Dan's Diner

Dan's Diner Moving to WordPress

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:55:00 +0000

It took me long enough, but I'm finally ready to move my blog away from its current content management system (a very funky use of Blogger.com that I don't recommend) and into WordPress, which I've fallen in love with.

You can check out the new blog location here:
http://futureforecast.com/blog/

For the next few weeks I will be dual-posting to this location and the new one. After that, I will cease publishing here and will post only on the new site. I'll do my best to redirect URLs from the old blog to the new one. If you subscribe to my RSS feeds, this one from Feedburner will update automatically:
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/dansdiner

The other RSS feeds? All bets are off, but I'll do my best to redirect them too. I apologize in advance if this causes you any trouble.

Pounding the Pavement and Planning Ahead

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:52:00 +0000

It's been about a month since Printcasting launched in Bakersfield, and our local grass-roots outreach is well underway. Every week our marketing evangelist meets with several new groups and individuals. Many of them see immediate uses for Printcasts, and we're starting to see a stream of new activity.

As of today, 180 Printcasts have been set up that have published 734 editions (You can peruse them all in the Printcasting directory ), and 144 registered content feeds. Because we're seeding the market with our own content and magazines some of these are ours, about half of this comes from the community -- which is not bad for the first month, and before we've done any serious marketing.

I'll be sharing more anecdotes about community outreach in the coming weeks. In the meantime, we continue to improve the product based on feedback from people in Bakersfield and elsewhere (for example, see this review and our response on the Metaprinter blog).

The new feature we're most proud of is a new tool that lets you create your own masthead using a photo from your hard drive.

Our development team is going down a punch list of 34 near-term projects like this. And in parallel, we're starting on the next big round of features that will launch in early summer. Those are:

1) Ad payment and controls
We're now working with The Commerce Guys in Jackson, Michigan to build out a straightforward, secure way for businesses to pay for ads (currently free during a trial period). Publishers will also be able to reject individual ads -- or all future ads from a particular business -- before those ads can appear in their Printcasts. All of this should be available in a testable mode in May, and ready to launch in June.

By the way, for you Drupal fans out there, we're really excited to have Ryan Szrama, the lead developer on the open-source Ubercart module in Drupal who recently joined the Commerce Guys team, working on the ad payment project.

2) Revenue Share
The Commerce Guys are also helping us build out a very sophisticated, but user-friendly, system that shares advertising revenue. We will be providing more information about how this will work in the future, but here's the gist.

Whenever a business places a self-serve ad in a Printcast, 60% of that money will immediately be passed on to the publisher via a Paypal account deposit. 30% will be set aside in an escrow account which is shared with contributors on Printcasting.com, and that escrow will be split among them every quarter in proportion to how much their content has been used. The final 10% will be maintained by the Printcasting network to cover ongoing hosting, development, maintenance and transactions fees.

Sharing revenue at all is fairly radical for anyone, including a newspaper. But we'll also be giving much more direct revenue to the citizen publishers on our network than most revenue-sharing services do, and for a simple reason. We feel that publishers bear the highest burden for the success of everyone on the network, and the network itself. They'll be footing most of the bill for printing, distribution and marketing of their publications to their own communities of interest, and contributors will only benefit when they do. If they incur the highest costs, we feel they should get the highest reward.

Note that the percentages above reflect only our current thinking, and they could change. One reason we can keep our portion so low is because our expenses are covered by the Knight Foundation through the end of May 2010. After that date we hope to be able to keep rev-share proportions steady, but much will depend on how much ad revenue is coming in the door by then, and how it compares to network expenses. In that sense, our own future success is also dependent on the financial success of publishers on the Printcasting network. And we like that, because it automatically aligns our interests with the interests of Printcasting.com participants.

Do you think these percentages are too high? Too low? Just right? Let us know.

3) "City Hubs"
As I've written about before, from the beginning we have seen organic demand for Printcasting in other cities. Our original plan was to extend Printcasting to five other cities starting in December, but based on all of the interest out there -- which includes interest from other newspapers -- we will be starting this rollout sooner.

City Hubs will be geographically-targeted launching pads for partners in other cities to promote Printcasting. If you don't live in Bakersfield and you want to use Printcasting, be sure to add your zip code to your Printcast at setup. This data will be used to surface your content on any future city hubs we may roll out.

