AEJMC 2005 – Transcripts

Jan Schaffer, J-Lab Executive Director

Jan Schaffer, Moderator: I want to welcome you to the sixth annual J-Lab luncheon at AEJMC. I’m Jan Schaffer, the director of J-Lab. We’ve been doing these for a while now, and we’re extremely grateful this year to the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation for supporting this event and feeding you today.

Today the focus of our Interactive Journalism Summit is going to be small “j” journalism — also known as open source journalism or citizen journalism. The bottom line is that citizens are both the consumers and creators of the content. In the past couple of years this has emerged as somewhat of a runaway train in the journalism community.

We’re going to look at three models today. NorthwestVoice, sort of a mainstream model — although Mary Lou Fulton says, “I can’t believe they’re calling me mainstream” — was launched, but not branded, by the Bakersfield Californian. We’re going to look at a J-School model, MyMissourian.com, launched I think as both an experiment and an experiential learning laboratory by the University of Missouri. And then we’re going to look at an independent initiative, Loudoun Forward. It’s only four months old, and its funded by J-Lab’s New Voices project. You’ll hear about what’s motivating their aspirations.

As most of you know, J-Lab received a Knight grant late last year to fund the start-up of 20 citizen media initiatives over the next two years. The first ten were chosen in April — of which David Wiseman’s project is one of them. We got the grant in November, and what’s really interesting to me is that we put the request for proposals in the field in January and in only ten weeks we got 243 proposals. 243! They came from J-schools, ethnic communities, rural communities — they also came from urban communities that were on the perimeter of major media markets. I think the nut graf in all of these proposals is that, “No one, no one, is covering us. Mainstream media is not covering us, so we’re going to do it ourselves.”

We’re going to move quickly through our program today. I first want to take a couple of minutes to show you a new tool that I think will be useful for journalism schools. It was funded by the Knight Foundation grant, and it’s very much a granular how-to-create-your-own-community-news site. We pulled the plug on it this morning, and it’s called J-Learning.org. What it’s designed to do is to provide tech support to jumpstart community media initiatives. It’s very much written without a lot of the online media jargon. That’s because I edited it and I don’t understand most of that jargon, OK? So, one of the things I learned, despite being the publisher of four Web sites, is that I finally now understand HTML and forms and databases as a result of editing this copy.

I think that this will be useful not only for community media start-ups, but we expect it will be useful for journalism schools that are struggling to do new media skills courses. We expect it will also be useful for small media markets where suddenly a copyeditor is deputized to be the Web master and does not have a lot of new media skills.

So, here’s a skim of the site. It’s a companion site to the New Voices project — our next funding deadline, by the way, is February 8, 2006, if you’ve got any ideas for a community media proposal. It’s intended to help support sites like this one, www.forumhome.org, which is one of the sites launched very recently by the New Voices grant.

J-Learning.org is very much a Plan It, Build It, Present It, Promote It site. You can register and post if you want to ask questions. We want this to be very, very interactive. So if you don’t understand something you can say, “I don’t understand this, this is confusing.” Or if you want to say, “I’ve got a better idea, I don’t like the software you’re recommending and I found something that’s more useful,” you can make that recommendation as well.

It’s divided into four chapters, and each chapter has sub-chapters. So the Plan It site will tell you everything from how to choose a domain name to registering it. It’ll tell you how to make some decisions on what you’re going to use, including what equipment you should buy. It’ll give you various Web standards: how to think about your navigation bar, where to put your search boxes, how to handle advertising on your site. One of the themes throughout all of this is we want these efforts to be self-sustaining if at all possible.

It will teach us some really fundamental skills: basic HTML, how to create forms, how to do page layout, how to manage your files, how to do databases so the content on your Web site actually talks to one another. You can evaluate the page. You can post comments. You can print it out if you want.

Build It will take you through how to do things like presenting it and making it pretty and adding some bells and whistles. That would include things like what kind of digital camera should you buy and how you upload a photo to your Web site; how do you animate and use some basic Flash applications; how do you stream audio and how do you stream video? How do you use a blog? What kind of blog do you create? How to manage traffic on your blog; how to digitize your audio; how to get feedback in forums; how to link; what you need to worry about in terms of copyright and attribution; some online libel issues; and how to count your traffic.

