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.

Creating a bold and serious collaborative niche membership network with existing and emerging independent media should be a primary objective of WHYY, the Delaware Valley public media organization.

Highlighted by its six-month-old NewsWorks online news site and hyperlocal news experiment, WHYY has attempted to recast itself as something more than a stodgy PBS TV channel and NPR radio affiliate. While progress has surely been made, WHYY is short of being as fully integrated and networked as the ‘public media’ nomenclature might suggest.

Whereas Philly.com is driven primarily by eyeballs and so its strategy should reflect that by becoming a truly comprehensive portal for the region, WHYY is ‘member-supported public media,’ so its driving focus (and its relationship with Philly.com) should reflect that. I’m not entirely sure that’s the case just yet.

First, I’m a true fan of WHYY’s NewsWorks initiative, if only because it is a new experiment in engaged, local online news taking into account many of the web-first strategies of native users, like linking out, audience participation and agility. Second, I don’t drive terribly often, but when I do and my favorite country music radio station is on commercial, I tune to WHYY. Thirdly, I am neither two years old nor am I 70 years old, so I’m not sure I have ever watched WHYY Channel 12 on TV ever.

[Full disclosure, as usual when it comes to Philadelphia media, I am quite close with many involved with this initiative, so I have neither objectivity nor distance.]

OBJECTIVES

So, if I were to devise a strategic plan for WHYY, here would be my three primary objectives:

1. Highlight strategic partners for collaborative membership growth – By offering technology, experience and perhaps sales support, WHYY could grow its own members, while developing some of the resources that should otherwise fall to the proposed PPIIN.
2. Better integrate TV, radio and the web to reflect the singular WHYY brand — To share the resources, branding and audience of the various platforms
3. Create and support bold, creative local content — Using its varied platforms, big reach

ACTION

To make good on those objectives, I’d investigate the following deliverables for each.

HIGHLIGHT STRATEGIC PARTNERS

• Find interested, relevant niche communities with a clear news source whose readers fit the WHYY profile of educated, civic-minded Philadelphians — There are ample places to start: Technically Philly, PlanPhilly, Public School Notebook, Grid magazine, NEast Philly, Geekadelphia, NJ Spotlight, Young Involved Philadelphia, Broad Street Review, Philly Beer Scene, Philly Sports Daily, the art blog, the Key at partner station XPN, National Constitution Center, Campus Philly, Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, Committee of Seventy, Metropolis
• Work with these select partners on membership sales, price points and objectives — They might teach you something too, you probably could get a big fat grant for helping develop independent media and, in the end, it should help you bolster your own members.
• Develop and/or host and share widgetized membership sales, tracking and outreach CRM –  So all of these participating strategic partners could host on their own websites membership sales mechanism. Say, an individual annual membership for Technically Philly would be $100 and for a reduced price of — I don’t know — $50, that individual could also be an WHYY member, with additional benefits. If TP has 500 members and just 10 percent opt in for WHYY, the revenue might not be large in the individual case, but the lead generation is valuable and the scale across partners should begin to be beneficial.
• Membership and cross-platform directory build out — Offer the technology and shared sales and follow up resources for niche sites to have a membership platform, that could fit into customizable directory pages, which would be populated by all tagged content, like this Knight application of ours. [Unless WHYY could get to this]
• Advertising network — I wrote that I don’t think the traffic would be meaningful enough for Philly.com to make this happen, but I think there’s a real build here WHYY, if PPIIN doesn’t get there first, to additionally benefit its own NewsWorks initiative.
• Event Partnering — As WHYY did with TP for Philly Tech Week, there would seem to be a very wise move to make around co-branded events with these strategic partners and their niche communities, in order to grow leads for paid events, bring in sponsorship revenue or the like.
• Content partnerships — With developed support around membership, it’d likely be easier to develop more content partnerships, like the It’s Our Money project with the Daily News, co-branded long-form reporting, partnerships around sharing or pushing content and the like, much of which could bolster NewsWorks.

