For Release:
March 13, 2013

Contact: Jan Schaffer
202-885-8100

Washington, D.C. – Four innovative news ideas – to cover the cultural narrative of food, build e-platforms for long-form women writers, expand Latino coverage in New England, and spotlight emerging women musicians –won $14,000 awards to develop their projects in the coming year.

The award winners were selected from 205 proposals received in the sixth year of the McCormick New Media Women Entrepreneurs initiative (NMWE). They join 18 other awardees selected from 2,011 applicants since 2008.

"To date, 100 percent of our winners have launched and 72 percent are still going strong," said Jan Schaffer, executive director J-Lab, which administers the program with McCormick Foundation funding. "These awesome women have established significant track records with their eye on niche opportunities."

Added Lisa Williams, Placeblogger.com founder and a NMWE Advisory Board member: “NMWE’s track record in producing businesses that launch a product, attract an audience, and are still in business at the year mark is far better than that of my high-tech angel network, and better than any VC I know."

The awardees are:

• AmericanFoodRoots.com – A StoryCorps-meets-James Beard initiative to tell the nation's cultural, historical and personal food stories in video, audio and text. It is the brainchild of NPR commentator and food writer Bonny Wolf, Associated Press food and cultural writer Michele Kayal, cookbook author Domenica Marchetti, and former food editor Carol Guensburg. They are close to announcing partnerships with national institutions and media to publicize, expand and preserve the canon of American food stories.
• First Person Female – An e-publishing, profit-sharing platform to be developed for quality, long-form journalism, memoir and fiction by women writers. Founders are Peggy Northrop, former Reader's Digest editor-in-chief, and best-selling author Laura Fraser.
• LatinoNewsNetwork - An eight-month-old Connecticut-based news site serving English language-dominant Latinos that will expand to Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In addition to a daily site, LLN also provides its news articles at no cost to other English-language media partners to ensure the stories reach as many readers as possible. The founder is Latino journalism leader Diane Alverio.
• Boxx Magazine – A newly launched site to cover women artists who are shaping the music industry. Launching Boxx are Jordan Young of the Knight Lab at Northwestern University and Selena Fragassi, Chicago Magazine's pop/rock critic.

"The great ideas just keep on coming," said Clark Bell, Journalism Director of the Chicago-based Robert R. McCormick Foundation. "The new winners are in very select company – 22 out of more than 2,000 applicants.  As in previous years, the judges had to make some very difficult decisions."

Each of the four projects will receive $12,000 over the next year and an additional $2,000 upon raising a match of $2,000. A total of $56,000 will be awarded. Project leaders will blog about their start-ups at www.newmediawomen.org.

"For women entrepreneurs, that first bit of funding is an ignition point that increases public interest in the product and launches the entrepreneur herself as an expert and innovator," said Erin Polgreen, a 2012 winner for Symbolia, a comics journalism e-magazine. She credits the NMWE program with providing critical support for women looking to take the leap to become founders and entrepreneurs. "The financial and networking support this program provides makes it possible to innovate and create truly creative media solutions."

Participating in this year’s judging were: Lisa Williams, founder and CEO, Placeblogger.com; Cory Haik, executive producer for digital news, Washington Post; Ju-Don Roberts, general manager and senior vice president, Everyday Health; Vivian Vahlberg, President, Vahlberg & Associates; Ellen Warren, senior correspondent, Chicago Tribune; Maria Ivancin, assistant professor, American University’s School of Communication; Erin Polgreen, founder, Symbolia Magazine; Jennifer Choi, journalism program officer, McCormick Foundation, and J-Lab’s Jan Schaffer.

The McCormick New Media Women Entrepreneurs program addresses opportunity and innovation, recruitment and retention for women in journalism by spotlighting their ingenuity and entrepreneurial abilities.

The Robert R. McCormick Foundation is committed to fostering communities of educated, informed and engaged citizens.

J-Lab is a journalism catalyst for igniting news ideas that work by funding pilot projects, awarding innovations and sharing practical insights from years of working with news creators. J-Lab is a center of American University’s School of Communication, a laboratory for professional education, communication research and innovative production in the fields of journalism, film and media arts and public communication, working across media platforms and with a focus on public affairs and public service.

So where can a $14,000 media start-up award get you?

It can get you just where you want to go, judging by the recent winners of the McCormick New Media Women Entrepreneur (NMWE) Awards.

Since 2010, award winners have built a leading website covering women's basketball, a comics arts/journalism iPad app, a site that lifts the veil on the wide discrepancies in costs for medical procedures, and a 164-page Illustrated Guide to Income in the United States, just to cite a few of their accomplishments.  Other winners have taken the lead on investigative news stories, become visible advocates for their constituencies, or nailed their fund-raising goals and are hiring more staff. 

With the Jan. 23, 2013 deadline for new applicants just around the corner (see guidelines), I wanted to shine a spotlight on their notable successes.

Take FullCourt.com, for instance. It grew from a strategic merger with 2010 winner Inside WomensBasketball.com and has made great strides towards becoming a leading website for national coverage of women's basketball.

With WNBA recognition, 16,000 Twitter followers and more than 12,000 monthly uniques (a number that skyrockets during summer recruiting), the site has hired a news editor and a three-person ad sales team, said co-founder Kelly Kline. It recently launched Full Court Fresh 50, listing the top girls' basketball recruits in the nation.