We want you to tell us what’s helpful, what’s confusing, what you recommend, and what you built using these tools, because we will give it a megaphone and we will showcase it. Have a look, give us your feedback and give us your reaction. It came out today and I’m sure we’ll have some bugs to clean up, but it’s there for you to use and it’s free. You don’t need to register to use the site, but you do need to register to leave comments on it.

So with that, let’s move on to our panel today. I’m very pleased to have these folks here, because they’re all in the middle of launching new projects and new products for what they’re doing.

We have Mary Lou Fulton, who is the founder and the publisher of NorthwestVoice, and she’s the Vice President of Audience Development for the Bakersfield Californian. NorthwestVoice was one of the earliest citizen journalism initiatives to happen in this country — very much modeled after OhMyNews in Korea . It is a citizen-created content site. It does have one editor who helps manage some of the copy, and it has a deadwood edition — a print edition that is circulated throughout Bakersfield, Calif.

Mary Lou will tell us how it came about and how they’re managing the community to produce the content of the site. She comes to us really being a community news reporter and editor for the AP and LA Times. She has worked everywhere — AOL, GeoCities, washingtonpost.com — and she’s got a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Clyde Bentley, as many of you know, founded MyMissourian.com as an open source publication. He’s an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism. He teaches online journalism. Before that he was a reporter, photographer, copyeditor, managing editor of the Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, Press. He’s had a number of managerial positions at the San Antonio Recorder Times. He just came back from Korea, where he attended a big citizens media summit there with the founder of OhMyNews. He’ll share with you some of that.

David Wiseman — he just gets into this in his spare time. He’s managing partner of Loudoun Forward. Loudoun County, Va., is one of the fastest growing counties in the United States, and it was one of the ten New Voices grantees we picked this year. In his real life, he is the managing partner of Useful Studios. It’s an information design company based in Leesburg, Va., and it focuses on making Web sites, printed media and other products a lot more useful.

So with that, I want to start with Mary Lou and have her talk. We’re going to leave some time for questions later.

VP of Audience Development, The Bakersfield Californian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• First we have topics around geography, where you live — schools, churches, youth sports, neighborhood news.
• And we also thought about topics of interest in Bakersfield — outdoor recreation, cars and horses are things that people in the community are really into.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Founder, MyMissourian.com

Clyde Bentley: While we’re getting this up there I want you to know that my boss, Dean Mills, is over there somewhere next door with the Knight folks. He couldn’t make it but I want to give him a nod as probably the most inspirational man in my life. Film at 11. Just remember that one, OK?

My name is Clyde Bentley and I write well. Now those three words have defined my life for the last 50 some-odd years. I have essayed my way to grades I probably didn’t deserve in school. I memo’d my way to better jobs and salaries in different jobs, and I’ve front-paged myself into the hearts and minds of the community where I work. And that shouldn’t be surprising to you, because that’s what we do; we’re journalists. We write well. It’s something we love. Here’s four more words that might scare you: We are not alone.

One of the pieces of prose that I’m proud of (for that good writing) was the lead to our paper that we did in MyMissourian. It says that if necessity is the mother of invention, panic may be the mother of journalistic innovation. What you’re going to see in the next few minutes is how a very traditional journalism school handled that panic in a way that we think was fairly logical, but in a way that was very much with what we do in our industry.

Missouri is, we like to think of it, the home school of journalism. We’re the first school in the country — in the nation — with a journalism school. It’s very traditional, so you’ve got to remember that. You probably all know that you don’t have to ask someone if they’re a Mizzou graduate, because they’ll tell you long before you ever get around to asking them. Part of it is we developed this curriculum called the Missouri Method. We’re very proud of it. We own commercial media outlets, and all our students work in those commercial media outlets. And it’s worked very well for us. But it makes us very much part of the traditional media center. The other thing to know about us is that we’re very big. We have about 80 full-time faculty members, and they’re almost all heavily experienced in the media business.

