Dan's Diner

WhozAround: Twitter For Your Calendar

2008-08-19T09:51:00.000-07:00

This summer I've had the pleasure of watching a new tech company be born right in my back yard. It's called Peoples' Software, and it's the brain child of two of the smartest community-minded entrepreneurs I know: Susan Mernit and Lisa Williams.

People's Software is one of the latest projects of TechStars, a venture capital and mentoring program in Boulder, Colorado that's generating some very interesting and cutting-edge startups. Among them is the social network aggregator service SocialThing, which was just acquired by AOL.

Lisa Williams provides a sneak peak of their company's first Facebook app, WhozAround, on the People's Software blog. She calls it "Twitter for your calendar," and it's all about making it easy to organize events without requiring people to sign up for another service. The events come to you through the social network or platform you use most -- initially Facebook, but eventually also Twitter, e-mail and your mobile device. This makes a ton of sense, especially the mobile component, for which eVite -- the service I use for invitations -- is a disaster.

I haven't seen the full service yet, but based on the track record of these two smart, accomplished women, I think it's worth following. Tomorrow I'll be hearing more about People's Software and other TechStars programs at a presentation in Boulder.

Full disclosure: Susan is running next year's Knight News Challenge, for which I'm a screener, and Lisa is a News Challenge winner from the previous year for PlaceBlogger. I also briefly worked with Susan at AOL years ago. I initially learned about their project because I know them, but it's not why I'm talking about it. I really think they're onto something with the idea of leveraging social services people are already using instead of creating yet another destination.

whozaround, techstars, peoplessoftware

Individuated News Conference Video

2008-08-07T12:31:00.001-07:00

Peter Vandevanter just sent me this video summary of presentations and discussions at MediaNews Group's Individuated News conference, which I was fortunate to attend this year:

I think my favorite quote is from commercial printer Oce's Duncan Newton, who noted that the phone bill is the most personalized print product in existence today:

You guys [newspapers] are talking about individuation. Old hat -- we've been doing that for 20 or 30 years ... I can do this kind of stuff in my sleep. And you guys are saying, 'Oh my God, the sky is falling.' No it's not. We know how to do it ...

I remember him saying that, and that's when I stopped thinking that personalized print products, and mass printing and delivery of niche publications (like those we'll create with Printcasting), is something that may one day happen in the future.

Get that thought out of your mind. It's happening today -- but just not with news. Companies like Océ, HP and Kodak now have printers that are focused exclusively on news and magazines. Over the next few years, I think our perceptions of print are going to change drastically as we begin to see more and more personalized content showing up in our mailboxes, on street corners and even on our home printers.

Printcasting's Advertising Implications

2008-08-04T09:34:00.001-07:00

Online media pioneer and chronicler Steve Outing has a post about Printcasting and Classifieds on his personal blog, as well as his new venture: Reinventing Classifieds.

I ran into Steve at the Individuated News conference in Denver, Colorado in June, after giving a presentation about Printcasting. He asked me how our tools could be used by businesses, and if there were any implications for classified advertising. I told him that while classifieds per se aren't a focus of Printcasting, self-serve advertising is, and I see a lot of parallels between the two. The posts above are the result of our conversation.

How does Printcasting dove-tail with Classifieds? They both help small businesses market their products and services. A large percentage of newspaper Classified ad revenue comes from commercial customers (basically auto dealers, real estate agents and employers). These businesses are accustomed to writing text ads that are formatted to look good in print. The better tools on the market eliminate most of the design work for the advertisers, and simply accept feeds which are then automatically formatted into nice-looking Classified ads.

At a high level, this is how Printcasting will work, with feeds of variable content flowing into pre-fab publication templates. We want advertising to work the same way. A small business will only have to type in a compelling message about a product or service, optionally upload an image, and choose which publications they want their ad to appear in. After that, we will automatically generate display ads with different dimensions and fonts. They'll be able to see what their ads will look like in different sizes, but they won't have to worry about finding a designer for every ad.

