Revolution in The Bakersfield Californian's Newsroom

One of the great things about being an early innovator is the sense that you are planting seeds that will one day sprout in other people, and take directions you never expected.

I'm having one of those moments this week as I marvel at what The Bakersfield Californian's newsroom is doing in the blogs on Bakersfield.com and their recent reorganization to support it. They call this new approach Bakosphere: Where Bakersfield and the Web collide. It's the most beautiful, natural evolution of online news I have seen in a long time, and a good example of how "news as a conversation" is becoming the norm in newsrooms around the world.

First, a little background.

When I joined The Bakersfield Californian nearly four years ago, the newspaper's Web site, Bakersfield.com, was largely an afterthought in the print-centric newsroom. Stories would sit around on reporters' computers until it was time to "file" for the next morning's paper, and at 11 p.m. every night an automated process would copy those stories onto the Web site. Meanwhile, those same stories were being covered more and more online by competitors, and they weren't waiting for the next morning.

The New Products group I work in started to challenge the status quo by doing things that some considered suicide for a newspaper -- such as creating separately branded Web sites with free Classifieds, launching tools that let anyone in the community write a news story or blog, and allowing young people to upload music and post content without anyone reviewing it first.

After those efforts proved to be more than a passing fad, we introduced the same capabilities on Bakersfield.com, and user-contributed content quickly became the fastest growing portion of the 140-year-old Californian's growth. A few reporters began to set up their own staff blogs and our "Blog Czar" Steve Swenson, later joined by community coordinator Jason Sperber, set standards for communication and conversation that act as glue for the community.

Three weeks ago, the newsroom -- all on its own and after no prodding or consultation with my team -- took that up a notch with Bakosphere. While it's bolstered by new technology, it's really driven by a whole new way of approaching the news.

Today I spoke with executive editor Mike Jenner, whose newsroom is the real force behind this. He says it all started with reorganizing the newsroom to reduce layers. Fewer editors now touch stories between creation and posting, with many stories going straight to the web in blog posts. Later in the day, another editor will read the story before it goes into print. By reducing the number of eyeballs at the front-end of a story, they've sped up the process of getting news online considerably, while still providing space for that second or third edit before a story goes into the immutable print medium.

Another major change is that there is no longer a "web team" through which all online content must pass. Now everyone is the web team! All story originators are trained and expected to post stories online and attach assets like photos, links, graphics and videos. They all know how to edit video, although video editing still goes through a desk that focused just on that. And they can all send out breaking news alerts, which reach readers in e-mail and cell phones.

"We managed to do this by taking nearly all print responsibilities off the shoulders of originating editors and putting more print production tasks on the back end," Mike told me.

You have to admit that's pretty radical for a newspaper, and I just have to wonder how long the term "paper" will be associated with our industry's name. It's now just one delivery mechanism of many, and also the last in the chain.

Another surprise for me is that the bulk of online news reporting is happening in blogs. Every reporter posts to a news blog, as well as a few "team" blogs -- such as Money Talks. Some of these blogs are seeing 6-7 postings a day by the authors, with even more comments by users.

I have noticed that in more than one of these blogs, the community is posting questions and comments, which the reporter reads and responds to. On the Pinheads blog, which is providing live coverage of a high school wrestling championship, you can see how the uncle of a wrestler was conversing with the reporters asking for details about his nephew. An excerpt from that conversation:

The reader:

my nephew is wrestling 130 wt class name is frank martinez . is there a way to watch on the internet,or do you know if he has wrestled already?

The reporter:

I caught part of Frank's first-round match at 130. He was ahead 8-0 going into the third period, so that looks like good news for you. I don't think there's a way to watch on the internet until tomorrow's semifinals.

OK, I know that we journalists like to hum and haw about our deep investigations and amazing storytelling. That's definitely important, but this exchange really shows how we can use the online medium to connect with our community. That uncle is never going to forget that he learned about his nephew's standings directly from the reporter in real time.

Some notes from Mike about what's working:

• Web traffic, which was climbing all along, is now climbing at a noticeably higher rate with little to no promotion.

  If you look at a bar chart of our hourly traffic M-F, it now looks more like a butte or mesa than like a sharp-peaked mountain," Mike says.

  Traffic used to run way up at 7 and 8 a.m. and peak at 9, then fall off quickly. Now traffic is running up and flattening out around 9 a.m., and not dropping precipitously until after 5. To me this says we're developing in users the habit of returning to the site for more news and updates during the day.