Our faculty started an e-mail chat about open source journalism, which has morphed in a year to citizen journalism. This man on the left here (points to presentation), Yeon-Ho Oh, started doing this stuff in Korea with OhMyNews. By the way, if you don’t know this man, he will probably go down as the genius of the early 21st century. The man is truly a media genius. He started the site and just started changing things, and then another person in Bakersfield picked up on that and put an American spin on it — Mary Lou — and really set the world on fire. The listservs are burning up all over the place asking, “What is this that she’s doing?” In our school, we were chatting back and forth about this quite a bit.

I said, “Well, I teach an online journalism class” — this was an “aw shucks” type of e-mail — “I can just take my class and put together this open source thing instead of what we normally do.” And Dean Mills said, “This is great! Go ahead and do it.” He said, “I’m in no hurry. Next week would be soon enough.” I told you this guy is inspirational. And that’s the kind of the panic that got into us.

So over the summer I got a handful of graduate students together and said, “We’ve got to plan this thing out.” Two of them are here — Brendan Watson and Jeremy Littau, who had been doing some great stuff. I got this core of students who took on this with just true genius. But, as we were doing this, this was a big challenge to the tradition of Missouri. Those 80 faculty members weren’t all just happy about what we were doing, and we had a lot of questions. The big question was control. Who’s going to control this? Who’s going to make sure you’re not making mistakes? How is this going to work? We need to know what’s going on here.

Well, the grad students picked up on this real quickly. Brian Hamman, who’s one of our students — by the way, if any of you are looking, this guy is going to be the next Adrian Holovaty, I’ll tell you — he is just genius out there on the technical journalism end of things. Grab him before he goes off somewhere else. Anyway, as Brian said, he got excited the more we were doing this. We’re coming up with something new. And he and the grad students came up with this idea that we’re no longer covering the news, we’re sharing the news. And this is an important concept: It’s not teaching people to cover and write, but to share. What we were looking at is if there’s a future for journalists out of this. That’s another thing about this: We’re a traditional journalism school. This is not the Montessori for graduate students. We’re not out there to try and put the newspaper business out of business. We’re out there trying to make this thing work. We are journalists.

We got into this whole idea of “is it going to be something out there?” And we think yes. Both professionals and citizens are going to coexist. But part of what we came up with is — as this whole blogging thing came up — we realized that there is a conflict between blogging and plogging. We’ve got a huge number of things on the Internet out there. And what is it that we do? Journalists, what we do really well is we edit, we consolidate, we find ways of making this thing go. So we’re moving from the picture of a journalist as a writer and reporter to the picture of the journalist as the editor and guide. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re going to be storytellers and guides as we go along here, and we think we have something that will work.

Now I go back on this idea. One of my other grad students, Hans Meyer, was saying that (you know, a lot of these grad students have a lot of experience — he was general manager of a newspaper) and what he was saying is, you know, where we have an advantage over most of the companies out there is we can do this as a way of showing that it can be done, and we can make this so that companies who are afraid of putting money into it can see what we’re doing. And our whole goal was that we’re going to make this work as something that someone can pick up, take out and put into their pocket as their own program. By the way, my own dean has asked me if we’d like to put together a seminar later this year that is just a how-to. If you want to come in and learn how to do this, we’ll teach you how to put together a project and we’re gonna try and do this later this year. So if you’re interested in that, please e-mail me.

Now, in order to make this thing work, what we did first was sit down with, first these grad students, and said, “We’ve got to figure out what the basic problems are with doing this.” And we broke them down into 4 areas:

1. Decency
2. Commercialism
3. Literacy
4. Banalism

And decency was a big deal. We’re a college campus. I can see indecent stuff in any e-mail that I get from students, let me tell you. It was an issue, and we asked, “How are we going to treat this?” Commercialism was big. I got a lot of hardcore journalists who did not want to give any room to people making money. And we have this idea of literacy, because what we do is write. We wanted everybody to edit. We had this idea of, “How much are we going to do to this?” And then we had this idea, “Is there anything that is too stupid to go into our site?” So what we did is we had a long and arduous kind of argument about this trying to figure out how we’re going to come up with it. And what we came up with was a set of policies.

