From Flickr user IceNineJon

Image of Old City Philadelphia cobblestone courtesy of Flickr user IceNineJon.

Niche news sites need to be brought together to strengthen the future of journalism.

Last year, we at Technically Philly started that hunt with a Knight News Challenge application for News Inkubator, a business services hub and incubation space for independent news startups. We didn’t make the cut, but we have taken to bootstrapping the concept by starting with an advertising network.

Today is the 2010 Knight News Challenge grant deadline, and we’ve continued that focus.

We took time to learn that our News Inkubator proposal was too broad and focused on trying to find smaller, more actionable steps, particularly ones that could work with other larger investment.

In doing so, we’re introducing Cobblestone, a proposed tagging WordPress plugin that will feed a searchable, dynamically updated, mobile-friendly directory platform homepage with content from various partners.

See our Knight application here.

Though we think it has real monetary value — considering it is based on a Technically Philly directory aimed at a membership model — this is a decidedly more editorial-first focus. Get the niche sites together, and we can build revenue together.

Perhaps the first question we expect to be asked: why is this different than Google alerts and RSS feeds?

Cobblestone gives tag-specific and cross-partner content some place to live. Once the alerts of Bill Green or the feeds from each of the partner sites pass in time, they are lost. This creates a true homepage.

Below, see our application, which you can also see here:

Project Title: Cobblestone: A shared Crunchbase to unite local independent news sites

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge: $65,000

Expected amount of time required to complete project:1

Total cost of project including all sources of funding:$65,000

Describe your project: Cobblestone is a shared, Crunchbase-like, editorial directory that will unite local independent news sites. The tagging WordPress plugin will feed a searchable, dynamically updated, mobile-friendly directory platform homepage with content from various partners.

For example, if established niche news sites like PlanPhilly and NEast Philly both “tag” Philadelphia City Councilman Bill Green in a story, there should be a central place to find those stories on a timeline of news about the councilman from all local news outlets . Tag pages, like ones for city council members, will bring together a fractured ecosystem of independent content providers by sharing a search-engine optimized homepage. This project will create tag-specific pages for all local people, companies, organizations, groups and places that will feature a chronological feed from all those content producers. The homepage will update as new stories are published and will have advanced filtering capabilities.

What unmet need does your proposal answer?: While Philadelphia has a diverse group of news outlets, these sites are often not connected in any way that extends beyond a hyperlink. Providing a shared directory will be the first step in exploring the ways local media can collaborate with one another. Cobblestone’s homepage can also act as a place where content consumers can discover news again, offering the serendipity of past news media.

How is your idea new?: During the past year, many mainstream and independent media outlets in Philadelphia have pursued content partnerships. Cobblestone is the next generation of content partnership by offering a shared taxonomy structure that lives well beyond the story’s publish date.

Large local news sites, such as The Texas Tribune, have a robust directory, however the directory is only powered by a single news outlet. Crunchbase only serves a single niche. However, what if every local news ecosystem had its own Crunchbase bringing together the work, insight, knowledge and audience of local niche news sites? Cobblestone’s homepage could also serve as an experiment in the next generation of aggregation and curation on a local scale. The homepage could eventually have “trending” topics and taxonomy that would highlight the most relevant news source for a specific topic, much like Google News.

What will you have changed by the end of the project?: By the end of our project, Cobblestone will have created a tangible relationship between independent news sites in Philadelphia. Additionally, Cobblestone’s homepage will track content powered by the city’s most meaningful content producers while completing an open source product to be shared with other hyperlocal ecosystems.

Our project will also serve as the basis for actionable sustainability ventures, like a shared membership model and create a robust, central landing page and service for the region’s news and information, growing the serendipity of community awareness of readers.

Why are you the right person or team to complete this project?: We have meaningful experience in the three primary pillars of this project. Technically Philly has an existing WordPress-based Directory platform that pulls our content and offers outsider user editing and functionality. (http://technicallyphilly.com/directory)

For an advertising network, we have brought together independent niche news sites (http://newsinkubator.com/proan), all of whom are readily interested in collaboration. Finally because of our coverage and our roles in various communities, we have relationships with Philadelphia’s legacy and independent media partners, in addition to developers and designers, all of whom can help ensure a locally-focused, collaborative and successful project.

What terms best describe your project?:

Collaboration.

Here in Philadelphia, there is an existing news ecosystem. The challenge is using the combined efforts of these sites to create an economically sustainable and editorially innovative news and information resource for the citizens of Philadelphia. We hope that other cities can also use our technology to create similar products for their hometown.