BETTER INTEGRATE PLATFORMS

• Redesign WHYY.org and its brand message– Honestly, you don’t even need to redesign it, for costs concern, it just needs a clear strategy and to be cleaned up. Much like NewsWorks, the site is just silly with boxes and choices. Why does someone go to WHYY? How is that different than NewsWorks? What are the calls to action and can we please drop the rest?
• NewsWorks Tonight Live — WHYY launched this Monday a daily local half-hour of drive-time radio called NewsWorks Tonight, which I think is a great concept, particularly because it was immediately podcasted so they’re paying attention to the slow decline of terrestrial radio. But with killer event space, at least quarterly, there should be a bigger, cooler live show, with on-air personalities giving news live, interviews live, with a live studio audience, live music, all of which is podcasted. Maybe only members can get in, surely strategic partners from above should lead the charge. Film the thing and put it on your TV channel. Then podcast the audio and stream the video online.
• Move the stars across platforms — It’s good to see your noted political writer Dave Davies on radio and online, but I’m always interested in seeing more of your staff take to more, like why not video when that fits.
• NewsWorks Tonight features — I’m likely more interested by this big jump into local news programming than the NewsWorks overall, so I’d like to see it driven. Thanks for the podcast and, as noted above, it’s good to hear a development of talent, but I’ll say that in creating community online (and I’d bet radio isn’t so different) it helps, if only in the beginning, to stake out some regular features, to help fill content holes and to welcome in listeners (who had previously been hearing national news so are surely apprehensive). Fortunately, NewsWorks.org is silly with branding, so, please, don’t create any others. The Feed, which is the top portion of the site that points to the biggest stories around the region regardless of content provider and pushes engagement, could be a weekly roundup of the best (funniest, most interesting or insightful) comments on social media, emails or the like from readers, to encourage more interaction by shouting people out. MindMap, something of a reader questionnaire, could be done in an audio format to introduce us to Philadelphians (of every race, position and direction, from interviewing someone in a crane working on a new Center City condo to a state policeman).
• Where is all the multimedia? — For an organization that as a TV station, a radio station, a dozen audio reporters and all the tools, I sure don’t see the type of seamless integration of media that I would expect online or elsewhere.

Watch below an example of WHYY doing a great job of getting video content, in this case, incumbent City Councilman Jim Kenney talking about the Democratic primary election who came close to getting knocked off the November ballot

CREATE AND SUPPORT MORE BOLD, LOCAL CONTENT

• Do something crazy and create local TV content — Take a one-hour block of  your worst performing late night programming and create something interesting experimental. Maybe leverage your strategic partners from above for a rotating block of niche-orientated discoveries of what the region has to offer. Perhaps create a contest for what the programming should be: long-form interviews, local politics. Could you create a local brand? Again, it’s all podcasted online with streaming video and the like. Maybe do it live again with a studio audience.
• Lead the public access TV charge online — Look, truth be told, I don’t really know the difference between groups like MiND TV and Philly CAM. And I know Scribe video and this new Comcast Project Open Voices is interested in local video. So shouldn’t you be the leader among them all? Create ways to share content, or grow or promote the best. Is there no relationship to be had with the various film festivals here?
• Help grow local niche communities – If they prosper, they can become strategic partners like the ones above, so they should be as friends, not foes. If you can’t do it, then help those who can and see them as friends, like, say, CenterCityLocal.
• Partner with anyone creating cool content — With the web and other platforms, you have an opportunity to brand yourself as way cool. I host a storytelling event and there are far better, cooler ones, like the FirstPerson Story Slam, so why aren’t they partners of yours to record a live show and share on NewsWorks? Why aren’t you partnered with the Philly Youth Poetry Movement or anyone else in the region that is creating cool content? All these groups are recording this stuff already on their own, so start sharing the best of them. Help me find cool new podcasts or web series through you. Events in your great space and then record great audio and video and use it as content. Repeat.
• Be a friend to the community weeklies — Public media is always concerned about ignoring underserved communities. A great way to grow this might be to do something cool like, say, host the latest PDF covers, like the Newseum does for national newspapers. Offer select services, like web hosting, static templates (if they don’t have websites or want new ones) all for a nominal charge. You might do the same for high school (and college?) newspapers.
• Support your media literacy training — Your grant funded work to offer training to the community is great. How would that fit with the community weekly push from above? Connect these newly trained community members with neighborhood news orgs, empower new creators. This fits your mission, and, sure, maybe there could be select discounted memberships to shape a more diverse support base. You should be the umbrella of all media literacy groups in the region. They should all come to your sweet space and see you as the real leader.