If our advertising approach is successful for small businesses, I can imagine it being applied to larger commercial customers, as well as consumers. Forget about how things work in newspapers now, and instead think about the fundamental need for everyone at one time or another to get the word out about something. That applies to everything from garage sales to white sales, and everything in between.

Newspapers have a lot of different tools and terminology for different types of ads, but in the end they all boil down to the same thing: "Will you buy my apples?"

printcasting, steve outing, classifieds, advertising, small business marketing

In Search of Creative Revenue Ideas

2008-07-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

My post on PBS Idea Lab this week is titled, It's Time for a Revenue Revolution. It puts the upcoming Printcasting advertising tools in a context that hopefully everyone can relate to: how can we help local record and book stores more effectively reach local customers, hold their own with online competitors and Wal-Mart, and stay in business?

Thinking back to my journalism school days, I remember professors telling me that I should try to block advertising sales and business development out of my mind because it would taint my reporting.

But here's what they missed. Local businesses are just as much a part of your community as the consumers who live there, and in fact business owners are often some of the most active, participating members of any community. It's possible to serve the interests of the community, and also the interests of local business, and harness that to pay for services that help the entire community.

As newsrooms lay off reporters because the advertising side could no longer bring in enough to pay the bills, everyone at every level of a news organization has an obligation to think about how to fund the great work they do. If you continue to assume that someone else is going to step in and solve this problem, you may find yourself with a pink slip instead of a savior. Now is the time -- and for some, the last opportunity -- to make your ideas heard. Trust me: it won't soil your hands, it won't influence your reporting, and it may even be fun.

As far as I'm aware, Printcasting is one of only three Knight News Challenge projects that has any sort of revenue / sustainability plan at all. The other two are David Cohn's Spot Us, and Richard Anderson's Village Soup. I don't say that to toot our collective horns, but rather to encourage more people to incorporate revenue into their plans for the next Knight News Challenge round.

Speaking of which, if you have such an idea you can use the new News Challenge Garage to start fleshing it out with the help of others who can tell you how to make it better -- including all 26 existing news challenge winners (which means also me!) By the time the News Challenge officially opens on September 2, you'll have a better proposal that will stand out against the thousands of others that didn't benefit from such advice.

knight news challenge, revenue

Aggregating Local Conversations With Twitter

2008-07-11T15:11:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to Andrew Hyde's Startup Drinks, an informal gathering of people who work at startups, or are interested in startups or the startup culture, in the Boulder, Colorado area.

While talking to a fellow innovator there about something I'd posted in my Twitter feed, he surprised me.

"Oh, was that you? I saw that."

Really, I asked? At first I assumed he was following me in Twitter, which of course made me feel cool. But alas, it turned out that wasn't the case. I delved further and learned that he found me through a Twitter Local search.

There are dozens of sites that now let you search for conversations that are happening in Twitter near you. The social geek I was chatting with bookmarks one of these local searches for Boulder and regularly follows what people are saying. I have to say that this is one of the most interesting things I've seen around community aggregation in a long time, and the possibilities for how it could be used are endless.

One easy way to do this is with Summize, a search engine that indexes conversations in Twitter (and which Twitter is rumored to possibly buy, too). To localize it, all you do is type the word "near:" followed by a city name or zip code. For example, I enter "near:80020" for areas around Broomfield, Colorado where I live.

You might be tempted to say, "So what? I use local message boards like that. This is nothing new." But you start to see how new and powerful this is when you use a Twitter local search to research a local problem that a lot of other local people are having.

Today I think we saw this on a global level with the iPhone 3G release. Like people all over the world, I shelled out a few hundred bucks for an upgraded iPhone only to find out that Apple's iTunes servers had crashed due to too many people trying to activate their phones. I wanted to know if I was the only one experiencing this, so I typed "iphone near:80020" in Summize and got a list of geographically targeted conversations from people near me who were having the same problem. (If you click that link now, you'll see posts from happy iPhone owners who were finally able to complete activation and are now surfing the web at high speeds from their handhelds).