• On decency we just said no profanity and no nudity. That’s the way it is. We’re going to follow general newspaper terms. You know our host newspaper, The Missourian, that’s what they do, we can go along with that. There’s no problem with that.
• On commercialism what we said was let’s just kind of be lenient. Let’s not ban commercialism until we can figure out where it’s a problem. But what we’ll do is, we’ll just be good journalists. If someone is in there hyping their business too much, we’ll say, “Hey back off a little. Let’s try to make this more useful to the entire community instead of just yourself.” We’ll work with that.
• Literacy: There was a long discussion on this, but we finally said that we’re not going to be working with an AP stylebook, we’re going to work with the idea of readability. So we don’t work along the stylebook. We said, “Let’s try to make it readable.” And so the way we do that is if one of our editors looks at something and says, “Oh I don’t know quite about this,” they ask one of the other student editors to take a look at it. “What do you think? Is this readable? Is this okay?” So there’s no stylebook that goes along with it.
• And then there was the whole idea of banalism. Hey, you know what we figured out is that journalists don’t know really well what is stupid. So what we figured out is, I don’t care how stupid it is, we’ll find somewhere to put it in there. Because we’re not very good at that.

And we boiled it down — we really like boiling things down, we’re headline writers, you know — and so we came down to four one-sentence rules:

1. No profanity.
2. No nudity.
3. No personal attacks. (No attacks on race, religion, national origin, gender — any of the nice things.)
4. We asked for original material.

But that’s it.

And you know what? It works. It’s hard to miss on four simple rules like that. Now Jeremy, here, was talking about this whole thing of “the end of no.” If you’re out there in the business you spend most of your time saying no. “No, I don’t care if you want a 37th wedding anniversary. We do 25th, we do 50th, we don’t do 37th. I don’t care if your wife’s dying and she’s not going to be here for 38. We just do it that way.” And we have those rules all the time. We never have to say that. If someone comes in with a pumpkin shaped like George Bush, hey, we’ve got a place for you. We’ll put it in. There’s no “no” in our paper. And it’s been a wonderful way of looking at that.

Our technology goals as we were doing this, unlike some institutes, my inspirational dean, one part of the inspiration he forgot about is he gave me zero budget. I mean zero budget. We have spent $300 in one year. That’s our total expenditure. We had to buy a domain license and we made a couple photocopies, but we have spent zero. So we had to come up with something with high usability and no cost and easy to do. And so we came up with Mambo. And it has this really simple design. We made something where we had a bunch of sections that we’d brainstormed out — much like Mary Lou — what kinds of sections would work. And we had a team of students leading each of those sections and a graduate student leading each of those teams of students, so it was kind of like the structure at a newspaper.

Now our design started out with our first site as one of the templates off of Mambo. We just kind of put our name on it and it was pretty easy. And then one of our students came up with an idea of a nice flag about grassroots journalism and we said, “Oh yeah, we’ll stick that on top there. It looks pretty nice.” Then Brian, my techno Wizard, came up with an idea and said, “Let’s redesign this.” And we had to put it on a new server, so we now have it on a Linux server. He came up with our new site, which is up there and it’s nice and clean and it works just darn well. It’s very readable. All this is just done within the framework of free software in Mambo, just moving things around. Real easy — well, not real easy. Easy enough that you can usually find someone to do it — not me.

He also, by the way, came up with this nice little thing on the side which is just wonderful. It gives us a cue of what’s on there. Any of the editors could come in there and figure out where it is and make our edits to the site. It’s just a delight to work with — it’s just the easiest thing I’ve ever worked with — and we have a nice easy way of submitting. You just fill in the blanks, push the button and your stuff is in our queue to be edited.

What happens is, well, they write. And they write about controversial things and they write about very nice things. We have a religion section that has some really great things by our local group of pagans, and we have some really great recipes and stuff. But they write and they write and they write. And that’s fine. That’s what we want. We’ve got all the room in the world. But we said, maybe we can do something a little different. We have a nice big Earth Day festival that happens to be right next to our journalism building, and so I said, “Why don’t we just set up a booth within our wireless internet loop?” And we set up a booth there and put a bunch of computers out there and said, “Hey! Cover this. Tell us what you think about Earth Day.” And people would come up and write. They’d write about these neat things about Earth Day and we’d post them right there. And they’d look and say, “I’m published! I’m published! This is great!”