Why isn’t WHYY partnering with the Youth Poetry Movement to record, raise funding for and share beautiful work like what you can watch below.

Broader thoughts:

• You’re the good guy — Never forget that the brand of public media is meant to be community-orientated and thoughtful and, yes, cool, if you make it so. You’re also set up with diverse revenue and varied platform integration. You have all the tools to be the leader.
• You are not competing with Philly.com — Every morning wake up and tell yourself that. Give really insightful, unique, deep analysis in a local way in the same way that NPR has rejuvenated its interested young listeners by being web-savvy, sexy and incredibly deep. That can grow eyeballs to the online site, particularly with the help of the dedicated radio programming. So, without that competition, no need for a beef
• Philadelphia can support innovation — Philadelphia does not have a lot of recent examples of innovation in media. So start something. Remind yourself that Philadelphia is a big market and so can have really bold examples. Do something thrilling and risky and set the tone.
• You’re not the leader — Don’t forget that public media across the country has consistently failed to lead the news and information conversation but rather lag behind, albeit often with deeper context. That said, let that light a fire under you and strive to be bigger and better.
• Let the people hear you — As noted above, I’m stunned I don’t see more multimedia — video, audio, photos — from such a multi-tiered news organization. Rather than recreate a proprietary video host, I’m cool with videos going to YouTube so they can at least get embedded (though regional site Viddler helps with branding) but your premiere local product is radio, yet you don’t post much of it and I can’t embed it elsewhere when you do.
Number of Views:294 ]]> http://christopherwink.com/2011/05/20/whyy-newsworks-and-other-thoughts-on-what-the-public-media-org-should-be/feed/ 3 http://christopherwink.com/2011/05/09/do-news-orgs-have-a-responsibility-for-action-notes-from-bcni-2011/ http://christopherwink.com/2011/05/09/do-news-orgs-have-a-responsibility-for-action-notes-from-bcni-2011/#comments Mon, 09 May 2011 13:30:48 +0000 Christopher Wink http://christopherwink.com/?p=6769

Do news organizations have responsibility for their outcome?

That became the final and, I think, as yet unanswered close to a discussion I led during the final session of the third national BarCamp NewsInnovation, held Saturday April 30 at Temple University and rounding out the inaugural Philly Tech Week. [See past BCNI write ups here.]

Overall I felt this BCNI, with some 150 attendees from startup shops and some serious brands, featured more sessions that embodied that unconference spirit in being less presentation and more dialogue, something I don’t think I felt in the past. I was also interested to see the true step forward past social media and other tools and into sustainability, which I find to be a far more important place to be.

To that end and coming off Philly Tech Week, without preparation, I proposed a session in the day’s final hour: “A conversation on news as a convener.”



The TBD.com audience in the same room as my session, which followed.

Maybe 10 or 15 attendees, left in the day’s waning schedule, came — including former McClatchy Vice President Howard Weaver, Politico deputy editor Dan Hirschorn, freelancer and rabble rouser Amy Z Quinn, Philly.com producer Dan Victor, JLab editorial director Andrew Pergam [Full Disclosure: JLab is funding the Technically Philly Broadband2035 project] and other brilliant people — without much promised. All told, I think the hour conversation went somewhere.

