The Local Niche Network Opportunity

Steve Outing's recent E&P column about how to take hyper-local journalism and citizen journalism to the next level, and the criticism and responses to it, got me thinking. I don't exactly agree with what he's saying, but I don't completely disagree with it either.

That's fine, though. The key word there is "I," and I think it demonstrates that he and most traditional media people may be missing the bigger point. Unless you're a celebrity, the world as a whole no longer cares what you individually think. The future of media is all about giving a little bit to everyone, and the future of media business is all about advertising across those interests.

I found one comment of his about typical citizen journalism content particular telling. He wrote, “I can’t begin to describe how dull this collection of content is to me.”

Here's the thing. For everyone who hates one piece of content, someone else loves it. He happens to hate what he reads in YourHub, but he also probably doesn't share much in common with the people who love it.

I can tell you for certain that the regular readers and participants of YourHub, The Northwest Voice and Bakotopia really connect with those brands, and some of them also HATE the daily newspaper. Everyone is an individual.

I've sure learned that lesson lately with my YouTube video Dog Eats Iguana. Many of the 1,100 or so people who've found it are big fans of iguanas, and boy have they told me what they think of that dog (and also me for not saving the iguana). But what about the people who like dogs and hate lizards, or those who know that non-indigenous iguanas are out of control on Puerto Rico? It doesn't bother them one bit.

One of the biggest problems with editorial oversight is that we can use it to fool ourselves into believing that we know what everyone else will be interested in. It’s the lure of the ivory tower. Everyone wants to be at the top and have everyone below agree with everything they say. The truth is that for any editorial decision you make, only a small subset of people will agree with your choices. You can choose to call your view "quality" and theirs "amateur," but I choose to call both niches.

The problem is that it’s very difficult to build a business out of just a few niches. That’s not the fault of “citizen journalism,” but a significant problem that can be solved. I personally choose to focus more on that, rather than trying to "train" regular people to look more like we traditional journalists.

Let me be totally clear about where I stand on this issue of training. We will never succeed in getting normal people to write and report like trained journalists, and we shouldn't try or attempt to pass value judgments on them for not being like us. There may very well be a reason that they're contributing their own stories and online content. Maybe some of them don't like what we're producing, or they think they could do a better job. That's fine, because they now have a voice that until recently they completely lacked. It's a new world.

I think a compelling argument could be made that for the past couple centuries, newspapers have succeeded in convincing everyone that there's one "right" way to share news simply because we were the only ones who could. That's no longer the case, but you couldn't tell by how we act. In reality we're masters at serving one large but shrinking niche interest: people who like traditionally-produced news. The world of media is so much bigger than us now, it's not even funny.

So if the new media world is all about serving many small audiences, where does that leave us? We need to rethink everything. A successful niche strategy requires many, many niches, so we should be trying to figure out how to position ourselves to manage the ultimate local niche network. Let's let thousands of local enthusiasts build their little ivory towers surrounded by a few hundred people and see what happens.

As long as we power the network and can advertise across it -- which I find more interesting and possibly easier than trying to break down one newspaper audience into multiple interests -- who cares about what I, or you, or Steve Outing thinks about the quality of the content? If it appeals to the people who are part of each niche, that's what's important. (And that's what advertisers will care most about too, by the way).

Don’t think this is possible? Check out Ning.com, the social-networking-creator tool championed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. It powers 230,000 networks and is growing at 1,000 new networks each day, and is now valued at 1/2 billion dollars. This shows that it's possible to make this happen, but it requires completely different assumptions and thought processes.

In my view, local media organizations' biggest challenge is how to do what Ning has done at a local level, and also leverage the unique knowledge and assets we have for “terrestrial” distribution of content (in other words, print). Our challenge is all about either embracing fragmentation, or being consumed by it.

steve outing, ning, niche networks

Homeshoring and Hoteling, for Cost Savings and More

I'm fascinated with the latest move of The Record in Hackensack, New Jersey.

