2003 Batten Awards Transcript

Transcript for
The 2003 James K. Batten Symposium & Awards
for Innovations in Journalism

Panel #1: Building Affinity - Elevate the news with local input

Jan Schaffer, Executive Director, J-Lab: Good morning and welcome. My name is Jan Schaffer, I'm the director of J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism. We're a center of the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism, and I want to welcome you. This is the first Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism, and as far as we know, the first award ever created for innovations in journalism. We're very excited about it, and we want to thank the Knight Foundation for fully supporting this program. It falls, I think, very much into the venture area of funding. The Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism were named after Jim Batten, who was a much-revered CEO of Knight-Ridder Newspapers, who very early in the 80s, started pioneering the concept of building connections with community. I'm sure he never dreamed that the connections with the community would take the form of what you're about to see today, but I think we're going to have an opportunity to show you some new connections really empowered by new technologies. That's what the Batten Awards for Innovations are about. It's trying to figure out how new technologies can play a role in engaging ordinary people in the news in some exciting, new ways. I tend to think about it a lot in terms of news "experiences" rather than news stories. The idea is to see if we can engage people in weighing in with an opinion or deciding what would be the best outcome. You're going to hear from different kinds of projects. Some of these will be Internet projects, a CD-ROM. Some of them will be e-mail listservs. Some are community media sites. Our program will be two panels. We'll break for the awards ceremony and lunch to which you all are, of course, invited.

Jan Schaffer: Moderating our first panel this morning will be Andrew Nachison. He is the director of the Media Center at the American Press Institute. The Media Center plays a big role in the industry, in teaching about digital storytelling and teaching about all kinds of revenue concerns about the Web. He just scored a big coup recently: New Directions for News has merged with him. So, Andrew, I'll invite you to come on up, and the rest of the first panel to come on up, and let us begin. Thank you very much.

Andrew Nachison, Media Center Director, American Press Institute: Good morning. I'm actually going to say very little this morning, because we have some fascinating projects to look at, and I want everybody's attention to focus on the projects and the work. So we're going to proceed in the order that's listed on the program--and one idea that I hope everybody will think about and pay attention to, as we're listening to all of these, you'll notice they are very different applications of technology. Some of these are very sophisticated, and some are really very simple. I think that's an important lesson to think about, that technology isn't always about pushing the limits in terms of sophistication, it's about pushing the limits in terms of the deliverable. And you'll see there are some innovations here where the real innovation that took place is in the brain. It was in the thinking about how to use the technology. It wasn't the technology itself. And so with that, Heidi, why don't you come on up, and we'll start looking at your project.

Heidi Swillinger, Community Editor, San Francisco Chronicle: Hello. My name's Heidi Swillinger, and I'm with the San Francisco Chronicle, and I'm here to talk about the "Two Cents" project. The "Two Cents" project is an ongoing relationship between the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Bay Area residents, who serve as field correspondents and commentators on news events of the day. The project's open to anybody. It's currently 1,600 people. New people join every week. The project is conducted by e-mail. We steer people who are interested in joining to a URL. They sign up and provide basic contact information, and then we invite them to come in to be photographed. We keep their photos on file, and their information goes into a database. The database--this is an example of one of the pages of the database--is searchable in a lot of ways. You basically ask for your name, your address, your phone number, your e-mail address, date of birth, occupation, and other areas of expertise or interests. Then you can search it. So, if you want to tailor a list and talk to, say, women who lived through World War II, or people who live in a certain zip code, or guys named Mike; you can check the database that way and send out messages specifically tailored to certain groups or you can send messages to people, to the group as a whole. It's really interesting to me. The San Francisco Bay Area is full of people that--you know, they're janitors by day, but during the evenings they're studying Mesopotamian history or something like that. The areas of interest really show how diverse that area is. We have people ranging from secretaries to--There's a nuclear physicist who works at the Lawrence Livermore Lab in the pool, so...

Another way we use the pool is to get sources for stories. This one is a really good example. We had an earthquake in Mexico that struck at eight in the evening, and we wanted to talk to people who had family or ties to the area. So I sent a message out to the group. I was called from home to do this, and I can operate it from home. I sent a message out, and within a couple of hours, we had numerous people. I always tell people, you know, if you can't help us but you know somebody who can, pass the message on. We were able to get somebody. That sidebar is a source from the "Two Cents" pool who had just come back from Mexico. She had family and friends who were living in the area, so she helped us get a nice story. This is a good newsroom tool when traditional sources of reporting fail. It's a great resource if you need sources for really sensitive topics. It's amazing how many people are willing to go on the record and talk to us about very sensitive issues. We've had some amazing columns on abortion, mental health, infidelity, things that you might not be able to find sources for all the time, but we have through this pool.

The other thing that we use [our e-mail contacts] for: We use them for guinea pigs to try out new ideas and new columns. This is a column called "Chronicle Watch" that's been extremely popular. Basically, it involves getting readers to send in tips about things that are broken or malfunctioning in their community that are paid for through taxpayer money. And then we investigate it, and talk about who's responsible, hold their feet to the fire, kind of keep track of it until it gets fixed. The way we launched this column was we sent a message out to the "Two Cents" pool, asking them for items that were broken or malfunctioning, and again, within a couple of hours, we had, like, 60 tips. By the next morning, we had 120. It really told us quickly that this was going to fly. One thing, people just thought it was a great idea. The other thing is it gave us enough material to get this thing launched until it was able to really run on its own, and we've launched several features doing this.