I can't share which cities will be first because the partners have not been announced yet. But do let me know if you or your organization are interested in sponsoring a city for our national rollout.

4) Print on Demand
If you've ever ordered photo prints from a site like Shutterfly or ordered an on-demand book on Lulu.com, you understand what we want to do here. Imagine an "Order a Printed Copy" button on every Printcasting.com microsite and you get the idea. You click that button, enter payment details, and a few days later get a copy of the magazine at your doorstep (or perhaps pick it up at a local print provider).

When I started this project a year ago I assumed there would be numerous print services that we could tap into using free Web APIs. I was wrong in that assumption. Most of these types of companies don't have full open APIs, although some are beginning to work on them. Now that we've launched, we're finally making progress with getting some large printing companies with national footprints to talk to us, so I'm hopeful that we'll be able to add printing functionality sometime in the summer.

That's the news from Printcasting.com this week. In the future: more about revenue sharing, and how it can benefit individuals, organizations, and also newspapers and printing companies.

This entry was cross-posted on PBS MediaShift Idea Lab. You can read that version here.

Printcasting Launches in Bakersfield

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:22:00 +0000

This entry was cross-posted on PBS MediaShift Idea Lab. You can read that version here.

This week we publicly launched Printcasting in Bakersfield, California. While our focus is on outreach to the 330,000 people who live there, anyone can now use the site to create an automatically updating, printable PDF magazine. I invite you all to give it a try at http://www.printcasting.com and let us know what you think. The more early usage we have the better. One easy way to get started is to browse through a list of recently updated Printcasts and subscribe to a few.

For those of you who haven't followed the progress of our Knight News Challenge funded
project, the gist is that Printcasting lets anyone participate in niche magazine publishing, and if they do a good job they also stand to benefit from advertising revenue when we begin charging for self-serve ads. It's an admittedly radical idea to come out of a newspaper at a time when many newspapers are cutting back or shutting their doors. As a result, we're starting to attract media attention, with positive mentions in The Miami Herald and Business Week.

But that's all talk. We're launched, so now instead of telling you about it you can jump in and try it out. One fun way to do this is as a Printcasting subscriber. With the permission of Mark Glaser, we've set up a Printcast for this Idea Lab site. Check it out here:

And for members of the Printcasting Community site, here's a widget that promotes a Printcast version of this blog:

The thumbnails above comes from a special blog widget that's available for any Printcast. Click on it to flip through a facsimile of what the printed version will look like. To get a copy to print, click the Download link. And if you want to receive an e-mail whenever a new edition is available (which happens about once a day for the PBS Idea Lab blog), click "Subscribe" and provide your e-mail address.

It's also really easy to get a blog widget to promote your own Printcast, or one that you like. Just find a Printcast in the directory (or your own), then click the "Share" link at the top of the page. Copy and paste the HTML code into your blog template, and your blog or Web site promotes a printable PDF version for those who may want to print it out or read offline. When a new edition is published the thumbnail and link will update automatically.

If you have more time you can create a Printcast using feeds people have already registered, including some very good ones from The Bakersfield Californian newspaper. To get your own site's content into your Printcast or make it available for other Printcasts to carry, simply register your RSS feed. All of these tasks take only a few minutes.

You can also print a few copies yourself and leave them at local coffee shops, bars, your local library, or anywhere that people in your community may be looking for local information. That's exactly how we plan to start local promotion of Printcasting in Bakersfield, starting out with the 3,600 blogs on the Californian's eight social networking sites. In addition, those sites have more than 53,000 public user profiles, which is a good indication of active participants who may take 5 minutes out of their day to register a feed or set up a Printcast.

That's how our outreach will begin, but as with all local products, traditional street marketing is what will make Printcasting a long-term success. Our marketing evangelist Tom Webster -- armed with mouse pads and t-shirts -- is already setting up meetings with places such as the Kern County Library, which after one demo offered to let us use their computers for community training. The library's Web site also has RSS feed content, so we're showing the librarians how they can automatically feed their online content into printable flyers that people can take with them. Tom is also planning a series of blogger brunches to get bloggers on board, and also collect feedback.

