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

August 12, 2005
San Antonio, Texas

Mary Lou Fulton
VP of Audience Development, The Bakersfield Californian

Mary Lou Fulton: Thank you, Jan. Thank you so much for the invitation. It’s great to be here in San Antonio where it’s so nice and cool. When I left Bakersfield it was 105, so I don’t want to hear any complaints about the heat from anybody here. But it’s always a pleasure to come and talk about the NorthwestVoice, particularly to educators who I think have a great opportunity to start changing the landscape for what journalism means and what journalism is, because it’s really changing. I think the traditional roles are evolving and we’re seeing more hybrid roles and new roles, and it’s wonderful to have the opportunity to influence people who are talking to students so that they are aware of the growing number of opportunities that they have in journalism, including the emerging field of citizen journalism.

As Jan mentioned, participation is really hot right now in the industry. If you’ve been following the industry press, I’m sure you’ve noticed the emergence of a growing number of sites that are fueled by community participation. Just this year we’ve seen the launch of BackFence.com, which is in Northern Virginia. It’s a privately funded hyper-local effort — maybe a competitor for David, I don’t know (laughs) — and it’s all online, all local and community-generated. In Bluffton, S.C., Morris Newspapers has launched a new daily newspaper that is primarily driven by user-created content. Up in the Northwest, there’s NewWest.net, which is a regional site that focuses on issues in the west — a combination of professional and citizen journalism. And in Denver, the Denver Newspaper Agency this year rolled out YourHub.com, which is 26 zoned, weekly editions all filled with user-created content. So it’s an exciting time to be in this emerging area of the field.

I have been an advocate of participation for a long time, so I’m thrilled about all of this. But I’m also worried, because I think it is a new area for us and I think that we are, as an industry, perhaps underestimating what it takes to be successful in managing participation and getting it going and sustaining it. It does require structure and ongoing management. It’s a different kind of work than traditional journalism, but it is real work. And so I’m concerned that what is a very powerful idea won’t take root because of our industry’s inexperience and impatience with new things.

So today I’m going to talk about some of the operating principles that we use at NorthwestVoice, about how we use them as a little bit of a structure for the things that you can do to lay the groundwork and then successfully launch and manage a citizen publication. The first thing you’ve got to do is know who you’re doing this for. You’ve got to know your community. You can’t just put a link up there and say, “OK, we’re open for the participation business,” because no one understands what that means. So you’ve got to have, in marketing parlance, a target audience for what you are doing.

You need to give people something to hold onto. The idea of participation is still kind of new, and people need to know what kind of topics you’re looking for and what kind of ideas you are welcoming in terms of the participation for your publication. You need to keep it simple, make it fast and easy, and minimize the number of rules that you have. You need to think about your contributors and what their motivation is — what are they going to get out of this thing and how are they going to be able to sustain their participation and energy over time. And then lastly and most importantly, you have to be an active community leader. You have to be engaged with your readers and engaged with the community to help grow this effort.

So I’m going to talk now about the NorthwestVoice and put the principles into action in Bakersfield. The NorthwestVoice was launched in May of 2004. As Jan mentioned, it is a hybrid Web and print product. Our content is submitted through our Web site, NorthwestVoice.com, and our policy is that all submissions, provided they’re local and legal, are published. They’re published first to the Web and then we queue them for print. We include as many items as possible in our print edition. The print edition is biweekly — it’s published every other Thursday — and it’s distributed free to every home in Northwest Bakersfield, which is one quadrant of Bakersfield. It’s a very fast-growing area of town, and that’s the reason we decided to focus on this part of town first for a citizen journalism effort. The Voice is staffed by four people. We have an editor, a sales and production manager, a sales representative and a production artist. It is, as Jan mentioned, operated, branded and distributed separately from the Californian. The Californian is an independent, family-owned newspaper in Bakersfield. We have a growing number of new products that we create separate from the core newspaper, because it’s our belief that it’s going to take many products targeted for many different audiences to be successful going forward. So the Voice is one of our new products.

So going back to how we got started. The planning for the NorthwestVoice began in the fall of 2003, when our publisher, Ginger Moorhouse, just said, “I think we should look into starting a community newspaper in the Northwest area,” and asked me to coordinate that effort. So the first thing I did was look at the market research and say, “OK, who lives in this area? What do they have in common?” And we found that this was an area dominated by people who own their own homes and have kids. So that became our community, our target audience: homeowners with kids in the K-12 schools. So you know if you’re into death metal and you live in the Northwest, this is not your publication. We have another one for you called Bakotopia.com, but again, you kind of have to know who you are doing this for.

