CITIZENS MEDIA SUMMIT October 24, 2005 University of Maryland, College Park Supported by: The Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation

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OVERVIEW

Some citizen media efforts are using open-source software, including Drupal and Django, to build their content platforms. Others are building their own systems, such as Bakomatic, developed in Bakersfield, Ca.

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.

Bakotopia uses a new platform he helped to create called Bakomatic, which Pacheco said can also be used for other sites. He said the site does not review or edit content, but that the community polices itself. He attributes that to the site being run by the Bakersfield Californian, because people know that they are a local company and not some national company trying to use a local focus to make money.

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.

• Define your community with as much specificity as possible.
• Decide what kind of content you want and do it well, whether it's stories, classifieds, business listings or social networking.
• Think about your marketing strategy at the beginning of the process.
• Decide what level of staffing you can afford, and don't assume you can do it "on the cheap."
• Research appropriate technical approaches. Creating your own program is the best if you have the technical staff.

Steve Yelvington, vice president of strategy and content for Morris Digital Works, founded BlufftonToday.com after about six weeks of development. Shortly after the launch of the site, Morris Digital Works launched a corresponding weekly print edition.

The site gives every member of the community his or her own Weblog to post personal or community-related news. Free, personal publication has been available on the Internet for 10 years, Yelvington said, but what BlufftonToday provides is space and a community context.

"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.

Adrian Holovaty, former lead developer at Lawrence.com and recently hired as editor of editorial innovations for washingtonpost.com, recommends adding computer programmers to your Web staff to create new applications. "If you want to do innovative things, it takes a kind of mindset to know what's possible," said Holovaty, who is also a programmer.

Similarly, HousingMaps.com combines Google Maps and Craigslist apartment and house listings to provide a service to people looking for a place to live.

"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."

The photo site Flickr also opens up its content for public use, and programmers have created applications such as:

• Spell with Flickr
• Color Fields "Colr Pickr"
• Flickr Sudoku

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.

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