Idea Lab

Kachingle is Overrated, So Let's Stop Writing About It

by Brad Flora
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

As someone developing a new online ad platform for newspapers and magazines (NowSpots), I read a lot of news about the news industry. Waking up and reading the latest industry headlines on MediaGazer is always a highlight of my morning... unless there's a story about Kachingle. Then I get irked. This happened recently, prompting me to express my feelings in comic book form: Now, I've never met the Kachingle people. I'm sure they're fine people, really. But at a time when newspaper CEOs are publicly dissecting the trials and tribulations of failed hyper-local pioneer TBD.com, advertising companies are rolling out...

• March 3, 2011
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3 Excellent Videos Explain the 'Game Layer' Conversation

by Brad Flora
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Want to learn more about the gamification of news that Chris O'Brien wrote about here last week? I did, so I spent the last few days digging into the web for videos and talks about taking game mechanics outside of what we typically think of as "games." Sure there's tremendous potential for news organizations that build games around their content, but it's just a darn interesting idea in general. In my searching I dug up three videos you should check out to get a sense of what people talk about when they talk about adding a "game layer" to something....

• January 26, 2011
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3 Reasons Every Local Blogger on Drupal Should Get Drupad

by Brad Flora
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last June, my company, NowSpots, won Knight News Challenge funding to build better local online advertising products for newspapers, alt-weeklies, and community newspapers. We've been building our product and working in closed beta with pilot publishers these last months.   We're seeing great results and are about to open up to new publishers. If your publication is interested in getting in early on a new flavor of online ad, one that local businesses, colleges, and political campaigns actually want to buy, drop us a line. In the meantime, we want to use these pieces on Idea Lab to focus some attention...

• December 8, 2010
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5 Ways to Improve the Non-Profit Journalism Hub

by Brad Flora
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Voice of San Diego, one of the oldest of the new guard of non-profit news orgs that have been popping up, has teamed up with some academics from San Diego State University to launch The Hub, a handy database of information about non-profit community news organizations. If you're looking to start your own non-profit news org or want to learn more about what's already out there, this is the place to start. Megan Garber over at NiemanLab has a detailed rundown on the who's and what's involved. I'm a big fan of things that solve problems, and The Hub clearly...

• October 25, 2010
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5 Mistakes That Make Local Blogs Fail

by Brad Flora
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

So you're thinking about starting a local blog. Maybe you're a reporter tired of office politics and lowest-common-denominator assignments. Maybe you're a neighborhood gadfly who wants to create a new place for locals to gather. Maybe you're a realtor who wants to generate new leads.Either way, your local blog, like most new things, will probably fail. It will fail to support you.  It will fail to win an audience.  It will fail to have real impact in your community.I meet a lot of local bloggers and people thinking about starting local blogs who ask me for tips or for feedback. ...

• September 17, 2010
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10 Must-Read Sites for Hyper-Local Publishers

by Brad Flora
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here at NowSpots we're developing a new advertising platform that will let local publishers sell and publish real-time ads on their sites. In my last post here on MediaShift Idea Lab, I explained why real-time ads are a better business model for hyper-local bloggers and local publishers than AdSense or existing display ad solutions. Since winning a 2010 Knight News Challenge award to kickstart development of our new platform, we've been busy meeting with publishers to learn more about their needs and problems. We've also been busy reading up on what's happening in the hyper-local publishing space. This week I'm...

• August 26, 2010
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NowSpots: Working to Make Local Web Ads That Work

by Brad Flora
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

NowSpots are beautiful online ads that feature the latest social media updates from advertisers, and make it easy for a reader to follow and share their content across the web. For the last year at WindyCitizen.com, a social network for Chicago news aficionados and urban explorers, we've been selling a simple version of NowSpots ads to small businesses and local colleges -- and we recently won a Knight News Challenge Award to spin the format off into its own company that provides these ads to other publishers. In a world where thousands of small businesses are signing up for sites...

• August 12, 2010
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