Just because our initial rollout is complete doesn't mean that we're finished with development, though. This week we're testing out a feature we call "review and approve," which is akin to the copy editor telling the publisher to give a publication one last edit before it goes to the presses, and we hope to launch that very soon. We're also gearing up to work on something a journalism major like myself never expects to be involved in: integrating e-commerce payment into the ad tool. To be honest, this is something we'd hoped to have finished by now, but we intentionally put it off so that we could give the core product the focus it deserved before launch. (Since we planned to make ads free for the first few months anyway, this doesn't hold us back at all and may even make local advertiser outreach easier -- especially in this crazy economy.)

It's been a big year, and a very big week. Thanks to all of you who have followed our progress and given us suggestions, feedback and moral support. Do us a favor and post a link to your Printcasts in a comment. And as always, let us know if you have any questions or need help.

Printcasting in Business Week

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:46:00 +0000

Printcasting is mentioned in a Business Week story about "online experiments that could help newspapers". And the story leads with Bakotopia.com, the social networking site I started for The Bakersfield Californian back in 2005. This is fitting, as Bakotopia's later success with a printed magazine helped inspired the Printcasting concept.

The story also cites other good examples of things newspaper companies are doing to change with the times, including collaboration with Outside.in and Yahoo and the upcoming Plastic Logic e-reader.

This is great timing for us, as we recently opened our beta site to the public and are putting the final pieces in place to publicly launch in Bakersfield later this month. Here are some excerpts worth mentioning:

"... the independent, family-owned Californian is preparing to take the idea of Web-created niche magazines national. Using an $837,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge and about $200,000 of its own money, it's launching a site called Printcasting.com later in March. The site will allow individuals, schools, homeowners' associations, wine clubs, and the like to create their own digital magazines. 'If we see a magazine that really has potential, we'll print it, place additional ads in there, and distribute it, [first in Bakersfield, then in five other cities as early as this summer],' Pacheco says. The Californian will get a cut of ad sales while spending little on the product itself. 'This is cheap and targeted,' Pacheco explains. 'Even though there's an ad recession, it doesn't mean there're no more ads.' "

And later on ...

"This reinvention is taking publishers such as Bakersfield Californian away from selling ads just for their own news content. 'Our future may be very different from how we started, in newspapers,' Pacheco says. '[Going forward], we are the network that allows people to communicate among themselves.'"

That accurately sums up what we're trying to do with Printcasting. Thanks to senior writer Olga Kharif for good reporting.

Of course the real story will begin once we launch later this month and are able to point to how regular old people are using Printcasting to make their own magazines and newsletters. Our local outreach is already starting in beta, and I can tell that what people do with these tools will ultimately be far more interesting than the tools themselves. The same has been true of Bakotopia and other social-media initiatives -- connecting with people and allowing them to connect with each other is what the user-generated content space is really about.

Technorati Tags: printcasting, knight news challenge, newspaper industry

Printcasting is in Open Beta!

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:03:00 +0000

I'm extremely proud to announce that Printcasting, our Knight News Challenge project, is finally in open beta. You can check it out at http://beta.printcasting.com. Or, click on the thumbnail on the right of my blog to see Danzine, the printable magazine version of Dan's Diner.

We're finishing up a few last features before we launch in Bakersfield (more on that here), but the rollout to early adopters has already begun with a post on Bakersfield.com by Tom Webster, the new "marketing evangelist" the site. Then later this month, we will "launch" -- which simply means the URL changes to remove the "beta", and heavier marketing begins.

As a Knight News Challenge project, Printcasting is focused on local news and information. For that reason, during the next few months most of our marketing efforts will focus on outreach to people who live in Bakersfield, with more to-be-determined cities rolling out in the future.

But as I've written about before, we have a lot of people following us from across the world (since I wrote that post a month ago, more than 100 more people have joined our Printcasting social network to bring its membership up to 325). So we invite anyone who has been following us to go to http://beta.printcasting.com and do any and all of the following: register your blog feeds, create Printcasts using your feeds (and those of others), and place self-serve ads. Then share your feedback by posting it online or sending an e-mail.