Meanwhile, 2010 cohort Catherine Mulbrandon expects to publish by the end of the year her 164-page Illustrated Guide to Income in the United States. In addition to her NMWE award, she has also raised another $14,000 on Kickstarter and has become a data visualization presenter at many conferences.

SiliconHillsNews.com, which launched a little over a year ago to cover the tech communities in Austin and San Antonio, has surpassed its goal and raised $110,000 in sponsorships, founder Laura Lorek reports. It is snagging visibility by forming alliances with major tech shows that give the site a cut of the sponsorships it raises. It is sponsoring a Beta Summit at one of the shows, where it will select the participating start-up and moderate a panel, and sponsoring a day-long conference BlogItSa! in January. It is also moderating a SXSW panel on Central Texas Technology Media. Coming soon is a weekly Silicon Hill News video show featuring interviews of local tech stars. To help with all this, Lorek has hired a part-time reporter and two new freelancers.

The 20-month old Carolina Public Press has now produced more than 700 stories and spearheaded a media alliance that sued to gain access to an audit outlining of the Asheville, N.C., Police Department's evidence room. CPP has done a number of major enterprise stories about missing cash, guns and other valuables under police custody. Working on sustainability, the site was awarded a two-year, $65,000 grant from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation. And, recently, the North Carolina Press Association admitted the site as a member – the first online news site in the western part of the state to get that nod. Founder Angie Newsome is also embarking on a major-donor campaign.

Jeanne Pinder’s ClearHealthCosts.com has launched a new website and gathered comparative data on medical procedures in New York City and San Francisco. It is seeking partners or sponsors to add data for 20 more cities. Pinder said her researchers were finding prices for identical medical procedures “varying by a factor of 10” in the same city. Pinder was hailed as giving the “most impressive” presentation of the night at a fall Women’s Demo sponsored by New York Tech Meetup.

The Seattle Lesbian got so much traffic in mid-September that it had to shut down for the day and amp up its servers. With the run-up to November’s passage of the marriage equality act in the state, “we have become so much more than just an online magazine,” said founder Sarah Toce, who has been tapped as a spokesperson and educator on LGBT issues.  Toce has also registered the URLs for similar sites in 18 other U.S. cities.

And, finally, at the beginning of the month Symbolia, the comic arts/journalism iPad app that is the brainchild of Erin Polgreen launched with great fanfare and one of the best guerrilla marketing campaigns I’ve seen. It will publish six issues a year for $2.99 each. One can also get the inaugural issue as a PDF with a full year subscription for $11.99. Polgreen snagged numerous interviews in the L.A.Times, Forbes, Poynter, CJR, Publishers Weekly and elsewhere. Coming soon are Ebook editions of the preview issue in the Amazon, Nook, Kobo, and Google Play stores as well as apps for Android and Kindle tablets.
 

A J-Lab pilot project that called for eight newspapers and one public radio station to network with local blogs delivered nine different models of collaboration, five success stories and roadmaps for rethinking local news, according to the project's findings.

In "Networked Journalism: What Works," J-Lab recounts the successes and failures of the three-year-old initiative. The experiments led to the creation of seven geographic and two topic networks as well as failed attempts to monetize four of those partnerships.

The project required each of the nine hub newsrooms to partner with at least five local news sites. Most of the newsrooms significantly expanded their partnerships. At its height, the number of partners grew from 44 s to 169; 146 are still participating, said J-Lab director Jan Schaffer.

The experiments required most of the hub newsrooms to drive traffic to independent news startups in their communities, and it called for the partners to produce enough content to attract that traffic. Five of the networks are active, but two are diminished and two are now inactive.

Editors of several of the successful pilot sites said the projects helped transform their newsrooms.

"I had no idea of how transformative this would be for us,” said David Shribman, editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which launched the Pipeline site to cover hydraulic fracturing. “It changed the center of gravity for our whole organization.”

Seattle Times Editor David Boardman called the project "hugely paradigm-changing for our newsroom and for me, individually.”

“This whole notion that we would feature someone else’s content on our website and drive traffic off the site, that was such an alien notion at the time we took the leap on this."

The Networked Journalism project was funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “Experimentation is only helpful when it comes along with an honest accounting,” said Eric Newton, foundation senior adviser. “The editors who shared the high and low points of networked journalism have done a service to the news community.”

The pilot projects surfaced critical issues now defining the emerging news landscape, including the new "news jobs" to be done, the rise of advocacy news sites, the fragile nature of news start-ups, the reality of sponsored content and the bandwidth available for innovation in legacy newsrooms.

"Partners come and they go. Some divorce the network, some die in an emerging news ecosystem that is still quite fragile," Schaffer said. "Indeed, only two of the projects still have the identical partners they launched with."

The J-Lab report tracks two rounds of grantees. The first five launched in 2009; each received $45,000 to pay for a part-time project coordinator and to offer $5,000 stipends to five partners. They received an additional $15,000 in the second year to try to leverage revenue from their networks. A second group of four newsrooms started in 2010, with $50,000 in funding support for a coordinator and partner payments.

Success stories included networks led by The Seattle Times, The Charlotte Observer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Oregonian in Portland and KQED Public Radio in San Francisco. The Miami Herald and TucsonCitizen.com launched bold and promising networks, but only a handful of partners now remain active. The Asheville Citizen-Times and Lawrence Journal-World got off to strong starts but didn’t make a go of it.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. It believes that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged.

