Supported by The Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation
I. Starting Up: Why, What & How
Jonathan Weber once told a reporter upon launching his latest venture, New West: “Any start-up is risky, but it’s more fun than working for Time Inc.”
Weber was the co-founder and editor in chief of The Industry Standard, a weekly business news magazine and online service that rocketed to prominence in the late 1990s only to suffer along with the rest of the dot-com economy in 2001.
He moved to Missoula, Montana, to serve as the first T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Professor in January 2002 at the University of Montana Journalism School. He quickly became fascinated by the myriad issues associated with growth and change in the region but was also frustrated by the lack of quality media devoted to those issues. In 2004 he began to think in earnest about how the dramatic changes underway in the media world might create an opportunity for a new kind of publication about the Rocky Mountain region.
The result was NewWest.net, an online publication derived from citizen journalism efforts that is currently based in Missoula, Boulder, Salt Lake City and northern Idaho.
Weber has also served eight years as a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times and was a co-founder of Geneva-based international affairs publication World Link.
Mark Potts, former business editor and reporter for The Washington Post and co-founder of washingtonpost.com, has been exploring the possibilities of online media since 1992.
Recently, with the emergence of blogs, citizens’ journalism and faster broadband Internet access, Potts and his colleagues started Backfence.com in Reston and McLean, two of Virginia’s more affluent cities. He now serves as chairman and chief creative officer of the project.
Backfence.com operates with an ad base and list of contributors within the communities it covers, and there are plans to expand nationally.
Potts was a member of the founding team of the @Home Network and is a pioneer in the development of new forms of online media. He was also vice president and chief product officer for Cahners Business Information (now Reed Business Information), the nation’s largest trade publisher, where he managed Cahners Digital and oversaw the development of 120 trade magazine Web sites, including Variety.com and PublishersWeekly.com.
As a consultant, he has developed strategies and products for The Washington Post Co., New Century Network, Classified Ventures, Disney’s Infoseek/Go Network and leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Potts has also been a reporter and editor at the Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Examiner and The Associated Press.
Barbara Bry is the founding CEO and editor of VoiceofSanDiego.org, an independent, nonprofit news and information source for the San Diego region.
She was vice president of business development for Proflowers.com, which she joined in 1998 as the person responsible for early marketing and business development strategies. Proflowers.com, now known as Provide Commerce, completed its initial public offering in December 2003 and reported over $120 million in revenue for its last fiscal year.
Bry was also a co-founder and board member of ATCOM, the pioneer in developing Internet kiosks and high-speed Internet access in hotel rooms. In September 1999, ATCOM was sold to CAIS Internet at a value of $85 million.
Though Bry’s early career was as a business and political writer for the Sacramento Bee and the Los Angeles Times, it was her young daughter and her need for more stable hours that found her exploring business ventures. Bry took up an offer in 1986 to run the newly founded CONNECT Program in Technology and Entrepreneurship at the University of California, San Diego. CONNECT was meant to provide entrepreneurs with the resources and management and marketing skills they needed, and it was through this program that Bry came to lead ATCOM’s Internet project.
In 1989, Bry also founded UCSD’s Athena, San Diego’s premier organization for women technology executives and entrepreneurs. She earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and her MBA at Harvard Business School.
Rob Runett, as NAA’s Director of Electronic Media Communications, analyzes business and content strategies employed by online publishers. He oversees the Web and e-mail communications products produced for New Media Federation members. Those products include The Digital Edge Web site (www.digitaledge.org), a storehouse for reports and articles about such topics as online classified advertising, sales techniques, user registration and paid content. He also compiles and distributes an e-mail update that keeps members in touch with the latest online business news,trends and research. Rob manages NAA’s annual Digital Edge Awards competition and co-plans the association’s digital-media conference, CONNECTIONS.
Rob joined the NAA in April 1998 following two years as a reporter and editor at Phillips Business Information, Potomac, MD. As editor of min’s (media industry newsletter) New Media Report, a biweekly publication, he covered the online initiatives of broadcasters and magazine and newspaper publishers.
Rob graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1995. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of Journalism.
II. Examining Mainstream Models
Travis Henry is managing editor of YourHub.com but wasn’t hired until a month before the Web site first went live on April 28, 2005, according to Rocky Mountain News editor John Temple.
Though produced by the Rocky Mountain News and distributed by the Denver Newspaper Agency (print editions are featured once a week and delivered to subscribers of the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News), YourHub.com is run by 11 of its own full-time editors, led by Henry. He oversees nearly 40 individual Web sites that make up YourHub.com, each covering a city or town in the Denver metro area.
Residents have the opportunity to contribute news about events, stories and photos, and staff members also write occasional pieces for YourHub.com. Additionally, YourHub.com links to other publications that feature stories about YourHub.com’s cities.
