The Columbia Journalism Review launched this year its News Frontier Database, meant to be a curated directory of independent online news organizations, included the two niche sites on which I collaborate.

See the entire News Frontier Database here.

Technically Philly was an early listing, having been contacted by CJR in March and launching in early May. See that listing here.

Northeast Philly hyperlocal NEast Philly was recently added too. See that page here.

Including those two, there are just four Pennsylvania sites listed, all from Philadelphia, including also PlanPhilly, with which Technically Media is now doing some work, and another FactCheck.

As part of its agreement with FCC to take over majority stake in NBC Universal, Comcast pledged to, among other things, bolster local news.

A half dozen NBC local affiliates, including Philadelphia, announcing a request for proposals to partner with nonprofit news organizations is just that.

I’d sure hope attention is being paid by WHYY and its NewsWorks initiative and the Philadelphia Public Interest Information Network, both of which could create some dynamic, interesting partnerships with a broadcast outlet with a large online audience to boot.

Applications are due next Friday, July 22. Details and applications here.

Then he tweeted he was “starting a hyperlocal project,” and followed that up by calling for South Philly activists.

It’s worth noting that I’d bet a lot of old head Inquirer folks will remind others that the paper tried something not unlike hyperlocal with its Neighborhoods initiative, dropping Inqy staffers to every gosh darn civic meeting around. It didn’t take, from what I hear.

That said, this is surely part of what Dan Victor and company are doing over there, and I’m always excited to experimentation. I support people doing anything with a plan. Maybe it’ll fit into my vision for what Philly.com should become.

I only recently come across someone doing a much better job of it, so I’ll leave it to her.

For the Reynolds Journalism Institute, Michele McLellan has dug in and created four main and seven overall categories for the always growing list of community sites.

It’s interesting to watch these numbers swell. Below, check out her categories and follow links to her lists.

1. NEW TRADITIONALS – These sites are dominated by original content produced by professional journalists. While the newsroom staff may be smaller than in a traditional newspaper newsroom, these sites tend to have more journalists on staff than community or micro local sites.  Many are embracing digital connectivity with their users, but traditional journalism is their bread and butter. Most of these sites are powered with grant funding and are searching for a viable revenue model, perhaps one that mixes grants, donations, sponsorships, syndication and advertising. Among others, the Knight Foundation is putting significant money to start organizations of this type.
2. COMMUNITY – These sites often rely on professional journalists but they tend to be bootstrappers who also focus on community building — actively seeking user feedback and content, writing in a conversational tone, and fostering civic engagement with practices such as voting, calls to action, and partnerships with local organizations and activists.
3. MICRO LOCAL – Sometimes called “hyper local,” these sites provide highly granular news of a defined neighborhood or town. They may have a tiny staff — one or two people plus interns or citizen contributors — usually supported by highly local advertising. [NEast Philly is included here]
4. NICHE – These sites focus tightly on specific topics — restaurants and entertainment, health and medical news, environmental or political coverage, consumer and shopping information. Revenue may come from advertising, subscriptions or syndicating content. [Technically Philly is included here]
5. MINI SITES – These sites typically are run by one or two people. They tend to be idiosyncratic in the selection of stories they cover and not highly aggressive in finding revenue.
6. LOCAL NEWS SYSTEMS – These are highly local, low cost sites created with a regional or national template, often by a corporation. In taking the temperature of the news ecosystem, it is important to note that corporations are interested in micro local news and the local advertising they may draw. What do they know that established news organizations don’t?
7. AGGREGATORS – These sites curate links and headlines from other sources. While curation provides a valuable service, our study is focused on sites that originate news.

A lot of legacies over at WHYY are going to be forged with whatever comes out of Newsworks, the online news re-branding and redevelopment initiative from Philadelphia’s NPR affiliate that I first wrote about back in April.

In short, NewsWorks, which had its official launch last Monday, Nov. 15, is WHYY’s new online news brand, serving as home to its existing journalism, in addition to (A) new columns, (B) calls for community contributions and (C) a trial hyperlocal push in northwest Philadelphia.

It’s a big bold swing and at least four years in the making.