This is a really big milestone for a project that started over a year ago by me filling out a few forms on the Knight News Challenge site. Since then, we've gone through many iterations of PRDS, designs, prototypes, and now alpha and beta. Many people have made this possible and it's hard to list them all, but I would like to specifically thank the following:

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and The Bakersfield Californian for giving us the funds and other support to make Printcasting happen.
Mary Lou Fulton, my boss and long-time colleague and friend for encouraging us to submit our concept to the Knight News Challenge -- and all of the great marketing and outreach ideas.
Justinian Hatfield, for helping us fine-tune the proposal, and lending his image and likeness -- as well as his camera and tripod -- to a video we submitted with the proposal.
Lead developer Ron Robinson for, well, turning Printcasting from a concept into a working tool ... and then some!
Designer Don Hajicek for design, Drupal consulting, camaraderie and wicked funny jokes that continue to keep everyone sane.
The good people at Photon Infotech for ongoing development and testing in conjunction with Ron.
Tom Webster, our brand spanking new marketing evangelist, for jumping into Printcasting with such fervor.

We are now on the verge of entering the next phase of our project: going out on the street to show how various individuals and organizations in Bakersfield can be citizen publishers. I'll continue to post updates here, on Printcasting.com (which will change to Community.printcasting.com after we launch), and on PBS MediaShift Idea Lab. But it's important to take a step back and be proud of what we've built. Ahh ....

OK now that that's out of the way, back to the grindstone! The real hard work (and the most fun part) is just beginning.

Goodbye to the Rocky, a Local Digital Pioneer

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 17:28:00 +0000

Today is a watershed moment in the history of journalism, and not in a good way.

It's the day that the Rocky Mountain News ceased publication after nearly 150 years of continuous daily production, and Denver became a one-newspaper town.

This hits me and people like me especially hard for several reasons, but among them: I grew up in Colorado and find it hard to imagine the state without an institution that has helped define what it means to live here. I once worked as a journalist in Denver (for The Denver Post, which is now the sole survivor in a long newspaper war). And finally, since moving back to Colorado 5 years ago, I have developed personal friendships with several people at the Rocky based on our shared vision for digital journalism.

Among those friends are editor and publisher John Temple, who I now consider to have been one of the most innovative, entrepreneurial-minded people working in traditional news organizations in the last 5 years. Also, online editor Mike Noe, who I went to college with at the University of Colorado, but only started to get to know when I moved back to the state.

For those who are tempted to think the Rocky, and many other newspapers, are all about a printed medium that is supposedly completely going away (an idea I think is preposterous by the way), you should look at what the Rocky has done in the digital space in recent years.

Just as one tiny example, their online video coverage has become top-notch, and just as good as -- or even better than -- what you see on the nightly news on TV. You can see one final example of that in a video posted on the Rockymountainnews.com Web site, embedded at the bottom of this post. It's on Vimeo, so it should be there if the Web site goes down tomorrow.

Another is citizen journalism pioneer YourHub.com, which was championed by Temple and fostered by Mike Noe and others, including Travis Henry who is now at Examiner.com. It endured much early criticism, but is now making money and -- from what I hear -- will continue to be maintained by The Denver Post.

And not to be forgotten, the Rocky's mobile site has been one of the best local mobile news sites focused solely on Colorado. The Denver Post has since developed and improved its mobile site, but as someone who uses those sites every day, it's clear that it has mostly followed the direction of the Rocky's. I think that goes for a lot of other digital initiatives.

Just to be clear in case you missed it, I'm saying this as someone who proudly worked for The Denver Post in the mid-1990s and helped them get their first Web site going. It's in my DNA to feel competitive with the Rocky, but looking back I have to say that they were definitely leaders when it came to things like design, format (I will really miss the broadsheet paper), and their understanding of and embrace of online community and digital journalism.

Yesterday Scripps said it would now focus its efforts on selling the brand, masthead and archives of the Rocky, so maybe it will have another life. But if not, I like to fantasize about the now-former Rocky staffers who built IWantMyRocky.com continuing coverage in some fashion, even if it's just online.

But don't rule out print in some fashion, even if it's only via a digital-print / print-on-demand approach like Printcasting. Some type of traditional daily print newspaper is also not out of the picture. Just look at what the former employees of the San Juan Star did after their paper folded. They're now starting a new, leaner, meaner daily called the Puerto Rico Daily Sun.

