Aarhus has amazing scenery -- it's a historic city with colorful, dainty houses. And while the buildings' walls speak of that history, also in the air during my visit there were innovation and a passion for technology. The conference, called "Challenges for Football," featured expected topics such as financing sports clubs and maintaining players' health, but it also included a significant section on innovation and technology.

I was invited to give an opening speech and share my experiences with operating SochiReporter.Ru, a website that covers, among other news, preparations for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, the second Olympics hosted by Russia.

The excitement surrounding the conference was enhanced because it was organized parallel to the UEFA U21 soccer championship, which Denmark was hosting this year; conference guests and speakers got to attend the match between the U.K. and Czech Republic in the town of Viborg.

Experimenting in citizen journalism

After my presentation on SochiReporter, I had the pleasure of meeting with Danish School of Media and Journalism professors Kristian Strobech and Nils Mulvad, and their partner Rasmus Johnsen from the Active Institute, who were engaged in an exciting experiment for U21. They built up a team of 20 students who were asked to be mobile phone reporters.

Then they tapped some local citizens -- or 150 volunteer reporters -- to cover the championship in real time. The experiment was carried out in collaboration with Danish national TV2 and local newspaper Aarhus Stiftstidende.

They worked out certain rules for every participant, introducing various levels of engagement and trying to systematize the flexible sphere of citizen journalism. The students went out each day into the field, using Twitter for their reporting (#U21aarhus) and a specially designed iPhone application created by the team with the help of Widgetbox, a site that enables anyone to build mobile apps in minutes.

They also used Storify, a social media curation service, to shape and weave their stories out of the social networks' status updates and multimedia. Strobech, Mulvad and Johnsen gave deep insight into the project during the conference's Innovation section, which was moderated by David McGillivray, a U.K.-based professor and new media researcher. McGillivray is participating in a number of projects covering culture and creativity surrounding the 2012 London Summer Olympics.

Andy Miah, a professor in emerging technologies at the University of the West of Scotland, organized a conference on Olympics and social media back in October 2010 at the Abandon Normal Devices festival in Manchester, which I covered back then. Both Miah and McGillivray are doing great research on how preparations for the Games are changing the cultural climate in the U.K.

The U21 experiment was an exciting test of how citizen journalism can enhance the coverage of a large sports event. It will be interesting to see how social media and citizen journalism will play a role first in the London Summer Olympics and then in the Sochi Winter Olympics. These big events are an opportunity for citizen and alternative journalism to converge and take center stage.

Image of Aarhus courtesy of flickr user Greg_e.

Of course, I try to be cautious about praising myself and our team too much, as satisfaction is always a killer of development and a friend of stagnation. The undeniable good news, however, is that SochiReporter launched in the fall of 2009 and we managed to reach some serious heights in 2010, especially on the marketing side of the product.

SochiReporter is a citizen journalism platform that reports on the preparations for the Olympics, by the people and for the people. As a result of our efforts, the site is today one of the most advanced websites in Sochi, especially when it comes to interactive tools, features, and design. Its possibilities and potential are enormous and still to be realized in many ways. SochiReporter is the best Drupal website in Sochi and one of the best Drupal sites in all of Russia, according to the Russian Drupal community and the local programming community. Right from the start, the project was designed to be much more than just a blog, or a news wire; we envisioned it as a multi-functional tool that can also be an educational platform. SochiReporter is the first global initiative to build a unified digital archive of the multimedia resources about the preparation of the host city for the Olympics.

Stories about the transformation of the city were abundant in 2010. Just recently we received a report about the demolition of the "iron flea market," where an office and shopping center will soon be built. Another example is today's post about the restoration of the famous summer-house of V. Barsova, a famous Soviet times opera singer. Citizen reporters are able to express how these kinds of changes affect the daily lives of residents.

2010 Highlights

SochiReporter enjoyed wide media coverage from both traditional and online media. Our site was featured in about 300 online media articles, 13 TV reports (that were aired 30 times), and over 20 newspaper stories. Here's a quick list of some of the key activities I engaged in over the past year:

• I organized roundtables and participated in a number of professional conferences, presenting SochiReporter in Russia and worldwide.
• I negotiated with and attracted our first partners.
• I worked to raise the number of users, utilizing social media and other platforms to spread the word.
• I communicated with potential advertisers, delivering presentations in their offices and meeting with them in other venues.
• I worked to diversify the number of topics covered on the website, and increase the brand awareness nationally and globally.

To put it in a nutshell, my activities were aimed at strengthening our young brand.

And here's a look back at some of the highlights from 2010:

January: Cooperating with McDonald's
SochiReporter supported McDonald's International Child Day on November 20. The Ronald McDonald Foundation is working to open child-care rooms in Russian hospitals all over the country (about 10 rooms are already open). SochiReporter, along with just a few other media outlets, helped with charity activities that raised 10 million rubles towards opening three more rooms in three other Russian cities. We partnered with McDonald's for a similar project early this year.

January: A Mobile Journalist School for the Students of Sochi
We organized a two-day seminar offering tips on how to blog, use social networking, and generate content. Professors from the faculty of journalism at Moscow State University took part as lecturers.