A more practical, meaningful example might be a local disaster such as a flood or tornado. The next time we get a tornado warning in my area, I'm typing "tornado near:80020" into Summize to see what comes up. And when the Democratic National Convention is happening in Denver, you can see what local Denverites think about Obama's acceptance speech at Invesco Field by typing in "obama near:Denver".

But Summize doesn't stop there. Just as it pulls content from Twitter, it makes it easy for you to put its content elsewhere using search RSS feeds. I can think of several uses for local conversation RSS feeds for news organizations, but one is creating locally aggregated topical searches and embedding them throughout a news site. And this can be a lot easier than you may think.

For our Printcasting project, I've already been experimenting with Drupal, which has some very nice built-in feed aggregation features. Today, in about 10 minutes, I was able to feed local Summize results for my area of conversations about Barack Obama, John McCain and the iPhone. They update every 15 minutes, so if you go back a little later you should see new conversations about those topics that get pulled in from Summize. Then, I'm able to feed all three of them into a Conversations category container.

Remember: I'm not a programmer, and I was able to do this. So if you're one of those people who learns enough just to be dangerous, trust me, you can do this too. If you don't want to mess around with Drupal, you can do something similar with RSS feeds in Ning, which is free and easier to use for novices.

Tools like Twitter and Summize that make it easy to aggregate local conversations are something every newsroom should be making use of. As I've said before, journalism is not work that is done for its own sake, but because it has relevance to a community -- and most often that means a local community. Or as Steve Yelvington says, building community should be job #1 for newspapers.

I also believe that the business of local news organizations is fundamentally about connecting local people with shared interests and goals to each other, and then connecting businesses to those targeted audiences that community exposes. Not every newspaper is able to create a rich social networking experience like we have in Bakersfield, but they can tap into existing social tools like Summize. I think there's a case to be made for an "editor" devoted to nothing but finding the best current local conversations searches.

What local conversation search tools do you use? Post a comment and let me and others know.

Technorati Tags: TAG, TAG, TAG

Pimp My Newspaper!

2008-07-08T14:46:00.000-07:00

I thought Medill student Brian Boyer was supposed to be a programmer-journalist. That's true, but apparently he's also into muscle cars and MTV's Pimp My Ride.

In response to my Media Shift IdeaLab post about Brian's insightful comparison of Printcasting to Moo Cards, he's expanded on the idea. Printcasting, he says, is like the custom El Camino, with each one looking a little different. The vanilla newspaper is more like a beige Toyota Camry.

I like this analogy because the truth is that everyone has an opinion about the car they drive. Some people really love Camrys, while others won't be caught dead outside of a gas-electric hybrid. Still others require a little extra fender here, a little more chrome there. It's like the "Dude, Where's My Car?" media model. I want my car, not yours.

The analogy I often use to describe the Californian's admittedly strange local media model is built around boats rather than cars. Think of every daily newspaper as a big, beautiful cruise ship cutting through the deep blue sea. The people on that ship have been floating out there for decades, content with whatever the chefs have on the menu and the 5 activity choices the captain has chosen for them for that evening. Some are fine with that, but others want more.

One day as the cruise ship is approaching an island, someone spots something different. A group of fun-loving natives comes out in hundreds of little boats to greet them. The native on one boat is selling fruit and tie-dye clothing. Another is a music boat, with the pilot strumming a totally new kind of instrument nobody has ever seen before. And still another offers rides in his little boat for a few U.S. dollars.

That night at dinner, the captain realizes that 10% of the cruise population is missing. No problem, it turns out they're out having fun with the natives on the little boats. The next day, that number increases to 20%. And the next, 40%. What's happening? Is it the end of the world!

To the captain and his cruise ship, maybe it is the end. He can choose to stay out there in the same old ship operating the same old type cruise in the same old way. Eventually he will have no more customers and he'll need to shut down his business. But there is another way.