Here's the touching video the Rocky staff put up on their Web site today. If the link goes down tomorrow, I hope someone will put it back up somewhere so that we can all remember how the Rocky Mountain News went out in style. We'll miss you!

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

Turning Print Upside Down and Inside Out

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:06:00 +0000

I'm reposting this entry from PBS MediaShift Idea Lab. Click here to read that post and associated comments.

Scripps executive and media consultant Jay Small has a shout-out to Printcasting in his Small Initiatives blog. Here's what he says about Printcasting in a post about decapitalizing printing.

"Watch Dan Pacheco's Printcasting developments closely. My read: This project attempts to cut cost, waste and inflexibility out of producing printed periodicals, while adding customization and speed to market for publishers of most any scale. I don't know if it will work -- Pacheco doesn't either, I'd guess. But it represents a creative, logical and valiant effort, with realistic chances of success."

And later ...

"I imagine, therefore, that Pacheco's experiments and others like them may favor new entrants to local economies for printed news and information. Incumbent holding companies might be able to free up funds for capital investment by consolidating printing if they are fortunate enough to have local newspapers clustered geographically in ways that would support regional printing centers. One press rolling off 10 newspapers in a 100-mile radius saves money vs. 10 presses, or even five, printing the same titles. That short-term efficiency might release funds to invest in digital printing that could, eventually, replace even the remaining central press."

I'm reposting my comments on Jay's blog entry here, as I think they speak to how Printcasting is primarily about preserving the news and information function of local communities in a sustainable way. Our use of print (or more accurately, printable content) supports that goal, but we're not intentionally trying to "save print."

The reality is that the future of print is digital, and there's no reason to print every single publication people create. We do want to print and distribute the highest-quality publications that come out the other end of this grand experiment, and only where the potential for ad revenue is higher than what those editions could receive from online self-serve ad revenue alone. This approach turns traditional print business model upside down, and also inside out thanks to the way it invites collaboration with people in the local community.

Here are my reposted comments, with a few additions:

I indeed do not claim to know 100% that the Printcasting experiment as currently defined will work exactly the way we except, but thanks to the Knight Foundation (which funds the project via the Knight News Challenge), we will have 15 months after launching to tweak things based on local community response. We will learn a lot during that time, make changes where we need to and end up with something that is more than just a theory, and hopefully a big success. For the record, I do believe it will be a big success -- I just can't point to anything that proves it will be. That's the nature of innovation. It all comes down to making intelligent bets and staying flexible.

Our objective is not so much to "save print" as it is to find new, sustainable ways to meet the news and information needs of local communities -- beginning in Bakersfield, but ultimately serving many different local communities.

Our idea for Printcasting came out of our experience in Bakersfield of creating multiple niche-focused social networking sites. We noticed that the brands that had a lot of user-generated content and printed magazines that locally distributed that content attracted more ad revenue than the sites that had less user-generated content and no print component.

As the business model supporting the general-interest printed product (the daily newspaper) began to crumble, while the business for niche digital-print hybrid products remained steady or increased, we asked ourselves, "what would need to happen in order for this new niche model to replace what we're losing in the general-interest space?" The answer was that we needed not just a handful of niche sites and magazines, but hundreds or thousands, all in a network that was supported by affordable self-serve advertising. We then submitted that idea to the Knight News Challenge, got funding and got to work.

I also want to point out that we're not assuming that all delivery of Printcasting publications needs to be via physical printing. And since the focus of our product is democratized publishing, where anyone can be a magazine publisher, we also don't want that. As with blogs and any type of user-generated content, there will be a wide range of quality and we will only invest in printing those that merit printing. Does this assume that a large quantity will be of low quality? Most likely, yes. Look at the blogosphere. Most of what's out there isn't up to the quality standards we expect from The New York Times, but it does have its fans who are willing to apply a different quality standard in exchange for getting the niche information they don't get from their newspaper.

Another theory we will be testing out is what I think of as the "American Idol" approach to print publishing. After a few months of outreach, we anticipate having a hundred or more Printcasts out there. Most will be subscribed to online so that readers who want to be informed receive an update in e-mail about new editions. They can read the content online -- in HTML form as well as in a "pageflip" view of the PDF -- or download and print the magazine on their home printers.