In terms of structuring the publication, I was the one who floated this idea of a participative model because I believe fundamentally in participation and in community and in the power of the Internet as a collaborative publishing tool. I thought, “Well, maybe, you know, we have tried over the years to engage participation and it hasn’t quite taken root, but maybe now that we have so many more people who are accustomed to the Internet who have digital cameras, who are creating their own content, maybe it could work.” So we took a chance on that and started thinking about how we would structure the effort, and we came up with two categories of topics.

• First we have topics around geography, where you live — schools, churches, youth sports, neighborhood news.

• And we also thought about topics of interest in Bakersfield — outdoor recreation, cars and horses are things that people in the community are really into.

These are the things that we’re going to start with as the content building blocks.

We created a prototype, a print edition. Again, I think this was every helpful for us to have something tangible to go out to the people in the community who we thought were the information keepers on these topics and say, “Here’s what we have in mind. Here’s the type of content that we’re hoping that you will help us with. What do you think?” And we had a VIP list, actually, of about 25 people we went out and met personally with — school superintendents, school principals, pastors of churches, people who led the soccer leagues, those types of keepers of the information that we wanted to have on board with us from the beginning.

We also had our moments of panic. What if you throw a party and nobody comes? What are you going to do? So, you have to think about some predictability in your model, particularly for print. So we decided to recruit some columnists; people who would write about topics of interest. We have columnists who write about parenting, horses, education and outdoors; things like that. Our editor also writes for the publication. She writes a cover story for each print edition and some of the inside stuff — crime reports and housing sales — kind of traditional community journalism stuff. The rest of the content comes in from the community. It varies from week to week, but it’s about half or so that we get in over the transom.

We try to keep it real simple. If it’s local and legal, we’ll publish it, all of it. And this is something that I think traditional newsrooms don’t do a very good job of with respect to community interaction. We’ve heard a lot of stories from people in the community who have interacted with other local media — The Californian and TV stations — and say, “I called and I told them about my church’s fundraiser and we raised $5,000. That’s the most money we’ve ever raised for anything and we were just so excited about it and they said, “Well that’s not big enough. We don’t cover that. That’s not news.” Well that’s the last time anybody’s ever going to call that station to tell them anything, because they’ve just lost that trust and confidence. We wanted to take that whole thing away and say, “You know what? If it’s important enough to you that you would take the time and the effort to write something up and send it to us, and it’s local, that’s good enough for us.” And so we found that changing the whole conversation has been very helpful for us.

It’s easy. Jan has walked us through her new site (it looks great, Jan, I can’t wait to play around with it). You know, just fill in the boxes, fill in the blanks, no technical stuff at all. We do edit the content before it’s published for grammar and style. Or if somebody, you know, writes in and forgets the time or date of something, we call or e-mail them and say, “Give us the information.” And we’re always thinking about ways to engage participation — contests, ideas — you know, again, giving people something to hold onto.

Our contributors are our stars. All of our contributors are volunteers. We don’t pay anybody in the community to participate, so it’s very important to give that positive reinforcement for their participation and for the publication of their stuff. We e-mail everybody once their stuff is on the Web site with a URL that they can forward to their friends and family. The print edition is huge for us because that goes to every home. People can look at it, they can see tangible evidence of their contribution and, more importantly, their family, friends and neighbors and people in church can say, “Hey I saw your picture,” or, “I saw your article. That’s really cool. That’s really great, I really enjoyed that.” And as a result, it creates a community of evangelists for The Voice who are out there talking about their experience with our publication and encouraging others to participate.

The community management part is really ongoing. In the beginning, our editor was on the phone everyday, knocking on doors, shaking the trees, reminding people that this publication existed and that they could participate in it. In the 15 months we’ve been publishing, we’ve doubled the rate of our participation. We now have more content than we can fit in the print edition and we are challenged now about really managing the mix, making sure that we’re representing the different schools and the different aspects of the community consistently on the Web site and in print. But it really is such an essential part of our effort.

