Thursday, August 5, 2004
Washington Convention Center
Washington, D.C.
Citizen-Produced Journalism
Mary Lou Fulton, Publisher,
NorthwestVoice.com,Bakersfield, California:
Hi, everybody, thanks for coming out. I’d like to begin by talking
about something that’s very important to me and something I believe
in and that is community. I believe in community because I believe that
in each of us there is a need, a longing, something that wants to be
part of an effort that’s larger than what we are as individuals.
And that’s really all about participation.
"I think journalism is terrible
at participation."
-Mary Lou Fulton |
|
I
think journalism is by and large terrible at participation. I don’t
think we do a very good job at all of interacting with our leaders and
listeners and viewers in trying to understand what’s important
to them. And it was in large part due to my frustration with this culture
in newsrooms that led me to leave the newspaper business ten years ago
and I went to the online world for a while, which is all about participation
and interactivity.
But I came back to newspapers last year and was fortunate to go to work
for the Bakersfield Californian, which is a family-owned independent
newspaper in Bakersfield, where community and participation is highly
valued. So I feel very much at home there and when I was asked as one
of my first assignments to look into creating a community newspaper,
I thought to myself: Well, I wonder what would happen if we created
a community publication in which readers contributed almost all of the
articles and pictures and events? What would happen if we turned it
over to the community? I wonder what would happen if we had a policy
that said “yes” to everything? Instead of being gatekeepers
and telling people that what was important to them really didn’t
matter, what if we just said: “You know what: If it’s local
and it’s legal, we’ll take
it."
"If it's local and it's legal we'll
take it. "
-Mary Lou Fulton |
|
And
what if we could leverage the strengths of the online medium and have
everything submitted through our web site? We’d publish everything
first online and then we’d take as many items as possible and
we put it into a print edition and we’d distribute that for free
to every household in the community. Well, that’s what we’re
doing in Bakersfield with Northwest Voice. I’m going to be telling
you a little bit more
about that today.
Now, as you might imagine, I get a lot of questions about this idea,
and when I talk to my colleagues, particularly those in the newsroom,
some of the looks I get are like: What? What do you mean by that? I’m
confused. And the composite reaction goes something like: Well, that’s
really nice that you’re doing that. Good for you. But, come on,
you’ve worked in newsrooms before, you know that this isn’t
really news because all the school plays and the youth sports and all
that stuff, that doesn’t really matter. It’s not that important
and don’t they really have better things to do?
"I don't care about being nice .
. . I care about being relevant."
-Mary Lou Fulton |
|
And
I’m sure because all of you here are interested in interactive
and participatory journalism that we don’t have anyone here who
shares that opinion, but in case you should run across someone who does,
I would say that you tell them to please pull your head out. You are
not the only ones who know what’s important. You are not the only
ones who know what matters.
I don’t care about being nice, not that I object to being nice.
I care about being relevant. We have a big problem with relevance in
our media today because people don’t see enough of themselves
in what we do and, as a result, they’re checking out of what we
do in numbers that are really scary.
And so, I think it’s a necessity for us as an industry to explore
new ways to connect with readers. It’s not just something that
we do because it’s nice; it’s something that we do because
we care about being relevant and surviving into the future.
Now,
one of the things that’s happening that’s good news for
us is that our readers and
viewers are not dropping out, they’re just sort of checking out
of what we’re doing and they’re checking in to other places.
And one of the places that they’re checking into is online. Now,
the online content revolution is generally described as everybody’s
doing e-mail and booking their flights online and all of that is true.
But there’s also something else that’s happening that’s
really quite amazing.
There’s
an explosion in creativity and in self-expression that’s happening
online today.
"There's an explosion in creativity
and in self-expression that's happening online today. "
-Mary Lou Fulton |
|
A Pew study earlier this year found that 44 percent of Internet users
had created some type of online content. That includes things like pictures,
posting on message boards, having blogs, participating somehow in the
online world. That is really pretty remarkable to me.
