Printcasting Launches in Bakersfield

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.

Mediashift post about my colleagues from Bakersfield.com

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

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

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

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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