Faced with falling print revenues (especially in Classifieds) and a poor economy, it needed to cut costs. Rather than lay off a few more reporters like most newspapers do these days, they're moving reporters out of their current offices and getting them into the field as mobile journalists. Read more in this Editor and Publisher story.

When reporters and editors need to be in an office together, they'll call ahead to reserve space at a new, smaller location -- a growing trend in business called hoteling. The paper expects to save $2.4 million a year on electricity, cleaning crews and building maintenance, with more to come when they sell the land.

Why do I like this idea? Well first, I'm obviously not happy that newspapers need to resort to such measures, but it makes more sense than cutting further into the reporting base that creates demand for a newspaper in the first place. It's a good example of taking a bad situation and turning it into a positive.

I also think it makes a ton of sense from a strategic perspective. Of course you want your journalists out of the office and in the communities they serve. Thanks to nearly ubiquitous cellular coverage, quality mobile broadband services and wifi, it's now possible for an employee to work from anywhere. I think news organizations should be doing more to mobilize their employees in general, regardless of cost savings.

Trust me, I know what I'm talking about, as I just spent my entire workday yesterday at a place called The Cup in Boulder, Colorado, surrounded by lots of MacBook Pro-toting entrepreneurs. I got a lot done, and so did they. Compared to four years ago when I felt strange pulling out my laptop at a coffee shop, today you almost stand out if you don't have a laptop.

As a remote employee who has worked out of a basement office for over four years, I find that it's sometimes helpful to trick my senses into thinking I'm in an office by working from a wifi coffee shop. It's actually more efficient than an office though because I don't know any of the people sitting around me. There's no temptation to waste time shooting the breeze. We all sit there hunched over our laptops typing away, with an occasional sip of coffee. We still spend a lot of time communicating with colleagues through instant messages, e-mail and phone calls, but most of those interactions are focused on work.

I know this probably sounds like a scene out of the movie Brazil. It's weird and different, but it works. And for you managers out there, I can tell you that we work-from-homers are also a lot happier than office workers. We have an extra 40-60 minutes each day thanks to no commute, we're more protected from the sting of $4/gallon gas, and we work on our own terms. And while you will very likely not believe this, most of us are also more productive thanks to fewer distractions.

How Technology Agnosticism Fuels Innovation

Steve Yelvington has an amusing post today titled "Dan Drinks the Kool-Aid," a reference to my decision to build our Printcasting tools on the Drupal framework. In the inside-baseball game that is the blogosphere, there's a story behind this that I think other media innovators can learn from, and in my opinion it's all about how important keeping an open mind is to building a culture of innovation.

Ever since the Californian started experimenting with social media after the launch of The Northwest Voice and Bakotopia, we've stayed in close contact with Yelvington and his team at Morris Communications. Very early on, people at both companies noticed that we had similar ideas and approaches to engaging audiences. The differences between the consumer experiences on the Voice, Bakotopia.com and Morris' Blufftontoday.com are very slight.

But there are some very large differences in our back-end technical approaches. Very early on, Yelvington's team started building its social media sites on the open-source Drupal platform. The Californian started its sites first with a vendor, and then partly out of the frustration of that experience, moved in the other direction and began building our own stuff.

There are some good reasons behind this. Compared to Morris, which has 13 daily newspapers, 33 radio stations and magazines in multiple states, the Californian is tiny. When my boss Mary Lou Fulton started the Voice, the Californian didn't have a single software programmer or system administrator on staff. Our complete lack of dedicated technical support staff made modifying an open-source tool difficult. We couldn't do anything on our own and had to rely on vendors and outside contractors to guide many of our decisions.

When I started in 2004, before the Californian had any niche products or technology to speak of, I wasn't satisfied with using vendors and I started playing around with various open source tools. We launched Bakotopia on an open-source platform called Noah's Classifieds. It was a great one-trick-pony platform for simple Craigslist-list style listings, but we wanted to do a lot more than that. In the end we saw that it had to be modified so much that we faced two choices: build a bunch of new functionality around a core to make it do something it wasn't designed to do, or spend an extra month building a new core that was a better fit for our long-term needs.