February: Sochi Winter Music Conference
SochiReporter was selected to be a media partner of the fifth Sochi Winter Music Conference, a two-day business forum and three-day music program. SWMC brings together well-known figures in show business, music journalists, DJs, producers, promoters, record company owners and managers, radio and TV presenters, brand managers, and music festival organizers. These creative, active and talented people are also sophisticated web users. Thanks to this collaboration, all of the 1,500 participants left with a SochiReporter leaflet in their conference bag.

February: Winter Olympics in Vancouver
SochiReporter participated in the Fresh Media Olympics conference. I Skyped into the conference from Sochi to connect with the dozens of bloggers and citizen reporters who gathered to cover the Winter Olympics.

June: Kinotavr
SochiReporter was selected to be the media partner of Russia's second largest film festival, Kinotavr. We were the only Sochi media to be named a media partner. (Other media partners were big Moscow-based media outlets as the Channel 5, STS, Hello! Magazine, etc.).

June: MIT Center for Future Civic Media Conference
This conference was one of the highlights of the year. After attending, I spent a week in Nebraska as the first Innovator in Residence at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Journalism School, where I met with students and faculty members and presented SochiReporter.

October: Abandon Normal Devices
I presented SochiReporter at the Abandon Normal Devices festival of new cinema and digital culture in Manchester, U.K. I also participated in the one-day #Media2012 conference.

October: Paralympics Action
SochiReporter reporters organized Paralympics Action to spread knowledge about the Paralympics and the Paralympic values in Sochi. This event was also aimed at supporting the creation of an accessible environment for disabled people. SochiReporter will continue to work on this important theme.

English Translation, Roundtables, Mapping
In 2010, SochiReporter started translating citizen journalists' posts into English. We also organized a number of roundtable discussions, including one on how residents of the city can unite on the web to fight smoking. I also spoke at a World Health Organization anti-smoking symposium in Sochi, I also moderated a roundtable on user-generated content at Moscow State University. Participants were the heads of seven leading Russian Internet sites. We continued our collaboration with Kodak, which saw digital cameras given to our citizen reporters. We also worked with Kodak to outline a Moscow replica of SochiReporter. Finally, back in Sochi, we initiated and fostered the creation of the OpenStreetMap of Sochi, which you can see below.

I hope 2011 is just as exciting and eventful.

Social Media and the Olympics

A special session on social media and the Olympics was organized by Andy Miah, a professor in emerging technologies at the University of the West of Scotland. He's a very well known Olympics culture researcher, and he posed a challenging and thought-provoking question, "Will citizen media take over the 2012 event?"

Miah built a very interesting one-day long program that drew charismatic and knowledgeable speakers. The goal was to have discussions "focused on opportunities, strategy and vision to create a publicly owned new media legacy for the Games." Miah also presented a media blueprint for London 2012, which emphasized the significant role of the new media in covering the Games.

Fortunately, the modern Olympic movement doesn't view the Internet as a threat (as it had). The IOC has started taking steps towards embracing the Net, and that trend seems to be continuing. It's obvious that the future of the Olympics strongly depends on the openness towards, and readiness to accept, new technology. With social media reinventing activism, the Games have a chance to get more people engaged in order to create positive change. And even more important, new media enables organizers to build a public archive of the preparations for the Olympics and the Olympics themselves. The legacy of the Olympic Games is one of the most important issues that the IOC and host country address every time the Olympics is organized. New media are the best tools to preserve and spread the legacy.

Presentation and Discussion

While in Manchester I gave a presentation about SochiReporter and participated in the discussion that followed. I spoke after Kris Krug, one of the creators of the True North Media House, which was established during the Vancouver Games. (Read more about it here.) My presentation was followed by one from Josi Paz of Brazil. She told us how the former Brazilian president had cried when he learned that Rio won its bid, and described the current state of preparations for the Games.

I first met Professor Miah virtually when I Skyped into the W2 Community Media Arts Fresh Media Olympics event back in February 2010. The folks at W2 in Vancouver organized an exciting discussion about social media's growing role in the coverage of the Olympics. The Vancouver Games were truly a breakthrough when it came to the engagement of bloggers; the expectation is that new media will only become more involved in telling the story of the Olympics.

During the event in England, Ruth McKenzie, the director of the Cultural Olympiad for the London 2012 Organizing Committee, pointed out that during the Olympics the London 2012 website expects a peak of 6 million visitors a day. They plan to turn the site into a platform for presenting the culture and soul of Britain.

A Natural Fit

In reality, the popularity and the accessibility of digital media basically requires the organizers of big events such as the Olympics to do their jobs better. The ability for anyone to document anything on their mobile phone and produce high-quality footage is something that organizers have to keep in mind. Fifteen years ago the big media played the role of a watchdog; today everyone is a watchdog.

Here's the simple truth: the Olympics are global and the web is global. What could be more logical than to marry the two? You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.

From that point on, every Monday will see us publish new exclusive stories about ongoing preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics, and about life in four of the Big Sochi main areas: Central Sochi, Adler, Khosta and Lazarevskoye. (We will be translating the Russian posts submitted by our citizen journalists.)