This last slide is one of the most important functions of the pool. That is, they tell us what we're missing. That's really important, and they're always e-mailing me with ideas that they have for stories or tips or--I can't tell you how many stories that have come directly from the pool that have ended up on section fronts, page one. That story in the bottom corner there is about a sleeper cartoon that apparently was getting really popular, and we didn't know that a San Francisco person had created it and we got a tip from a "Two Cents" person.

One thing I just want to mention is that when I was gathering material for this presentation, I wanted to know what the impact on the community was, and I was really surprised. I decided to send the message to the pool, because I thought I should let them speak for themselves. So I picked a group of 400 people--random selection--and asked them how this had impacted them, and I was shocked at their response. I mean, pleasantly shocked at the response. It really went from micro to macro, where I had a woman who was saying that her daughter, through reading her answers to various questions that we had sent, had learned a lot about her mother; to people that talked about how they had dinner-table conversations with friends and family based on questions that we were asking.

There was this one guy who had a very controversial answer in a column. He ended up getting phone calls from people he didn't even know. They tracked him down in the phone book, called him up to have conversations. He told me about one conversation with a guy who told him he had totally changed his mind about the issue by the time they hung up.

People have been invited to speak based on their answers. They've been asked to write things. Somebody told me that they had been asked to provide testimony for a congressional report. Another thing people always tell me is that they get recognized on the street by total strangers, and so they initiate conversations based on their answers to us. So, it's really drawn the community together in a very interesting and exciting way, to me. I consider this much more a leap in philosophy than in technology, but it really has served us very well, and that's my two cents. Thank you.

Andrew Nachison: And I'm going to suggest that we can take a few questions now, or we will also have questions at the conclusion of all of the presentations so that we can talk as a panel. And I have one question immediately. You mentioned that this is a great tool when traditional forms of journalism fail. At what point does this become a traditional tool?

Andrew Nachison: Yeah, well you implied that there were other means, more routine means, of seeking sources and interviewing candidates, and this was helpful when those routine means didn't work.

Heidi Swillinger: You know, that's a good question I'm not sure I can answer. I mean, it's something that I really don't want to be overused, and that was one of the real concerns at the Chronicle..

Heidi Swillinger: Because you don't want to just rely on e-mail to get your sources. You want to make sure you're going out in the street. This is a tool. This shouldn't be considered the tool by any means. It's limited. The strength of it is the weakness, and that is, that it's all done by e-mail. A lot of people have active e-mail, but a lot don't, so you want to make sure you're not cutting those people out.

Heidi Swillinger: Yeah, the ongoing and interactive nature of it is--you know, again, this caused concerns at the beginning: what if people answer more than one question. You know, there's sort of this, I think of it as the Kleenex approach to sources, where you use them once and then get rid of them. This is not that at all. We stay engaged with them, we build trust, and that's why we are able to get so many people who are willing to talk to us about sensitive topics that they might not be willing to if you were talking to them on the street. They trust us now, and they come to us with ideas and with stories. Another thing is we do rely on them to tell us what we're missing, and that is a change too. You know, we don't always know the story, and I think there's a tendency in this profession to think that we do.

Heidi Swillinger: It was really, really easy. We started just by running house ads in the paper, asking people to sign up and then. At the bottom of each column, there's a tag line that explains how to join. It's really open to anybody until we get the critical mass, you know, so people sign up and try it, and I tell them to only answer questions that they're really interested in or feel really passionate about. So, some people answer more frequently than others.

Heidi Swillinger: You're asking about how it's structured and how many people it takes to run? It's actually a one-person job, and--considering what it's brought to us, I think of it as pretty low-maintenance. I'm really interested in the people and what they have to say, so it's fun for me, but, it is, yeah, it's full-time for sure because you have to not just deal with the actual people and the answers, but you're having to maintain the database too.

Heidi Swillinger: Yeah, they told me that their letters to the editor have dropped off some since we started with "Two Cents."

Heidi Swillinger: Well, I actually talk to them a lot. I mean, I hear about their babies being born and their husbands sick and all that stuff, but no, I mean, we don't discuss opinions or anything. I don't discuss opinions with them, but I'd love to have more interaction with each other. A lot of them have suggested that, and if we could provide more person power to do that, that would be a lot of fun.

Andrew Nachison: Heidi, thanks a lot. I think we're going to continue to make sure we have time for everybody. Now, let's find out what's going on in Philadelphia.

Chris Satullo, Editorial Page Editor, The Philadelphia Inquirer: Good morning, my name's Chris Satullo. I'm the editorial page editor at The Inquirer in Philadelphia. I've been doing a lot of citizen engagement work over the last seven years, working very closely with Jan and her various incarnations with Pew and, now, the J-Lab. And I was driving down from Philly last night, thinking: "How many of Jan's things have I been at?" I think this is number six, so if any of you are saying, "Oh God, not this guy again," I'll try to be quick.