Before investing in a fully custom solution, we looked at other open-source tools, including Drupal. I liked the way it was structured, but found that it had stability issues and just wasn't all there yet (I used it on my blog for a good 4 months before it crashed and took all of my postings with it). The Californian couldn't wait for the perfect open-source solution to emerge and I didn't want to risk staking the future of this 140-year-old media company on a promising, but at the time still adolescent, technology.

So we started "rolling our own" and, to our amazement, ended up with the award-winning Bakomatic platform. That was the right thing to do at the time, and we will continue to use and enhance the system. It still has some unique functionality and experiences that don't exist in Drupal -- for example, the Inside Guide business directory and a Facebook-like Personal Inbox. And in some respects we can innovate faster with it because we don't have any external dependencies on other projects.

However, we don't have any strong religion about proprietary technology, or any technology for that matter. Whenever a new need comes up we think first about the end-user and specific business goals, and then see how different technology solutions meet those needs. We're technology agnostics.

Printcasting is unique for us in that it needs to work really well in Bakersfield, then be quickly adopted by partners in five other cities, and finally made available to anyone under an open-source license (read more about the three phases of the project).

Building the features on our own proprietary platform was one solution that would have required releasing some or all of our code to the open source community. We briefly considered doing that, but then realized that technology was only half of the picture. We also needed an open-source community. We decided that the project would have a bigger overall impact if it was connected to an existing open-source movement versus trying to start our own competing movement.

Four years after our initial evalutation, Drupal is well out of its adolescence and is an ideal launching pad for almost any social media tool. By making modules for the consumer-facing pieces and tying them into PDF generation on the back end (which by the way would not be done by Drupal, but the end-user will never know or care), we know that thousands of existing Drupal sites, and many more thousands to come, will experiment with what we build. Not only that, they will take what we do and make it better. That's perfectly aligned with the goals of the Knight News Challenge.

Will the Californian use Drupal for more projects? Maybe, or maybe not, depending on the project. We're also now using Ning sites as a low-cost way to serve smaller niche audiences. If they show promise, we invest more resources and move them into our larger network. If not, it's really easy to shut down a Ning site. Ning didn't even exist when we started down the path of social media. In another four years who knows what else will be out there?

Drupal is looking really good now based on our current needs, and it may continue to look good in another four years. But if there's one thing I've learned it's that innovation relies on flexibility and open-mindedness. The minute you put a stake in the ground, you're cutting off your options and your rate of innovation slows down.

One thing that has bothered me since I re-entered the newspaper industry after nearly 7 years away is how it's always looking for one silver bullet. Perhaps that's because the industry relied on one solution (the daily printed newspaper) for its entire existence up until now. But times have changed, and one solution to every problem is no longer feasible.

Innovation requires the opposite of silver-bullet thinking. It's an ever-evolving process that requires constant experimentation, evaluation and change.

Or put another way, feel free to drink someone else's Kool-Aid, but make sure you buy the variety pack. Today's Black Cherry may be tomorrow's Blue-Dini or Purplesaurus Rex.

printcasting, knight news challenge, news innovation

Help Build Printcasting in Drupal!

Ever since we won a Knight News Challenge grant for Printcasting, we've had our heads down looking into different programming languages, frameworks and architectures that could help us achieve two goals.

• Goal 1: Build something quickly by March that we can improve over time, without the need to reinvent the wheel for common features like registration, feed aggregation and user-contributed content.
  
  
• Goal 2: Since this project will ultimately be open-sourced, we want to start engaging an open source community early on so that a number of talented, motivated people are already working on the next version by the time our Knight Foundation grant ends (two years from now). We don't just want to build software. We want to kick-start a movement that outlives us all.