Vancouver Test Case

As I previously wrote on Idea Lab, we began testing an English version of SochiReporter during the Vancouver Olympics. We then hired Yuliya Talmazan, a Russian-speaker from Vancouver who worked as an editor at NowPublic, to cover the Olympics for us. We wanted to see what English content would do for our traffic. Simply put, it had a significant effect, driving our traffic up over 300 percent.

Yes, those weeks in February were a hot time for anything Olympics-related. Thousands of people were surfing the web looking for the information about the Games. Our headlines were crafted and customized according to SEO principles in order to attract that traffic and deliver news about what was going on in Vancouver with the Russian team.

We are currently in the process of translating content for our English version, as August and September saw the significant rise in the number of posts at SochiReporter. What makes me especially happy is that the journalistic quality of stories has improved -- that's partly why I made the decision to start translating into English. At first, we will translate about 60 to 70 percent of every post in order to convey the core idea of the story.

SochiReporter.Ru Posts

We're very happy with how the posts on our site are starting to evolve. To give just a few examples, we've received a story about the public hearings related to the reconstruction of the Sochi embankment; the transformation and rebuilding of one of the city's main hotels; the opening of a new center that will provide municipal services to the citizens of Sochi; the creation of an open-air fitness club; a mini-golf championship in Sochi; the arrival of new wolves at the nature reserve; and the start of an around-the-world voyage of a famous sailor and an honored citizen of Sochi and Newport, R.I., Victor Yazikov; and many, many more.

Another interesting story was about Sochi residents who were collecting the clothes and other donations for residents of central Russian towns who lost their houses in the fierce summer peat fires.

All of these stories inspired discussion at SochiReporter.Ru.

This book challenged the conventional wisdom of city planners of that era and celebrated the vibrancy of the urban streetscape. It also encouraged citizen involvement in the development of neighborhoods. I wonder if Jacobs ever looked at the cities and the changes they undergo to host the Olympics, as Sochi will in 2014?

Life in a Day

Along the lines of citizen participation, July 23 was the day when anyone worldwide could make a short movie and submit it at YouTube's Life in a Day channel to participate in the Oscar-winning director Ridley Scott's new global project.

By January 2011, Scott will put together a movie containing short videos taken by professional and amateur film directors worldwide. We at SochiReporter submitted a video and it would be great if we're included. Even if we aren't, participation is the key.

This project reminds me of the recent YouTube Symphony Orchestra global initiative, which I previously wrote about for Idea Lab. But while the Orchestra experiment was targeted at a comparatively narrow and professional audience (musicians), Life in a Day is more popular and aims at reaching ordinary people living ordinary lives. This is probably why I liked this project, though it's pretty simple at its core.

It focuses on the small things happening in people's lives. The video "must be personal," according to Ridley Scott. The other person behind this project, Kevin McDonald, said that each video:

...could be something that to you seems really banal, it could be your journey to work, watching your baby at bath time, going to a hospital to visit a friend, your birthday, going for a walk in the countryside, or it could be something much more meaningful to you, much more emotional -- the knocking down of the building next to where you lived, that you've always loved, the death of a friend. It's a little snapshot of your life.

I think this project is in many ways similar to hyper-local journalism, which is about the daily life of an individual in his community. Hyper-local journalism puts a community online suddenly so anybody anywhere can see it and maybe criticize it or present it as an example.

McDonald said the resulting film will be a time capsule. He recommended people think about the three things while shooting their video:

1. What makes you frightened.

2. What makes you laugh.

3. What is in your pockets (literally) -- film it.

Covering the Special Olympics

This project made me think of Jordan Pascale, a city desk intern at the Lincoln Journal Star because the day to submit a video was also the closing day of the Special Olympics, which began in Lincoln, Neb., on July 17. I met Pascale when I was serving my six-day term as innovator-in-residence at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska, where he is a student. When the Special Olympics came to town, Pascale had a lot of work to do.

I saw an immediate connection between Lincoln and Sochi -- both are small towns hosting big sports events. I recently got in touch with Pascale to have him share how his paper covered the event, and how they documented the reactions of locals and the changes in the everyday life of the local community.

I was interested in how a local paper adapted to cover such a big event online using multimedia tools. I wanted to compare it with what we have been doing in Sochi. Here's what Pascale wrote in an email to me:

Our newsroom at the Lincoln Journal Star has been doing multimedia videos for a while, but thanks to new technology we recently bought, we are now equipped to cover events even better than before.

The Lincoln Journal Star has been using iPhones, Twitter and CoverItLive.com to provide Special Olympics fans with instantaneous updates from around the city.

Here's an example from Saturday.

Using twitter on the iPhones, our reporters in the field have been taking photos and videos and collecting snippets of "color" from each venue around the city. CoverItLive.com pulls our Twitter feeds into one place, making a convenient one-stop spot for readers.

It really has been a good learning experience for our newsroom. Few have ever used any of this technology but a lot have adopted it and are now comfortable reporting from the field this way. Web users from around the United States have been following our feed and we have received a lot of compliments for the depth and breadth of the coverage.

Back at his journalism school, Pascale participated in a new media and design class led by Adam Wagler. As part of that class, Pascale and his fellow students built a special website to cover the Special Olympics. That, too, is a feature that connects Lincoln and Sochi.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

Flying over Lincoln, Nebraska, aboard a Delta jet, I peered down at the gently rolling meadows, farmlands and the statue on the peak of the high-rise state capitol, which is situated the heart of this cute town.