The citizen engagement work we had done at the beginning of 1996 tended to revolve a lot around elections. Doing citizen work on elections has its good moments, but it also has its frustrations, chief of which is that you're at the mercy of the self-interested agenda of the candidates. You're also subject to the timetable and the deadlines of the election. And the other problem is the work we do involves giving citzens an opportunity to go through, what we call "choice work," which is modeled on the National Issues Forums and work that's been done by the Kettering Foundation over the years.

And the problem with election is that the fundamental choice that brings the citizens out, the election, is a choice that's predetermined for them and often, to them, a fairly unappetizing one, so that's always been a frustration. So, we were looking for an opportunity to do a project where we'd get in a little more on the ground level. Where we'd be able, [to do more] than to have citizens simply have a chance to say, "this one or that one," or in the tradition of Philadelphia civic activism it's almost always around saying no. Philadelphia's an old-fashioned, Democratic-machine town.

Most proposals are picked up behind closed doors, and the only role a citizen in Philadelphia has is at the very last minute, they go, "Oh my God! Look what they're doing to my neighborhood," and they hire a lawyer and get out and watch in the streets. So, we were looking to create a project where people in Philadelphia would get a chance to say, "What about? What about this? What about that?" Essentially to frame the choices that were going to end up deciding the issue, rather than to react to a set of choices that have been provided to them. So, into that desire, we enter a star-crossed slice of land on the Philadelphia riverfront called Penn's Landing.

Philadelphia, like a lot of cities, was wounded in the 1950s when they built the interstate through town. Interstate 95 runs right there. You can sort of see along the right side of the picture--it separates the central riverfront on the Delaware River from Center City, from Old City, the place where Independence Hall and all the historic area is. Penn's Landing, over the years, has been the topic of any number of grandiose schemes by developers which failed, the last of which failed in August of last year.

At that point, the paper's news side did a major series about the history, the potential, and the pitfalls of Penn's Landing, called The Lost Waterfront. In that we put a little note saying, "Would you like to attend a public forum about Penn's Landing?" We got about 500 responses from people saying yes. At that point I hooked up with Harris Steinberg from University of Pennsylvania. He's at the Graduate School of Fine Arts there. He runs a program that attempts to bring students into the real world to work on real-world projects. And connecting with him was very important to this project, because the other frustration that I've seen with citizen work is citizens, when they come to public issues, bring two things of enormous value, one of which is their personal experience with the issue. And the other thing is the values that they bring to the issue, and it helps to create a very rich conversation about aspirations. But one thing citizens don't bring is a lot of expert knowledge about how to actually solve difficult policy problems, and we've been working for years on that problem: "How do you connect expert knowledge with citizen values?" And the connection with Penn here gave us a chance to do that.

We decided to move our group of 400 people through a four-part process, the first of which would be to get an expert grounding in the design, architecture, and financial issues of Penn's Landing; then to hear what their ideas were, have them boil those ideas down to a set of principles, public principles for what should happen to this important piece of public land on the riverfront; then, in a very concrete way, to bring architectural designing and financial expertise together with the citizens. I don't know if any of you have ever worked with the architects, but the architectural community has a forum they call a charette. A charette can be a day- or week-long session where, essentially, the architect sits down with whatever the client is, whether it's the public or a corporation that wants a building built, and they just work through every problem on the site. They try to find out, in depth, what the client wants--in this case the client is the public--and they work through a number of possibilities for this site.

So the third piece of our project was to bring the citizens together with architects, planners, experts from the Wharton School of Finance to work through a charette to come up with a set of options for how the waterfront could be developed, based on the principles that the citizens had already come up with. The final phase was to bring everybody back together for a session where the charette teams would explain their three different visions for the site. Again, there would be forums and small groups where people would get a chance to talk through what they thought about all three schemes, and then at the end of the night they all voted on what they thought of the schemes.

The role of the online component of the newspaper in this was more modest than I hoped it would be. Essentially, what we were looking to do over time, was to build expertise and to communicate to a large group of people, not all of whom made it to every forum, what was going on. That was basically the role that the Internet played.

I'll just take you through this quickly. This shows the first forum at Penn, about 250 people attended that. As an aide, I'd recommend not doing these projects in January in the Northeast. We had a snowstorm on three of the four days of our forum, so it held down attendance a little bit. That gives you a sense of the work we did. We had public forums with about 20 different groups--citizen groups got together and worked out their own version of the principles, their notions of what the core principles for developing a site were. Of course, 20 different groups, you get 20 different versions.

This was a matrix we worked out to begin to steer the principles down. These are the seven we came up with. It just gives you a sense--Now, these seven principles we put in the paper and then became the basis for the charette. I won't go into too much detail, because if you don't live in Philadelphia, you're not deeply moved by these. Probably the most important thing was that people were very concerned. Penn's Landing is a place where millions of people gather in the summer for fireworks displays and things like that. They were very afraid that, in the Philadelphia way, they were going to hand the site over to a developer, who was, essentially, going to make it a private development in a mall and block access to the river.