Community.

Cobblestone will bring together various niche audiences of Philadelphia that care about similar public and community affairs but are increasingly segmented. By bridging these disparate sects, growing collective audience and pooling resources and research, Philadelphia will have a strengthened news network and a more empowered citizenry.

Context.

Much like how a person’s Facebook account aggregates social activity, Cobblestone’s pages will act as a news feed for the people, places and organizations that matter to Philadelphians. Because Cobblestone will be powered by local independent media, readers will be getting their news produced by niche media without existing in a “silo” of a single news site. This will help readers understand how news and information impacts different communities and Philadelphia as a whole.

Have you applied to the Knight News Challenge previously?: Yes

Credit to Sean Blanda for the Cobblestone name.

CoPress co-founders Greg Linch and Daniel Bachhuber at BarCamp NewsInnovation 2.0 at Temple University in Philadelphia on April 24, 2010. I spoke with them about Technically Philly and News Inkubator back in December.

I missed the release of the podcast once, and it took a conference four months later to remind me once more.

Back in December, my fellow Technically Philly co-founder Sean Blanda and I spoke to CoPress co-founders Greg Linch and Daniel Bachhuber about our site’s development and its work with News Inkubator, which was passed on in its Knight News Challenge attempt but conversations continue today.

Give it a listen here.

I guess I’ll have to get a copy of the mp3, since the boys are closing down CoPress to focus on other projects.

Updated 4/25/10 @ 5:41 p.m. with William Penn Foundation clarification

Fewer than four months after its Philadelphia media elite round table to discuss the subject, the William Penn Foundation has released a more detailed outline of its intentions of investing and developing local online journalism in the region.

The report, which was released Wednesday, comes from the J-Lab journalism institute at American University and its Executive Director, Pulitzer Prize winner and former Philadelphia Inquirer business editor Jan Schaffer.

“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,” said the foundation’s President Feather Houstoun in an e-mail to stakeholders in the initiative.

The final report, which can be read in its entirety here, tacitly outlines the steps to develop roughly two things: (1) a central website of public affairs coverage and (2)  a journalism collaboration by way of staff, funding and shared administrative and business services — which I like to think was at least partially influenced by our pushing on with News Inkubator.

Updated: The William Penn Foundation will not “necessarily” implement what was found in the report, communications director Brent Thompson told me.

More broadly, as Schaffer wrote in an e-mail to those she interviewed in her months-long research: “After a deep analysis of the media landscape, J-Lab has recommended that Philadelphia is ripe for a unique Networked Journalism collaborative, partnering new media makers with original reporting on public affairs.”

It’s a quick and more detailed move less than half a year a large stakeholders meeting that was less than decisive.

There is too much coming out of this report and the feedback and buzz I’ve heard around it to make clear here. This is what broadly comes from this, with context to follow.

William Penn Foundation President Feather Houstoun

The most explicit mention of the foundation pledging to lay down funds to shake up the city’s media ecosystem came from Feather’s e-mail to stakeholders.

“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,” Houstoun was quoted as saying.

According to a press release on the topic, “Over the coming weeks, the Foundation will make several investments designed to strengthen the links among these groups by developing an independent journalism collaborative and establishing two ‘early action’ projects:”

1. “The OMG Center for Collaborative Learning has contracted with a project manager — Michael Greenle, formerly of Penn Praxis and Plan Philly — who will convene a team of stakeholders and community leaders tasked with designing a regional journalism collaborative. This is expected to result in a proposal to the Foundation for a more significant investment to implement the collaborative.
2. “A tech-savvy organization will be funded to help journalists experiment with content delivery, engage audiences and find new and constructive ways to analyze and present data in the public interest. [Author note: this seems to mean a content management system of some kind, but UPDATED, Thompson from William Penn says, "the technology aspect is not really about developing a CMS. It is intended to provide technical assistance to help news gatherers experiment with different tools, applications, and ways of connecting with audiences. I suppose if the groups agree that a CMS is their most important tech need, it could go in that direction, but that seems unlikely to me. Again, we are not pre-judging the process."]
3. “An intermediary organization will be identified to manage a series of micro-grants for enterprise and investigative reporting and collaborative projects among news organizations.”

Greenle and the OMG Center have launched a WordPress.com blog to track the progress, which can be seen here.

Updated: “These grants do not proscribe specific outcomes – the group will need to decide what best serves the needs of Philly’s independent journalism community,” Thompson of William Penn said. For example, a central website is not necessarily going to be the result of the process. Mike and the team he puts together will have to invent the structure of the collaborative, which may or may not result in that type of central website.”