The premise was that ?Technically Philly is a news site and so we build audience with content, but, as prominently evidenced by Tech Week, we’re moving rapidly into the space as convener in the more traditional sense of bringing people together in a room.

The ladder we seemed to follow:

1. Is it a news organization’s role to host (and profit, through tickets and sponsorships) events?: The answer from the crowd was a resounding yes, suggesting this was hardly a new concept.
2. Is it ethical for convening to lead to action?: I recently wrote about how I believe news organizations in the future will have to engage and act, but I was interested to hear this group’s take. With the help of my colleague Brian James Kirk, who joined the discussion, we shared my meeting with the City Planning Commission and first encouraging a dialogue around broadband in their citywide planning report, which followed a grant outcome of the aforementioned JLab grant project. We then encouraged the commission to have a lunchtime even to highlight the innovations in their plan to the tech community, which pushed on broadband and technology focuses. That and other stories shared, the group landed firmly on this being the age of ‘transparency, not objectivity,’ so that our editorial perspective was in line with our mission so provided that we disclose and share these conversations, it’s not only honest, it’s important.
3. Then, I queried the group: Do news organizations have a responsibility for action?: I brought up that infamous June 8, 2004 Times-Picayune stalled levee reconstruction story, that predated the disaster that followed Hurricane Katrina. In the future, if not today, should the Times-Pic take greater responsibility on pushing on something its reporting shows could be so dangerous? For so long, it feels as if the role of news was to point out what was happening and let others make action, perhaps going so far as offering the spotlight to help the cause, but I’m not sure I believe that’s enough anymore, particularly when the web makes it so much easier to disclose (like when I went to a lunch with local ACLU leaders). Here is where the group split, though it did seem like many (Weaver and Quinn pragmatically, and Hirschorn emphatically) tended to feel it’s untenable for news to also serve as actors, if only in a convening manner.

I’m not so sure, but I feel like this conversation was elevated for me after the session. So thanks for all who attended!



Wall Street Journal's Zach Seward leading group session on social media ROI and metrics.

Other sessions I attended: See the full schedule here.

[Full Disclosure: I have close relationships with just about everyone who presents at BCNI, so, you know, nothing here is coming without that perspective.]

• 10 a.m.: I was helping to make sure things were in order with the Open Gov Hackathon presented Tropo, which ran all day
• 11 a.m.: Finding a business model for hyperlocal (led by Tedd Mann, Gannet) — Early, the conversation dragged, but as people got more acclimated, I felt the last 15 minutes were productive. Joined by Ben Ilfeld from the Sacramento Press, Mann from Gannet, Chris Grant from Joystiq, Wendy Warren from Philly.com and others, I found myself in a group that was embracing the concept that news had to move past advertising, a concept I floated (with considerably less evidence and experience) in the same room, at the same event, in 2009. Now it was accepted and we had the experience to share: events, sponsorships, consulting and otherwise finding new ways to leverage audience. I shared my focus that news organizations need to find their ‘catering business.’
• 12:30 p.m.: Zach Seward group session on social media metrics and ROI — The group session, depicted above, was new and served as the end of lunch. Zach is bright and detail orientated, so he left us with a lot to mull over, sharing details from the Wall Street Journal. Most prominently: more followers does not mean more click throughs, which, perhaps more than engagement, can be a trackable end.
• 1:10 p.m.: Lessons from TBD: Dan Victor and team — I left very focused on the fact that this prominent D.C. experiment in online news was given only six months before the plug was largely pulled. We didn’t get to get the real lessons that we could  have out of this initiative.
• 2:10 p.m.: Come help Philly.com — Philly.com Vice President Wendy Warren and new community engagement leader Dan Victor, who also led the previous TBD session, opened up a dialogue on how to push Philly.com forward. I wished the group attending was larger and had fewer insiders (a handful of former Philly Media Network heads for example) so there could have been a more honest back and forth. I shared some thoughts and the overall tenor seemed to settle on three things: be more open (share), be more serious (fewer ‘photos with boobs,’ as Warren said) and be more relevant (personalize). I’m working on a more detailed post on my thoughts here.
• 3:10 p.m.: Reshaping public media online with NewsWorks from WHYY — A session led by Shannon McDonald, with some perspective in the audience from her boss Chris Satullo, I was interested to hear an update from the roughly six-month-old online news experiment from this region’s NPR affiliate and public media hub. All in all, it’s an interesting project — built from the ground up, often linking out generously, fostering interactivity and featuring hyperlocal deep dives — but it’s actually quite new to have many big lessons, just six months. Satullo said they have the funding for at least two years, which seems much more promising than what TBD got (a bit more than six months). They did share traffic numbers, as can be seen below, showing a spike from 69,000 unique visitors in December 2010 after launch to 170,000 unique visitors in April. That’s good growth for starting from scratch — the numbers, of course, don’t include existing WHYY.org — but for the powerful, regional, general interest impact they surely want those numbers to continue to spike quickly, without cheating with cheap content. No easy measure.
• 4:10 p.m.: Conversation on News as Convener — The session I led.
• 5-5:30 p.m.: Closing — My colleague Sean Blanda addressed those left, had title sponsor Center for Public Interest Journalism chief Tom Jacobsen speak about the initiative, unveiled the hackathon projects and kicked everyone out for the after party, with free booze and food (thanks to CPIJ) at local college bar Draught Horse.