J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism is a journalism catalyst for igniting news ideas that work. It funds pilot projects, awards innovations and shares practical insights from its research and years of working with news creators and evolving news ecosystems. It is a center of American University's School of Communication.  

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The best journalism schools in the country are now providing genuine opportunities for students to do authentic reporting. However, the most valuable of these are more than just classroom exercises that live and die by the academic calendar.

"If the students are steeped in the passion and values of journalism, they will figure out their contribution to a democratic society."

The models vary with some of them outlined in the worthy "The Classroom as Newsroom" report. You can be a stand-alone community news outlet, share your stories with a legacy news organization or engage in enterprise or accountability journalism that is syndicated or republished elsewhere.

At J-Lab, however, I have learned that the sustainability of these efforts is just as fragile as the sustainability of legacy news organizations. As with any challenge, however, there are opportunities.

I have come to believe more in the entrepreneurial model of journalism over the teaching-hospital model. Since 2005, J-Lab has helped to fund 23 university news startups in the Knight-supported New Voices program. All had very robust starts; 13 are still going strong; five others were last updated in spring semester. Of the overall total, six have had their university support cut back; two of those spun to other entities. Several of these have tried to pivot to keep going. Most did a great job with the news, but didn't focus enough on sustainability. Some lost their momentum amid summer and academic breaks. The ones that are the healthiest are year-round ventures.

One takeaway: Beware of expecting news organizations to pay to publish any of these stories. With only a handful of exceptions, traditional news outlets have proven to be remarkably stingy,

To achieve lasting impact, I think we need more of the "Newsroom as Classroom" model of teaching journalism skills – and less of the "Classroom as Newsroom."

And we need to rethink the purpose of these efforts. They can – and should – involve more than a reconstruction of newsgathering in an age of cutbacks.

For that to really happen, some things needs to be tweaked:

• Open the door wider. Avoid cherry picking only the best and brightest j-students to participate. Sure you want the copy to be good but you need good story frames as well. Include the students who sacrifice an A because they have to both work and go to school. They have a level of street smarts that are grounded where journalists need to be grounded.  And they likely can't swing an unpaid internship.
• Cultivate the gonzo journalist. Students who conform to the journalism curriculum may feel like safe participants. But give me the likes of one of my Philadelphia Inquirer colleagues who hacked off his ponytail, tossed it in the back of the company car, and dashed off to an assignment. He's still dashing to assignments around the world.
• Recruit across campus. At USC-Annenberg, NeonTommy.com founder Marc Cooper each year interviews more than 100 students from all majors to build a newsroom roster that plays to individual interests and strengths – and accrues to the value of the news site.
• Teach operations, not just skills.  Sure, you want students who can report, write and master digital production. But we also need to expose students to the realities of running a news enterprise.  Hats off to faculty who are working pro bono hours on university news sites, but we need to bolster abilities to manage people, assign stories, edit copy, solicit sponsorships, and close a partnership or ad deal. As any indy news startup will tell you, their news won't happen if their site goes belly up.
• Master events. Today, events are journalism. Teach your students how to run a money-making newsmaker event and render it as journalistic content.
• Foster university support as part of the institution's broad community-service mandate.

Like many others, I get called a lot by students who need to find someone to interview for a class assignment. Generally, I find their research to be poor, the point of the interview to be vague, and frequently they are rattling off questions from a list in front of them. These students have not learned how to listen on the fly or probe with follow-up questions. To me, these classroom exercises should not be considered acts of journalism.

"We have come to a place where news organizations, large and small, are trying out some new things as they navigate the bumpy road of disruptive chaos."

Students engaged with a daily university news site, on the other hand, are not only learning to generate real journalism, they are equipping themselves with skills that can serve democracy in ways every bit as significant as journalism has.

University news sites should be investments in civic entrepreneurship, training grounds for a new generation of civic players.

It would be a shame to measure the effectiveness of these efforts by whether they keep news organizations alive with free or cheap labor.

Run well, these news initiatives can teach all interested students, not just journalism students, how to hold democratic institutions accountable, how to help citizens do their jobs as citizens, and how to foster new information paradigms.

To this end, journalism education needs to reach for more than a clinical-skills, teaching-hospital approach. Indeed, it doesn't take much in this election cycle to see how some of the journalistic conventions we have taught are actually getting in the way of an informed citizenry.

Whether or not traditional journalism institutions survive in the long run, we need to impart information-gathering and truth-seeking skills to a broad array of future civic players. It may be that today's student is tomorrow's lawyer or Supreme Court judge. Perhaps they will work for a mission-driven nonprofit that is producing content steeped in journalistic DNA. Maybe they will invent new ways of creating and sharing news and information. Maybe the poorest writers will be brilliant data miners or the next non-narrative genius.

If the students are steeped in the passion and values of journalism, they will figure out their contribution to a democratic society.

Event Date: September 27, 2012
Location: A speech by Jan Schaffer at Howard University for the Social Media Tech Conference 2012

Good afternoon and thank you for having me.  I want to drill deep today on the news ecosystem is evolving and some of the roles that social media are playing in that evolution.

Who would have thought just eight years ago when new journalism news sites started launching in earnest in the U.S. how things would evolve.

In those days – we’re talking late 2004 – the fledgling news sites were disdainful of legacy media. They thought the big media players were doing a lousy job of covering their communities – and in some cases totally blowing the facts. The newbies identified significant gaps in coverage and aimed to do a better job of filling them.