The state capitol tower, a historic landmark, is one of the few places in the United States where all three branches of government are housed in one building.

I am on my way back to New York City after spending a wonderful and very efficient week at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as its first Media Innovator in Residence.

The position is part of the new program being enacted by Gary Kebbel, the new dean of the college who officially starts tomorrow. He invited me to spend six days in town to meet with faculty and students and speak about SochiReporter and the project's developments. The idea was for me to share my experiences and participate in discussions about the future of new media. 

Lectures and Active Discussions

As Kebbel put it, one of the central ideas of this program is that active entrepreneurs -- people who are right in the middle of working on their projects -- visit the college, demonstrate their work and also focus on the questions and issues not yet resolved. One of the main questions that I ponder is how to make our website sustainable. What new media business model -- or combination of models -- will keep the site running after the Knight grant money runs out in a couple of months?

While visiting the school, I gave six lectures that eventually turned into vibrant discussions with  students. In a marketing class we discussed the partnerships that SochiReporter forged with local media, the ways to promote SochiReporter online and offline, and the SochiReporter-McDonald's partnership.

In the design and advertising class, one of the students said she would be interested in working out a plan for the global marketing strategy for SochiReporter. In the reporting class, the students were especially interested in the kinds of stories being generated by our citizen reporters, how the moderation process works, and how we package stories at the website. They wondered which kinds of stories actually cause change and influence the decisions made by the city officials. The students also viewed SochiReporter as an outlet for possible internships next year.

I also spoke to students at the College of Business Administration and with Dr. Sang M. Lee, a distinguished professor and chairman of the Department of Management. We discussed the possible business models based on attracting global and local businesses.

What I found interesting is that in about three weeks Lincoln is hosting a Special Olympics event that will attract thousands of visitors from all over the country. This creates a direct bridge between Lincoln and Sochi, the host of the 2014 Olympics.

I really clicked with Jordan Pascale, a student and staff writer with the Lincoln Journal Star. The newspaper is organizing a new unit to cover the Special Olympics and produce content for the print and the online versions of the paper. Pascale said the plan is to post more original content online than usual and to experiment with it. We talked about the ways of integrating the citizens of Lincoln into covering this event. Some of the school's journalism students will volunteer at the Games and will also be blogging about it.

Trip to Omaha

At one point Dean Kebbel and I took a trip to Omaha to meet with the publisher, executive editor and advertising executives of the Omaha World-Herald, the largest newspaper in the state. It took us 50 minutes driving one way, and I found Omaha to be a fast-developing city with cheerful residents who are excited about the construction of a new, big stadium.

Publisher and company president Terry Kroeger and the vice-president for news and content Larry King (whom I jokingly complemented on his CNN show when we first met) were open and excited about collaborating with the school. They agreed with Kebbel's statement that the future of journalism builds upon traditional values of quality reporting by using new technologies to enable people to get news in any format, any time, on any device. (The above photo shows Joanna Nordhues from UNL along with Gary Kebbel and Mike Reilly, executive editor of the Omaha World-Herald.)

We spent more than three hours in the newspaper's office, and it was also entertaining to meet with the paper's cartoonist Jeff Koterba. Aside from me, he had a very unusual visitor in his office, as you can see below.

One final interesting fact about the school is that faculty members all just received iPads, and it was great to see them all downloading and trying out applications. 

Serving as innovator in residence was a delightful and enriching experience. Since it's a long-term program, I'll always be the first -- but I definitely won't be the last.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

It's a challenge to transform the Soviet-era sanatoriums. For example, her job entails computerizing the files and data and modernizing the registration of new clients. But she said it's exciting work. For her, the most enjoyable part of the job is organizing courses for the staff (doctors, waiters, janitors) who at first seem dazed and confused by the changes and new technology. Gradually, their puzzlement gives way to excitement. "How come we were doing this job manually for so many years?" they eventually ask.

Those many people, who are trying to modernize different aspects of Sochi culture and society for the upcoming 2014 Winter Games, can definitely relate to her experience. It's not just about the modernization of the sanatoriums; it's about every aspect of the locals' lifestyle and the character of the infrastructure. Of course, this is what makes this process of transformation so exciting.

Our project, SochiReporter, a hyper-local citizen news website, is working to create an archive of these changes -- an archive that is built by and for locals. And, as the website is reflecting change and transformation in the city, it changes itself.

Over the last several weeks we have been working at mastering our own technology. We added new features to the site, expanded the social networking component, added links to SochiReporter groups on other social networks (twitter, vimeo, flickr, livejournal, vkontakte.ru, ya.ru), and will add more changes over the next two weeks. Also of note is that the website is loading much faster, partly because of some back-end work, and partly because the new 4G WiMax Internet service called Yota was launched in Sochi at the end of March.

Becoming a Journalist-Entrepreneur

I have become part of the new breed of journalists-turned-entrepreneurs, and I'm finding a certain amount of pleasure in this lifestyle, crazy though it is.