Now, we were doing this in parallel with the city going ahead with a request for proposals to a new set of developers. Essentially, we were trying to do this very quickly to get ahead of the city's process, so that the input from the citizens--input that the city was claiming to be interested in, but we were skeptical of how interested they actually were--we had to make sure we got it before [the city], before they went ahead. Those are the seven principles put together. Now these are scenes from the charettes. Some of the architects and planners who were there--some of them are from nationally-known firms such as Venturi, Scott Brown; Owen Partnership; Wallace, Roberts & Todd--they were there for a long day of about 10 hours. If we had to pay their billable hours for this, it would've probably been worth about $30,000, so there was a tremendous donation of professional time here.

These were the three different approaches they came up with: "A Respite from the City," essentially a park on the river; "Making Independence Harbor Work," essentially a tourist-oriented vision for the river; and the last one is "A Vibrant New Neighborhood," the idea being that they would stitch the river back into the residential part of the city. These are a few more scenes from the charette. You can see that the people really got down on the floor and did their work. There was tremendous energy in the room that day.

We brought in, essentially, a jury--a panel of planning architecture experts then to listen at the end of the day to what had happened--and they critiqued the plans, helping shape them a little bit more. This is one of the plans done by the architecture group. That's actually Hoboken, New Jersey. They were saying, "We want something that looks like Hoboken," and you can see some of the work. This was all done on the day of the charette, and then all that went into the paper and online so that people could begin, well before the final forum, to get a sense. That was the site plan map that was in a special section in the paper where we presented these.

That squiggly thing at the right is the thing the architects called "the big thing," at the end of Market Street. That's a technical architecture term: "big thing." They don't know what it is, but they knew they needed a "big thing" at the end of Market Street by the Ben Franklin Bridge, and there you see the "big thing" in the center of that drawing. That's the Independence Harbor. Look, you can see they did an enormous amount of work that day. So all this stuff went in the paper to give citizens, before the final public forum, a sense of what it is they were going to vote on. You might recognize that as the Spanish Steps in Rome. One of the architects thought that's what we needed going down from Market Street to the river, but one thing about architects I've learned is they're big on ideas and not very big on how they're going to pay for them. You may know that if you've ever had your house redesigned.

So these were the end results of the forum, which about 400 people attended. We asked people to rate each of the plans, on a scale of 1-10, based on two things: one, the degree to which they fulfilled the principles, which is a sense of how much they were responsive to the public desires. A separate question was your personal reaction to things. There might be things that responded well to the principles that, for whatever reason, you hated. So, those were the scores for that one, those were the lowest scores, this is the one that won, and that one was relatively close. The end result of this is that all the input from what we did--most importantly the seven principles--ended up being used by the city in its request for proposals to developers. In other words, the request that went out to developers took the seven principles that we had generated and put them in as, essentially, their criteria for the plan that they had to come up with. The plans were just released this week. I have to say that three out of four of them are horror shows, in my opinion, but they, at least, clearly responded. They clearly altered their final designs in response to the seven principles. I don't think most Philadelphians think that they went far enough, but at least there was a sense that the public was helping shape the choices. Thank you.

Jan Schaffer (from audience): So, what did the news side do while the editorial side was doing this throughout?

Chris Satullo: Jan knows that this is a long-term struggle at The Inquirer to get the news side to cover what people on the editorial side do, but there was a much greater sense that this was an interesting process, and it was the best way to actually get information out of the developers that were in the mix. The developers came to our forum. One of them told me, "I got more information about what we need to do at this site than we've gotten out of the city." Our municipal administration is notoriously close-mouthed. They were doing a very secret process, so the only public game in town is, essentially, what we were doing. So, this story of Penn's Landing, which is a huge story in the city--it was essentially driven by what we were doing for a period of about three months, because everything else was happening behind closed doors. The only open-door discussion of it was the one we were holding. So things are getting a little better, Jan, but we don't have it totally licked yet.

Chris Satullo: The first forum was the last week of January. The second forum was the first week of February. The charette was two weeks after that, and then the final concluding forum was March 13. So, we were doing this on a break-neck schedule, because we were trying to get ahead of the city's process. We never knew exactly what the city's timetable was, because they would never answer that question, but Philadelphia is electing a mayor this year, so we assumed that everything that happened had a great deal to do with electoral politics. And the assumption was the mayor wanted to have a press conference down at the riverfront with a drawing and ribbon-cutting saying, "This is my great new project." So we knew that November was, essentially, the deadline, so that we had to get ahead of it. So it was intense, and if we hadn't had the resources of the people at Penn and the students and the program over there, it might not have been doable.

Male audience member: Could you elaborate a little bit on how the charette works?

Chris Satullo: We probably had eight architects, three or four landscape architects, three planners, two civil engineers, and about seven citizens. The citizens were chosen to sort of represent the voice of the citizens in the group. We broke them up into three work teams. Each work team is about ten people. Architects know how to do a charette. I basically left it to them to lead it, but they break up in the morning and start discussing the fundamental issues that they need to address, start surfacing ideas, break for lunch, and then the real planning and drawing begins. And it's remarkable how it comes together by about 5 o'clock in the afternoon. They would've liked to have had another day, but I wasn't paying them, so they weren't really willing to volunteer the second day. And then there was a lot of follow-up work. Each team had one architect who really worked on the drawings and made them look a little more polished.