Those gaps usually involved a community or neighborhood – or a particular topic, such as education, health and the environment.

For the longest time, legacy media players didn’t pay much attention to these upstarts.

"We have come to a place where news organizations, large and small, are trying out some new things as they navigate the bumpy road of disruptive chaos."

I remember just a few years ago interviewing top editors at a major metro newspaper for a foundation study. We asked the editors about several new, and rather robust news sites, that were covering things like education and city planning – right under their noses.

The editors were pretty clueless about what was happening. One even went so far as to declare that these small initiatives didn’t matter.  “We’re the only game in town,” he said.

Well, a lot has changed since then. Many of the newcomers started breaking major stories, winning prizes and getting traction in their specific areas. Indeed, the highest honor in U.S. journalism, the Pulitzer Prizes, have gone to the likes of ProPublica and the HuffingtonPost. And their social media footprint is also significant. HuffPost, for instance has 2 million monthly users of its Facebook application and 2 million Twitter followers. ProPublica has over 150,000 Twitter followers, and more than twice as many, 382,000, in its Google+ circle.

Mainstream news outlets, on the other hand, kept getting smaller and smaller, forced to downsize their staffs and their news reports amid declining readers, revenues and a recession. As a result, their value proposition got slimmer and slimmer. Why should someone pay to subscribe when there’s not much there?

Before long, some epiphanies set in:

• For one, MSM outlets have more than a business-model problem. They need to beef up their content and recruit some more feet on the street to continue to have a valuable product.
• At the same time, the news startups also had some epiphanies: Scoops, alone, were not enough to make it in the digital-first news world. They needed a megaphone – some ways to amplify their good journalism. They also needed some validation so they were not just dismissed as overheated bloggers.
• And everybody needed some ways to have more impact and more opportunities for support – be it from sponsors, funders, or advertisers.  

When I look at the emerging news ecosystem today, I see at least seven trends.  All, so some degree, rely on social media.

They are:

1. The start up of smaller and smaller news organizations that are having bigger and bigger impact - from Talking Points memo to Politico to Pro Publica.
2. The rise of independent news startups -- often nonprofit.
3. The growth of mission-driven (or soft-advocacy) news sites.
4. The creation of university news sites that are more than classroom exercises.
5. And the increase in non-narrative news stories.
6. The increase in collaboration among content creators.
7. The expansion of tech sites into content -- such as Google's YouTube.

So watchdog sites are really rising on the statewide level with such sites as California Watch and Texas Tribune. The new Investigative News Network now reports some 64 members.

The oldest of the local indy startups have been around for 7-8 years and are managing to hang in there – sites like New Haven Independent in Connecticut, Twin Cities Daily Planet, West Seattle blog.

And some of these sites are on a strong enough footing that they are beginning to expand and launch satellite sites. DavidsonNews.net, for instance, last year launched CorneliusNews.net.  And the founder has visions for a bigger network.

Now advocacy has long been a scarlet-letter word in journalism, but we are increasingly seeing the creation of news sites that produce content from a point of view, but that content that has a lot of journalistic DNA. Human Rights Watch is one example, but on a local level we are seeing sites covering public schools, such as the Public School Notebook in Philadelphia or the Catalyst in Chicago. Their point of view? They better public schools.

Similarly Bike Portland advocates for cyclists, while also doing enough good journalism that the Oregonian newspaper was willing to partner with them.

One new trend I am seeing is the rise of news sites covering arts and culture.  Sites such as Oregon Arts Watch, theartblog.org in Philadelphia and NolaVie in New Orleans are providing coverage that has disappeared from local papers.

Niche news sites area also finding a following -- sites covering the environment, such as Great Lakes Echo, and health, such as ClearHealthCosts.com.

In June, J-Lab convened a summit of editors of university news sites -- some 44 attended.  There are very robust models emerging here:  from the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at Boston University, to Mission Local at Berkeley and Neon Tommy at USC-Annenberg. These sites are now often supplying stories to mainstream news organizations.

We are also seeing all kinds of non-narrative forms of journalism.  Comics journalism (Symbolia), database journalism (PolitiFact), games as  journalism (see the Cool Stuff on Great Lakes Echo), events as journalism, and  social media curated into story forms through such tools as Storify.

So now we have come to a place where news organizations, large and small, are trying out some new things as they navigate the bumpy road of disruptive chaos.

One of those things involve some degree of working together.

I see at least Four models of collaboration shaping the relationships between old and new media.

They are:

• Distributive partnerships. Involving the republishing of  content that one news organization creates by others who want to run the story.
  • California Watch now has agreements with 11 newspapers and five radio stations in the state. They pay a membership fee based on their size that allows them to use California Watch content. Some of the partners might localize the stories; and some work with California Watch to help report.
• Co-reporting partnerships. Involving working together on newsgathering. This could involve localizing a national story divvying up reporting tasks, or assigning a corps of correspondents to help gather the information to build a story.  Think ProPublica's "Dialing for Docs" story.

• Content-creation partnerships. This usually involves a news startup sharing content, or creating content, especially for a legacy media partner, such as the Texas Tribune producing content for the NY Times.

• Networked journalism partnerships. These usually entail formal agreements to belong to a metro network of blogs or news sites, often anchored by a legacy news outlet.  J-Lab is about to come out with a report on nine pilot projects we funded and I will tell you there are some clear winners and losers.

