hub site, as I’ve previously suggested, serving as an editorial fire hose, but also being home to compelling video content and content from the below sources.
  Staff of 50: Community managers, sales representatives, video producers, data specialists, web analysts
• Daily newspaper: Folding the staffs from both dailies and maintaining the Inquirer brand, the newspaper should further shed staff and focus on core areas (local and state politics, investigative, crime and business), in addition to heavily vetting and copyediting contributions from various independent and partner news outlets, in addition to individuals. The big voice still looms large, so they have an opportunity to be filled with rich content from a variety of sources, and profit against that. Reporters are plentiful, editors scarce.
  Staff of 150: Reporters, editors, copyeditors, designers, community managers, sales representatives
• Sports Weekly: Continue to publish and grow the sports-focused weekly paper that may likely sell well and drive longer-form sports reporting. If sensible, perhaps fold this and a broader feature push into a more robust Sunday paper product.
  Staff of 20: Reporters, columnists, editors, copyeditors, designers, community managers, sales representatives
• Incubator: Sure, they’ve launched it, so they should bolster their efforts to house and receive some revenue back from mentoring and partnering with media innovation startups.
  Staff of 5:
• Administration: managing the actual company, its building and staff.
  Staff of 20: administration, security, leadership, accounting, HR,

Of course, this would require significant bloodletting, major union concessions and reorganization, forced buyouts of older staff who have not evolved, a completely new vision of what its content looks like, who its partners are and what groups do what. In short, they are all things that won’t happen.

In 1947, a staff strike crippled a daily paper here called the Record and forced its sale. It wasn’t the first time in the long history of daily newspapers in Philadelphia. And I would expect it to happen again before something so dramatic were to happen today.

I am not predicting the collapse of the Inquirer. That would still surprise me. I am not predicting that the paper will become completely irrelevant. That would surprise me too.

If nothing bold happens, though, I do predict a slow, sad, muffled trend downward in impact, something most would argue has been happening for 20 years.

Big stories will still come out. But among all the outlets in the region, more and more of them will from time to time share the lead story of the day.

At a recent event at the NBC affiliate here, I asked a few of their staff members whether they thought the future would be more competitive — because media convergence would put everyone on the same playing field — or less competitive — because everyone will find a niche and largely partner. None had an answer, nor did they appear to have ever thought about the subject.

One can envision a PMN that looks more like a TV affiliate with much more serious reporting and resurgent impact. My fear is that no one involved in the actual ownership negotiation of the company even thinks to do so or has the will to ever make that happen.

More than a year ago, Steve Jobs spoke about the iPad and Apple’s broad role in touching publishing and journalism, during a broader interview at the D8 conference.

At 1:50 in the below video, watch highlights of Jobs talking about his relationship with news and follow the quote below.

“One of my beliefs, very strongly, is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press…. Some of these papers — news and editorial gathering organizations — are really important. I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers myself. I think we need editorial more than ever right now. Anything that we can do to help the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other news gathering organizations find new ways of expression so they can afford to get paid, so they can afford to keep their news gathering editorial operations in tact, I’m all for. What we have to do is figure out a way to get people to start paying for this hard earned content. So [the tablet industry] provides us an opportunity to offer something more than just a web page and to start charging something for that. I’m trying to get these folks to take more aggressive postures than what they traditionally charged for print because they don’t have the expenses of printing, they don’t have the expenses of delivery and to charge a reasonable price and go for volume. I think people are willing to pay for content.”

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.

Academic Clay Shirky tossed down another great post ahead of an undergraduate course he’s teaching at NYU. In the end, he calls for more chaos — more competitive approaches to creating meaning news for citizens, beyond news for consumers.

You ought to read the whole piece, but here are a couple of my favorite parts:

This system was never ideal—out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made—and long before Craig Newmark and Arianna Huffington began their reign of terror, Gannett and Scripps were pioneering debt-laden balance sheets, highly paid executives, and short-term profit-chasing. But even in their worst days, newspapers supported the minority of journalists reporting actual news, for the minority of citizens who cared. In return, the people who followed sports or celebrities, or clipped recipes and coupons, got to live in a town where the City Council was marginally less likely to be corrupt.

“There are only three things I’m sure of: News has to be subsidized, and it has to be cheap, and it has to be free.”

If we adopt the radical view that what seems to be happening is actually happening, then a crisis in reporting isn’t something that might take place in the future. A 30% reduction in newsroom staff, with more to come, means this is the crisis, right now. Any way of creating news that gets cost below income, however odd, is a good way, and any way that doesn’t, however hallowed, is bad.

Almost two years later, I read the entire Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age, the report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities.

Debuted in September 2009, I tackled the 80-page document for “the Hardly. Strictly. Young conference I attended in April at the University of Missouri, which was dedicated to brainstorming alternative recommendations for implementing that report.