He can start throwing out some life rafts so his customers can more easily float around in the little boat world they prefer. Instead of being in the cruise ship business, the captain may discover he's in the flotilla business. Some people may move between boats in the flotilla and the cruise ship, and some may choose to float in the same little boat forever. And yes, some will never leave the comfort and convenience of the cruise ship.

But one thing is clear. If newspapers are going to have a long, bright future, we need to operate more like the flotilla and less like The Love Boat.

printcasting, newspaper industry

Accident or Innovation? It Depends.

2008-07-07T06:15:00.000-07:00

At a time when everyone is doubling down to find new ways to engage audiences and grow revenues, it's good to remember that some of the biggest innovations in history were either accidents, or discovered while working on something completely different.

Robert Austin, Lee Devin and Erin Sullivan of The Wall Street Journal interviewed innovators in fields from manufacturing and fine art and came up with these recommendations for how to encourage accidents that may lead to future innovations. Their prescription includes periodically mixing things up between seemingly unrelated projects, making experimentation (and resulting accidents) cheaper, and my favorite, encouraging people to collect what appears to be random junk if they find it interesting.

If something interests you, they say, squirrel it away into your messy filing cabinet of random ideas and periodically stumble through it. You never know when it may pop into your mind at the right moment, and even change the world. We all owe a debt of gratitude to Edward Jenner, who remembered a milkmaid telling him that she would never get smallpox because she had cowpox. That simple idea lead him to discover a vaccine for smallpox.

innovation

The Local Niche Network Opportunity

2008-07-03T20:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-02T08:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-30T08:41:00.001-07:00

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!

2008-06-27T15:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-23T16:47:00.001-07:00

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

2008-06-23T11:41:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-20T16:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-20T12:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-18T13:57:00.001-07:00

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.

Many Eyes: a cool tool for journalists

2008-06-13T12:51:00.000-07:00

I've spent the last two days at the MIT Future of Civic Media conference, which was like a live mashup of smart MIT Media Lab students and Knight News Challenge winners. My head is still spinning with all of the amazing projects I've learned about, but one that jumped out at me is Many Eyes, a project of IBM's Visual Communication Lab.

Many Eyes is a visual graphing tool that will accept simple text and data tables (such as Excel files), and present that data in a visual, interactive way. It's the kind of thing that makes data come alive, transforming it from something dull that people normally tune out, into a fun engaging, individualized experience. The example they showed was a "word tree" presentation of Alberto Gonzales' 2007 Senate testimony. Go there and type in the word "I," and then click "don't," and you will immediately see how data analysis can be fun -- and even amusing.

Many Eyes graphs are embeddable too (see an example of a gas price graph below), and anyone can create and share them for free. So come on journalists: get busy! Start uploading your data and sharing it on news sites, blogs and anywhere else it makes sense.

In Defense of Rob Curley, LoudounExtra and Innovation

2008-06-08T08:20:00.000-07:00

Will Sullivan has a great post on Journerdism about some of the undue criticism of Rob Curley and LoudounExtra.com upon Rob's latest move from The Washington Post to the Las Vegas Sun. Some journalists see Rob's move as a sign that LoudonExtra is a failure, and they cite some of Rob's own admissions of what he could have done better as evidence.

I used to work in Loudoun County (at AOL) and, much earlier, at washingtonpost.com. So I think I can speak with a small amount of authority on both the Loudoun community and the culture at the Post -- although I know both have changed quite a bit since I was out east.

And here’s what I can tell you. Before LoudounExtra, there was NOTHING significant that served that community, which is now one of the wealthiest counties in the country, but not long ago was what a friend of mine called "dueling banjo country". Even AOL, which was based there, had nothing that was specifically focused on the area. Loudoun was screaming for something new and different that spoke to its unique local needs, and LoudounExtra emerged to fill that need.

Rob Curley should be congratulated for seizing that opportunity and laying a solid foundation that others can build on. He's a startup guy, and this industry needs to give him (and others like him) credit for doing what he’s best at. The worst thing we can do is discourage future innovators from trying because they're afraid they'll be ripped apart if they don't create overnight successes. They'll ontinue doing what they do, but in competition to existing local media organizations rather than as part of them.

