Idea Lab

The Turning Tide for Online News

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Over the past few weeks, I've been interviewing candidates for an associate editor's position at the Daily News. Several things about that process convinced me that the tide has turned, both for our organization and for online news: I've been explicit with our candidates about the risks involved. We're a start-up, and it's possible that our grant funding will go away within a year. More than one candidate has told me that, given the state of our industry, he considers working for us LESS risky than taking a job with a daily newspaper. More than half of the applicants for...

• July 16, 2008
• 2 comments

Cheap, But Not Free

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

A lot of the interest in citizen journalism over the past few years has been related to economics. Sign up a bunch of users on your site, get them to write stuff, sell ads along side the free content, retire early. While some content that comes in this way is impeccably written and delightfully newsworthy, most is not. So news organizations interested in publishing quality content, and hoping to do it for free, are bound to be disappointed. Partnering with citizen journalists to produce great neighborhood coverage involves money, and sometimes a lot of it. The journalists need training, and...

• July 3, 2008
• 1 comment

Driving Forward, Toyota Style

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When Toyota first began to rise to prominence in this country, the company's cars were known as cheap, plasticky, not-to-be trusted imports. Now Toyota is on pace to unseat GM as the world's auto sales leader, and is regarded as one of the most innovative companies around. A New Yorker article by James Surowiecki gives a quick rundown on how that happened. At Toyota, "the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps, but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis ... Instead of trying to throw long touchdown passes, as it were, Toyota moves down the field...

• May 8, 2008
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Bring On The Clowns

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Sometimes I wonder exactly what we're offering our citizen journalists in return for their hard work. We don't pay them. Reporting can be challenging and time-consuming, and sometimes it's not nearly as exciting as the movies make it out to be. On the other hand, last week I was able to introduce a citizen journalists to one of our business' greatest pleasures -- the random famous-person interview. Here's how it went: The citizen journo, Jack Newell, was working on a feature about a local artist who makes theatrical masks. The artist told an anecdote about the time he spent traveling...

• April 3, 2008
• 1 comment

Keeping it All Together

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I wrote a long-ish piece that's up over at poynter.org about how we organize and manage our crew of three dozen citizen journalists. We've had to take some unexpected detours into CRM software, etc., to make sure people and stories don't fall through the cracks, but it seems to be working fairly well....

• April 2, 2008
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Know a Good Manager?

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the biggest challenges of building ChiTownDailyNews.org has been running the business side of things -- fundraising, ad sales, etc -- while also trying to build a network of volunteer community journalists, edit their stories, manage our bloggers and beat reporters. As of this week, we're looking to break those tasks into two separate jobs. All of our non-editorial operations will be supervised by a general manager, and we're looking to fill that role ASAP. You can check out the complete job posting here. And please pass it on to anyone you know who might fit the bill....

• March 21, 2008
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Crowdsourced Election Coverage

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

What with the nonstop drumbeat of presidential campaign news these days, it's easy to forget that we've actually got some other elections coming up. On Feb. 5, primary voters in Chicago will cast ballots for ward committee leaders, the county's chief prosecutor and a slew of other positions. From my point of view this is an interesting deal, because I've never run a news organization's election coverage before. I'm always the guy who comes in afterwards to do the big project on voter fraud. Which is a good thing, because I can't plan my way out of a paper bag....

• January 25, 2008
• 2 comments

It's All About the Maps

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Today we're unveiling some site features on ChiTownDailyNews.org that represent, in my humble opinion, a huge step forward in the way people and content are connected on the internet. The features are focused on what's become known as geotargeting, and they're things that you won't find on any other website. Basically, we're making it easy for you to see the news and ads that are relevant to you because they take place near you. If you're a registered user on the site, you'll have the opportunity to give us your address. Our frontpage will then display a map centered on...

• December 20, 2007
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My, What a Pretty Face[book]

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been ignoring Facebook for as long as I can. And most other social networking applications, too. I already get several dozen e-mails a day. Add to that a dozen or so phone calls, voice mails and letters, and I begin feeling like I need to be less networked, not more. But I finally sat down and looked at what the site has done with its publicly available APIs -- programming features that let web developers like me build stuff on Facebook. Yes, it is cool. Cooler than I'd imagined. It took me about three hours to slap together the...

• November 15, 2007
• 2 comments

Exactly What We Dreamed Of

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I first began thinking of launching a website that published the work of citizen journalists, one of the most alluring potential benefits was the idea of putting more eyes on the street. If we ran a typical local news operation that had a dozen reporters or so, we'd have a dozen people out and about who might see some news. But with grassroots journalism, the possibilities are vastly expanded. We got an illustration of how important that is on Friday, when citizen journalist Kimberly Michaels called to say that an acquaintance had witnessed an instance of apparent police brutality...

• November 7, 2007
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Gone, But Not Forgotten

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've unexpectedly been thinking a bit lately about how news organizations cover death and the lifes lived by the recently deceased. Our website doesn't currently run obits, but in light of my blathering about how valuable they are as a community service, it seems like we probably ought to. The question: What's the Web 2.0 version of the obit. Video? Roll-your-own death notice? How can we best use the web to fulfill and expand on the purposes of the traditional newspaper obituary? Suggestions invited....

• October 30, 2007
• 4 comments

Finding Stories

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the funny things about citizen journalism is the notion that most people are walking around with a thousand story ideas in their head that they would gladly write if given the opportunity. It's not true. As we build our network of citizen journalists, we're finding that some folks have a good feel for what's newsworthy in their neighborhoods. But most don't, and so we need to help them. But how? We can't know what's going on in every neighborhood in Chicago, a city of three million people with a southern boundary that's more than 10 miles away from...

• October 15, 2007
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