Now, on a local level, the Public School Notebook, a site that covers public education in Philadelphia, has a very interesting relationship with WHYY, one of the city’s public radio stations.

WHYY actually pays for part of the salary of a school reporter who does stories that appear on both thenotebook.org and on WHYY’s website NewsWorks.org. The Notebook is the assigning editor in this relationship. WHYY gets excellent school coverage that is a product of the Notebook’s extensive knowledge and network of sources. And they have beaten the city’s major newspapers on a number of stories.

So, now let's go to the nut graf of this conference.  Where does social media fit into this picture?

There are several ways.

• As communication tools for partners -- Facebook groups are a key tool for collaboration.
• As a story tool itself -- Storify's curation of  Twitter and Facebook posts.
• As a distribution tool -- calling out stories and content to be consumed.
• As a way to measure (or count) engagement - fans, likes, followers.
• And, perhaps somewhat ominously, as a data mining tool for tech companies to build out new content enterprises, be they Google, Facebook, Twitter or Amazon.

I want to go a littler deeper on the use of social media as an engagement tool because J-Lab recently released a report  based on online survey responses from 278 mostly small digital-first news sites.  Copies area available for you.

"The editors were pretty clueless about what was happening. One even went so far as to declare that these small initiatives didn’t matter. “We’re the only game in town,” he said."

One of the most frustrating difficulties is using social media as a measure of engagement.

There’s been a lot attention on building new business models in the evolving news ecosystem, there's not much attention to what constitutes meaning engagement. Audience engagement itself is another nut to be cracked.

It is becoming clearer that there is a difference between superficial interaction with users (and social media is a factor here) and engagement that drives users to support news operations and drives citizens to be citizens.

The nut graph of our report:  While these news sites are adept at using social media tools to distribute and market their stories they are not able to corral the kinds of data that would tell them wither they are converting their users into to become donors, advertisers, content contributors, even volunteers. These roles are critical to the future survival of these news startups. We make some recommendations in the report and it is available online at www.j-lab.org.

Indeed 8 out of 10 respondents said they could not tell whether they were converting users/readers into advertisers, donors, contributors or volunteers.

News outlets were using social media as a top engagement avenue. along with content contribution and e-newsletters.

But, curiously, they were using website metrics -- unique visitors and page views -- to measure engagement.

And they identified web metrics as their most important engagement tool.

Moreover, they were frustrated.  They didn't just want to measure a superficial breadth of engagement, they wanted to measure the depth of engagement as well.

So, social media is falling short here.

We identified four strata of engagement, but social media really only played a key role in two.:

• In driving people to consume content
• Inviting reaction, comments, shares, likes or chats.
• Only a little was used in eliciting story tips or stories.

More innovation in capturing genuine engagement is needed and more research is needed into impact.

So, with that, I'll let you steep on the rich opportunities there are in this arena.

And I thank you again for having me.

Event Date: Sept. 20, 2012
Location: Hyatt Regency San Francisco

Online News Association Conference & Awards Banquet

Thursday, Sept. 20, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco

J-Lab for the fourth year in a row put on a pre-convention workshop at ONA bringing together experts on specific challenges confronting entrepreneurial news startups.  This half-day workshop was produced by J-Lab and funded by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. 

View the event on Sched.org.

View videos from the session.

Entrepreneuring 4.0

ONA pre-conference workshop
1 p.m.  to 5:30 p.m. Thursday,  Sept. 20.

Agenda:

1:00 – 2 p.m. The Art of the Close – Journalists are great at producing content and covering stories.  But ask them to sell an ad and they can’t close the deal. But more and more news entrepreneurs are developing strategies and getting coaching in how to do it.

Speakers:

• Howard Owens. The Batavian
• Susan Mernit, Oakland Local
• Ben Ilfeld, COO of Sacramento Press and Founder of AdGlue

2 – 2:40 p.m. Engaging Audiences – Just because you build it doesn’t mean people will come. A new J-Lab/McCormick Foundation survey finds that online news startups can use social media tools to distribute content, market their sites and track users. But most say they cannot lasso data to track whether they are turning users into supporters who will help their sites survive.  This discussion looks at the four strata of engagement and successful engagement strategies.

Speakers/Report Authors:

• Jan Schaffer, J-Lab Director
• Erin Polgreen, Symbolia comics journalism entrepreneur
• Gaby Brink, Founder and Executive Creative Director,
  Tomorrow Partners, and Creator of Sparkwi.se

3:00 – 3:45 p.m. Collaboration vs. Competition – When should a news startup partner with a mainstream news outlet? A look at collaboration models, do’s and don’ts, guerrlla marketing.  With new results from nine Knight/J-lab funded Networked Journalism projects and copies of the report. 

Speakers:

• Bob Payne, Seattle Times
• Bruce Koon, KQED
• Debbie Galant, Founder, Baristanet and Director New Media Initiatives, Montclair State.

3:45 – 4:30 p.m. The Rise of University News Startups  - J-Schools are launching news sites as outlets to teach students both reporting and entrepreneurship skills.  There are several models. 

• Helene Goupil, acting editor, Mission Local, UC-Berkeley
• Marc Cooper, Founder, Neon Tommy, USC Annenberg

4:30 – 5:15 p.m.  Entrepreneurial Pop-ups  – Presenters lend their expertise to individual entrepreneurs who are struggling with particular challenges.