Indeed, where Newsworks is a year or two from now will mean a great deal to the entire news ecosystem of Philadelphia, at least. Some of those people who come to mind:

• WHYY chief Bill Marrazzo has been beaten up for taking a big paycheck and so could use a bold success to become the dominant memory of his tenure there, supplementing the construction of a public media wing to their Old City headquarters and a general shift toward being a public media, not public broadcasting, company, aligned with the national shift of NPR.
• WHYY news head Chris Satullo has led this latest iteration of an online journalism push from WHYY. This is meant to be a big cap to career in civic dialogue, a reputation that has received its criticism.
• Metropolis Editor and former Inquirer columnist Tom Ferrick was a part of the consulting and organizing of the concept of a new online journalism initiative when it was first conceived at WHYY back in, at latest, 2006, as I wrote about here. The reputation soured as it slowed. Now how it goes in its new form will surely have Ferrick thinking.
• New Philadelphia Media Network CEO Greg Osberg is pushing to do innovation and online journalism in a new, fresher way at the region’s standard-bearer news operations: Philly.com, the Inquirer and the Daily News. A year ago, he was the only game in town. WHYY is hoping to prove otherwise. (It needs to be pointed out, though, that WHYY’s collected web traffic is still not even in the conversation in terms of audience size, so being a bit higher brow is an obvious target.)
• Whoever the Hell is the Philly region’s Patch.com oversight [I'm told that would be Tim Windsor, formerly of the Baltimore Sun] — Aol’s hyperlocal department ain’t nearly as evil as people want to believe it is, but it does have sites in two of the neighborhoods that WHYY has focused the localized version of NewsWorks. That’ll be portrayed as a showdown between the hyperlocal trials of an existing, local legacy media brand and a media giant.

In a lesser way, former Inquirer political columnist Dick Polman and former Daily News politics senior writer Dave Davies, both of whom were part of an exodus from the dailies to WHYY after Satullo, who is also writing for the product, and Ferrick, will surely be judged for whether the seemingly obvious decision was smart after all.

That’s a lot riding on a website.

It is the biggest splash into the online journalism world of Philadelphia yet, though word is that an even bigger one is looming, foreshadowed at the year’s beginning.

Check out some other thoughts on NewsWorks roll out:

• American University’s J-Lab
• American University’s Center for Social Media
• Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab
• The Clog from Philadelphia CityPaper
• Podcast Interview with Chris Satullo from Philadelphia CityPaper, which you can also listen to below.
• Brownstoner
• Developer Todd Vachon, who helped build this jawn
• Philebrity

Listen here.

[Full Disclosure: I have close relationships with Satullo, Ferrick and others involved with the NewsWorks product.]

Is Patch evil?

That was the wildly well-remembered question asked by Robert Hernandez at a lunch keynote panel during the Online News Association conference, which I was able to attend. Hernandez was asking Aol CEO Tim Armstrong, whose company owns hyperlocal news and information platform Patch and who was on stage with NPR President Vivian Schiller.

I’d say the answer is simple: it’s not.

There are lots of complaints about Patch, which plans to have something like 5o0 community sites up across the country by next year.

Some of those complaints:

• Patch works their staff too damn hard
• Patch is ‘corporate news’
• Patch is ‘the Walmart of news’
• Patch editors plagiarize
• Patch relies of free content
• Patch isn’t a serious part of Aol’s business anyway
• And lots of other complaints, like failing to chase important investigative journalism and failing to be authentic and local.

I can’t be the only one who hears this just as whining and complaining from those in a broken industry.

Patch is a profit-driven investment by a for-profit corporation. They are beholden to no one but their shareholders.

Generations of thickening the editorial wall has apparently made those points difficult to understand for journalists.

When I heard the excitement in the ONA ballroom after Hernandez asked that question, I immediately thought of the widespread push back against high-end coffee super-chain Starbucks.

Starbucks, like Patch is trying and hundreds of other chains have done in various industries, developed efficiencies, created a brand, pushed out a product and won customers.

Many smaller coffee shops lost out. Likewise, journalists fear that their local niche or hyperlocal sites will lose too.

Look, I have made one Starbucks purchase in my entire life, and that was at the original location in Seattle.

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I most certainly do not kneel at the corporate altar, but, simply, corporations aren’t as universally bad as American populism might have you believe.

They employ people. They pay taxes. To avoid paying as much in taxes, they donate a lot to charitable efforts.

That’s not the real problem here.

The reality is that competition is brewing in an industry that has mostly had monopolies for decades, as newspaper staffs contracted.

In Philadelphia, for example, Patch has two sites in neighborhoods in the northwest part of the city, with more to come there and in the suburbs. They’re running right into WHYY, the NPR affiliate here that is launching its own hyperlocal movement starting in the northwest.

So let the competition begin.

If you like the locality and the authenticity of your local coffee shop, then support it. Likewise, if you think your news is better discovered and disseminated by a local group or independent site, then support it, follow it or create it.

Out compete, don’t complain.

If you don’t or you won’t, then I don’t understand the problem.

I think it makes a hell of a lot of sense to sell your local site as valuable because it is truly local, but it’s lazy and surely downright un-American to think a company chasing market share is evil.

That’s what this country — and most certainly the news industry of a different age — was built on.

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

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

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

Our notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Find the presentation online here or see it below.

Photo from Flickr user Leo Reynolds

I’ve been asked a dozen times in the past few weeks what it takes to develop communities on the Web. There isn’t any scientific response, but I’ve started thinking about four Cs that come to mind.