Not a journalism-only report at all and backed by a year of conversation, outreach and testimony, I wanted to share my notes and thoughts on diving into the seminal report.

Executive Summary:

• The growth in access and benefit of greater information tools is happening unequally in the country
• Three objectives are necessary for more informed communities: (1) maximizing relevant and credible information, (2) strengthening the capacity for individuals to engage with information and (3) promoting individual engagement with information and the public life of the community
• “Journalistic institutions do not need saving so much as they need creating”
• The Commission ‘applauds’ the search for new business models to fund these efforts
• “The United States stands at what could be the beginning of a democratic renaissance”

Introduction:

• Most dramatic example of challenges: “Only 68 percent of households on Tribal lands have a telephone; only eight Tribes own and operate telephone companies; and broadband penetration on Indian lands is estimated at less than 10 percent.”
• Biggest promise: “Wireless devices may bring new services to the consumer at gigabit speeds with the next three-to-five years” [and the report is almost two years old]

Section One:

• Importance: “a 2008 MIT study found that members of Congress who are covered less by their local press work less for their constituencies, as evidenced by lower federal spending in their districts.”
• Problems in funding journalism: (1) “information creates what economists call ‘positive externalities,’ [t]hese are benefits from the public as a whole from which no individual can profit, and (2) ‘much information is also non-rivalrous,’ which means because sharing such information doesn’t reduce its quality, there is a natural free-rider problem
• “Beginning in the 18th century, the Posal Service subsidized the delivery of newspapers” [p. 16]
• Two kinds of information to be informed: (1) civic information to be aware and involved and (2) life-enhancing information to connect with services [23]
• Libraries, universities and nonprofits will fill these roles, including media literacy education and various information sources [26]
• ‘Local Nonprofits can also perform some journalistic functions ‘like the Silicon Valley Education Foundation that, in response to coverage drops from the San Jose Mercury News, made it a mission to ‘inform, inspire and involve’ [29]

Knight Recommendations

1. Direct Media policy toward innovation, competition and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.
   • “The journalism supported by marketplace incentives… is likely always to provide the lion’s share of original and verified reporting.” [33]
2. Increase support for public service media aimed at meeting community information needs.
   • “Public stations do not have a strong record of spearheading local investigative journalism, and most public radio broadcasters have little or no local news reporting staff.” [35]
3. Increase the role of high education, community and nonprofit institutions as hubs of journalistic activity and other information-sharing for local communities.
   • Nonprofits and foundations should fund ‘information portals’ and short-term fellowships to cover state and local government
4. Require government at all levels to operate transparently, facilitate easy and low-cost access to public records, and make civic and social data available in standardized formats that support the productive public use of such data.
   • “Make information available; people will find ways to use it productively.”
   • “In short, information should be available in ways that people can remix, mashup and circulate for private or public purposes.”
   • “Major technology companies could make an enormous contribution to the public interest by volunteering expertise and facilities that could help accomplish this ambitious objective.”
5. Develop systematic quality measures of community information ecologies, and study how they affect social outcomes.
   • The Knight Commission provided an Information Community checklist, which one of the groups wanted software tool for

Questions I still have:

• What percentage of Americans would engage and consume news if it was perfectly tailored, personalized, delivered and engaging? I’m not sure we can truly engage everyone as ignorance is one the privileges of a functioning democracy.

A friend recently told me that everyone should have at least one good analogy every few months.

He’s already heard my Journalism needs a catering business spiel, in which I suggest meaningful, public affairs reporting needs to be an audience or reputation grower for something more profitable. That is, if journalism is the low yield equivalent to a coffee shop, to really succeed, it needs a back-end catering service that really supports sustainability.

So I returned to another I tried passing: movie theaters don’t necessarily need more people in the seats, they need more people in the seats buying snacks. Because, the thinking goes (though hell if I actually know this to be true) that snacks and soda are much more profitable than your movie ticket. News needs to make more on the popcorn.

Meaning, simply chasing more eyeballs for more advertising hasn’t felt like a real strategy to me for at least a couple years now. Instead, we should be curating audiences of greater value, who are more engaged and, one way or another, help fund our work.

Technically Philly does about 22,000 unique monthly visitors, which is a fine number but nothing any big player would take notice of. But in that raw number, we are cultivating a community that comes to events [that attract sponsors], hires people within the community [and pays to use our jobs board] and, we think, will be interested in some form of membership that will offer free access to these and other opportunities [that help support the service we provide our engaged community]. In turn, we even fine haven’t an engaged and connected community has brought in some passive advertising [and resulted in actually successful campaigns] and other related funds.

Getting more people in our theater is great — and as we build community that is happening — but a bigger audience isn’t as interesting to us as a more loyal, more engaged audience, preferably one with popcorn.