First of all, I am living between two cities: Sochi and Moscow. Being in Sochi means working with contributors and the people who actually submit content to the website, and promoting the project at the local level. Moscow is a bigger source of financing, a business hub where I can meet with advertisers who might be interested in supporting SochiReporter.

Our team has recently been working on developing a sustainable business model, as the Knight Foundation grant money that enabled us to launch the project and start the experiment will soon run out.

Being an entrepreneur means being simultaneously responsive to two mobile phones, an iPad, a laptop and even a fax machine. It also means being very open to new collaborations and projects. You need to be open to taking risks, and adept at using the knowledge you acquired in traditional media reporting and applying it to new media.

Giving Newspapers a Chance

We recently decided to start giving the local Sochi papers, which don't have an online presence, an opportunity to place their content on our site. This section is called News and it's where we mostly have content from RSS feeds. It's separate from the Reports section, which is filled with reports from citizens and includes original content.

The editor of the first Sochi paper to go on our site is extremely happy about the arrangement. He had been seeking a presence on the web. For our part, we'll see how things go and will probably partner with additional local media. However, our main goal is to provide our content to local media. We hope to expand those possibilities by enabling people to submit reports and photos via mobile phone. Right now, people aren't able to upload content using their phone, though they can read the site and add comments to the articles.

Marketing

Just a final word about marketing, as it is now one of our primary goals. With the site now built and working, we are focused on telling people about it and getting them to use it. One way of doing that is by being part of big events in the area. We were recently chosen as a media sponsor for one of the biggest annual movie festivals in Russia, Kinotavr. It will take place in Sochi from June 6 to 13.

We are the only Sochi-based media outlet to be among the sponsors. The rest are Moscow-based media outlets. We will receive some very cool promotion during the event and the SochiReporter logo will be present in the Kinotavr daily newsletter, its brochures and on its website.

But I wasn't laughing about the fact that there was no way -- except for a 38-hour train expedition -- to get to London this week to attend a lecture by Andy Miah, a well known Olympics scholar and professor of the University of the West of Scotland. His speech, "Sport and Society: the Summer Olympics through the Lens of Social Science," was at the British Library, and it would have been one of the highlights of my trip. (Our Knight-funded project, SochiReporter, is closely linked with the 2014 Olympic Winter Games coming to Sochi, Russia.)

While in England, I was also planning to meet with some new media entrepreneurs who expressed interest in replicating some of the features of SochiReporter. I was open to it. But the volcano was not.

Another change in plans for me had nothing to do with the volcano: The cancellation of Moscow Drupal Camp, which was planned for April 16 and 17. It was moved to early autumn because the suburban campus where it was supposed to take place decided to give rooms to tourists instead of tech geeks. Fortunately, a Kiev Drupal Camp was announced by the same folks, and it will take place next month. SochiReporter will likely be there.

On a similar note, the local Drupal user group in Sochi recently prepared a review of the best local websites built on Drupal, and SochiReporter featured prominently on the list. That was great to hear. In fact, we were also told that the Russia's CMS Magazine named SochiReporter as one of the best 10 Russian projects built on Drupal in 2009. (This is something I have to verify.) What I know for sure is that we were recently featured in Novosti SMI magazine, a bi-weekly magazine about the media industry that's published in Moscow.

When my trip to England was canceled, I decided to head to Moscow and participate in the Russian Internet Forum (RIF). This is the country's biggest annual gathering of the Internet industry workers, and I wrote about it last year. This year's RIF was special for its focus on open source software and, especially, maps. The program was loaded with discussions around how citizen mappers can create maps at the hyper-local level.

In the same vein, last month Yandex launched a project called "a citizen map," which is pretty similar to Wikimapia. SochiReporter will soon take steps to integrate citizen maps into what we're doing.

Preparations for the Sochi Games

In terms of the preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia, the hot topic is choosing the mascot. Some Russian creative agencies also recently announced a contest to create an alternative mascot for the Olympics. At Illustrators.ru, they're encouraging designers to create imaginary candidates to run for the Olympics. As of this writing, there were around 80 submissions. Users will vote for the best candidate. Here's a sample:

At the same time, the town of Velikii Ustug (which is located in the Vologda region) is lobbying for Ded Moroz -- the Russian version of Santa Claus -- to become the mascot. Ded Moroz is popular, and he is definitely associated with winter fairy-tale magic. Supporters of his candidacy recently organized a Twitter flash mob. People started talking about how Ded Moroz was seen skiing at high speed over the streets of Moscow (apparently on his way from Vancouver to Sochi), and some folks even managed to document this on their mobile phone cameras. Others prepared a more professional video about this.

During the Games, SochiReporter experienced a 350 percent increase in the number of European and North American visitors to the site. We also published several exclusive posts from Yuliya Talmazan, a Russian-speaker from Vancouver who works as an editor at NowPublic.

During the Olympics, Talmazan worked for NBC doing editorial research, and she also attended athletic events and other festivities during the Paralympic Games. I asked her to provide us with coverage of the Paralympics because they receive much less attention from global media. Having her on the ground during the Paralympics has given us some very unique content in all multimedia genres.

Also, beginning in February, SochiReporter changed its design to celebrate the Vancouver Games. The site's new background image is focused on winter sports and mixes blue, violet and magenta. The images feature athletes and reporters together, and we think the softer background colors do a better job of letting users focus on the site's content.