But the neatest thing is, we got this idea of saying, “Give me your driver’s license, I’ll give you a digital camera. Wander around here and take pictures, we’ll put ‘em in.” We had something-like-12-year-old girls, and this big 7-foot giant started taking high altitude pictures. The next day, Tom Warhover, The Missourian newspaper editor, came over to me — we’d done really good coverage of this festival — and he said, “Your folks did better than my folks.” And I said, “Whoo, that’s a hell of a compliment.” I think actually we did better together than anyone did. We did it both ways and that was cool.

So, we’re working with one of our museums on a history of then and now. They give a picture of the way that something was, we go out and find the same scene and take a picture of it and say that’s the way it is now. That’s a fun kind of thing that people like.

Here are some of the things that happened here. We had some unexpected issues. What kind of confused everybody is that politics didn’t turn out to be a very big thing at all. We launched this thing in October so that we’d be able to be part of the election. But the stuff that we got for politics was stuff we had to pull teeth to get. People did not want to write about politics. But then we did a little thing on the prettiest pet in the county. My God, I’ve never seen so many images of cats, rats, whatever. Recipes — we’re talking about doing a cookbook. We can’t keep up with the recipes. Everybody seems to have a recipe. And religion — people write with passion about religion. I mean they really do. They don’t write blasphemy or anything, but it’s something that’s very near and dear to them. And guess what? They’re pretty technically savvy, even though we in the newspaper business kind of think that is something in the back part of the paper that shouldn’t be around.

The teaching issues we ended up with were we found out that there a lot of things that journalists didn’t know that we thought they would know. One of those things was our sports department. About sports we thought, this is a natural. Jeremy found out that [students] didn’t know how to find anyone who was in Little League. We had someone literally say, “Without a press guide, what am I going to do? What are these guys?” And we found that the new students really don’t like to talk to anyone face-to-face. Oh, they love to e-mail people, but don’t like to talk to people face-to-face. And trying to get someone out the door to talk to people and bring them in is a difficult task. But we’re working on it. They were just not prepared to work with the public.

We, of course, started to work with OhMyNews, and I was going to be shipped over there to talk to them. So I had to look at this whole American perspective, and what we’re finding out is that in America we have this need for family topics.

One of our grad students from Korea said that this makes him kind of nervous. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a need for alternative media. The people are pretty happy with their government and they’re not all that upset about things, so it’s not a big political thing. And so he was up there saying, “Is this really journalism? You guys have got to get out there and punch it up a little more. You guys have got to be a little more aggressive on this.” And maybe he’s right.

What we did do is we looked into the future. We’re going to go to the print edition. Even in a great place like Missouri, I’m having a very difficult time having our administration say, “Follow the NorthwestVoice idea.” The point here is to put it in print; make a blended thing. Like everyone else we have this problem with blending. But we’re going to do it this year. We’ll also do a daily teaser in the paper saying, “This is what’s on MyMissourian.” And we’re going to add student-written blogs on there as part of my class. Teaching blogging as one of the things we’re doing in citizen journalism. And we’re going to try to put in some sort of content directly from blogs in the area.

We’re getting into this whole idea of participating — the idea of journalism; of sharing. It’s a new concept for us, but we think it’s going to work. When we started this conference, I was at a focus session on the spiral of death in journalism that asked, “Are we on the way down?” And I’m going to repeat this and say no, I don’t think so. I think what we’re looking at is the dance of the phoenix. A phoenix will burn up, be something really ugly, but it will come up. I watched the Harry Potter movie. That phoenix came back as a new set of colors and it saved the day. And it wasn’t the way the phoenix was that started it, but it’s going to happen. And I think that’s what we’re going to do.

So if you’re interested in talking about how we can roll this out, please e-mail me. And if you’re not, just tune in to MyMissourian.com and we’ll see what the future brings us in the next few months. Thanks a lot.

Project Manager, Loudon Forward

David Wiseman: I started this with a friend of mine, Tamar Datan, and it’s just the two of us right now. You’re looking at 50 percent of Loudoun Forward.