Well, I'm happy to report we've finally settled on the obvious choice: Drupal. So to that end, we're now officially looking for Drupal contractors who can help us inject Web 2.0 juju into the print world. It's an exciting opportunity to democratize and, to quote MediaNews Group's Peter Vandevanter, "individuate" the print experience.

Please feel free to spread the following posting far and wide. And let me know if you know of anyone who would be good! Inquiries can also be sent to jobs@printcasting.com.

_______________

Drupal developers needed to democratize magazine publishing

The Bakersfield Californian is looking for experienced Drupal developers for an exciting new social media project. Using funds from a Knight News Challenge project, we're going to make it possible for anyone to be a local media mogul. Sound interesting? Read on for details!

WHO ARE WE?
The Californian is an independent, family-owned newspaper in central California that has a reputation for innovation. We're leaders in our industry in applying "Web 2.0" concepts locally, and among the first newspapers in the United States to adopt social networking and citizen journalism as part of our core offerings.

We focus not just on our newspaper, but on growing local audiences through 11 niche brands. All of them have participatory Web sites, and 6 also have print magazines or newspapers that feature users' content. We are the leaders in our industry when it come to fresh ideas that others are eager to adopt, and we have been covered widely, including in a front page story on The Wall Street Journal.

WHAT'S THE PROJECT?
As one of 16 winners of the 2008 Knight News Challenge, we have the support of Knight Foundation (http://www.knightfoundation.org) to develop a revolutionary set of tools that will allow anyone to create a local newspaper, magazine or newsletter. Everyday people will be able to publish printable magazines (in PDF form) that self-update with fresh content they've created themselves, as well as content from participating local blogs and news providers. Money, technical skills and design skills are not required -- only passion about a niche interest. The end result will be hundreds of magazines which are also full of local ads that local businesses submit using self-serve tools.

WHAT'S THE KNIGHT NEWS CHALLENGE?
The Knight News Challenge is a five-year program, now in its second year, that will award at least $20 million for digital innovations for transform community news in specific geographic communities. Since its creation in 1950, the Knight Foundation has invested nearly $315 million to advance journalism quality and freedom of expression. Learn more at http://newschallenge.org

WHY DRUPAL?
Under the terms of our Knight Foundation grant, we're developing these tools under an open-source license in order to start a new movement around personal print publishing.

What better place to look than the Drupal community? We want top developers to provide their knowledge and expertise to this project. We know that the Drupal community can develop a reliable, feature-rich application that can then be used by thousands of other Drupal sites.

Our project requires multiple skill sets. Please review our needs below, and let us know if you can contribute.

• Drupal - Ability to create modules correctly within the Drupal framework
  
  
• PDF Generation - PDF generation with advance layouts and functionality. Do you have ideas on how to generate PDFs within PHP? We want to talk to you!
  
  
• RSS/Atom - Key content is derived from RSS and Atom feeds. Knowledge of these standards and how they can be used is invaluable.
  
  
• MySQL - You should know how to effectively design a scalable database which will work well with Drupal.
  
  
• UI (Javascript/Ajax/DHTML) - We'll need a rich interface to control content. Anyone who likes a challenge needs to work with us.
  

INTERESTED?
Send inquiries to jobs@printcasting.com and include a resume of jobs and/or Drupal projects you have worked on. Links are always appreciated.

Jared Polis and Politics 2.0

One of the coolest piece of junkmail I've ever received.
Originally uploaded by pachecod

I think I may have just encountered the 2008 version of a politician shaking hands at a campaign event, but it happened online instead of at a high school cafeteria. It says a lot about the changing nature of political campaigns in the Web 2.0 world, and how, just like all media, political advertising is becoming less of a one-way broadcast and more of a conversation. And it's also an example of how print and online media can work together in advertising.

My story begins at my mailbox, which just like every day was overflowing with junk mail I didn't ask for. As usual I sifted out the bills and prepared to drop the rest in the recycling bin. But this time, something caught my eye.