Why is this happening? Well, people are much more familiar with the
Internet today, they’re not afraid of it anymore. Everybody’s
got a digital camera, more and more people have broadband access at
home, and computing horsepower and web publishing tools are really easy
now. You don’t have to know much of anything to publish to the
web; you just have to be able to type.
And
so, individuals are saying: Hey, you know what, if my local media doesn’t
do it for me, I’m just going to go do it for myself, and they’re
going out and doing this as individuals. They’re also going out
and participating in community efforts. So, I think the real challenge
for us is not to say that this doesn’t matter or that we don’t
care. It’s how do we plug in? How do we participate by harnessing
the power of all of this creativity that’s going on out there
and creating better content that’s not just about bloggers ranting,
but it’s really about community. And it’s about participating
and adding something special and new to our local efforts.
Just to share with you a few examples of what’s happening out
there: In Korea there’s a site called ohmynews.com where there
are some 33,000 content contributors. And these individuals contribute
articles and, if those articles are accepted onto the web site, they’re
paid. It’s been going on for a few years in Korea. I would say
-- would you agree, Jan -- they’re really the pioneer in terms
of participatory journalism.
In Long Beach, California, where I spent part of my life, I signed up
for a site called lbreport.com. And this is a guy who sends out seven
to ten e-mails a day about everything under the sun. Just one guy. He
goes to public meetings, he does audio files, he sends out pictures
when the jacaranda trees are in bloom, he sends what we call impact
reports to raise money, I mean, everything under the sun. This is just
one guy.
Jan mentioned GothamGazette.com. They do a great job being good community
watchdogs and keeping track of government and providing that civic focus.
We have a number of community sites that are also springing up. There
is one in Vermont called mybrattleboro.com. There’s one in Maine
called villagesoup.com. These are all kind of community, newspapery-types
of sites that are inviting readers to participate by submitting content
and whatever they want about what’s going on in the community.
NorthwestVoice is part of this sort of family of new community sites.
It was launched in May of this year. As I mentioned, all the content
is submitted through our web site, northwestvoice.com. All submissions
are published to the web provided that they’re local and legal.
And we include as much as we can in the biweekly print editions published
every other Thursday and distributed for free.
There are extra copies up here if anybody’s interested in taking
one home. These are created independent of our daily newspaper, The
Californian. So, branded separately and distributed separately.
So, how do we go about doing this? Well, we started out first by looking
at this area of northwest Bakersfield, which was the fastest growing
area of our community and saying: What is our target audience? Who are
we doing this for? We decided that we were doing this for homeowners
with young families. We have a lot of young families moving in, buying
homes. They are moving into this area because the public schools are
good and we wanted that to be the focus of our effort.
So, if that’s the focus of your effort, then that leads to count
your priorities like schools and churches and youth sports and local
celebrations. We did a great deal of personal outreach to community
leaders to tell them about this idea, to ask for their participation
and support. We met personally with every school principal, every parent/teacher
club, every kind of a youth sports organization in town and, and asked
them to join with us in this effort.
"Having
predictable forms
of content makes
it a lot easier."
-Mary Lou Fulton |
|
We
also looked at what were the community’s interests in town. So,
in Bakersfield off-roading is really popular, horses are really popular,
and cars. We identified people who wanted to write about these topics
regularly. We also have an editor who writes a cover story every week
and a few other little items, but her job is really to be an evangelist
for this concept, to be out in the community, to look at the content
when it comes in, make sure that the spelling and the grammar are okay
and put it out there on the web.
One of the things that is really important in doing an effort like this
is having some predictability in the content. One of the things that’s
very scary is: Oh-oh, we just put one issue out. What if nobody sends
us anything? So, having predictable forms of content makes it a lot
easier.
For
columnists,
we have a half dozen provide about 30 percent of our content. This is
our horse columnist. Our editor writes 10 to 15 percent of what you
see in the paper. The rest of it just kind of comes in randomly from
the community. And by the way, all of our community columnists and contributors
are volunteers.