Traffic numbers for NewsWorks.org, shared during BCNI 2011 presentation April 30. As noted during the presentation, see that one of the top search terms is 'slabbers,' which is one of their more outgoing freelance photographers, who is constantly promoting the site while taking photos.

 

Outcomes:

• We held a hackathon during a journalism conference, encouraging interaction
• A group of hackers scrapped city data to create a tool that allows property searches in Philadelphia to happen by name, a project suggested by an attending journalist.
• We held the first group session, led by Zach Seward, as described above, bringing all the attendees together over lunch.
• The Inquirer previewed BCNI in print and then followed up the event with the giggle-worthy headline of ‘Bloggers, other gather.’
• Daniel Bachhuber wrote up a bit more on their conversation of a ‘Github for News.’
• As in the past, we got old journalists and new, students and practitioners, Philadelphians and not, web-first and print heavy, all in a room, talking about moving forward the practice with real results and examples.


The Hackathon crew watching their projects be unveiled.

Take Aways:

 

• This was the first BCNI we organized as full-time employees of Technically Media, our business that formally organized the event. …Any extra time and effort that would have afforded us, we took away and had less because of the overall Philly Tech Week.
• Thank goodness we baked in the 10-minute intervals between sessions, which is an obvious, important step.
• Name tags and whatever else to help foster new introductions, perhaps at the beginning of sessions, as we got some strong thoughts from @purplecar that there wasn’t enough mixing.


After party at the Draught Horse. This was the first year we had the sponsorship support to offer free booze and food.

Some of my favorite #bcniphilly tweets:


• “Is it just me, or are folks in Philly really, really friendly?” @phillipadsmith
• This year’s #bcniphilly was even more awesome than last. Brilliant group of people. Props to those who made it happen. @danielbachhuber
• Feeling like a part of something @bcniphilly. @Brydels
• @christopherwink real talk in p.m. posed good questions @ how and why we do what we do. @AmyZQuinn
• Been doing that “add + to the end of bit.ly links to track hits” thing a lot since @zseward showed us at #bcniphilly. Fascinating. @DSMacLeod
• Sounds like #bcniphilly is the place to be this morning! @brianboyer
• “Everyone in the newsroom should be thinking about community engagement, every moment they’re reporting.” – @TBD folk @elizakern
• Flash ads have no place in the future of journalism. @danielbachhuber
• Pick a language that someone you know knows well and is nice enough that you can bug them with inane questions, says @albertsun @greglinch
• I remember at the first #bcniphilly, in 2009, it was a trending topic on Twitter. Oh, how times change …  @pazzypunk
• Very little success with ad networks in the room too. Experiments, but mostly failures. @danielbachhuber
• Key takeaway: For anything, define what success is beforehand. It’s much easier to figure out when you’ve hit it. @danielbachhuber
• Zach Seward @wsj #bcniphilly: many followers don’t actually exist; therefore, more analytics value in clicked links  @sejorg
• @zseward: “there’s mo correlation between the vast reach that an account seems to have and the actual reach.”  @DSMacLeod
• One TBD lesson: you can’t ignore the big beats just cause the big boys own them. CIty Hall is still City Hall  @pkerkstra
• Raymond Williams: “There are no masses. There are only ways of seeing people as masses.” via @zseward @BradyDale
• “The colon is a very subtle call to action.” – @zseward on theories of retweetability @elizakern
• Sacramento Press also does social media consulting, website building as a side business — 1/3 of their revenue.  @DSMacLeod
• it takes about 18 months for a blog to start sustaining regular traffic. @charingball
• Sacramento Press does social media consulting, because that’s what they’re good at. Sell what you’re good at. @bydanielvictor
• My new Twitter strategy: Don’t give away the milk for free (in a tweet). Make them buy the cow (by clicking the link). @BurbsAndBeyond
• TBD saw itself as a news org to cover the whole metro with only 8 reporters. What an uphill battle. @benilfeld
• @zseward: Good news spreads faster on Facebook because of the “like” button. Bad news spreads well on Twitter.  @DSMacLeod
• I like this idea of “showing your work” in journalism (like you do with your algebra homework). @pazzypunk
Number of Views:427 ]]> http://christopherwink.com/2011/05/09/do-news-orgs-have-a-responsibility-for-action-notes-from-bcni-2011/feed/ 1 http://christopherwink.com/2011/04/20/hardly-strictly-young-roundtable-alternative-knight-commission-recommendations/ http://christopherwink.com/2011/04/20/hardly-strictly-young-roundtable-alternative-knight-commission-recommendations/#comments Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:19:08 +0000 Christopher Wink http://christopherwink.com/?p=6715

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.
Catsignal

View more presentations from Matthew Thompson

View more presentations from Matthew Thompson

 

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
Number of Views:483 ]]> http://christopherwink.com/2011/04/20/hardly-strictly-young-roundtable-alternative-knight-commission-recommendations/feed/ 10 http://christopherwink.com/2011/04/18/five-criteria-for-the-flourishing-of-news-entities-of-the-future/ http://christopherwink.com/2011/04/18/five-criteria-for-the-flourishing-of-news-entities-of-the-future/#comments Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:30:13 +0000 Christopher Wink http://christopherwink.com/?p=6520

Late at a bar in my neighborhood, a friend asked me: how are you innovative?

His general assessment was that Technically Media, a consultancy, and Technically Philly, a news site, weren’t particularly innovative or interesting for 2011. We’re an online-based startup of 20-somethings creating journalism-fueled content. That might barley bass for envelope-pushing in the late 1990s.

Sure, we think editorial strategy — in which all organizations create content to build audience to have impact — is interesting, and that’s a big part of what we’re doing, but I wasn’t satisfied.

So I’m going to share what I came to: the five criteria of news entities of the future.

Upon greater review and conversation, I think there are five areas we as a company are moving toward, as are others, that makes interesting again the conversation among news producers. It’s worth noting, that though I cherish greatly lessons from the old vanguard of journalism, this is something largely unrecognizable there.