We’re trying to help people understand the changes in their lives and provide a way to better own their community. That’s kind of our overriding goal.

I just wanted to start out by talking a bit about Loudoun County. It’s really close to the nation’s capital and that drives a lot of things. There are a lot of government workers, and it’s close to a very affluent and growing metro area. It’s a place where a lot of people commute into Washington.

Growth is the biggest issue in Loudoun County right now. In the ‘60s it was a very rural, agrarian economy. Loudoun was the largest producer of milk in the region. Now there’s one dairy farm there and they are about to leave us next year.

These are census numbers. In 2000, we were the fastest growing county in the country with 100.000 people or more, and by 2020 we’re supposed to hit a little over 400,000. By 2010 we’re a little over the curve here with 230,000 [population].

For those over 25, 17 percent are high school graduates, 27 percent have some college, 32 have a college degree and 15 percent have an advanced degree. And the household income for Loudoun County is a whopping $104,000. There are a lot of two-earners.

Of the roughly 110,000 people over 25 in Loudoun County, roughly 47 percent have some form of college degree. And if we can just get 25 percent of those people, that is 13,000 people who could be subscribers and could interact with Loudoun Forward. And just to put that in perspective, that’s the same number of people who voted countywide for the person that sets the agenda for the County Board of Supervisors.

More people in the county vote for president than they do for the Board of Supervisors, and that’s kind of an odd thing because decisions that are made on the Board of Supervisors far outweigh any effects that the presidential election has.

Just a quick thought on growth: The pace at which growth occurs in the county compresses all the decision times there. So when you have a limited time to make a decision, it seems like the arguments all become very polar. Either one side or the other — there’s no consensus building. There’s no time to build a consensus. So extreme positions become the norm in the county and it’s a pretty shrill political environment right now.

Talking about the political environment: It’s polarized. There’s reaction then counter reaction. There are no staggered terms. There are nine members of the Board of Supervisors and they are all elected at the same time, so nine go on and nine come off.

And they can have subsequent terms, and it usually swings 7-2 Republican or 2-7 Republican, and it’s usually based on what their position is on growth. It’s the biggest-driving decision-making thing in the county.

Right now in the political environment it’s hard to get any kind of consensus.

So what motivated Tamar and myself to start this thing? Well, we saw low levels of public participation. I guess this is normal because citizens don’t have the time to become subject matter experts unless it directly affects them or their families.

Also, it’s not a good setting for people to share opinions, knowledge or expertise at the Board of Supervisors meeting. The only time you get to publicly comment is letters to the editor or at the Board of Supervisors meeting and it’s a very official, on-the-record kind of thing, and it’s very intimidating for a lot of people.

There is a low level of public knowledge. People don’t become experts until it affects them and you get that not-in-my-backyard reaction. And I submit that, in Loudoun, if you have a backyard, something is eventually going to happen there. So you need to know what’s going on.

There’s a lack of context right now with the current media in place. Currently, Loudouners get plenty of news, but not much context, so it’s hard for someone to figure out where that news story fits into the bigger picture. It’s a very this-week mentality, instead of this-year, or the next four years.

We’ve got two weekly papers. One’s issued on Wednesday and one on Thursday. A lot of people get The Washington Post. There’s a metro section, but it touches on local counties with the local news scene. The Post has recently come out with a Loudoun edition. It comes out every Wednesday, but it’s about what happened last week in Loudoun County.

Then there’s the react versus plan mindset: People just react instead of planning and that’s what we’re trying to get them to stop doing in the community.

This is a little thing I put together that shows you how we’re going to try to tackle the news versus the contextual topics.

Here’s what happens now: Say in July you get two articles about education, nothing about health care, a big article on technology and a little one about housing concerns. Then in August, you get a lot of education news. In September: a couple little health care issues are touched on, nothing about technology. So there’s no real coherence there.

We’re going to try to do it this way. As part of our civic toolset, we’re going to try to compile all of the articles about technology, healthcare, housing, conservation and crime in a kind of vertical way so that people can say, “Gosh, what happened last year about growth or technology?” Then, they can go back to an archive they can refer to.

There are challenges: time. People just don’t have a lot of time to sit down and read things. I think it’s the highest hurdle we have to overcome.