So, what are we getting? We are getting a wide range of stuff coming
in. Pictures are the most popular form of content; about 30 percent
of what we get are pictures. School news is about 14 percent, the columnists
are about 15 percent. We get everything -- from an 86-year-old guy sending
us his recipe for chocolate chip cookies to a local professor writing
an analysis of the No Child Left Behind Act in Kern County and the effect
it’s had on schools. and everything in-between. It’s really
kind of fascinating to just kind of watch this thing evolve.
The people who are contributing, about 60 to 65 percent are women --
and I guess we didn’t really think about this a lot before we
did the publication -- but I think women do tend to be a little bit
more closely tied to community and tend to be a little bit larger part
of the social fabric. And so, we are seeing, at least in the initial
stages, a little bit more participation by women than men.
"...that
feedback loop is really important."
-Mary Lou Fulton |
|
How
does all of this work? We have a web publishing system that’s
really at the heart of our operation. It was built by a Canadian content
management company called iUpload. What readers do is to type in text
and send their pictures through our web site. We review it, we assign
it to a category and we e-mail the contributor when their content is
online. It’s very important that when someone takes the time to
send you something that you always be polite and get back to them and
tell them: “Thank you, yes, here’s your stuff on the web.
Or no, I’m sorry, it’s not local or we need you to modify
it in this way.” So, that feedback loop is really important.
Also,
when we approve content we can queue the content for print. So, we say,
this would be good for the next print edition or this is about an event
that’s coming up in three weeks. So, we’ll just put that
in the hopper for the next print edition. We also have a way to designate
trusted contributors who can publish directly to our web site so our
columnists and others who we know and have a good sense of what they
do and what they’re capable of doing, they can just publish directly
to the site.
I wanted to keep a pretty tight rein on it at the beginning because
I just wanted to make sure that everything was local and appropriate,
but I believe over time we’re just going to loosen that more and
more and more and we’re going to have more people who really have
ownership of the site and they’re going to be just out there doing
this thing on their own.
So, just to give you a sense of the process our readers go through,
if you go to northwestvoice.com, at the top of every page is a graphic
that says ”Share your Voice.” And if you click on that you
see this page and you just simply select the type of content that you
want to contribute, whether it’s an article or a picture or a
letter, whatever it is. We do require you to register so that we know
who you are before you submit content.
You just fill in the blanks, put in your headline and your description.
If you know how to type you can do this. No special technical skill
is required and then you click the submit button. It comes into a queue
where we see who sent it, when they sent it in, what’s the headline,
what type of content it is. This is how we manage all the inbound content.
When we open up an individual piece of content, we can edit it right
on the web. This is where we do all of our writing and editing. We don’t
have an editorial production environment other
than the web. And we choose a content category. So, we put it in school
news or put it in sports, and we can also queue it for print. So, we
choose a date for a future print edition from a drop-down menu. And,
at the top there is a way to e-mail the contributor automatically. So,
when we hit that publish button it goes out to the web, the contributor
gets an e-mail, it gets queued for print, distributed for print and
we’re done with that piece of content.
Just a few operational notes. We do this with a staff of three and a
half people. There’s a salesperson, an editor and an office manager,
a part-time production artist and me. Here, we are at a community yard
sale in Bakersfield where we were handing out balloons and talking about
The Voice. We do a lot of grassroots marketing that way.
"This
is not a replacement for our daily newspaper; it's a complement
to it."
-Mary Lou Fulton |
|
We
are read and distributed separately from The Californian, the reason
being that this is different from The Californian. This is not a replacement
for our daily newspaper; it’s a complement to it. But because
its standards and approach are really different, we just wanted to have
it be separate.
And for those interested in crass things like money, I’m happy
to tell you that our revenue has increased 33 percent since we launched
the product in May. We’re six to eight weeks away from starting
to make money with this newspaper. One of the great lessons for me in
being involved in community products over the years is that you have
to think about the business, too. Even though we may be in editorial,
we have to have a strategy for how this thing is going to make money
or else all of the great things about community won’t survive.
I’ve had that unfortunate experience before.
