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OVERVIEW
Adrian Holovaty urges community news sites to consider inviting people not only to contribute content but also to add ways to do things with the content – such as filtering it in innovative ways or "mashing" data from several sources. Mary Lou Fulton, vice president of audience development for the Bakersfield Californian and founder of NorthwestVoice.com, kicked off the panel as moderator by saying the first thing the head of a new Web site must do is "have some sense of what you want to do." She said anyone developing a site should know who will participate, what types of contributions they'll make, audience demographics, how activity will be tracked and feedback will be gathered. Dan Pacheco, senior product manager of the Bakersfield Californian, NorthwestVoice.com and Bakotopia, said he has focused on creating products that appeal to 18- to 35-year-olds, who are less likely than their parents to read newspapers. He helped create Bakotopia.com, which launched in January 2005, to provide free community-based information and classified ads, similar to craigslist.com. He said it allows people to post anonymously.
Instead of focusing on user-written news content, Pacheco said Bakotopia is a place for people to connect. The user profiles are the most popular items on the site, and anytime they make a change to improve the user profiles function they get an increase in traffic. This feature is similar to MySpace and is used by people who want to keep connected and by local bands who want to promote themselves.
"Look
for unmet needs in the community and meet them." Lessons
learned:
--Pacheco
"People
are a lot more comfortable sharing photos than they are with
writing."
"Spotted"
has two components: "You Spotted" and "We
Spotted," references to whether the photos were submitted by
community members or found by staffers. He said the site has received
hundreds
of thousands of photos from citizens, which it runs without editing
and without captions in order to "get the faces of the community
in the product."
Everyone who’s photographed receives a business card directing
them to the Web site, and Yelvington said that is BlufftonToday's primary
marketing tool.
--Yelvington
"It’s
as important for newspapers to have programmers as pressmen
or journalists themselves."
Similarly, HousingMaps.com combines Google Maps and Craigslist apartment
and house listings to provide a service to people looking for a place
to
live.
--Holovaty
Holovaty also expanded the definition of citizens media by demonstrating how citizens can contribute technology to media content instead of only contributing content. For example, the BBC offers its Web content through backstage.bbc.co.uk and invites programmers to build applications that use that content. "I would call that citizens media," Holovaty said. "Granted, the citizen isn’t making content, but the citizen is still performing an act of journalism in filtering the content somehow." "We've
been talking all day about letting citizens contribute content
... One thing we haven't talked about is letting citizens contribute
technology."
The
photo site Flickr also opens up
its content for public use, and programmers have created applications
such as:
--Holovaty
Holovaty urged traditional newspapers and online publications to hire programmers rather than throw journalists with minimal programming knowledge into Web ventures. Hiring programmers, he said, allows newspapers to create software that will do exactly what the company wants as well as to create innovative and interactive applications that will engage readers. Jump
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is a center of the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College
of Journalism. It is a spin-off of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism
(www.pewcenter.org). © 2004
University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism
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Some
citizen media efforts are using open-source software, including 
Download
Dan Pacheco's handout.
Bakotopia