Changing the design is part of our marketing activities, and we plan to keep on introducing new background images in the future. My feeling is that it's another way to tell a story and make the website more topical and relevant. For example, Google often alters its logo to celebrate holidays, and the iGoogle service allows people to customize their header. Twitter also allows users to choose from a wide range of skins, or to create their own.

New Tagline

Aside from the new background image, we introduced a new tagline for SochiReporter: "The news is me." It was inspired by the well-known saying, "The law is me," which was made by France's Louis XIV, the Sun King, in the 17th century. The tagline reflects the new realities and conveys the idea of citizen journalism, which is at the core of SochiReporter.

On a related note, the Vancouver Games were notable for the presence of citizen media and social media. There themes were explored in recent articles and photo essays on MediaShift.

Thanks to our work on the Vancouver Games, I've been receiving emails from people in Europe and Northern America. They tend to be either students inquiring about an internship within SochiReporter, people writing a thesis about social media who are interested in getting to know more about SochiReporter, or folks working in new media who are interested in how social media is being integrated into the traditional media content structure. In the end, our work during the Vancouver Games has helped build the global dialogue around SochiReporter and social media in general.

We've done just that by pursuing a partnership that would probably make a lot of people scratch their heads.

With the 2014 Olymic Games coming to Sochi, local Internet providers are working to expand areas of coverage and increase network speeds. Not too long ago, the main web hub for many locals was the McDonald's situated in the heart of Sochi. You can see plenty of locals and tourists working on their laptops there, and I've also spent a lot of time at that location. That's how an idea was born.

Partnering with McDonald's

SochiReporter.ru became a media partner for the McDonald's World Children's Day, a charity event wherein McDonald's and the Ronald McDonald House Charities raise funds to open so-called "family rooms" inside Russian hospitals. On November 20, some of Sochi's local celebrities volunteered to sell hamburgers to customers and help raise money. To support the initiative, SochiReporter produced a report and video about the event.

Then, over the course of two weeks in January, McDonald's handed out hundreds of thousands of leaflets in 240 McDonald's restaurants all over Russia to announce the results of its fundraising initiative. It raised 10 million rubles ($330,000) and enabled the creation of three new family rooms. As a media partner, the SochiReporter logo and URL were on every leaflet. (A leaflet was placed on each food tray.)

Partnering with McDonald's brought 35 percent more visitors to SochiReporter, and drove a 30 percent increase in the amount of content uploaded by citizen journalists. As a result, we were able to change our "Video of the Week" feature into "Video of the Day." Partnering with McDonald's enabled us to reach many more local web users (and hamburger lovers, too!).

Main Messages

When thinking about our marketing campaign, we wanted to communicate these messages:

SochiReporter is a hyper-local website, where pople can create and discuss news about Sochi, Russia. We want people to understand that traditional media -- especially TV -- are paying more attention to content created by bloggers and Internet users. So if you create online content, you can get famous. Your story might be told and retold by journalists. Other local news sites have already started citing reports on SochiReporter and linking to our work, which is helping drive traffic.

SochiReporter is a place to engage in respectful debate about the changes going on in the city. On one hand, SochiReporter is a hyper-local website; but, on the other hand, the city itself is facing an unprecedented amount of global scrutiny and interest because it will host the 2014 Olympic Games.

SochiReporter is a website where anyone can contribute, participate and tell his or her story. It's also a place for communication and interaction, and that's why we are integrating additional social networking functionality.

SochiReporter is more than just a blog. It's a place where people can upload their own content, such as videos. It also has additional sections (such as a wiki guidebook) that help turn it into a virtual portrait of the city. Right from the start, the project was designed to be an educational platform, as well as a news source.

Reaching the Youth of Sochi

Our marketing has been focused on reaching younger people, as they're the most active web users in the city. I've organized about 40 presentations at schools and universities and, as a result, the website is known to many students -- even though it's only been online for three months.

We are also using social media to spread awareness. I created an open SochiReporter group at Vkontakte.ru, which is kind of like the Russian version of Facebook. In January, we also organized a two-day SochiReporter seminar on Web 2.0 and mobile journalism for local students. We talked about the web's influence on journalism, and the possibilities for participation and creation that the web offers to people worldwide. To illustrate this point, we looked at some of the posts on SochiReporter, as well as at other global citizen journalism websites.

Finally, SochiReporter was selected to be a media partner of the Fifth Sochi Winter Music Conference, which is a two-day business forum and a three-day music program. SWMC brings together well-known show business figures, professional music journalists, DJs, producers, promoters, record company owners and managers, radio and TV presenters, brand managers, and music festival organizers. These creative, active and talented people are also advanced and sophisticated web users. Thanks to this collaboration, all of the 1,500 participants left with a SochiReporter in their conference bag.

I submitted my essay in March as part of the Virtual Olympic Congress, an open international competition that was announced by the IOC in the early fall of 2007. Here's what the IOC said about the competition:

Via the "Virtual Olympic Congress," a dedicated website, over 1,700 people from 90 countries submitted their thoughts on the five themes of the Congress following the "Call for Contributions" launched two years ago. The website was designed to accept written contributions on the themes of the Congress in the form of a written contribution of 1,000 words or less.