• They're seeing a broader range of readers commenting on blogs -- a welcome change from the one or two dozen commenters Mike calls "frequent fliers." The new names and faces mean new points of view that were drowned out before.
  
  
• The newsroom is getting more story ideas and leads through blog comments. And he also says they've discovered mistakes and been able to fix them more quickly, which also results in not memorializing comments in print.
  
  
• Reporters are growing more accustomed to direct interaction with citizens, readers and sources and are much less dismissive of the value of the interactivity.
  

There are some negatives, too. Mike specifically asked me to mention these because he recognizes that this is a work in progress and that it will take time to get just right. I would add that the process of innovation is inherently messy. I'm reminded of Gannett's Jennifer Carroll's frequent advice :"Conversation is messy. Welcome the noise!"

Negatives include:

• Some areas and staffers are a little overwhelmed by the extra work and a few things have fallen through the cracks on the front end. (But hey -- this is only a three-week-old revolution, right?)
  
  
• Reporters and originating editors are reveling in volume and speed, and that can easily come at the cost of story-telling that provides depth and insight for non-commodity news.
  

All of this is a reminder to me of how no good idea stops at step 1. It's gratifying to see how a company's entire culture could be changed simply by opening it up to outside involvement. By giving our audience the tools and structure necessary to share their voice, we unknowingly opened the door to a revolution within our own organization.

It's a story of "If they can do it, so can I." In the end, user-contributed content isn't something to fear. It's a community partnership that is changing the nature of media.

user contributed content, the bakersfield californian, networked journalism, netj, participatory media

Get Ready for the Crowd

One of the most interesting threads from last week's Networked Journalism Summit was reports on recent crowdsourcing projects.

Since my blog is read by more than just the news digerati and increasingly by small "mainstream" independent newspapers, here's some background on what the heck crowdsourcing is. (If you already know just skip half way down in this entry).

So you know that crazy "citizen journalism" thing we've been doing in Bakersfield, where average people are invited to write their own stories about their community that get printed and distributed to their neighbors? And that wacky "social networking" stuff that encourages anyone to blog and share their deepest secrets with each other on our web sites, including our main newspaper site, without any editorial oversight? Apologies for repeating myself, but in this case I'm speaking to the nice old editor I met at the Georgia Associated Press conference who picked up a print edition of The Northwest Voice and declared a cheerleader's story and photos about her summer cheer leading camp experience "crap that isn't anything new" (to which I responded, "that crap was written by some mother's daughter, and she's probably proudly displaying it her refrigerator and sending it to everyone she knows, unlike most of what you've written in your long career." No, I didn't actually say that last bit but I sure did think it.)

Crowdsourcing takes this all up about 100 notches by not just encouraging participation, but focusing a group of volunteer contributors on a specific research / reporting topic. Just a few examples:

• The News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla. uploaded public documents related to a proposed sewer expansion and invited hundreds of local experts such as accountants, lawyers and engineers to scour them and help identify relevant trends and facts that should be further investigated. Their work was folded back into the resulting news stories.
• More recently, the News-Press sued FEMA for information about how it provided aid to people affected by hurricane Katrina. They posted it in a database on the site, asked the public to search for information on their houses and friends' homes, and picked up leads that they further investigated and reported on. This worked because many of the people in "the crowd" who helped out had been trying to get this information themselves, but weren't having any luck. They had a stake in the outcome of the story because they were part of it.
• Another is Jay Rosen's Assignment Zero, which in conjunction with Wired Magazine invited a network of volunteers to conduct 80 interviews of people related to a trend story, including our Mary Lou Fulton (in this case the trend was crowdsourcing itself, which is a little ironic but certainly a valid story). You can read Rosen's initial thoughts and learnings about the project on his blog.
• And my favorite, simply because the barriers to entry are so low and the information is so relevant to everyone, is WNYC public radio's feature on price gouging. They invited people to go to their local grocery store and check the price of a gallon of non-organic milk and a six-pack of Budweiser beer and post the results online. The radio station then plotted the results on a Google map.
  

This idea of letting anyone not only contribute, but also research and report, is a radical new idea that borrows from the open-source software movement. In the information space it's probably best exemplified by Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, but anyone can also edit or "roll back" changes on to prevent abuse and bias from self-interested parties. One big difference when this idea is applies to journalism is that the content is much more focused and subject to all the time constraints in a business that is focused on the here and now.

This concept is either the old newspaper editor's worse nightmare, or her salvation. I happen to consider it a next logical step in journalism, because it allows stories to be investigated and told that may never have seen the light of day, especially as mainstream news organizations cut their reporting staffs (although that is definitely not the reason to look into crowdsourcing).