In discussing the value of YourHub.com as a community effort, Henry told Editor & Publisher that he expects the community members who contribute to YourHub.com will eventually “scoop” the newspaper that produces it.
Henry is a Colorado native who graduated from the Metropolitan State College of Denver with a journalism degree and had worked at both weekly and daily newspapers, including The Daily Times-Call in Longmont, CO., as the editorial page editor.
Catherine Shen is vice president of strategic development for Horvitz Newspapers Inc., responsible for the company’s weekly newspaper division, which includes nine newspapers for which she is publisher. She is also responsible for content and business development for the company’s newspaper web sites. She has been with Horvitz since 1994. Based in the Seattle suburb of Kent, Horvitz also owns two dailies in the area and one in Tennessee.
Shen recently helped The Daily Times newspaper in Maryville, TN., develop the citizens’ media effort known as BlountCountyVoice.com, modeled after the NorthwestVoice.com in Bakersfield, CA.
Shen has served as publisher of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, deputy managing editor of the LIFE section at USA Today and associate publisher of the Marin (Calif.) Independent Journal. She was also with the San Francisco Chronicle for 11 years, serving in many newsroom roles, and has been communications director for the San Francisco Foundation.
She received her bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College and her master’s degree from Claremont Graduate School. She was among the first group of McCormick Fellows in 1998.
In comparing her stints with papers large and small, national and local, Shen told Seattle’s Northwest Asian Weekly, “Local is one of the best niches to be in if you produce content … because no other outlet has it.”
Steven Safran is director of digital media and an executive producer at NECN, New England Cable News, the Boston area’s only 24-hour news channel. He is also managing editor at NECN.com and appears on-air doing segments from the Web office several times a day.
On July 15, 2005 NECN launched “Video New England,” which allows viewers to upload digital video that might later be used on the Web site or broadcast on television.
Safran told The Boston Globe that this would take blogging to the next level. He hopes these kinds of efforts will bring trust back to the journalism industry after numerous scandals have undermined the media’s credibility.
Safran graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and holds a master’s degree in broadcast journalism from the Boston University College of Communications.
An advocate of using a variety of media to tell a story, Safran wrote atthe Poynter Institute, “I mine the Web for information and report on-air the useful news we find. I am honored to be a ‘convergence journalist’ because convergence makes for better journalism.”
III. Making Tech Tools Work for You
Steve Yelvington is vice president of strategy and content at Morris Digital Works (MDW), a division of Morris Communications Co. that provides consulting and Web development services to Morris properties and other clients. Morris Communications publishes 27 daily newspapers, 13 nondailies, five city magazines and numerous free community newspapers.
Yelvington played an integral role earlier this year in launching BlufftonToday.com, a new community web site with a mission of helping Bluffton, S.C., “come together as a community.” It also helps provide content for a free daily tabloid that serves Bluffton’s 15,000 residents. Yelvington helped define everything from the site’s strategy to its philosophy. “That means I think about the long-term impact of the Internet and related new technologies and attempt to plot a course to the future,” he explains in his BlufftonToday.com profile.
BlufftonToday.com contributors get their own weblogs, photo galleries, the ability to post entries in certain site databases and the chance to interact with staffers via blogs.
Yelvington grew up in a newspaper family, began his career as a small-town weekly newspaper editor, and worked for several U.S. daily newspapers before moving to the online world in 1994 as the founding editor of online services for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. Under his direction the Star Tribune’s Web site won numerous awards from the Newspaper Association of America, Editor & Publisher magazine and others. In 1999 he joined Cox Interactive Media as executive editor of its nationwide network of local portal sites.
He has spoken on new media at conferences in the United States and Europe. He received the 2001 EPpy for Outstanding Individual Achievement.
He maintains his own blog at http://yelvington.com.
Adrian Holovaty, an Internet developer based in Chicago, was recently named editor, editorial innovations, at washingtonpost.com.
For the past two and a half years, he has worked as lead developer at World Online, the Web division of The Lawrence Journal-World in Lawrence, Kansas, and supervised three sites: LJWorld.com, KUSports.com and Lawrence.com.
Holovaty’s free public service site, chicagocrime.org, which gives residents access to a vast but easily searchable database of crime information, recently won the $10,000 Grand Prize in the 2005 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.
His other Internet projects include designing the interface and Web site for Django, an open-source Web development framework.
Holovaty received his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia and has worked as a reporter, columnist, copy editor and graphic artist for The Columbia Missourian. He has also spent time at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a database specialist.
He maintains his own blog about the technical aspects of Web sites at http://www.holovaty.com.
Dan Pacheco is senior product manager at The Bakersfield Californian in Bakersfield, CA, where he launched Bakotopia.com, the first U.S. newspaper-owned Web site that provides free community-based classified services in a local market.
