Transcript for
AEJMC 2005
Interactive Journalism Summit:
When Consumers Become Creators

August 12, 2005
San Antonio, Texas

Introduction
Jan Schaffer, J-Lab Executive Director

Jan Schaffer, Moderator: I want to welcome you to the sixth annual J-Lab luncheon at AEJMC. I’m Jan Schaffer, the director of J-Lab. We’ve been doing these for a while now, and we’re extremely grateful this year to the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation for supporting this event and feeding you today.

Today the focus of our Interactive Journalism Summit is going to be small “j” journalism — also known as open source journalism or citizen journalism. The bottom line is that citizens are both the consumers and creators of the content. In the past couple of years this has emerged as somewhat of a runaway train in the journalism community.

We’re going to look at three models today. NorthwestVoice, sort of a mainstream model — although Mary Lou Fulton says, “I can’t believe they’re calling me mainstream” — was launched, but not branded, by the Bakersfield Californian. We’re going to look at a J-School model, MyMissourian.com, launched I think as both an experiment and an experiential learning laboratory by the University of Missouri. And then we’re going to look at an independent initiative, Loudoun Forward. It’s only four months old, and its funded by J-Lab’s New Voices project. You’ll hear about what’s motivating their aspirations.

As most of you know, J-Lab received a Knight grant late last year to fund the start-up of 20 citizen media initiatives over the next two years. The first ten were chosen in April — of which David Wiseman’s project is one of them. We got the grant in November, and what’s really interesting to me is that we put the request for proposals in the field in January and in only ten weeks we got 243 proposals. 243! They came from J-schools, ethnic communities, rural communities — they also came from urban communities that were on the perimeter of major media markets. I think the nut graf in all of these proposals is that, “No one, no one, is covering us. Mainstream media is not covering us, so we’re going to do it ourselves.”

We’re going to move quickly through our program today. I first want to take a couple of minutes to show you a new tool that I think will be useful for journalism schools. It was funded by the Knight Foundation grant, and it’s very much a granular how-to-create-your-own-community-news site. We pulled the plug on it this morning, and it’s called J-Learning.org. What it’s designed to do is to provide tech support to jumpstart community media initiatives. It’s very much written without a lot of the online media jargon. That’s because I edited it and I don’t understand most of that jargon, OK? So, one of the things I learned, despite being the publisher of four Web sites, is that I finally now understand HTML and forms and databases as a result of editing this copy.

I think that this will be useful not only for community media start-ups, but we expect it will be useful for journalism schools that are struggling to do new media skills courses. We expect it will also be useful for small media markets where suddenly a copyeditor is deputized to be the Web master and does not have a lot of new media skills.

So, here’s a skim of the site. It’s a companion site to the New Voices project — our next funding deadline, by the way, is February 8, 2006, if you’ve got any ideas for a community media proposal. It’s intended to help support sites like this one, www.forumhome.org, which is one of the sites launched very recently by the New Voices grant.

J-Learning.org is very much a Plan It, Build It, Present It, Promote It site. You can register and post if you want to ask questions. We want this to be very, very interactive. So if you don’t understand something you can say, “I don’t understand this, this is confusing.” Or if you want to say, “I’ve got a better idea, I don’t like the software you’re recommending and I found something that’s more useful,” you can make that recommendation as well.

It’s divided into four chapters, and each chapter has sub-chapters. So the Plan It site will tell you everything from how to choose a domain name to registering it. It’ll tell you how to make some decisions on what you’re going to use, including what equipment you should buy. It’ll give you various Web standards: how to think about your navigation bar, where to put your search boxes, how to handle advertising on your site. One of the themes throughout all of this is we want these efforts to be self-sustaining if at all possible.

It will teach us some really fundamental skills: basic HTML, how to create forms, how to do page layout, how to manage your files, how to do databases so the content on your Web site actually talks to one another. You can evaluate the page. You can post comments. You can print it out if you want.

Build It will take you through how to do things like presenting it and making it pretty and adding some bells and whistles. That would include things like what kind of digital camera should you buy and how you upload a photo to your Web site; how do you animate and use some basic Flash applications; how do you stream audio and how do you stream video? How do you use a blog? What kind of blog do you create? How to manage traffic on your blog; how to digitize your audio; how to get feedback in forums; how to link; what you need to worry about in terms of copyright and attribution; some online libel issues; and how to count your traffic.

We want you to tell us what’s helpful, what’s confusing, what you recommend, and what you built using these tools, because we will give it a megaphone and we will showcase it. Have a look, give us your feedback and give us your reaction. It came out today and I’m sure we’ll have some bugs to clean up, but it’s there for you to use and it’s free. You don’t need to register to use the site, but you do need to register to leave comments on it.

So with that, let’s move on to our panel today. I’m very pleased to have these folks here, because they’re all in the middle of launching new projects and new products for what they’re doing.

We have Mary Lou Fulton, who is the founder and the publisher of NorthwestVoice, and she’sthe Vice President of Audience Development for the Bakersfield Californian. NorthwestVoice was one of the earliest citizen journalism initiatives to happen in this country — very much modeled after OhMyNews in Korea . It is a citizen-created content site. It does have one editor who helps manage some of the copy, and it has a deadwood edition — a print edition that is circulated throughout Bakersfield, Calif.

Mary Lou will tell us how it came about and how they’re managing the community to produce the content of the site. She comes to us really being a community news reporter and editor for the AP and LA Times. She has worked everywhere — AOL, GeoCities, washingtonpost.com — and she’s got a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Clyde Bentley, as many of you know, founded MyMissourian.com as an open source publication. He’s an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. He teaches online journalism. Before that he was a reporter, photographer, copyeditor, managing editor of the Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, Press. He’s had a number of managerial positions at the San Antonio Recorder Times. He just came back from Korea, where he attended a big citizens media summit there with the founder of OhMyNews. He’ll share with you some of that.

David Wiseman — he just gets into this in his spare time. He’s managing partner of Loudoun Forward. Loudoun County, Va., is one of the fastest growing counties in the United States, and it was one of the ten New Voices grantees we picked this year. In his real life, he is the managing partner of Useful Studios. It’s an information design company based in Leesburg, Va., and it focuses on making Web sites, printed media and other products a lot more useful.

So with that, I want to start with Mary Lou and have her talk. We’re going to leave some time for questions later.

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