And to dispel any protectionist reactions, it doesn't do away with the role of the editor. If anything, it expands it to being more about managing and inspiring a group of people who are
getting nothing more than "psychic income" at best for their efforts. Jay Rosen said as much in his report on Assignment Zero, noting the importance of starting with the right people who have the right motivations, and the "sudden coordination costs" that come from identifying what needs to be researched when and by whom, and folding their material back into one cohesive story.

Another knee-jerk reaction in traditional newsrooms is that a crowd comes with a myriad of opinions, sometimes not socially acceptable, and that the newspaper has an obligation to limit that. Jennifer Carroll, VP of Content for Gannett, put a fork in that idea during her panel. She said,

We say "Bring on the debate." We say, "conversation is messy, welcome the noise." From what we hear, our credibitliy is measured by the multipolicity of viewpoints. At the same time, we're never backing away from the journalism side. We're just looking to have a much more open sense of what the dialogue needs to be."

We haven't done anything that could be considered crowdsourcing in Bakersfield yet (one possible exception is our collaborative maps), although as always there are some ideas out there. So all I can offer to this discussion is what I have learned again and again in my career. It all comes down to community.

One thing Jay Rosen said that I thought really rang true was that you'll do better off by getting an existing community to report on a topic -- preferably one that has some shared connection to the topic that you're investigating -- than if you just invite anyone in to contribute. This is more true for the Big Investigative Story than for the average pothole map.

This is similar to what we've learned about participatory media in general. In Bakersfield, the second most popular social networking / participatory news site we have is Tehachapi News because it's focused on a mountain town of 10,000. It gets slightly more traffic than Bakotopia.com. I suspect that's because we provided a community watering hole to a community that existed already. We tapped into behavior that already existed and just made it easier and more convenient for these people to do what they were already doing. (Bakotopia still gets a lot of traffic, and it did reach out to an existing community of musicians and downtown-focused people, but its existing community wasn't quite as big as Tehachapi's).

Jennifer Carroll said much the same, and cited the early success they're seeing at the Des Moines Register with an ongoing story about biofuels. They reached out to people in the biofuels industry and invited them to blog about the topic. She said the biofuels area is quickly becoming one of the most authoritative sources on biofuels.

And that gets me to the big missing element I see in many of the crowdsourcing experiments out there. In my opinion, most are missing a key ingredient: a robust online community where people can not only share information, but express themselves and share with each other.

One of the most important features on all of our participatory sites in Bakersfield is the user profiles. If you go to any of our sites, you'll see that peoples' smiling faces are prominently featured under the heading, "Meet Your Neighbors". On Bakotopia the persona functionality is right at the top, while on Northwest Voice and Tehachapi it's off to the side, but it's always there. Related to this, whenever anyone posts anything, their user profile and photo show up right next to the headline. And everyone's profile can be found through site search, right along with news content and blogs.

People come to our sites not just get published in print, but to get validation from each other. And some never publish a single thing, but update their profiles regularly and post a comment on someone else's content every so often. I think this shows that you can't divorce crowdsourcing from the crowd, or "networked journalism" from a network. Some journalists tend to think of social networking as somehow less important than Journalism with a capital J, but I say what people cover and the people themselves are intertwined. By having social networking tied into a user-contributed content experience, you have the broadcaster(s) and audience all in the same room.

I think Jay Rosen is onto this too, because he hinted that future Assignment Zero projects may seek to engage an "existing social network" around a story of interest to that network. If I can make a suggestion, Facebook groups would be the perfect platform for that, perhaps through a new Facebook application that lets groups collaborate through wiki-like editing tools. But whatever comes of Assignment One or Two or Three, it will be worth watching. Kudos to Rosen for being so open about his successes and failures.

crowdsourcing, netj, networked journalism summit, jay rosen

Networked Journalism Summit: Myheimat and Groundreport

I was fortunate to participate in the Networked Journalism Summit in New York City this year. The premise of the conference, as iterated by organizer Jeff Jarvis, was "more action than talk" to outline next steps to make even more use of "pro-am" journalists (read: bloggers, people who contribute to sites like The Northwest Voice).

The conference was only one day, so truthfully it's pretty hard to get everyone to commit to next steps in such a short period of time (especially the jet-lagged ones). I did collect a zillion business cards though and had some very interesting discussions, and I do believe that some very concrete next steps will emerge. The first step for that next step is for everyone involved in this area to more openly share information with each other, which I started to do with some people who are in this space and pledge to do more of in the future. It's not all about personal PR, folks!