We will track each Printcast's online traffic and PDF downloads, as well as reader ratings, and use that information to identify high-quality citizen publications that we think could attract even more advertising revenue if they were printed in larger quantities and locally distributed.

Here's just one example of how this may play out. Numerous people at the Californian over the years have suggested creating a local wine publication, but creating that ourselves would be risky. It would take a lot of up-front investment in design, planning, sales outreach and content creation, and it may take many years for such a publication to break even. It could also fail.

With Printcasting, we'd reduce our risk and increase audience engagement by partnering with the community to generate a great new local wine magazine. We know there are people in town who know far more about wine than we do, and some are already blogging about it. Others -- such as local wine shops -- could write wine columns in their sleep, but they may not be doing it yet because they don't have an online audience to make it worth their while. We'd reach out to all of these people and get them to register their content (or post it on Printcasting.com), then in 5 minutes make a self-updating wine Printcast that features their content. Others may come along and create their own Printcasts about wine, or use the wine reviews in Printcasts with a slightly different focus. We may print a few thousand copies of our wine Printcast, or possibly even a citizen-produced version, and place additional pages of ads in it.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of other Printcasts may have a good online following of people who print copies from home, and those Printcasts will be supported by self-serve ad revenue alone. Each will each make a little money and reach only a handful of people, and that will work just great for their publishers and readers who are currently getting no compensation for their online content.

Some topics may be so niche that we would never, ever want to invest in printing them ourselves. But no matter -- the community is full of people with home printers, and they can use their $60 ink cartridges to print them out if it's worth it to them. I should also point out that the Printcasting network will take a small portion (around 10%) of ad revenue from all Printcasts to support this activity, so it will be in our interest to foster wide adoption of mostly-digital subscriptions.

The revenue from the self-serve ads as well as the additional ads we sell would be shared with those bloggers. Why do that? We want them to continue contributing high-quality content, and letting them share in the rewards is one way to motivate them. But it will also cost far less to share a portion of ad revenue than it would to hire a writer or two or three to write about those topics -- let alone a publication designer, dedicated salesperson, and so on.

As you can see, while we will be using the print medium in some cases, this model is completely different from how print-based media businesses operate today. It merges the best of the Web with the best of print, and throws out all the inefficiency and waste.

I also hope that Printcasting will remove once and for all the artificial, largely institutional barriers that exist between "the print side" and "the online side" at most newspapers. In the Printcasting model, all content originates online, and flows into print where the ad revenue can support it. If not, the content is still printable by millions of home printers where readers think it's worth the cost. The dividing line between print and online departments, not to mention staff and community, will become very difficult to discern -- as it should be. Then we can all get along with the business of serving new audiences, collaborating with them and supporting our efforts with shared revenue.

Printcasting Featured on "Spark" Radio Show

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:14:00 +0000

Last week I got a call from a guy named Dan Misener who works on the CBC radio show, "Spark". He was very well informed about Printcasting and asked me a ton of questions about it. Then he asked me if I could head down to a nearby public radio station in Denver to give a longer interview.

That happened yesterday, and one day later the radio show is up. You can listen to the Podcast on the "Spark" site.

Many thanks to Dan, and also host Nora Young for a great interview. And extra special thanks to them for doing their homework, which as a former journalist I'm embarrassed to say is becoming a rarity among reporters.

In other news, we are getting our Printcasting beta site ready over the next couple of weeks, and we may invite some of our alpha testers in to help make sure everything is in good shape. Our soft date is February 9 and -- knock on wood -- we're feeling good about hitting it. Based on how the beta is performing, we will take off the password soon after, and then start moving down the runway toward our March launch. (More on that here).

Wish us luck!

- Dan & the Printcasting Team

The Day Print Didn't Stand Still

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 03:30:00 +0000

Last week I saw the remake of the 1950s movie, "The Day the Earth Stood Still." It's like The Matrix meets The Terminator, but with worse special effects, less action, more aliens and more philosophy. It's certainly not the best movie of all time, but it does makes you think, as it's about humanity standing at the brink of destruction with one last chance to change its ways.