Kudos to Homicide Watch for exceeding its Kickstarter goal. I was among those who donated.  But I have to confess to a lot of head -scratching over all the rallying cries, berating national foundations for not supporting a good local news site.

Homicide Watch launched in 2010 to track and follow up homicide cases and victims in Washington, D.C.   Run by Laura and Chris Amico, its future was in jeopardy because Laura has been awarded a Nieman-Berkman Fellowship for the coming year.  They are trying to keep the site going by raising money to pay stipends to student reporters.

The fact of the matter is:  Any entrepreneurs who leave their startups after only three years are dooming their projects to failure  – barring a mega-bucks buyout from an interested purchaser.  And that's not something that usually happens with local news sites.

That's why many community news entrepreneurs choose not to move to better gigs or new opportunities when they are offered. They know what the consequences will be for their startups.

On the other hand, others elect to accept new offers – often new jobs that pay a real salary with benefits – presented to them as a result of their venture's success.
And their sites go dark.

There is not yet a micro marketplace for the buying and selling of local news startups when their founders need to move on. 

By all means, Homicide Watch's founders should pursue their new opportunities. 

We should be mindful, however, that it's not enough these days to be innovative in covering a niche topic with a clever platform.  Entrepreneurs also have to be innovative in developing ways to support their sites. Submitting grant proposals to big, national foundations should only be one route.  But let's be real about the odds.

J-Lab's Women Media Entrepreneurs awards program has received 1,800 proposals for only 18 awards since 2008.  That means an applicant only has a one in 100 chance of success.  The Knight News Challenge has even greater odds.

While licensing technology is an excellent revenue stream, local news sites need multiple streams of revenue. There are better chances for success if a local site explores local foundation support, partnerships with local partners, tip jars, events and corporate or nonprofit sponsors.

I, too, admire Homicide Watch, but I agree with the Wall Street Journals' Raju Narisutti, who tweeted: "Lost in all the hype today is a Kickstarter effort to train five young journalists to use a failed hyperlocal model."
 

Event Date: Aug 11, 2012
Location: Marriot Chicago Downtown Hotel, Chicago, IL

New News Labs:  The Rise of University Entrepreneurial News  Startups

Around the country, journalism programs are launching news websites to cover their communities, state capitals, or public issues on a day-to-day basis. These are genuine news initiatives that take many forms and they are quite different from the blogs or websites that house student assignments for a particular class.

During this event we examined different models and how they operate.

Date: Saturday Aug. 11, 2012

Time: 12:15 – 1:30 pm
Location: Marriot Chicago Downtown Hotel, Chicago, IL

Produced by J-Lab and co-sponsored by AEJMC's Council of Affiliates and the Civic and Citizen Journalism Interest Group.

Agenda:

Moderator: Jan Schaffer, Executive Director, J-Lab

Presenters:

Willa Seidenberg, Director, Intersections SouthLA and Annenberg News Radio, USC-Annenberg

David Poulson, Editor, Great Lakes Echo, Associate Director, Knight Center for Environmental Journalism, Michigan State  

Steven Elliott, Director Digital News, Cronkite News Service, Arizona State

Suzanne McBride, Founder, AustinTalks.org, Columbia College-Chicago

The luncheon is sponsored by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.

Registrations are open to the first 100 people. Contribution towards lunch is $10.

Sign up via Eventbrite:http://aejmc2012luncheon.eventbrite.com.

Event Date: Jun. 21, 2012 at 12:15pm
Location: Hilton New Orleans Riverside, New Orleans, LA

Black News Entrepreneurs: Where Are They?
NABJ, New Orleans, June 21, 2012

By Jan Schaffer
J-Lab Director

Three black news-site founders unpacked how they juggled several demands to get their news startups up and running at an NABJ session last week for prospective news entrepreneurs.

One key was weathering a slow, steady buildup of their enterprises. Creating buzz with content that went viral helped disguise non-existent marketing budgets. And substituting new ideas for old ones that didn't work kept them in the game.

The three news-site founders said they not only confronted the typical challenges any entrepreneur faces, but particular challenges of being a black news entrepreneur.

Many blacks don't have entrepreneur role models, they said.Their families often don't have resources to back their startups as early investors. And they may place a higher value on traditional trappings of success that come with a job security and benefits, the speakers said.

Often they don't tap into the networks that would help them build teams. "Venture capitalists invest in teams, not ideas," said Michelle Ferrier, founder of LocalGrownNews.com in Greensboro, N.C.

"As minorities, we buckle down and get invested in what we do. It's so isolating that we miss out on the networks that could help us," she said.

Here's a recap of their experience and advice.

QCityMetro.com

Glenn Burkins launched QCityMetro.com in 2008 to cover the African-American community in Charlotte, the "Queen City." 

By June 2012, he had registered slow but steady growth: The site has more than 60,000 unique visitors a month and brings in more than $100,000 a year in revenue.  He hopes to double that revenue by next year.

Rather than depending on selling banner ads, he's had luck finding companies to sponsor content.  BlueCross BlueShield, for instance, is the primary sponsor of the site's health news page.

Other revenues that support him, two part-timers and several freelancers, comes from:

• A business directory.
• A summer camp directory.
• Ads on the e-newsletter.
• An Amazon.com page, where users can go and buy things.
• And some national ads sold by a California ad agency

He has a robust content partnershp with The Charlotte Observer; each news outlet can use up to four stories a week from each other.