If we ever want to have a true culture of innovation within newspapers, this business of sniffing out the blood in the water as soon as something new shows signs of struggle needs to stop. We saw the same thing happen when Mark Potts' Backfence and Steve Outing's Enthusiast Group imploded, with lots of journalists claiming them as signs of of the end of citizen journalism -- which of course wasn't and isn't the case -- more and more initiatives like that continue and grow increasingly financially viable. With LoudonExtra, the criticism is even worse because the site is still in operation. The only thing that's changed is that the guy who started it is moving on to something else.

I think the real problem here is not any individual’s failure, but the increasing desperation in the newspaper industry in a year when print ad revenues fell by $42 billion, barely offset by an increase of $3.3 billion in online ads. This breeds a culture of panic that makes people focus on shoring up existing business models and revenue streams, often at the expense of the long-term opportunities which are fueled by disruptive innovation.

Of course, a "back to basics" strategy in the face of change makes absolutely no sense. If an existing business is faltering because the model is changing, you need to double up efforts to move with the changes. Otherwise -- game over! And we have to remember that every time we try and supposedly “fail,” and then give up because we didn't have an instant home run, there are dozens of others who will keep chipping away and be satisfied with every tiny gain. If existing local news businesses pull back as the world continues to move forward, it's easy to see what that means for our future. We will cede the journalistic role to others.

LoudonExtra is ahead of the curve in its community, and for this reason I doubt the Post sees it as a long-term failure. It’s just a baby! I'm sure that Don Graham will give it, and other initiatives like it, time to grow up. Startups take time to work, and innovation is an evolutionary process.

I also have to say that as someone who’s created many local participatory sites (Bakotopia and 11 total in Bakersfield), I can empathize with how hard it is to get the word out. Local outreach is key, and really, really hard because it requires a lot of pavement pounding. And once you reach out to the thought leaders in your community, the job has only just begun. It takes time to get the ball rolling. But we shouldn't consider that a hindrance -- getting out on the street is what the big pureplay Internet startups will never do, aside from local-technical initiatives like Google's Street View initiative. Sending interns out with car cams is a lot different from calling up school principals, pastors and community organizers to show them a new way that they can connect with their local community.

Could Rob Curley have done more to, as he says, reach out to the local rotary clubs? Sure, but isn't there always more than needs to be done? He's set a solid foundation that others can build on, and honestly stated what he learned from it so that the next person can continue where he left off. That's the mark of a leader.

loudoun extra, rob curley, the washington post

My Reality Check for Steve Ballmer

2008-06-05T16:34:00.000-07:00

I'm cross-posting this from something I sent on the Online-News list today in reaction to a Washington Post interview with Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, who basically said there would be nothing in print 10 years from now. The exact quote:

There will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

All I can say to that is, really? Print is dead? Just last week I received a postcard in my mailbox from Microsoft urging me to upgrade to Windows Vista.

Ballmer's statement is overly simplistic and completely disregards other trends that are not directly connected to "the daily newspaper" or general-interest magazines. Here are just a few:

Increased niche print products, especially hyperlocal ones. Larger newspaper circulation may be decreasing, but in some cities -- like in Bakersfield where I work -- there's a net increase in total number of eyeballs reached with niche print products.
The hybrid online-print synergies observed in such niche products.
Home printing. I like to tell the story of a local pastor I know who receives e-mails all day, but prints them out and carries them in a folder. At the beginning and end of the day, when he has time, he answer them.
Direct mail, circulars and flyers, and anything that can be stuck on your windshield or door (like that Microsoft postcard!)
Anything that can be printed out as a Kinko's and left in a coffee shop or bar. I urge everyone to go to your local copy shop on a Thursday or Friday night to observe all the bands painstakingly creating and copying "hand bills" for their gigs to leave around town. Not only does it show that print isn't dead, but it's being used by the young generation we're all told is tuning out print. Something is getting lost in translation there.