Who the stakeholders will be is less than clear. At the Jan. 7 stakeholders meeting, all of the major legacy media were represented and seemed cautious of what the foundation and its partners would fund. Indeed, soon after the meeting, WHYY and Chris Satullo, who was at the stakeholders meeting, announced its plans to develop its own hyperlocal news network.

How they may align is as yet unclear, though Schaffer’s report notes it:

Currently, while the newspapers are cutting back, WHYY public television and radio is trying to increase its local news coverage with a $1.2 million initiative. It is moving forward with reallocated funds and a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which currently has a keen interest in enhancing the local journalism efforts of public media. WHYY plans to beef up reporting and train citizen journalists in eight Zip codes in Northwest Philadelphia.

Two projects in which I’ve had a hand caught reference in the report.

In the report’s section titled “Asset I: Blogs and niche websites,” the technology news site I co-founded in February 2009 was noted:

One newcomer has made a quick impact. TechnicallyPhilly.com was founded in the spring of 2009 by three Temple grads. Since then, it has achieved a notable level of recognition for its coverage of the city’s technology community. And it is moving forward to hire an ad salesperson, who will work on commission.

“They break the news that needs to be broken,” says one tech entrepreneur, who points to TechnicallyPhilly as a key example of what can happen in the city. “They remain timely, relevant and interesting” in part, he says because “they are there when the story breaks because they would be anyway.”

In the section titled, “Asset VI: Temple University’s Journalism Program“, NEast Philly’s branding was gotten half-wrong but mentioned nonetheless:

In addition to the TechnicallyPhilly team, Temple grad Shannon McDonald has launched the NEast site for Northeast Philadelphia and a few other non-news sites have launched. [Italics mine]

From the report’s conclusion:

We believe the focus of any new public affairs initiative has to be what is best for the citizens of Philadelphia – not what is best for any commercial news organizations or individual Web start-ups. While collaborative processes, alone, might be good for individual news sites, they don’t do much to build a collective audience for public affairs news and information.

Philadelphians are not getting all the public affairs news and information that they once did. There is a robust media ecosystem that has emerged in the city.  There is a talented and organized community of creative technologists.  People in the community feel that the city’s traditional media outlets are failing to cover some important issues or covering them in a haphazard manner with undependable follow up.

Back on My Feet founder Anne Mahlum and members of the organization in 2007.

I’ve decided to step away from self-employment.

I’ve spent the last year of my life freelancing, by some accounts, at perhaps the worst time to do so in my life and arguably the worst time in the history of journalism.

After a meeting of the most influential media leaders in the region made clear no drastic foundational investment would be made into niche news anytime soon, I knew I needed to secure my finances — as a new homeowner, especially — and take a more cautioned approach toward building News Inkubator, Technically Philly and NEast Philly.

A funny thing happened not a week or two after I made this decision. A friend made me aware of a job opportunity I actually wanted.

On Mon. Jan. 18, I walked into a Locust Street building in Center City Philadelphia and began defining what a media director should do for homeless advocacy nonprofit Back on My Feet.

I spent nearly three full semesters working with Philadelphia government oversight organization Committee of Seventy in the beginning of my college career, offering some policy research, the occasional graphic design tweak and other gap-filling. For almost all of it, I worked under the tutelage of a precocious, 25-year-old, workaholic, marathoner North Dakota native named Anne Mahlum.

She was fun and challenging, and I knew then that she had her sights set high.

We had two breakfasts in summer 2007. During one, she told me about telecommunications giant Comcast luring her to a high-paying lobbying gig. During the second, she told me that after accepting the job, she reconsidered and launched Back on My Feet, what started as a homeless running club and has now become an advocacy agency that creates a community around running and then connects participants with job training and job placement programs and will be in four cities by May.

Nearly three years later, her organization needed a 14th staff member and thought it should be someone to handle the group’s Web presence and develop relationships with traditional media.

I interviewed with Anne and others Monday Jan. 11, had a follow up by phone that Wednesday and accepted later that day. Told I was pitted against an older crop of more traditionally experienced marketing people, I pitched hard on my role extending to content creation around the issues of homelessness, job creation and other related social advocacy plots.

Back on My Feet had caught the attention of runners already, but to continue to grow they needed a world of people interested in social justice. To attract them to our site — and eventually bring them on as volunteers and donors — let me create a blog that chronicles the plights of the men and women with whom we work and the conversations that are happening around these issues.

It could prove to be more serious journalism than what I’ve done the past year as a full-time freelance reporter.