Jared Polis, the Boulder entrepreneur famous for Blue Mountain Arts (sold to Excite for $780 million) who's now running for congress, sent me a laptop!

Well, not exactly. But the card looked like a laptop, and the techie in me just had to open it. The inside of the card spoke straight to my geek heart, sporting a miniature MacBook Pro keyboard with Jared Polis on the screen above. I thought this was one of the more creative mailings I'd seen, so I pulled out my iPhone, snapped a picture and e-mailed it to my Flickr account (something I do at least once a day). You can see it here, or in this post.

A few days later I got an e-mail from Flickr saying someone had commented on my photo. I was tickled to see that Jared Polis himself had found the photo and posted a comment thanking me.

Before I continue, I just want to be clear that I have absolutely no relationship with the Jared Polis campaign, and when it comes to congressional elections I haven't made any decisions about who I'm going to vote for (which ironically is exactly what I told a Jared Polis caller the other day). And when I do, I'm certainly not going to blog about it.

But as an online media person, I do want to comment on how much more interesting and, yes, even FUN this was for me as a voter. It's the kind of experience politicians and marketers of all types should strive for. Compare it to endless robo-calls at dinner, sticky notes on doors and windshields, duffel-bag-carrying doorbell ringers, and of course the mass of mostly uninteresting political mailings. This was the complete opposite of all that.

Whoever came up with the idea of a card-as-laptop mailing is a genius (given Polis' greeting card background, I wouldn't be surprised if it was him). And Polis is very smart to not only search social media sites for content that people are posting about him, but also publicly interact with the content owners. After all, it got me to blog about him, didn't it?

In the context of a presidential election year where the Republican and Democratic candidates both have their own social networking sites -- McCainSpace and MyBarackObama.com -- I think we're seeing a very new kind of politics that's driven not just by the messages politicians send out, but also the degree to which they connect with potential supporters and help them connect with each other.

My story doesn't end there, by the way. My kids, 2 and 5, have since found the mailing and they refuse to let us recycle it. They consider it one of their toys: a play computer. Yesterday a neighbor kid came over and she started playing with it too, and when it was time to go home she refused to let go. To keep the peace, I had to promise her that she could play with it the next time she came over.

So lest you think print is dead as an advertising medium, or that print is something only old people care about, take a look at my kids. I wonder how many other kids are fishing this mailing out of the recycle bin and taking it to mom and dad, who then open it and read the message.

jaredpolis, social networking, politics

News Challenge Marketing Gig

The Knight Foundation is looking for a Web 2.0-savvy marketing freelancer from July to September to help spread the word about the 2008/2009 Knight News Challenge contest. You can read the contract description here. Sound like you? Send an e-mail to knc-marketing@abcdelta.com.

If you're the type of person who lives on Twitter, Facebook, Seesmic and whatever is right around the corner, and you have a good network of connected peeps, this is a great way to get paid to do what you're probably already doing. And as a News Challenge winner, I can also tell you that it's a great way to meet some wicked smart, fun people. That includes this year's contest coordinator Susan Mernit, one of the smartest tech innovators around.

News Challenge, marketing jobs

Craig Newmark's interview with The Washington Post

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark met with reporters and editors from The Washington Post yesterday and talked about all kinds of interesting things, including the presidential election.

But of course, the newspaper's interviewers couldn't resist addressing the elephant in the room: how does he feel about Craigslist's impact on newspaper Classified ad revenues? While it wasn't specifically mentioned, I imagine some of the people in that room were thinking about longtime friends who have recently left the Post through buyouts.

Here's a clip from that part of the interview:

Newmark's response was interesting, and I think pretty accurate. He says that these problems are not the fault of Craigslist specifically, but rather larger trends of which Craigslist is a part. He pointed to niche sites focusing on narrow Classified verticals, and the fact that investors of publicly traded newspaper companies insist on ongoing profit margins of 10-30%.