1. Connection — Whether it’s a geographic or topical vertical, or one strictly based around a product, organization or experience, there has to be an identifiable reason for people to come together around a single site or platform.
2. Consistency — If it’s going to be once a week, or once a day or five times a day, you need to remain consistent in connecting with your community
3. Communication — Dialogue is sticky. Active communication online around your audience keeps people around and coming back.
4. Compelling content – What is going to bring that community back to that blog, or social media account or forum or mobile application? It needs to be content in one of its many forms and it has to be related and compelling to your audience.

What am I missing?

Photo from Flickr user Leo Reynolds.

April 21, 2010

Dear Colleagues,

In January, most of you participated in a meeting with Jan Schaffer from J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, where she presented early findings of her research on the state of public affairs journalism in Philadelphia. We appreciated the feedback that came during and after that presentation and we are pleased to announce that Jan has released her final report at this link.

We funded J-Lab’s study because we believe in the role that high quality journalism plays in making our region a better place to live. We see robust public affairs coverage as critical to having an engaged, informed public and accountable public institutions, and like many of you, we are concerned about our region’s ongoing capacity for that type of journalism.

William Penn Foundation President Feather Houstoun

Based on what we’ve learned from J-Lab’s recommendations, substantial dialogue with key professional journalists (including many of you), and our analysis of other regions’ approaches to the shifting landscape of metro journalism, we have decided on a basic approach for an initial investment.

What We Hope to Create

While we’re not ready to brand the project at this point, it is fair to characterize what we have in mind as an independent journalism collaborative. Our approach to this work is based on the following principles:

• We are concerned with strengthening professional journalism that chronicles civic issues in our region and advances the public interest.
• We will encourage collaboration that capitalizes on the collective strength of our region’s excellent, but diffuse, journalism assets.
• The infrastructure of a collaborative must respect the independence and identity of established projects and provide value to its members. At the same time, for the project to succeed, members will need to buy in to a vision that creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
• The infrastructure should be flexible and scalable so that it can support experimentation, evolve, and take advantage of new opportunities for coverage.
• It is imperative that the collaborative develop business strategies for long-term sustainability; however, we believe that imposing the requirement of a fully-developed business plan is too much weight for a nascent project to bear. For at least a few years, we expect that philanthropic support will needed to subsidize the collaborative. Nevertheless, members must aggressively plan for a day when their work can flourish with limited grant support.
• The collaborative must help its members to capitalize on the opportunities presented by technology. It should help journalists to experiment with content delivery, engage audiences, and find new and constructive ways to analyze and present data.
• We seek to support a collaborative that features work by professional journalists, broadly defined. Citizen journalism and youth media have value and may play some role in the project, but we are primarily interested in the craft of professional news gathering.

Next Steps

To initiate this effort, we will make three grants in the coming weeks to support project design and early action projects. These grants are intended to lead to a more substantial investment in the near future.

Designing a Journalism Collaborative

We have made a grant to the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning to hire a project manager who will be tasked with staffing a small team of stakeholders who will do the hard work of designing the collaborative. This includes the editorial model, governance structures, and business operations, as well as identification of key partners and potential leaders.

OMG is a trusted partner of WPF and has been a facilitator for many of our major initiatives. Working under OMG’s auspices, Michael Greenle, formerly of PennPraxis, will serve as project manager for this phase of the work. Mike’s track record as one of the architects of PlanPhilly, his familiarity with the work that most of you do, and his knowledge of the field makes him an ideal choice for this role and we are delighted that he has agreed to take it on. Mike will help to formulate and launch the collaborative, including assisting in identifying management and a permanent home for the effort. OMG’s Gerri Spilka and Emily Byrne will play key roles in the strategic planning process.

The expected deliverable for this phase is an implementation plan that we can propose to our board for a significant investment later this year. Along the way, we have asked Mike to be as open and transparent as possible about the team’s progress through a blog/web portal. The site has very little content at the moment, but it will eventually become the primary repository for information and materials related to the project.

Early Action Projects

We will make two additional grants in the coming weeks to fund precursors to the type of support that we hope a collaborative will ultimately offer to its members.

• We will fund a tech-savvy organization to help journalists experiment with content delivery, audience engagement, and analysis and presentation of data significant to the public interest.

• We will establish a program with an intermediary organization to award micro-grants for enterprise and investigative reporting and collaborative projects between news organizations.

More information about these opportunities will be made public as soon as details are finalized, most likely by Mike once he begins his work.

Finally, we’d like to thank Jan Schaffer and her team at J-Lab for the excellent work they did to help us understand the current environment, and all of you for your participation in her research and the subsequent dialogue.

We’re excited to embark on this path, and we’re hopeful that many of you will remain involved in the process and the collaborative when it is launched.

Sincerely,

Feather O. Houstoun

President