And he reports being "inundated" with calls from people in the community wanting the site to cover their events.

He had saved three years of income before quitting his job at The Observer to launch the site and it's taken about that long "just to get to the floor of sustainability," he said.

An ongoing challenge is bringing home the bucks from the $30,000 in outstanding invoices he has.

DominionofNewYork.com

Kelly Virella, former deputy editor of City Limits magazine , estimates she has spent $10,000 since she launched DominionofNewYork.com in 2011.

With local, national and international content, she leverages social media, which generates about 70 percent of the site's traffic, and content partnerships with HuffingtonPost and Nation Institute's Investigative Fund  to generate buzz and awareness. Virella also gets some attention from her participation in New York City radio shows. Early stories on the Trayvon Martin killing resulted in content that went viral.

Kelly says she is producing 70 percent of the site's content herself but is looking for freelancers who want to report, not just blog, as well as a marketing partner.

Current aspirations look different from her original business plan, she said.
She's now looking to generate revenue from advertising, subscriptions, events and book sales, she said.

LocallyGrownNews.com

Three years after LocallyGrownNews.com went live in April 2010, founder Michelle Ferrier, an associate professor at Elon University in North Carolina and a winner of a J-Lab New Media Women Entrepreneurs award, says, "I am going back to a print model."

By that, she doesn't mean a newspaper.  Rather she plans to distribute small decks of advertising cards with content and coupons at local farmers markets and retail outlets, soliciting vendors to buy into spreading their message via the cards.

She hopes to seed other Locally Grown sites around the country with a ready-made content management system, evergreen locavore content and some easy revenue.

Black entrepreneurs, she said, face challenges from both "pattern matching" and "stereotype threats."

Startup investors often evaluate prospects based on what has been previously successful, looking at such things as personality types, alma maters or track record.  Often successful patterns emerge from white computer-science grads of top schools. It's hard for black entrepreneurs to match these favored patterns, Ferrier said.

Blacks may also suffer from a psychological phenonmenon, known as stereotype threat.  Ferrier said this could surface in situations where a negative stereotype might be present about a social group and that stereotype actually creates anxiety or reduces performance in a member of that group.

Further challenging black entrepreneurs, Ferrier said, are advertisers who may "undervalue" African-American audiences.

Quietly, and not so quietly, journalism schools around the country are starting to give their students new news opportunities. More than beefing up course catalogues with multimedia and convergence offerings, the schools are becoming incubators for entrepreneurial news startups – news websites that are populated with student content.

See the notes, a Storify of the event and a full Twitter feed of proceedings here.

The degree to which student production of news stories for these startups is fully integrated in the curricula is still a nut that needs to be cracked.  But there is no question that students involved in these initiatives are learning not only how to produce stories on a faster turnaround than most classroom assignments, they are also getting firsthand experience in how to operate a news business.

The models vary widely as shared by group of some three dozen editors and founders of university news sites that J-Lab convened on June 1 and 2 in Washington, D.C.  Indeed, J-Lab has funded some 24 university news sites since 2005.

They range from Temple University’s required capstone that has some 180 students covering 30 neighborhoods over the course of an academic year for its PhiladelphiaNeighborhoods.com,  to UC-Berkeley’s program that divvies up its journalism grad students among its three hyperlocal websites (Mission Local, Richmond Confidential and Oakland North) as part of their clinical work.

Some sites such as USC-Annenberg’s NeonTommy.com  are 24/7 operations covering national and metro news that attracts some 270,000 unique visitors a month.

Others, such as the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NECIR) and WisconsinWatch.org, are separate university affiliates located in academic offices and employing or assigning students but are primarily producing stories for mainstream media outlets.

The degree to which the universities support these offspring also varies widely. Neon Tommy benefits from $150,000 and more in direct support.  Boston University antes up $60,000 a year for NECIR. But other news sites hobble along on budgets of $5,000 to $20,000 a year – or less.

Most of the sites, however, face similar challenges:

• How to embed their operations more fully into the curriculum so that they are more than the pet projects of a few faculty members?
• How to stimulate widespread faculty buy-in that will result in steady streams of copy for real-time publication?
• How to “feed the beast” year round so that the sites don’t go dormant over the summer or school breaks?
• How to get the students up to speed so they can hit the streets and report before they’ve had formal media-law courses.
• How to pay for these efforts.

University Assets

These news sites offer different experiences than traditional classroom reporting exercises or “beat” work that never leaves an instructor’s briefcase. J-Lab workshop participants said their news projects are turning into university assets that foster:

• Experiential learning in a clinical setting, a genuine newsroom that is covering real stories for real communities.
• Service learning that involves students in helping to meet the information needs of their communities.
• Civic engagement that helps universities nurture good citizenship and be good neighbors in their communities.

“We’re thinking about this more as service learning. They are a required component of being a college student,” said Carola Weil, USC-Annenberg’s Director of International and Strategic Partnerships who attended the workshop. “These programs are part of the experiential learning.”

Indeed, MadisonCommons.org at the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently got some funding via service learning grant to integrate the news website into the journalism curriculum, said its founder Lew Friedland.

Flow of Content

The university sites can post as few as three stories a week to as much as 40 pieces of content a day.  Nearly all find getting citizen contributors to supplement student content difficult to sustain.