I think most media entities have this challenge: the attention span. Often conflict makes news in the county and there is a lot of conflict right now. Our challenge will be to create a hook for people that doesn’t depend on conflict.

There will be several things that we think the established media don’t provide right now and that we will provide.

• How does it affect them. We think that is one of the hooks. Clyde mentioned dogs. People love dogs and they don’t like to talk about really important things like a new power line going in, unless it’s going in their backyard. So maybe we need to talk about the politics of dogs, or some Trojan horse, or kids, to get into the homes that way. So we’re just trying to connect all these various dots that effect people in a very real way.
• Providing context. How does this fit into to what happened last year and what will happen in the next five years. We talked about that.
• Creating dialogue. There’s not a lot of dialogue in the county except at these very contentious meetings, and we’re going to create public forums were people have another venue to have dialogue.
• Memory. People are just way too busy to remember things unless it directly affects them. We hope to help them remember things or at least provide them access to an archive to help them jog their memory.

One of our challenges, structurally, is that we don’t have an institutional home. We’re not sponsored by another entity, a university or anything. So we have a challenge to build an infrastructure and keep it going.

Here are the five components of the vision that we have. It’s very similar, I think, to the other panelists.

1. We’ll have a discussion paper and it will be delivered to every household in the county and it will be a very deep and thorough analysis and study of a problem. We hope to have a couple writers working on this. We hope it will be the TIME magazine of just Loudoun County. Maybe it’s more academic in nature.

2. We’re going to have moderated public forums. Some of them will be very small. We might have one that is just focused on religion, where you might have only 30 [people] at a time. And there will be some large events.

3. We will have a community Weblog. We already have it up and running. It will be a moderated forum so that when people get the discussion paper, they can go to this Web site and discuss. There will be threads that will go on for as long as they need to be there. There are a lot of really smart people in Loudoun. We want to bring other people into the conversation who just aren’t there right now.

4. We’ll have a topic-centered newsletter. Some people may not be interested in education, but someone may be very interested in technology. So they will be able to subscribe to a technology newsletter, so anything news that comes up that relates to technology, we’ll push that to them so they can keep up to date on it. I know The Washington Post does that right now and I know a lot of papers are doing it. I subscribe to several topics on The Post and they push out a lot of articles with very national implications. These are going to be very local implications.

5. And lastly, this topic-centered Web archive, where you can go back and research by topic.

We had a public meeting that was by invitation only. We invited around 17 people: community leaders, republicans, democrats, bankers — we had very prominent people in the county. We had farmers.

They came up with these ideas for the first issue, and we’re still noodling ideas for it:

• The creative class. I don’t know if anyone has read any of the Richard Florida books on the creative class and the effects the creative class has on culture and the economy, that kind of thing.
• Research universities in Loudoun. We are going to do a student survey on the news that came out of Loudoun on theatrical censorship there.
• What does Loudoun look like when the oil runs out? Everyone’s got two or three cars in Loudoun County, and one of them is probably a Hummer now, so we’re going to try to study what it would be like if we couldn’t depend on our cars so much.
• Politics 101. People just don’t like politics, but I think our challenge — our goal — is just to make it relevant to them. We need to find the hook of why people don’t think it matters because it really does.
• The power of homeowners associations in Loudoun. I think something like 70 percent of the people are members of a homeowners association and they are very powerful, almost quasi-government types of things. So you write your check every month to this group and there may be two or three people who are making big decisions on your home.
• And then culture, art, economic development.

Those are some of the ideas that this group came up with for our first issue.

Here are six goals:

•     Maintain a nonpartisan, unbiased platform for sharing information and ideas.
•     Broaden the number of voices and perspectives.
•     Provide a deeper understanding of the things affecting everyone’s lives.
•     Improve the deliberative process. We want to shorten the distance between the public and policy. That’s one of the things we’re trying to do.
•     Sponsor and promote forums for public dialogue to give people who are uncomfortable with the current, various limited forms of dialogue, better forums for it.
•     Foster the proactive community thinking and decision-making processes.

So, in short, just to help people understand the changes in their lives and help them better own their communities.