The content mix for us has been very photo heavy — 38% of our content are pictures. If you talk to any of the citizen journalism or community sites, this is very typical. In fact pictures are sometimes a greater percentage than that when you think about it. It makes sense — it’s easy. You don’t have to worry about somebody criticizing your writing, and everybody’s got pictures from their vacation or their neighborhood that they can share. But we have a pretty good mix otherwise of stuff from schools and community events. We’ve been pleased with that.

Two-thirds of our contributors are women. We didn’t think about this going in. We didn’t set out to recruit women, but I guess when you think about it, women do tend to be a little bit more engaged with the social fabric of communities and the information keepers. So I guess that’s not surprising that that’s how it ended up with The Voice.

So we’ve been at it for about 15 months now, and I think the achievement that we’re most proud of is that we are well received in the community — we feel we have a lot of good will and a very good reputation. We have published more than 1,400 community contributions, and the participation is growing. It’s not just the same four people and that’s really a very important achievement to me. And on the financial side of the house, we did break even with the publication in the first quarter of the year, so we’re continuing to hold our own financially, which is also good news for the model.

In terms of our room for growth, our Web site usage has been a little disappointing to me. It’s primarily used as a content management tool. I think that most of the content that’s on the Web is also in print so there’s not a lot of incentive to go online, but as we get more and more content and as the print edition becomes an index of sorts for the Web, I think that’s going to change. And we’re also going to be switching technologies to move to a platform that is more interactive and offers more opportunities for participation online. So we’re looking forward to growing that.

Our lessons learned: First and foremost, I think there were a lot of questions in the beginning about participation, and I remember when I first started out doing this, people just looked at me like I’m crazy — and people still do that, but fewer (laughs). Participation does work. I think you have to believe in your heart, when you do this, in community. I do. I believe that there’s something in us that wants to be a part of something larger than what we are. We just need ways to do it — ways to engage. And we in journalism are in a great position to offer some of those ways, and it takes thought and structure and effort, but it can work. The print edition, as I mentioned, is a big part of our success in terms of marketing, revenue and the refrigerator factor — being able to cut stuff out and send it out to others. We also learned that you need a different type of staff. Three of our four folks were not from the newspaper business — didn’t know a darn thing about it — and lo and behold, we’re actually making a publication.

I think that having people who are open to a new way of doing things and aren’t burdened by assumptions about the way that we do things — the history — that’s really a good thing, because that way you get a fresh approach and fresh thinking. This is our editor, by the way, Lauren Ward, in the center (points to slide) who’s with one of our community contributors here. She came into this straight out of J-school: USC journalism graduate, 22 years old, very articulate, poised, young woman who has a really great way with people. They just love her in the community. She’s just done a fantastic job.

Another thing you have to get used to in citizen journalism is that people come and go. This is a volunteer effort. If you’ve ever been a volunteer or worked with volunteers you know that not everybody is there every time, and that’s okay. That’s just how it goes. We were also pleasantly surprised by the quality of the content of what came in. People were actually not too bad — not too bad at all. We do a little bit of editing, but not a lot. And through The Voice I think we’ve also paved the way for more participation in The Californian and in other products in our company, and also in our industry, by providing an example — one example — of not the only way, but of how we did it, how it can be done and how you can sustain it.

So I do appreciate your interest in The Voice and thank you for your attention. I also have a few copies of our print edition that I’m happy to give out after we finish up with the panel. Thank you very much.

Jan Schaffer, Moderator: One question, Mary Lou, before you sit down, and we’ll open up to questions later. It sounds like advertisers like this, too, if you’re breaking even.

Mary Lou: Yeah. I’m a little bit of a metrics-obsessed person, and we try and measure everything that we can about our new products. One of the things that we measure is ... not just how much advertising we have and how much revenue, but who the advertisers are, and half of the advertisers are new to our company. ... They’re the small and medium-sized businesses that can’t afford to be in the daily paper. So not only are we enjoying some financial success, but we’re doing so by growing market share, which is our core goal in new product development. You know, in newspapers today we’re in this weird paradox where we’re growing revenue and newspapers are profitable, but we’re losing market share. So we’re getting more blood from the same stones, but there are fewer and fewer stones with department store mergers and grocery store mergers and that sort of thing. So we have to think about not just how much money we make, but how we make the money, and that was definitely part of The Northwest strategy from the start.

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