Technology is fueling more personalization and direct-to-consumer delivery in all of the above print distribution channels, which is the subject of the Personalized News conference in Denver next month.

I've been trying to track down what the net difference in print is when you factor in these other sources, and also figure out how you would measure it. Just like the broken "pageviews" stat for Web sites, total copies doesn't seem to make as much sense as total audience reach. If you have some relevant data, please send it my way!

My suspicion is that we're all individually receiving more personalized messages in print from these personal sources, and less so from general-interest publications. It's part of the larger trend that we see with information in all mediums.

And of course I'm working on something in this area called Printcasting via the Knight News Challenge that seeks to bridge the gap between online UGC and local "citizen" print publishing.

There's a lot of life left in print. But just like everything else, what it looks like tomorrow will be very different from what we and Steve Ballmer see today. And technology is fueling that shift.

printcasting

Why Print, and Why Now?

2008-05-27T16:33:00.000-07:00

It's been more than a week since the Knight News Challenge winners were announced, which included our Printcasting project and many other cool ideas. It's been really interesting to learn more about all the projects, many of which are about new delivery mechanisms for local news and community.

So now that the dust has settled, it's a good time to address the unspoken question that I know is on many peoples' minds.

I'm someone who has been involved in digital media innovation for 13 years, and one of the early people in the newspaper industry to bring user-contributed content and social networking into the fold. I know that online social media is redefining the entire media business model, and have even done my part to accelerate that.

So why in the world am I supposedly leaving online media to go back to print, which many techies (and not just a few traditional journalists) consider a dying medium? And why at a time when every month we see new reports of falling newspaper print circulation?

And the answer is that I'm not. On the contrary, I'm seeking to bring all of the energy and excitement of social media into the world of print, and make local print distribution of online content an integral part of the fabric of Web 2.0.

In all the justified euphoria surrounding the emergence of the social Web, I fear that the newspaper industry has developed some unhealthy biases about its native print medium that are based on the assumption that the print-to-digital transition is a zero-sum game. As a result, we see continued innovation around pure-play online content (good) and almost no true innovation in the print model (bad!)

Yes, there are plenty of redesigns and creations of new niche print publications, but those don't count as true innovation of the model in my opinion. Just as we've done with user-contributed content, we need to think about fundamental changes in how print products are produced, and by whom, so that print is part of the social media revolution.

Arianna Huffington, the Huffington Post editor who spoke at this year's Editor and Publisher Interactive Media Conference, put it best in her keynote speech. Said Huffington, "I don’t believe for a moment that print is dead. I think newspapers, and media in general, have a tendency to think about everything in terms of the delivery mechanism."

And lately, in terms of innovation, we seem to be focusing mostly on the Web, a little on mobile and not at all on print.

I suspect this bias is partly to blame for why most newspapers still have "print people" and "online people" after more than a decade since the advent of the consumer Internet. With a few exceptions, anything new and cool tends to be focused 100% on the Web and completely ignore print. Newspapers seem to increasingly hire people who are focused on digital media, and lose people who focus only on print -- which is a shame since both of those camps can, should and must come together.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the social networking forum that is either getting lost in the new-media hubbub, or intentionally ignored. While we see more and more activity in local online social networks, all of the real revenue growth is still in print. And it's coming through the back door in new niche print products which contain content that's submitted online by local consumers.

The concept of Printcasting really started in 2004 after the launch of The Northwest Voice, the first so-called "citizen journalism" product created by a U.S. newspaper. This is the now-familiar approach of letting people write stories about their neighborhood, which are then reviewed by an editor and placed in printed publications that are delivered to everyone on the block.

We see this with the Voice, others like it such as the Denver Newspaper Agency’s YourHub.com and magazines like New West and 8020. All of these work because they have print editions.

There are two reasons for that. First – and I know that this will shock some of the digerati – average people love the idea of seeing their content printed and locally delivered. That's the primary reason they spend time writing their stories. I have no way to test this, but I would bet that the quality of content in citizen media products that include print editions is higher because people know that once it's printed, everyone will see it and it can't be changed.