Five criteria for news entities of the future:

1. Content — News, information and, yes, even journalism builds audience. Have an audience — loyal and targeted or of relatively large size — and you have impact, when you can move them to action. [Audience building]
2. Data — Metrics on audience, influential data regarding your coverage/mission, tools that utilize these and other subjects to influence action will be incredibly key. The battle for data is underway. [i.e. working with city data and collecting your own]
3. Engagement –News needs its audience to act. This will mean getting people into a room for events, to learn, to interact, to bring about change and action, and to help fund it all. It also means recognizing that everyone is a content creator and the only value of a news entity is to curate and create bigger audience. (In truth, even that middle man role will likely be lost, but it will carry on longer for sure) [i.e. Convening a major, region-wide collaborative series of events around your community]
4. Action — My friend asked: “Did the newspapers coverage of impropriety change it?” No, then there is no real impact there. News entities of the future must spearhead action to improve their communities, whether it be through existing mission or organizing an audience or leveraging its voice. [Pushing forward what city data will come out in addition to coverage]
5. Mission — This is where Technically Media fits, in that I believe most any organization of influence should be interested in this space of audience building. But still, even news entities from other veins will need a clear mission to have an impact. The un-impassioned doesn’t build audience in a competitive environment, and it also doesn’t make our communities a better place to live and that has to be relevant again. [What is your purpose?]
6. (Sustainability) — This seems to almost go without saying, so I didn’t list it, but yes, news will need a strategy to succeed and sustain. Diverse and different revenue streams for each, from shared foundation  support, to memberships, and events and related work and tools and so many more I don’t even recognize yet. I want to stress that I don’t think this is what is new anymore, these methods are there, it just involves breaking down barriers of the past. Indeed, we just need to find the catering business to every news entity.
Number of Views:314 ]]> http://christopherwink.com/2011/04/18/five-criteria-for-the-flourishing-of-news-entities-of-the-future/feed/ 1 http://christopherwink.com/2011/03/21/why-print-will-last-so-much-longer-than-you-think-it-will/ http://christopherwink.com/2011/03/21/why-print-will-last-so-much-longer-than-you-think-it-will/#comments Mon, 21 Mar 2011 14:30:49 +0000 Christopher Wink http://christopherwink.com/?p=6504

Print is going to last longer than we might think because we can prove print in a way we cannot prove with digital.

Someone recently mentioned to me that in 10 years, we’ll still be predicting the death of newspapers. I think sitting here, in my office, looking at a copy of the Wall Street Journal that I stuffed into my pocket after finding it on a bench at the 2nd Street station in Old City Philadelphia, I believe that to be true.

Let me say something controversial: newspapers mean something more than news sites. Just like printed photographs mean something more than Facebook pictures.

Digital media still should amaze in their flexibility, utility and reach. But their printed counterparts are also still remarkable for all the reasons their future seem limited: they are inflexible, expensive and in-viral.

For more than their serendipity, when I pick up a newspaper, I so often want to hold on to it because it still feels like the best way to preserve our history: how we see, interpret and understand today in this present. Digital media are so powerful because they are so malleable — we can shape words, correct mistakes, add visual supplement so easily. But when it’s printed — that newspaper, that photograph, that view of the world — what we see cannot be as easily changed.

Understand, truth is very rarely in a newspaper or in a photograph, but what is in them — and what is far more difficult to change — is our version of that truth, and that matters something too.

Our understanding of the world and our trust in it is so tied to having our own piece of it — not sharing it with a cloud — that it’s difficult to give that up. Even someone as young as I am — mid-twenties — understands almost preternaturally the mechanics of print in a way I cannot understand digitizing information. Understanding and trust seem so interlocked.

The reality is that the internet may likely give us a place where all information is accessible and distributable, culled and curated in ways absolutely unimaginable in the history of civilization. That reality does, I believe, make us better equipped to understand, and, with a set of ethics, that means we are more able to hold accountable what was said, what was thought, what was shared in the past, in a much cleaner way.

We don’t need a stack of yellowed newspaper clippings anymore in that world. But won’t we still frame photographs for some time now into the future?

Because while there are so many ways to improve on print, we feel so much more in control of that stack of clippings and that framed photo than we do with them in pixels. So while our senses say we should pull the plug on print promptly, it’ll take a decade or two before we overcome the feelings over which we have less control.

Number of Views:259 ]]> http://christopherwink.com/2011/03/21/why-print-will-last-so-much-longer-than-you-think-it-will/feed/ 0