Every month, Berkeley’s MissionLocal.org posts about 100 feature articles and videos produced in-house and 200 photos taken from around San Francisco’s Mission District, said current editor Helene Goupil.  The site was launched more than three years ago “to give the grad students some place to publish,” she said. “But it stopped being a class right away and felt like being a startup.”

While 14 to 18 grad students produce content during the school year, that falls to only three students over the summer.

Still the site attracts about 100,000 unique visitors per months. It translates content into Spanish and publishes monthly print editions. Its  $350,000 operating budget includes two faculty members who work for the site.

UNC-Annenberg’s edgy NeonTommy.com can post 25 to 40 pieces of content on a “good” day, says editor Marc Cooper. It has a core staff of 30 people; 20 are editors.

“I was frustrated that the school had no outlet for print,” Cooper said. However, he quickly realized that the classes would not produce enough content for the site. So, this year he met with some 95 students from all over the university who wanted to work on the site and matched their interests with Neon Tommy opportunities. “Our default answer is ‘yes,’” he says.

Neon Tommy is currently a finalist for 16 LA Press Club Awards, Cooper said, competing right alongside major media outlets in the Los Angeles area.

Still, he and others say it’s not easy to keep up the publishing momentum over the summer.  “School breaks are – how do you say – disastrous,” said Gersh Kuntzman, editor for The Local - Fort Greene-Clinton Hill, a publication of CUNY that is affiliated with the New York Times. CUNY also houses NYCityNewsService.com and VoicesofNY.org.

Willa Seidenberg, who runs Intersections: South LA, one of USC-Annenberg’s three hyperlocal sites, finds it “baffling” that students can’t find story ideas.  So she distributes a weekly email to students with story ideas and invites them to sign up. The stories post on the sites and the students can use them for class.

With competition for support, Intersections, which covers a diverse and poor community abutting the university, may soon be wrapped into a Community News Program although Seidenberg is working to keep it going.  “Students are really the beneficiary of the site,” she says. “It’s changed the culture of the school and increased the amount of reporting done in South LA.”

AustinTalks.org, a website run out of Columbia College-Chicago, has also made major inroads in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. It partners with a local weekly and a neighborhood volunteer has offered to jazz up the website. Now, other city neighborhoods are asking whether they can get a “Talks” site, too. “There is definite interest in doing this for other neighborhoods,” said site founder Suzanne McBride, who also helped to launch the school's ChicagoTalks.org news site.

Next to Berkeley, Temple has done the best job of integrating the Philadelphia Neighborhoods website into its journalism curriculum.  All journalism students must report for the site as a capstone course. Two full-time faculty and three adjuncts help run the operation. The site won nearly 30 state, regional and national journalism awards over past two years, co-director Chris Harper told the workshop.

BU’s New England Center for Investigative Reporting has probably developed the most sustainable model, so far.  The university contributes about $68,000 in cash, which includes some salary and travel support and postage. BU also contributes space and equipment.

Co-director Maggie Mulvihill said NECIR believes its content is good enough it deserves to be sold to news outlets throughout New England. Content sales this year will about $60,000 with stories appearing in the Boston Globe and on WBUR radio. NECIR has produced 32 major stories since it launched in 2009. It now has two full-time co-directors, three to four freelancers, three to five college interns  and the same number of high-school interns per semester.

Training is another significant contributor to the center’s $530,000 operating budget. NECIR will bring in about $180,000 this fiscal year from training professional journalists and high school students in workshops on investigative journalism.

Support

Few of the university news sites get full rides from their institutions.  Temple offsets the costs of its program by assessing students a tech fee. It also charges some of its mainstream media partners $2,000 a year to run Philadelphia Neighborhood stories.

The Medill News Services charges clients about $900 a semester for stories from two “beat” areas of coverage. Arizona State's Cronkite News Service doesn’t charge at all.  While the University of Maryland’s Capital News Service charges client news outlets a few hundred dollars a semester, which it divvies up among the students to reimburse for gas money.

CU-CitizenAccess.org at the University of Illinois-Champaign/Urbana works off university funding plus money from the local community foundation.  GreatLakesEcho.org at Michigan State has found environmental and other funders willing to support its work.

Madison Commons supplements grants with a small amount from the university and $5,000 a year from such partners as WISC-TV, which co-publishes all its work.  But founder Lew Friedland next wants to set up a MadCom agency to involve students in fee-based social media consulting work for local organizations.

Meanwhile, AustinTalks’ McBride dreams of a “Bob Newhart” model of funding, that is, getting a wealthy native of the Austin neighborhood to ante up some support.

Noted by nearly all the workshop participants were the tensions between the startups and faculty members who want to teach traditional journalism courses. Some faculty question, point blank, why students need to publish, said several participants.

Give Back

Students seem to benefit significantly from working on the news startups.

Only a handful of USC students will be investigative or general assignment reporters; “most will get a web job,” said Neon Tommy’s Cooper. “Our goal is to give our students maximum experience in the world of publishing,”

What’s better, Cooper asks:  Doing an internship logging tape for NBC or producing for Neon Tommy?

Mission Local alums have gotten jobs at The New York Times, The Washington Post, L.A. Times and Frontline, Mission Local’s Goupil says.

Mulvihill says NECIR not only teaches BU students how to investigate and mine data, the university has also recruited incoming students from the high school workshops, placed graduates in good jobs, and gotten positive press from the center’s work.The center is actually “a sales pitch for why to have one of these centers,” she said.