He predicted that more newspapers would work together in networks, and that philanthropic models like ProPublica (and I would add that in the future, hopefully also David Cohn's community-funded Spot.us) would continue the professional practice of journalism. And lest you demonize Newmark, he did make a point that newspapers are still leaders in fact checking and professional judgment, which implies that he thinks these qualities are less present at the "amateur" level.

In my opinion, throwing up your hands and assuming that journalism-by-handout is the only way to ensure the practice of journalism is a worse-case scenario. There's a place for it, but is it the only choice? No. We still have time to fix this problem.

The truth is that the ad-supported media models that worked before the digital era are no longer guaranteed to work in the same way because the information environment is fundamentally different. That doesn't mean that new models are not possible. At The Bakersfield Californian we're going to try some new approaches with Printcasting, and we're floating a lot of other little boats in the water.

The real message here is that any business that focuses on delivering information needs to constantly think outside the box about how to monetize that activity. That's what Craig Newmark did. For many years he charged nothing for what turned out to be a superior way for people to meet, connect, buy and sell. He only started charging for a few services later as a way to pay the bills. If Craigslist disappeared tomorrow, another similar service would replace it in a heartbeat.

So much innovation at newspapers has focused on serving the audience, which is important since that's where everything begins. But we have seen little to no true innnovation around business models. I'm not really a "revenue guy" so I can't explain why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with the psychology of sales. Salespeople are compensated based on how much they sell, and when the sales environment sours to high sales they follow the money. Often that means they pick up and find an environment where the money is still flowing.

The thing that's most on my mind these days is this. How do we foster a culture of risk and innovation in sales?

Printcasting in the Blogosphere

The word about Printcasting is starting to spread on the blogosphere. Here are a few recent posts mentioning the project -- for which we are very grateful.

• Fernando Pizarro of the Honolulu Advertiser puts Printcasting in the context of a larger trend of reverse publishing. Many newspapers, like the Advertiser but also The Bakersfield Californian, now publish content online first and then feed it into print publications.
  
  I think the big difference with Printcasting is a) that we give total publishing power over to regular people, b) we allow it to happen automatically, c) we don't require printing and distribution in order for people to read, as they can also subscribe to receive PDFs in e-mail, and d) there's a significant self-sere advertising component that is not dependent on a sales person for every ad.
  
  
• Kristen Taylor from The Knight Foundation is publicizing our screencast of early User Interface concepts.
  
  
• The AFP's MediaWatch site is including a link to my MediaShift Idea Lab post.
  
  
• Fellow News Challenge winner David Cohn posted this impromptu video of a demo I gave him at the MIT Future of Civic Media conference. (I reluctantly link to it, but not because of Dave, who rocks. I really hate videos of myself. So focus on the ideas and not on the bumbling, talking head :-)
  
  Speaking of Dave, check out his own News Challenge project Spot.us, which will take the idea of community-funded reporting to new levels. If there's a story you want to fund, you'll be able to drop some coins in a tip jar -- kind of like Barack Obama's approach to election fund raising. Very cool! Hopefully one day every Spot.us reporter can have an instant Printcast, too.
  
  
• And finally, 2007 News Challenge winner Lisa Williams says she can't wait for us to build Printcasting so she can have an instant magazine for her blog. Music to my ears!
  
  Speaking of Lisa, she and Susan Mernit are now in a partnership together for a new company called Peoples' Software. There aren't many details available yet about what they plan to build, but I've talked to both and I can see the light in their eyes. It will be fun to see what these two smart innovators cook up! Susan is also also running the Knight News Challenge for its 2007/2008 round.

printcasting, knight news challenge

Making Print Part of Web 2.0

For the next two years, I'll be posting thoughts and updates about Printcasting on the PBS MediaShift Idea Lab blog. My first post is titled, "Making Print Part of Web 2.0." It explains some of the thinking behind the idea -- especially with regards to the digital-print hybrid activity we've seen in Bakersfield -- and examines some of the roadblocks people have to new print models.