Pacheco came across the Internet and its significance while serving as a reporter for The Denver Post in the mid-1990s. After helping launch Denverpost.com, he went on to The Washington Post and worked on Digital Link, the precursor to washingonpost.com. Pacheco has also served as a multimedia producer at Knight Ridder-Tribune Interactive and principal product manager at America Online, where he helped develop AOL chat, message boards, journals (blogs) and the “You’ve Got Pictures” digital photo-sharing platform.
As he says on his personal page at http://www.futureforecast.com/danpacheco, “My experience with content and community has proven invaluable in understanding the dynamics behind free community sites like Craigslist, blogging and community publishing – trends which are now having profound effects on the entire media industry.”
IV. Managing the Community:
Getting the content you need and quality you want
Mary Lou Fulton is vice president of audience development for The Bakersfield Californian and founder of The Northwest Voice and its online companion, NorthwestVoice.com, pioneering citizen journalism efforts building on contributions from community residents.
Fulton has worked for both The Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times, where she was a community news reporter and editor for six years. While in Los Angeles, she also served as the founding editor of City Times, the community news section created to improve coverage of central Los Angeles after the 1992 riots. She later served as managing editor of washingtonpost.com.
She had held senior management positions at a number of online companies including AOL, GeoCities and HomePage.com before returning to journalism in 2003 with The Bakersfield Californian.
Fulton holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Arizona State University and a Master of Public Administration degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Chris Muldrow is content director for Internet operations at Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., in Birmingham, AL, which owns 130 papers nationwide.
He was formerly editor of Fredericksburg.com, the online publication of The Fredericksburg (VA) Free Lance-Star and kept the newspaper on the leading edge of technology. As The Free Lance-Star’s Director of Internet, Muldrow oversaw the FredTalk discussion board, which now boasts more than 7,000 users. It provides a forum for area residents and a source for news leads for the newspaper’s reporters.
He gave Fredericksburg.com the distinction of being one of the first newspaper sites in the country to display – direct from a Multiple Listing Service – 100 percent of area real estate listings.
The newspaper also produced a wireless edition in 2001 as part of the NAA Wireless Pilot Project, where Muldrow helped to create a Local News Gateway that allowed users to find wireless editions of their local newspapers.
Muldrow has also served as a consultant to the new media team at Cox Interactive when it wanted to develop a real estate Web site.
He received his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of South Carolina Honors College in Columbia, SC. Muldrow had previously worked as a copy editor and page designer at The State in Columbia and as an editor for the South Carolina Press Association.
Hillary Rhodes has just joined The Associated Press’ asap team, a new service designed to attract 18-to-34-year old readers with multimedia and other cutting-edge content.”
Previously, she was editor of the teen publications Your Mom and YourMomOnline.com, a division of The Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, that were launched in 2004. The Your Mom project originated in the Medill School of Journalism‘s graduate Media Management Project class, and Rhodes and her fellow students were able to successfully pitch the idea of a teen-driven publication to executives at Lee Enterprises, which owns The Times.
The Medill team acknowledged to Editor & Publisher that the name Your Mom was peculiar: “The name conjures up memories of jokes we don’t like to admit we find funny, but Northwestern University’s Media Management Center also reports that today’s teens are very close with their parents, so the name works on two levels.”
Rhodes previously produced The Writers Almanac and did research for National Public Radio personality Garrison Keillor on his show, Prairie Home Companion. She received her master’s degree from Medill at Northwestern University.
Jan Schaffer, J-Lab’s Executive Director, left daily journalism to lead pioneering journalism reform initiatives in the areas of civic journalism, interactive journalism and participatory journalism.
She launched J-Lab in 2002 to spotlight new forms of digital storytelling that engage citizens. J-Lab (www.J-Lab.org) rewards novel ideas through the $15,000 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. It funds cutting-edge citizens media ventures through its New Voices (www.J-NewVoices.org) project and it provides technical support for community news projects through www.J-Learning.org.
Schaffer previously directed the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $14 million, 10-year initiative that funded more than 120 pilot news projects that engaged people better in public life and provided training workshops and resources for newsrooms and classrooms.
A former Business Editor and a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer, she brings more than 30 years of journalism experience to her work. As a federal court reporter, she helped write a series that won freedom for a man wrongly convicted of five murders. The stories led to the civil rights convictions of six Philadelphia homicide detectives and won several national journalism awards, including the 1978 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service. Also while covering federal courts, she broke the Philadelphia Abscam story about the FBI sting operation that used agents posing as Arab sheiks. She was sentenced to jail for six months for refusing to reveal her sources; the sentence was stayed on appeal. She also held a range of reporting and editing positions on the city desk, the national desk and the business news department.
She earned both her bachelors and masters degrees from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University.