Male audience member 2: Do you have any sense of who participated in the projects?

Chris Satullo: Yeah, well, we had a database. I would say probably 450 to 500 people fit in one event or another. I would say about 150 of them attended all three major public events. So we had some continuity, but that's why online is so important--to allow people who missed the first notice, or missed the first forum, to dip in, catch up. I mean, this is not wildly innovative. This is one of the basic uses of an online site, but it's still a really valuable one. People, then, can catch up on a project and not feel, because they missed the first forum, they're out of it.

Chris Satullo: In the world of Philadelphia, to get that much of citizen values inserted into the real world is a more significant success than it might seem, but the process is really the success. We discovered ways in which you can marry expert knowledge to citizen values and produce something new that's workable in the real world. The guys at Penn who worked with me on this project, I mean, I think they may have a consulting business comes out of it, because they're now working with another town in Pennsylvania, another town in Connecticut that had riverfront issues, that heard about this process and were taking them through that process there.

The key thing is that anybody can have a hearing, you know, where people stride up to the mike and yell and scream and try to get on film at 11. The issue here is to have a process that actually enables the initial take citizens have on something to sort of grow and evolve and distill a little bit into something that connects with what experts are actually going to do, so I think we've made a decent start on how you might do that.

Chris Satullo: There were three people from the Wharton School of Finance at the charette, and their job was to sit there and say, "You guys are nuts. This costs too much." One thing I did discover is, you know, if you're looking to architects to be your governors of reality that's not a great thing to do. There's nothing there that couldn't be built. Matter of fact, if you look at the designs that came out last week, they're all more grandiose than these. These are all more modest and less expensive than the ones the developer proposed. One of the principles of the forum was make it affordable and sustainable. [People] are tired of grandiose schemes to build hundred-story office buildings on riverfront that never happen. They want something that's scaled to Philadelphia, which is sort of a very low-rise city, and they want it to be affordable. They don't want it to involve a half-billion-dollar public subsidy. So, in a sense, the citizens were the fiscal realists.

Chris Satullo: Yeah, this is always a problem. Whenever we do "Citizen Voices" stuff, I start by putting a notice in the paper. We get an excellent response--usually enough people to fill the room for the amount of money I have--and the groups are wider, more affluent, and more suburban than the region. So, then, what I have to do is go back and work my network of contacts in civic organizations, churches in Philadelphia and see if I can get some more people out. Unfortunately, with the time frame this one was on, I probably should've done more, but, I mean, we got some significant diversity at the end of the day, but we probably should've had more. What we ended up getting was a lot of people who live in Center City and the adjacent neighborhoods, a very affluent group of people. This is their waterfront. They were most involved. We could've done some more work to get more people from around the region.

Andrew Nachison: We're now going to look at an innovative way of evaluating candidates from Boston.

Robin Lubbock, New Media Director, WBUR, Boston: All right. I'm going to just spend a few minutes talking about the "Vote by Issues" quiz, which was a project that we developed for the governor's race last year at WBUR in Boston. We started the project by really just sitting around and wondering what we could do that would help the users--from the users' perspective, what do they want? And we concluded that what they really want is to be able to look at the issues that the candidates bring forth and compare them on some kind of a leveled playing field. So, to do this, we sat down, and one of us, Will Thompson, came up with this idea, which was to get position statements from all the different candidates--there were five candidates in the race--and then present them in a vacuum, separated from the candidates themselves, and allow them to battle with each other on their own merit. And we would do this by getting the users to come in and select their choice among these statements and positions, so they wouldn't know who put them up. Then at the end of that process, we would present them and say, "Okay, here are the positions that you've selected, and here are the candidates that they relate to."

So, it was a way of doing two things: One, try and get the users to see more of the positions. I think most people go in and look at their own candidate's position. They may look at the challenger's position. What we wanted to do was kind of create something where people can easily look at all of the positions. And then, of course, by doing that you're kind of challenging them as well to see how much they understand of the election, how much they understand of their candidate's position, how much it fits in, or if they haven't selected their candidate yet, it's just a broad way of looking at the stuff.

Okay, what did we need to do? We needed to define the issues, and this, obviously, was one of the most difficult parts, because different issues are of more importance to different candidates. We had to look at it across the board and just select 10 issues, which we did--education, health, you know--you can imagine them. Then, the next trick was to go to the candidates and get them to give us their position statements on these issues within very strict parameters. Obviously, this is important to try and get the leveled playing field, so they were not allowed to say who was backing them or any of this. They had to answer the question very strictly, and if they didn't, we sent it back to them and they had to do it again. Obviously, getting one candidate to do it is the challenge. Once you've got one on board, you've got the rest of them on board.

The next thing is to randomize the content. Obviously, if we could randomize the content, one: You can't learn the thing; you can't do it twice, and learn anything in the process so that you can be better at it the next time; and, of course, you can eliminate all possibility of bias. So what we did was we took everything, and we got the technology to randomize it all, so even on this front page, actually, that you're looking at--and we knew this would happen--even the content, the pictures of Romney and the other candidates. They are randomized, because we knew they would call and say, "Why am I not top of the list?" And, indeed, they did call, and we were able to say, "Just refresh the page," and they'd jump around and there's a different one next time. So, that was kind of satisfying.