One hundred contributions from the general public were chosen by the Congress Editorial Committee for inclusion in the official Congress book, and 20 of those contributors were invited to Copenhagen to attend the Congress. Ten men and ten women from 15 countries around the world spent three days in the Danish capital along with the members of the Olympic family.

Nearly 1,400 Submissions

For the first time in the history of the Olympic Congress, the general public was given the opportunity to have their say on the topics being discussed at the gathering. The IOC invited contributions from anyone, anywhere in the world between October 2007 and March 2009.

The IOC asked people to write about one of five themes. The most popular theme was "Olympic Games: How to keep the Games as a premier event", which received 300 contributions out of 1,319; "Olympic Games: Olympic values" received roughly 240 contributions; and "Olympics and Youth: Moving towards an active society" received about 160 contributions. Roughly 100 submissions were devoted to my topic, which was "The Digital Revolution: How to increase the size of the sports audience." My piece was called, "Olympic Audiences in the Wired World."

In the end, there were 1,319 submissions from 1,148 contributors in 90 countries. Singapore was responsible for the most submissions (249), followed by the U.S. (176) and Japan (129). Interestingly, 276 of the submitted essays focused on rugby. This is because the International Rugby Board encouraged people to write in order to show their support for the inclusion of rugby in future Olympics.

Olympic Audiences in the Wired World

My essay ("Olympic Audiences in the Wired World") was devoted to the future of the Olympics in the digital age. I gave my vision of how the Olympic brand should evolve and adapt to the demands of the wired world, and how it can embrace the challenges brought by new technology. I suggested that the IOC experiment in exciting ways with new media in order to bring its message to communities throughout the world.

Here's an excerpt of my submission:

The answer [to increasing the size of the Olympics audience] lies in the essence of content and content diversification. It's important to provide TV and web viewers (who are getting more and more sophisticated) with more detailed, insider Olympic-related content. However, the focus point should be not just in relying more on the one-way online video streaming of the Games, but on attracting Internet users to shape virtual communities around the various aspects of the Olympic Games. This would enable the IOC representatives to more specifically aim at certain audiences and adjust the content and distribution methods to the demands of those audiences and groups...It is vital to offer effective ways of diversifying content in order to reach a larger and more effectively targeted audience.

In the digital age web users are not just content consumers. They are content producers. And this is the key point which should be considered when thinking about and shaping the successful future of the Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement in the new media era.

I then offered examples of how some media and entertainment industry giants realized the potential for interacting with their fans, and worked to create online communities and involve people in the marketing of their products. I described how this helped them to extend their brands.

One positive sign is that the IOC embraced social media to help promote the Virtual Olympic Congress. It created a Facebook page, and established an Olympic Congress YouTube channel. It also announced a new video contest that invites people to submit video responses to the question, "How do you see the future of the Olympics?"

Personally, I see the future of the Olympics as being inextricably linked to digital media and online communities. What do you think?

In the days before the launch, I didn't sleep a wink. But this is natural. I was very excited about the launch, and did my best to convey how cool and innovative SochiReporter is to the journalists and students that gathered on launch day in the hall of one of the best schools in Sochi.

Generating Content

We have been working on this project for almost a year, but we started generating content a few months back. At the end of July, we organized a seminar about the web and new media for students in Sochi. We also announced a contest that would give prizes for the best photos, text and video. So between August and October, students were generating content for the site. We provided the students with some nice gadgets to help with their reporting, as well as some basic knowledge about blogging and other skills. This meant we were able to launch with lots of original content.

Site Design and Structure

For me, design is really important. As my designer friend who works for a lifestyle magazine told me, "folks are subconsciously attracted by good design." We had a great time working with four designers from Cetis, which is one of the leading design studios in Russia. I call our design "adrenaline." It's really colorful and bright, and each section has a personal touch. Please take a look and let us know what you think. You can also view a video about the creation of the site:

In terms of the structure of the site, I believe we were innovators. As I understand it, innovation is a process that aims to combine existing tools to create a new product.

We created a section on the site called Time Machine. It enables a user to go back in time to any day (starting from October 2009) and see which material was uploaded. This is basically a way of archiving and storing information, and it's very useful when it comes to sites like ours.

Other innovative sections include the Guidebook, which is a wiki-based virtual guidebook of Sochi. (I wrote the first Russian guidebook of Norway when I was 21, so this section is important to me). I believe that the Guidebook creates a sense of community, and it's a great element for any community-oriented website. In order to create the Guidebook, I made agreements with the publisher of the best travel guidebook for Sochi to provide us with basic travel information. So we're starting with information provided by professional travel writers. Then, as the city changes, users will be able to edit and add to the Guidebook. We already have some local students writing about Sochi's museums.

Marketing

We launched with a major presentation of SochiReporter at the 2009 Russian Internet Week. This is a big web industry exhibition organized in a huge venue in Moscow. It was great to be a part of this expo, and many people were interested in our project. We had a small but comfy stand with walls that were covered with samples from the site.

In Sochi, all of the local television channels covered the launch, as did the online media and some of the local papers. I realized how much the publicity helps when, days after the launch, I was recognized by a waiter in a café. He had seen me on television.