So, some advice for those of you who might be interested in taking something
like this on. Look at your community and choose an area where there’s
a strong sense of community or an emerging sense of community. Make
sure you know who your audience is and build the content around what
they care about. Community outreach is really important. You have to
be out there talking to people, making sure they know who you are. Support
community organizations, be at community events.
This model is different in that we have to also train our readers and
contributors to be
active participants rather than passive readers. One of the things that
happened to us a lot in the beginning was that we would go out and introduce
the concept and invite people to participate and, and we’d inevitably
hear: “Well, okay, but can you come out and cover this event for
us?” And we would say: “No, but if you would like to write
something up and send it in, then we would be happy to publish it.”
One of my observations about all this is how passive our readers and
our viewers have become. They don’t expect that they can participate;
they don’t understand that whole model. And so, we’re trying
to turn that around and get people thinking about how then can really
become part of this effort.
You have to also give the community ideas for how to contribute. We
are constantly publishing suggestions in the paper. Send us this, we’re
looking for that, we’d like photos about this and we’d like
articles about that, and each time we do that we start to get that stuff
in. And so, we’re giving people ideas for how to participate.
It’s just a lot of fun. You know, we give people a way to share
their stories with the world and I find that to be incredibly fun and
interesting and inspiring and we’re really having a great time
with this product. I would just ask all of you to think about how you
can say “yes” to community. And when someone calls and asks
if you can cover something or if they can get some information in the
paper, instead of telling them, “Well, we don’t cover ground
breakings. We don’t do this,” just stop and just ask yourself:
Is there a way that you can say “yes?” Is there a way that
you can ask them to submit something, a picture so you can somehow integrate
what’s important to your readers and viewers and listeners into
what you do. If you do that, they’re going to start to see themselves
in what you do and that’s going to create that relationship that
Jan talked about, that personal and emotional statement of product that’s
so essential if we’re to be relevant in the future.
Just as some resources, I created a site called opensourcejournalism.org,
where you will find this presentation later today as well as all of
the business planning and technology information, contact information.
So, I’m happy to help anyone who’s interested in starting
one of these things in their community or interested in talking their
publishers into doing that, please call me.
There’s a great new book out by Dan Gillmor called "We, the
Media" up here. It just came out last week. Dan is the technology
columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and he’s really nailed
it with his book. So, if you’d like to have a better understanding
of this whole revolution, I’d really recommend that book. And,
again, I hope you’ll contact me if you have any questions or want
to talk about it some more. And if anybody has any questions here, feel
free. Yes?
SPEAKER: I have a financial question. Who are your
advertisers and do you have a set staff and Advertising Department for
selling this and a front-page analysis in terms of the number of FTEs
dedicated to Northwest Voice?
MS. FULTON: I’m talking mostly today about the
content strategy, but one of our important business objectives was to
get more small and medium-size businesses into the paper because those
are the businesses who either can’t afford the daily paper or
don’t like it. And so, we track all this stuff very carefully
and about 60 percent of our advertisers are either brand new to the
company or are very frequent advertisers in the daily publication.
So, we have one FTE for our Voice sales. The ads are very highly trumpeted
in the print edition. We price them lower so that we can afford to get
more folks into the paper at a cheaper price. And we also pick up ads
from the Bakersfield Californian, from the daily paper. so, all of that
stuff together comprises our revenue stream. And we sell web ads, too.
Go ahead.
SPEAKER: Can you tell us a little bit more about the
editing process and what you emphasize in terms of the content?
MS.
FULTON: We edit primarily for grammar and spelling. Most of
the things that we get are very personal in nature. So, there are people
writing about something that happened to their neighbor down the street
and so I don’t feel the nature of that content really requires
a lot of fact checking.
When somebody comes in like the No Child Left Behind Act, yeah, we do
look at that. If anything comes in regarding local government or any
kind of public issue, we look at that a lot more closely. But if it’s
very personal journalism, we feel that’s really the responsibility
of the contributor and if there’s a problem with an article, we
refer people back to them.