Okay, the quiz: the user comes in, looks at that page, hits "Start quiz," and then what you see is an issue randomly selected--in this case health care--so I just did this and just copied the pages as I was doing it, but it could be education. The order will be different every time, and then you see the positions, the statement of positions from each candidate on the page, again, in a different order every time. If you got this page a second time, these would be in a different order. If you want more information, you can click on "View full plan," and you'll get a slightly broader position as well, but, as you can see, they can't see who the candidate is. There were actually ten items, ten issues in this election, but there could be five, ten, fifteen, however many you want; and you can, of course, jump out at any moment, because you may only have five minutes, only time to read three of the things. So, you click, click, click, and then you can bail out and go to the final page, which is the "View your results" page. On that page, you will see which candidates you've selected on which issues. Now, here, one of the things that concerned us was we didn't want anyone to see this as a kind of scientific way to prioritize who your candidate is, because, clearly, that's not it. So we applied the same rules that we applied to the rest of the thing, and we randomized this page as well. So, the selections that you made are associated to the candidates, but as you can see here, Jill Steiner's second even though I selected three of her issues. So, again, it's randomized, the idea being this is not the answer to the way you're going to vote; it's just to get you to learn more about the elections.

Obviously, for people who didn't have the time or weren't interested in actually going through the quiz, we got all that content in the database, so we can just throw it all on one page so you can click on an issue and get all of the candidates' responses to that issue; or you can click on a candidate and get that one candidate's responses to all of the issues. So, there is this back door whereby you could just go through and read the content if you felt like it. And that, essentially, is a way to try and get people who are coming to an election to read, not just their candidate's positions but all of them, and to understand something deeper about the election, and I think, something about the way they related to it as well.

It was, by our standards, a good success. We got a lot of traffic across the sites, particularly in the week of the election, and a major spike the day before the election--people coming in and working through this thing. We got wonderful feedback. We got lots of e-mails from people saying how much they'd enjoyed doing it, how much they'd learned about it. And, of course, as you can understand from looking at it, as you go through and you try and pick ("Now which is my candidate?"), you know, you actually learn a lot more about yourself, about your position in all of these statements, and about where your candidate is. And often more people would say to us--their candidate was not where they thought he or she would be.

Moving forward: we obviously need to look at it and improve it. We can always do it better, and we want to work with other people now. KQED is obviously in the midst of the recall elections, and we're working with them right now so that they'll be able to use this. It's not up yet, and I can admit Romney is not running in the recall election, but this is a dummy page here. It'll look a little bit like this, and obviously in coming elections as we move forward--primaries, national elections--we will be out there looking both for funding and, of course, the partners to work with using this tool to explore issues in other elections. That's about it.

Was it a success? I think it was. It was fun. The users thought it was fun. I think it did, at some level, raise the bar a little. It did allow people to get a slightly broader view of an election that they may not have gotten unless they'd come in and taken the quiz. So, I look forward to doing it with media outlets in the future. Thank you.

Jan Schaffer (from audience): How long would it take a user to go through all the issues and look at all the positions? How much time? And, also, detailed demographics of the users...

Robin Lubbock: Yes, time. It would depend whether you read the full plans or just the initial plans, but I think you could get through it, probably, in about 15 minutes. Really depends on how carefully you wanted to read them. In terms of the demographics of the users, we don't know them exactly, but we assume--and our focus groups and our survey seem to confirm--that they are the same demographics, more or less, as our listeners, which are sort of older demographic--25 to 55. They skew slightly more to women than men. Anyone else?

Male audience member: Two questions: How much linking, outside of your... site, do you give to the candidates' Web sites? And secondly, do you have session groups to capture the vision of these other people who call in?

Robin Lubbock: All the sites of the candidates are linked up on the front page and in various other places you can go through. Actually, I think on this page you can see the links of that to the candidates' sites. On the forum thing, we did not have a special forum or conversation area associated with this, but that's not a bad idea. We should probably do that in the future.

Female audience member: Did any of the candidates try to use the [this] for their campaign? Was there any sort of accumulation on what the results were?

Robin Lubbock: No, there wasn't. That's an interesting thought, but no, there wasn't. I mean, for one, it didn't end until Election Day, you know, and, indeed, it was up after Election Day. But no, we didn't release those figures, and we didn't release any of the data that had come in. We were quite concerned that no one should view this as scientific. This doesn't show anything other than there are issues, and people are involved with them. But, you know, I mean, who's to say which issue is more important to which person? You know, there's no way you can take this and say that it tells you something about the election by the number of things you selected. You know, for you, one of the issues might be the issue that makes you choose your candidate.

Robin Lubbock: There were 10 issues. Broadly, they were, you know, health care, education. They were all the things you would think of...budget, very standard issues. Yes, obviously it's very tough when you've got such short, little responses to ge real detailed replies, but I think the best thing would be if I just gave out the URL and people could look at it later. But, yes, I mean, you've got 75 words, so you're not going to get into much either. To us, the more important thing to that was to keep them all: (a) to answering the question strictly, so that if they didn't answer the question, they did get turned back; and (b) to limit them to that amount of text so no one could go over, and if it did go over, again, we threw it back to them. Some people chose not to answer some of the questions or only to briefly answer them, but I think there was only one answer that was not answered at all by one candidate.