And second, local advertisers also like print when they can afford it. When you see that newspaper advertising is faltering, it's not because local businesses are saying they don't want to advertise. They're saying that they can't afford the high rates required to print 70,000, 120,000 or 200,000 copies of the same ad in the hopes that it will reach the much smaller number of people it was intended for. Because we have not solved this problem, they increasingly avoid the newspaper and turn to more targeted local delivery mechanisms, such as direct mail (hello – a print medium!) which costs less to get a message out to locals who are more likely to want their products.

The bitter irony for newspapers is that of all industries, we have more experience around creating and delivering local news and information in print than anyone. And yet, even the U.S. Postal service, with it’s snazzy Click2Mail service, is doing a better job than we are at delivering customized information and advertising in print. Let me restate that for emphasis: an institution that is part of the bureaucracy-laden federal government is doing more around personalized print delivery than newspapers.

With all due respect to the post office, that's just pathetic.

At The Bakersfield Californian, we've had a lot of success with local niche-focused social networks that include print editions. We're very good at identifying an audience with unmet information needs, creating a publication and Web site, and leveraging peoples' online contributions for printed magazines. And we’re getting better at selling ads in those publications.

But the challenge is that for every audience we identify, there are 100 others that we miss and may never identify, and even if we did we could never hire enough people to manage those publications and Web sites. That's the nature of todays fragmented media world, where less time and more choices naturally eat away at traditional aggregation-centered media models. That's where automation and citizen publishing tools come in – the very heart of the Printcasting concept. We want to, and really need to, tap into peoples’ passions so that they can create new niche publications all on their own which local advertisers can afford.

If this idea sounds interesting to you, I hope you will join our growing community of interested individuals at our Web site: http://www.printcasting.com. It’s a place to review our ideas and participate in discussions that will help ensure this project is a success. And I hope it also has another effect of breaking down the self-inflicted, anti-print stigma that has developed over the years.

The attitudes about print aren't all bad, by the way. Over the last few months I've been happy to discover that there are many people and companies out there that are orbiting around the same basic ideas. Thanks to MediaNews Group’s Peter Vandevanter, there’s even a global personalized print conference (in which I'll be a participant). Thanks to the convergence of good ideas and promising new print technologies, we may be at the beginning of a new global movement around personalized print creation – the child of the Zine explosion of the 1990s. It couldn't come at a better time, or a moment too soon.

printcasting, newspaper industry, the bakersfield californian, knight news challenge

Printcasting story in Rocky Mountain News

2008-05-19T09:45:00.000-07:00

The Rocky Mountain News has a story today about Printcasting, a tool we'll be building that will let local people aggregate RSS feeds and local advertising in personalized print publications (through PDFs). Printcasting is one of 16 winners of this year's Knight News Challenge. Thanks to Janet Forgrieve for doing a good job with the interview and final story.

And with that -- even though I can get this online, I'm off to a coffee shop to pick up a copy in print for my scrapbook. Print still matters! :-)

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knight news challenge, printcasting, bakersfield californian

Mediashift post about my colleagues from Bakersfield.com

2008-05-19T08:10:00.001-07:00

Mark Glaser from PBS's Mediashift blog has a great post about a training session at the Knight Digital Media Center in Berkeley, California. It included two of my colleagues at The Bakersfield Californian: Jason Sperber, our Community Content Coordinator, and Jennifer Baldwin, Contributions Editor.

What Jennifer says about local users really wanting to see their content in print is true, and it's partly what inspired us to think about how to make it even easier to make that happen through Printcasting. I'll be spending the next two years work on that project, thanks to a generous grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation -- part of their five-year, $25 million Knight News Challenge program.

Speaking of Jason Sperber, he, Mary Russo and a larger cross-company team just launched a new site for local parents using Bakomatic called Raising Bakersfield. It will also have its own print edition. Kudos to them!

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the bakersfield californian, knight news challenge, raising bakersfield