Of all things, that made me think about the newspaper industry.

If that sounds alarmist, it's really not. This year many U.S. newspapers face such a dilemma, with one large paper in a two-newspaper town up for sale, a major chain filing for bankruptcy protection, and two newspapers in a major city reducing their print editions to three days a week. As this comes on the heels of what we're told is the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, it's safe to assume that we'll be seeing more of this kind of thing in 2009.

My PBS MediaShift IdeaLab post this week is about "Newspaper Armageddon" -- a term I use to describe the collective bad news coming out of the newspaper industry in the last two months -- and how Printcasting and other customized print solutions represent a much-needed opportunity for newspapers to evolve. I also discuss how the value of print media and physical "stuff" in general increases as you focus on smaller geographic communities and niche interests. Read the full post here.

I'm not naive enough to suggest that Printcasting, or any one initiative or movement, is the silver bullet that will single-handedly save newspapers. That's never the case for anything. But I do feel that customized print, and "printable" and portable media, are a big part of the future of news. And the great thing is that with a little thought and effort, all of this can be done now. Rather than dwell on same old boring doom-and-gloom, I choose to look at the larger trends and what they mean for the future of publishing. For those news and information companies that enthusiastically embrace change, this is not Armageddon at all. It's a true second chance to evolve.

printcasting, scripps, newspaperindustry, printindustry

A Quick Update

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 17:34:00 +0000

Hi folks. I've been remiss in posting to this blog lately. Part of that is due to being busy at work, and the rather tedious and un-blog-worthy nature of that work (lots of internal product testing and bug filing.) But I did want to let you know that this Tuesday we launched the Printcasting alpha.

You can find out how to be a tester at http://printcasting.com. We will continue to update the alpha until all features are complete, at which point the more open beta testing period will begin. We anticipate that happening between late January and February. Printcasting will launch publicly in Bakersfield on March 2.

By the way, I'm posting this from a new iPhone app that works with Blogger -- thus, the brevity. Despite the fact that I spend most of my day at a computer, most of my personal online time has moved to my phone. I also find that I post more frequently on Twitter because it's easier to do and more social. You can see my Twitter feed in the sidebar of this blog. And if you use Twitter, you can subscribe to my feed.

Spot.us Launches: Fund a Story You Care About

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:26:00 +0000

Today, fellow Knight News Challenge winner David Cohn launched Spot.us, a non-profit project in community funded reporting. David says it's not 100% finished, but at good starting point.

In case you haven't heard of this novel idea, here's the elevator pitch. Spot.us lets citizens submit news tips for stories that they want to see covered in their community. Journalists are then invited to submit pitches for stories they want to report -- some of which may be inspired by citizen pitches, others of which are their own ideas -- and readers can donate money to fund individual projects. You can learn more about it in the video below, or better yet, go to http://spot.us, register, find a story and donate.

I just did this myself, and I'm still basking in the glow of knowing that I made a difference in a story about when solar power will be affordable in the San Francisco bay area.

I live in the Boulder area, not San Francisco, but I have been asking this very question for my own area and have even run some back-of-napkin calculations for possibly solarizing my home. I've quickly gotten lost in a vortex of facts and spin that make me appreciate every professionally researched story I find about this subject. And generally speaking, I like to support projects that promote alternative energy. I'm looking forward to reading the final story that Spot.us reporter Aaron Crowe produces, and it will feel good knowing that I helped make it happen.

Spot.us makes a lot of sense at a time when news organizations are contracting due to economic forces and changing business models. But it's also worth noting that Spot.us will also accept 50% donations from existing news organizations in exchange for exclusivity, so it's also trying to help existing journalism businesses.

But that's not why I'm interested in the project. I simply like the way it connects people with the journalism they depend on. It's like a mashup of public radio, online political campaigns and causes, and journalism -- as if Howard Dean had applied his online fundraising success to the Fourth Estate. I think it also serves as a reminder to people that investigative journalism takes time, resources and money to do well.

While I still am and always will be a big proponent of citizen's media, I think there will always be a place for professional journalism -- sometimes even more than before. In an expanding sea of voices, a trusted, authoritative voice becomes all the more valuable. I'll even go so far as to say that without professional journalism, Democracy as we know it could not survive. If you agree with that statement, you definitely should head over to Spot.us right now and fund a story. And please congratulate David on a successful launch!