SPEAKER: You say you’re trying to target an audience...What
other kinds of information have you collected in terms of income level
and other kinds of things?
MS. FULTON: We do have a lot of demographic information
about the area -- 30 or 35 percent of the population is younger than
age 17. We have a lot of young kids and that’s why we’re
really emphasizing the school and the sports stuff.
The household income I think is relevant as it pertains to generally
being more likely to have Internet access, generally being more technologically
literate. This is not the highest income area of Bakersfield. It’s
the fastest growing and one in which our daily newspaper penetration
was not keeping pace with the market. And so, we wanted to make sure
that, with folks who are traditionally good newspaper readers, homeowners
with young families, that we have something for them that they really
connected with.
SPEAKER: You talked a little bit about the reaction
you got in the newsroom, but what was the reaction you got from people
in the community?
MS. FULTON: It’s been extremely positive. I can’t
recall another project I’ve worked on where I get calls every
time the print edition, in particular, comes out. People are saying,
“Thank you.” I rarely hear that. We get letters. People
say thank you for this publication and when we go out to the community
the response is positive. It’s very positive.
We’re starting to get -- and I think this is just part of having
a publication -- people saying you got this wrong, you got that wrong.
But that’s fine. That’s good because that’s participation,
too. And so, it’ll just evolve that way, but people feel a sense
of ownership because they see pictures of people they know and places
they know and they feel emotionally connected to it and that’s
why they really like it.
SPEAKER: How does The Voice show up in the daily paper?
MS. FULTON: It does not. It’s distributed independently.
SPEAKER: But is there any effort to promote The Voice
in the daily paper?
MS. FULTON: Very little, very little. Every once in
a while there’s a shared item, but it’s really entirely
independent. We also have racks in the community that help us. Yes?
SPEAKER: What about for a particular news item, would
contact them for that? How does that work?
MS. FULTON: Yes. I say we have no relationship and
we don’t, in terms of what the consumer sees. In other words,
they see something called the Northwest Voice that’s different
from the Bakersfield Californian. But we’ve already had a case
in which an oil well blew up near our horse columnist’s house.
That’s not something we can really deal with as a breaking news
story. So, we sent it over to the Californian and they wrote it up and
they handled it. I think we’ll see more of that, too. Yes?
SPEAKER: Can you say something about the financial
aspects?
MS. FULTON: Yes. It’s printed in The Californian,
but we have all the costs allocated back. So, rent for the office space
that we use and the newsprint. the printing costs, and carrier delivery,
other things on that order. Miss Jodi?
SPEAKER: How much of your coverage is e-mail driven?
MS. FULTON: That’s a good question. I don’t
know and I should know. I hope a lot of it will be. What we’re
seeing in the traffic patterns is something that you often see in community
sites, which is that the traffic pattern is just kind of a mile wide
and an inch deep. So, you see lots of three and four views on a single
page and not hundreds and hundreds of views on any one page. which tells
me probably that stuff is getting forwarded around.
MS. SCHAFFER: Any more questions?
SPEAKER: It seems like we have the momentum to move
forward with this as a new era of interactive reporting. How do you
see this playing out in the future? Do you envision both kinds of reporting
coexisting with the other?
MS. FULTON: Yes, I do. It’s the next generation
of community journalism. We’re just taking
"It's the next generation of community
journalism. "
-Mary Lou Fulton |
|
advantage of the medium and trying to not inherit a lot of the legacy
habits from daily newspapers in order to be more efficient.
SPEAKER: How do you see the two types of newspapers
existing in the future?
"You have to have this as a standalone
model in the beginning to prove that it's viable because it'll
get smothered in traditional newsrooms."
-Mary Lou Fulton |
|
MS. FULTON: I see integration in the future. You know,
I’m not standing here saying that we should stop publishing our
daily newspapers and replace them with Northwest Voices everywhere.
But I think you have to have this as a stand-alone model in the beginning
to prove that it’s viable because it’ll get smothered in
traditional newsrooms. And once you kind of hang out its own identity.
I predict everything will sort of come back together .