Andrew Nachison: And last but not least, we're going to look at community journalism in a broader sense with Village Soup.

Richard Anderson, President, VillageSoup.com: Okay, thanks for the opportunity to be here. Today, I want to talk about some special places, important places that are being pretty well abandoned by the mass media conglomerates, places like ex-urban communities in Big Bear Lake, California; suburban communities, like Lake Forest, Illinois; and urban neighborhoods, like Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts. And these are places that people call home. When they ask you where you live, this is where you say you live. You don't live in Philadelphia. You live in this neighborhood. And the common things about these places are their news locally comes weekly; and their post offices, banks, schools, Ys, markets, are going outside their places and no longer in their centers; and people aren't talking to each other very much anymore in those places. And these web sites are basically nothing more, typically quite a bit less, than what the printed product is that comes out weekly. And there's a real attention to trying to preserve the value of the print product and not let anything go online first, and they're not taking advantage of the many to many attributes of the Internet and what it can bring. It's still a one-to-many medium where the one publisher is talking to the many users. And the revenue is typically quite a bit less than what you want it to be.

The three places here that we're looking at are three ex-urban communities up in the midcoast of Maine, and they also are places people call home, or where they reside. Unlike the other places, though, their community is online, not just their local newspaper online. There is a great concern about keeping the magnets, the schools, the town halls, the post offices, in the center of the communities, in their downtowns. And people are interacting, talking to each other, and doing things online. These three Web sites are common in that they--all three--bring communities online. They have news that is online, but also they have goods and services and transactions going on online. News is happening, and it gets online immediately, not until the next week's print publication comes out, and the people are inputting content, they're requesting content, and they're acting on content. They're not just sitting there passively reading content, and the revenue is from advertisers who were doing more than advertising. They're serving their clients, their customers online. And the community online, basically, is a database, and you have servers that are putting in actionable content; and then from the actionable content you have users that are selecting and acting, they're ordering, they're making reservations, they're responding. And then, back up the top, the servers are responding with processing orders, taking reservations, and responding to inquiries. So you have a complete cycle of servers, a complete transaction cycle, sort of unfettered by VillageSoup.com, but facilitated by villagesoup.com.

The interactive content that comes into the site--news--comes from our reporters. We have a staff of, now, about 14 full-time journalists that put their news in, but so do community correspondents. A wife, whose husband was just dragged off of a lobster boat and rescued by friends happening to see his boat going down by the breakwater without anyone on it, and she reports this. In news that night, we take that article, that she posts, and do a follow-up, expanded story the next day.

You have organizations posting their own press releases, businesses posting their own news releases, real estate brokers putting in their own inventories. As soon as the house is listed, they log on, take their laptop, input--it's in the database. Just like that, they now have their property up for sale. School closings are input by superintendents of schools, soccer league moms and dads putting in scores after the game, logging vacancies by proprietors. Then the users can request the information they want. They can ask for notifications. I can ask to be notified when that house on the waterfront comes into the database, the moment it comes in. I know the minute there is a new listing that meets my criteria--or an apartment that fits my needs; I get notified by e-mail. A score of a game, a closing of a particular school, I'm notified by e-mail when it hits the database, put in by the superintendent, the minute it comes in. And I also can go to the database and I can select by content, by topic, by price, by location, by interests of mine, what content I want to take out of the site.

In the community online, you truly do get a great deal of interaction and input. If you see here, 2 percent of our posts are by journalists, journalists that we engage; by individuals 6 percent; by businesses putting in news releases; by organizations putting in organizational news; letters by individuals, letters that have been attributed with their name; and then posts by individuals that are attributed to some handle--some anonymous, some fictitious names. So, we truly have a community involved where 77 percent of the posts last year were put into our site by non-VillageSoup people.

Another way that we get community involvement is through our community source program. It's a little bit like your "Two Cents" project, where we have people who volunteer. We have a hundred people who respond to queries that we might raise periodically on issues of interest in the community. And in this particular instance, 17 of our 100 volunteers responded to a query we made about our new Wal-Mart coming into town. We've created an article using their responses, and, at the end of the article, we included links to the complete response that each of those 17 people gave us. And I think it's interesting to note, as you look down there, there's Rockland, Rockport, Camden, whoops there's Tampa, Florida and some place out in Connecticut. So, what if those 17 responders to that particular query were people who don't reside in our place full-time? They may summer there. They may, sometimes, wish to live there. They, maybe, used to live there. They have relatives or friends. But somehow they're connected. They belong to this affinity group that use common interest as this place--Camden, Maine or Rockland, Maine or Belfast, Maine--and, interested enough, they would respond to issues that are going on locally.