There are two people who really stood out to me, though. I suggest watching what they do next, because I think they're both onto something powerful.

First, there's Martin Huber from a German outfit named Myheimat.de (loosely translated to "My Town" but I'm sure I'm slaughtering that as I don't speak German). You can read his writeup here. The short version is that he's built a system in Germany that automatically creates print publications based on user-contributed content.

Since 2003, his company gogolmedien has gotten 5,000 German contributors to write stories for 18 locally-focused publications that are distributed as what they call "freesheets" in their cities. There are 1,800 such small cities with less than 10,000 residents in Germany, and their objective is ultimately to get it's citizens to cover their own communities.

The concept of regular people writing stories is not new, as we've been doing it in Bakersfield since 2004, along with larger operations like Denver's YourHub.com and Morris Digital.

But what is new is something I've always hoped someone would do. Myheimat print publications are created automatically based on users' content ratings. The highest rated content automatically flows into prefab templates which an editor can view in a PDF, then edit in Adobe InDesign to make just right. If an editor is really busy, he or she can just choose to automatically print the PDF without review. Is this heretical to traditional editors? Well, yes, but ... to potentially cover an entire country like Germany with printed user-contributed content in a way that's profitable, you almost have to do something like that. And in my opinion, we lower the bar on quality a little with user contributed content anyway, so it just makes sense to do the same with printed material. I'm sure there are some legal concerns to work out, but as I've learned in my career, where there is a will there is a way. They've done it in Germany.

Second, I found myself captivated by Rachel Sterne, who has a relatively new site called Groundreport.com. The concept of the site is also not new -- she has 1,000 citizen contributors around the world reporting on international issues (a focus that came out of her experience reporting on the United Nations Security Council and events taking place in Darfur) -- but her ideas and passion for democratizing media are refreshing in a "new" field that is sadly becoming more rote and cookie-cutter by the day.

What's great about Rachel is her knack at matching needs with possibilities. When Rachel was reporting on the U.N. she was also working for file-sharing service Limewire. She felt that she had so much access to information and people at the U.N., and she could see that there were global events that people in the U.N. should pay more attention to. Unfortunately nobody was adequately covering these beats, which was partly the fault of the editors and of the subjects they covered. She realized that the tools that allow regular people to report on important events existed. So she got some funding and hobbled Groundreport together.

Groundreport seeks to democratize news in several ways. From the Netj writeup:

1. GroundReport allows everyone to participate by posting articles, videos or livestreaming content.
2. The community decides what is on the front page through voting - there is no editorial control.
3. GroundReport shares revenue with all contributors based on traffic to their stories.

So again, we see this concept of loosening -- or in this case removing -- editorial control (citizen editing?) and giving profits back to the contributors/editors. Taking myself out of my newspaper shoes, I love this idea of giving total control over to the citizens in certain situations. It doesn't have to happen in every case, but there is a place for it in everything we do. Letting people vote stories to appear higher and lower on a page is just another way for people to share their voice and take ownership of news.

The other thing I loved about Rachel is that she didn't just stop with what was in her technology platform. At Limewire she saw how easy it is to stream video if you have a Webcam, so she worked out an arrangement with a site called Mogulus that does just that -- for free! A prominent "Watch TV" tab at the top of Groundreport brings up streaming video of whatever Rachel has recorded most recently from her laptop. She said she hopes to eventually let any of Groundreport's contributors publicize their own channels and aggregate these together on the TV tab.

In case you're wondering, Mogulus is in beta right now and you have to be approved to use it, but they plan to open it up to anyone in the future when their tools are just right. If you're interested in doing something like Rachael has done, just ask her -- or ask me and I'll pass your info on to her. Once you have a channel you simply embed it on your page, and the Mogulus tools do the rest.

Rachel says her next step will be to let anyone in any city create their own "publication", although they'll be entirely online. If you ask me, the combination of Rachel Sterne's ideas around instant geographically-focused citizen news sites and Martin Huber's instant print products would be the ultimate in citizen media. That's what's great about these kinds of conferences. You see how people in different parts of the world are solving the same problems, sometimes the same way and sometimes in different ways. If we can all just share a little more and try to control a little less (not just in terms of what we let the "citizens" do, but how we limit each other for fear of competition), I think we'll be better off. People in small communities certainly will.

netj, myheimat, groundreport, rachel sterne