After I started, here’s what I more officially wrote out:

My five primary responsibilities now as I see them currently (I put them in order of time I think I’d spend on them, from most to least time):

1. *Our own content — I think this has the potential to be most important and involve the most time. The primary vehicle for this would be a blog placed highly and incorporated fully into BackonMyFeet.org. This would be the daily-updated stream of all BOMF content, including standard organization updates and offers, but buttressed with multimedia, interviews/day-in-the-life pieces on residential members, tracking of media coverage and perhaps a weekly/monthly podcast on homelessness and systemic joblessness.
2. Social media — Interject BOMF into the conversation, connect with people online and build branding (Twitter and Facebook to start)
3. Legacy media — Make traditional story pitches to established media, leveraging my existing relationships.
4. Partnerships and events — I think my role is natural to help develop, or at least highlight potential partners in content and in our mission (other nonprofits, academic and research institutions, etc.)
5. Independent media — Indie blogs, smaller niche publications and the like shouldn’t be ignored — smaller, more targeted audiences often mean they’ll take even more seriously the coverage

To start, I’ll have to trim down our existing bloated site and otherwise transition — introducing myself and finding my place. Beginning my third week, I’m quite pleased and look forward to tracking our progress.

I’m sure there will be updates to come.

Some measurable starting points:

1. Using internal analytics, but also a (perhaps very) rough guide can be seen publicly here, which shows about 3,700 unique visitors in December
2. Social media accounts: (Starting on my first Monday morning) Our Twitter account had 335 followers, 99 tweets and was listed 30 times, in addition to just about 35 @replies since April (I got nearly half that yesterday alone, including GPTMC); Our Facebook account had 727 friends and had fallen inactive; Our Youtube account had 10 uploads and 12 subscribers
3. We’ll also try to track the volunteers and donors who come over the transom of the Web.

Though certainly now only during nights and weekends, I will remain an active partner in Technically Philly and NEast.

Today, more than a month after we officially launched and longer than a week after being rejected by the primary organization we directed the proposal, we at Technically Philly introduced News Inkubator to our readers.

It’s a tweaked, matured and better-branded version of what I first introduced here in October. It’s a business services hub and collaborative newsroom for niche news sites in Philadelphia. It’s a pitch to create the mechanism that we believe would create the next generation of profitable, localized news coverage.

Over at Technically Philly, a news site for technology and innovation in Philadelphia that I helped launch in February, we do a lot of coverage of startups. In doing so, we’d speak to a lot of smart 20-somethings with business plans and ideas who were handed thousands of dollars, time, mentorship and space to foster ideas. We couldn’t see why, particularly at a time of turmoil, the same opportunity wouldn’t exist for media startups.

Of course, what’s a touch different about TP when compared to other Web-based startups is that, like others across the country, we’re trying to build positive revenue around the preposterous value proposition of community-focused news, ours being the rich community of technologists, innovators and entrepreneurs in Philadelphia.

Early on in our development of this site, we found others who were trying on their own to develop platforms from which they could generate revenue to cover the costs of covering communities.

We watched Dan Hirschorn hustle for his creation pa2010, which regularly contributes to the dialogue of Pennsylvania election news. We watched — and, full disclosure, one of us helped — Shannon McDonald grow NEast Philly, the city’s preeminent hyperlocal news site with incessant attention to Northeast Philadelphia. And, yes, we watched everyone’s favorite superhero Eric Smith enter his third year of leading Geekadelphia as the voice box for a young, hip, bright Web class of Philadelphians.

All of them smart 20-somethings with business plans, ideas and, yes, even existing audiences. These, we believe, are glimmers of how profitable, professional journalism can exist in the future, albeit with reduced overhead and serious help from our communities. We need more of them.

To welcome more, not only do we need to unite around the obvious — like a metro wide ad network — we need to share expenses over ad-sales, marketing, administration, libel and health insurance and so many other banalities of business.

What’s different than just creating an online newspaper is the step-first decision to create an editorially-decentralized product with distinct and individualized revenue plans. It’s as if your newspaper let the business section, city hall bureau and arts and entertainment desk run loose and sell to their targeted audiences.

Yes, the idea was formulated as a pitch for the Knight News Challenge. The folks at Knight let us know quite quickly that this project isn’t their ball of yarn at the moment, but we’re not done yet. There are more than a few dialogues we’re waiting on in early 2010, but — because we’re not holding out breath — we at Technically Philly are still working hard to develop our flagship and try to slowly, on our own, bootstrap toward News Inkubator.

What do you think about that?