People can come to our archives and search for topics of interest to them. In this particular instance, they were searching for an issue that had come up around a mother tying yellow ribbons on town lampposts, in consideration of her son who was fighting in the Iraq war. And this particular topic--it ran over two or three months--generated over 200 letters from people. Twelve articles there altogether and a constancy of three different threads evolved; and over 200 people, attributed with their names, responded to this topic and discussed it. And what happened was, after this woman tied the yellow ribbons on the lamppost, a resident came forward and objected to using town property for a political statement. And the town select board, in fact, went out and took them down, and so it got a lot of controversy to whether town property could be used for such purposes.

Another thing that we do to involve community is we allow anonymous posts to be made on our community boards. Handles can be used, but they are registered users who we know who they are, but they can post anonymously. And in small, granular areas, that's pretty important, because there are times when you do have opinions and thoughts about what's going on in your community, but you don't necessarily want to be associated with that thought because of various sensitivities in the community. And, in this instance, we took one of those posts as a lead, as a tip, and created an article about it. In this case, an incumbent had made a statement to a student group in support of legalized drugs, and the incumbent, in fact, claims that we were very instrumental in her losing her re-election because of this article that we posted. That also was, then, a subject of a roundtable that we held last January about whether we were fair in our treatment of that issue.

Another thread that's been going on for about four months is around a controversial group that feels that the local Montessori school is being mismanaged, and the board isn't properly listening to parents and so on. And they wanted us to write about this. Well, in this instance, it's been going on for four months. We could not get anybody to go on record to talk about this issue, and so we just let this strand go. And there's some 70, 80 posts on this strand, and it wasn't until last week that the board president finally was willing to talk with us on record; and, in fact, their enrollment has gone down 67 percent over the last two years.

So where are we going? Today, we have these prototype communities that show the community online. Last week, we introduced our inaugural Village Soup Times, a 48-page, paid-circulation broadsheet with, in our first edition, about 42 percent ad hole and our second edition, it looks like we're going to reach 50 percent ad hole. It's a brand of its own. This is Village Soup Times, the community newspaper. VillageSoup.com is the community online. So, trying to keep the two very distinct products doing very different things but each complementing, supporting each other, and tomorrow, maybe there'll be a villagesoup.com in Bear Lake, and there'll be a Lake Forest villagesoup.com and a Beacon Hills villagesoup.com the next day and the day after that. Thank you.

Richard Anderson: We do not touch either the letters or the boards. We do have a policy relative to libel and slander and profanity and we will remove posts once they're up there, but we do not intercede ahead of time. You put it up and it's there.

Richard Anderson: No, we can't let you filter that way, but let's say if you're a participant in a thread, you'll be notified every time a new post is made to that thread. So at least you will know that it's there, and some of them are not very intelligent. Sometimes they're just bantering and inane, but there's some self-policing that goes on there too, and it quickly changes thread.

Richard Anderson: At this point, they don't go up automatically, but they do not get edited. They're clearly identified. We have an area that we call community correspondence and so, yes, under the heading of community correspondence, so you do know that this isn't a professional journalist that has posted this article.

Richard Anderson: The transparency of government? Well, we've been at this about six years, and, over the years, we've become more and more a part of select board meetings. There's reference to villagesoup.com or comments and the letters. The other thing that we've done is we've taken the town tax maps and put them online, so that if you want to know the valuation of a piece of property or valuations of the neighborhood--what that house sold for in the last ten years--you can log on and get that information right online. And the town has been very appreciative. In fact, that's cut down a lot of traffic to them--a lot of Realtor-kind of traffic to them--where they come in and ask and they want to see the tax map. And you have to get them out and show them, so they have had an impact that way.

Richard Anderson: Yes, there is a weekly newspaper serving in Camden and a weekly newspaper serving in Rockland, and when we came out with The Times, we've chosen to be sort of going the opposite direction. We're using the paper to be regional, and we're using the Internet to be granular. And we can afford to put up news everyday in the little 5,000 community of Camden, the 10,000 community of Rockland, where you couldn't afford to print daily in there.

Richard Anderson: They're scrambling. There's a book called The Tipping Point, and they talk about what causes things to all of a sudden be, "everybody seems to be doing it." And one of them is the context in which an idea is occurring, and these are things that are out of your control. In this particular instance, it's a hundred-and-some-year-old newspaper, the paper owned by somebody from the Y now, from South Carolina, and they're doing some things that are interesting in that they're not acting from strengths. They're choosing, for example, to now come out and they're taking full-page ads saying "We have a new web site," and so they're sort of coming and attacking us where they think our strength is as opposed to using their strength and going there.

Richard Anderson: We did. We've tried for five years to try that. We realized the value of print to drive traffic, to make people aware of the services--the things you can do online--and they just would not cooperate. And that's how we finally decided to just come out with our own, because we knew we had to have a print product to work in conjunction with our online product but very different products.

Richard Anderson: We don't feel there's any liable issue there at all. The courts have proven that. Now, if you come to me with a court order wanting me to tell you who Montessaurus is, I will tell you, but Montessaurus is the one making that comment. And we had the issue with MNBA, the credit card company, that there were some blasts against them, and we said the same thing to them. Your fight is with whoever this poster is. In this case, it wasn't an anonymous person. It was an attributed person, and you need to go see Mr. Hubert. Don't come to us about your problems with this post. So far, that's held up.

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