Technorati Tags: spotus, knightnewschallenge

IFRA Flashlight Report on Printcasting

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 20:43:00 +0000

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was interviewed by IFRA magazine, but what I didn't know is that they also published a full spread about Printcasting in their monthly "Flashlight Report". You can download a copy of it here: http://ifra.com/flashlight. Scroll to the bottom to find download links for PDFs in English, German, Spanish and French.

In the report, IFRA puts Printcasting into the broader context of how print publishing is changing in the digital era. It includes an introspective piece by IFRA Research Director Manfred Werfel, and a quote from Kiruba Shankar, CEO of Business Blogging.

Interestingly, Shankar refers to a community in Chennai, India that is passionate about Ultimate Frisbee and may include good target Printcasting publishers. It just so happens that Printcasting is being jointly developed by Chennai-based Photon Infotech. It's a small world indeed!

printcasting, ifra

A few Printcasting updates

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:20:00 +0000

I haven't blogged about Printcasting here for a while, but I have been talking about it in two other places: Printcasting.com and the PBS MediaShift Idea Lab site. I've also given a couple interviews.

If you're following Printcasting, here are some links that may be of interest to you:

Printcasting prototype video, posted on Idea Lab and Printcasting.com
Screen shots of new Printcasting templates, and some geek-level information about how the templates are created and translated into PDFs.
My interview in IFRA Magazine

Get Money for Your Killer News Idea

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:42:00 +0000

Since my blog is read by a lot of people who work in digital news, I would like to invite everyone to submit good ideas to this year's Knight News Challenge. All entries must be in by 11:59 p.m. on November 1, 2008, which means there are only 24 days left. You can submit your application at http://newschallenge.org/

The Knight News Challenge is an annual contest that awards $5 million for innovative ideas that develop platforms, tools and services to inform and transform community news, conversations, and information distribution and visualization. The criteria are:

Digital – Your idea uses digital technology (computers, the internet, cell phones, that sort of thing).
Innovative – Your idea is new and original. It’s different from what people have done before. You are, in some way, breaking new ground.
News/information – Your idea is about giving people access to what they want to know.
Timely – Your idea delivers news or information while it’s still fresh.
Community-building – Your idea helps create a sense of community among some group of individuals.
Limited geographic area – Your idea affects people in a specific area, which could be as big as a state or province, or as small as a city block. (If your idea is national or worldwide in scope, it must work at a regional level.)
Open Source – The inner workings of what you create will be visible to the world, so that others can take it and improve upon it.

ALL CRITERIA are applied to EVERY application, so if you have an idea I suggest you read it over once for every rule above and make sure that your idea and application fit within the scope of the contest -- especially the "limited geographic area" requirement. You would be surprised at how many people don't do this.

Think the odds are stacked against you? The bar is very high (last year there were 3,000 entries and 16 winners), but if you have a killer idea you stand a chance.

I can speak from experience here. A year ago, I entered this contest along with my colleagues -- Mary Lou Fulton and Justinian Hatfield -- from The Bakersfield Californian. We had an idea for making it possible for anyone to be a local print publisher without any money, design skills or even content. To our surprise and delight, that idea, Printcasting, was one of the 16 winners, and we're on track to launching phase 1 next March.

Now for a few caveats. I'm a screener for this year's entries, which means that if I know you I will need to recuse myself from reviewing your application. I also may not be the one to screen your app, as they're assigned randomly.

Finally, if you have a good idea and want feedback from me, as a screener I'm not allowed to provide any. However, everyone is encouraged to post their ideas first at the News Challenge Garage (http://garage.newschallenge.org/). You can request a mentor who will review your application and help you make it better. When you feel it's ready, post it at http://newschallenge.org. Note that you only have once chance at that point, so make it count!

Good luck!

Technorati Tags:
knight news challenge, news

WhozAround: Twitter For Your Calendar

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:51:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:31:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:34:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:00:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:11:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:46:00 +0000

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.

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:15:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:38:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:26:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:41:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Dan) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:18:00 +0000

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.