Thanks to our seminars back in July, most of the local journalists had already heard about SochiReporter. This helped create a sense of anticipation for our launch -- and helped make it a success so far. The number of registered users is gradually growing and new stories come up on SochiReporter.

The gathering discussed many global issues, such as the decline of trust in the press, measures of responsibility in journalism, and the social weight of the printed word. There were discussion groups, creativity contests, meetings with politicians, celebrities, scholars, and various workshops held by leading Russian journalists.

One of the highlights of the Forum was the presentation of SochiReporter (www.sochireporter.ru), which is funded by the Knight Foundation. Sochi residents and several local citizen journalists presented our project to the gathering. Visitors could also learn more about us and read related articles at the SochiReporter stand.

Bringing Citizen Journalism to Sochi

On September 26, I led a panel, "Online Media: Citizen Journalism in Russia," which featured six local newspaper and magazine editors:

• Svetlana Handabak, editor-in-chief, City Fresh (a Sochi lifestyle magazine)
• Irina Druzhinina, law reporter, Zakon i Pravo (a local newspaper about law and order)
• Lana Petrosyan, editor-in-chief, Nashe Vremya (a local weekly for young people)
• Eleonora Ervandyan, deputy editor-in-chief, Nashe Vremya
• Anna Petrosyan, culture reporter, Chernomorskaya Zdravnitsa (Sochi's oldest quality paper)
• Alexander Kim, Editor-in-chief, Student (a Sochi student magazine)

Some of the issues raised on the panel included:

• The current information needs of the Sochi residents, and how they changed after July 4, 2007, when Sochi was awarded the Olympics.
• The role of hyper-local news and how it relates to local newspapers.
• The impact of the financial crisis on local media.
• User-generated content and other new sources of news for local newspapers.
• The need to develop citizen journalism in the pre-Olympic city.
• The growing need for additional public Internet access points, and the local government's initiatives to wire the city.

The audience was comprised of representatives of Sochi media outlets and journalists from different parts of Russia, such as the Volga Region, the Urals, and Siberia. They participated in the discussion and commented on the novelty and importance of SochiReporter as a model for the Russian media market. The participants also noted that this is the right time to initiate a discussion about new models, as both Sochi and the industry are undergoing big transformations.

Right now, Sochi is receiving a lot of attention in Russia because of its preparations for the Olympics. The stakes are high for the city, and for SochiReporter.

SochiReporter is getting ready to launch on the web and for mobile users. We spent the last three weeks fixing linguistic, technical and design bugs, all with the goal of maximizing ease of use.

So far we have drawn a fabulous group of people from both local and virtual communities: garage tech geeks and web schizophrenics, coffee-shop amateurs, and folks who want to use the site and offer feedback. Their comments have helped us to get better. We also attracted an avid gamer in Sochi who spends most of his time in an underground Internet café at the center of the city. He first took our Games Section (devoted to the preparation for the Winter Olympics) for a repository of Olympics-themed computer games, which was funny.

We are building the site using Drupal, a great platform. But the biggest challenge at this stage is that Drupal isn't as good at handling languages other than English. So our programmers had to invest a lot of energy into making it take Russian as a default language. In many cases, Drupal was unwilling to accept the correct phrases, and it especially disliked the cases (the correct endings of the Russian numeral adjectives). As for design, it is getting easier at this stage and we recently added magenta as our main color.

If you'd like to learn more about the story of SochiReporter so far, please watch this making-of video. It's about the 100-day process of creating the SochiReporter layouts.

SochiReporter by the numbers

Here are some numbers about our process so far: 7 designers, 11 versions of the logo, 17 pages and 3 backgrounds created, 1048 cups of green tea consumed, 17 nights per designer spent in discussions. We spent so much time discussing things because of the shared enthusiasm for the project, which often took the brainstorming deep into the night.

So, with only a bit of time left before the site is launched, here's an overview of some key details about SochiReporter:

• SochiReporter was a winner of the 2008 Knight News Challenge and is being implemented thanks to the grant from the Knight Foundation.
• SochiReporter is the first ever initiative to build a multimedia archive about the preparation of a host city for the Olympics.
• This is an experiment to help define the future of news. We hope to work out a successful business model as well as the accompanying website that will satisfy the community's information needs.
• This is a project aimed at supporting the Sochi community by enabling citizens to track and debate how the Olympic preparations are changing the city over a five-year period.
• The project will create a repository of multimedia resources and content about the preparation for the Olympics. It will document information that otherwise might be lost or not captured at all.
• The project will create a database of information and content that will be of interest to journalists who come to Sochi in 2014 to cover the Games.
• This project will help improve local traditional media and introduce them and the community to the concept of citizen multimedia journalism.
• The model being developed for SochiReporter will be able to be replicated in any country in the future, whether in connection with the Olympics or other similar grand events.

Just weeks away from launching my Knight News Challenge project, SochiReporter.ru, I organized a seminar for third, fourth and fifth year students from the five leading Sochi-based universities. Thirty-five journalism and IT students participated in the two day seminar called "Web and Journalism: The New Trends." We received press coverage in over 30 online publications, in newspapers and from three of the city's leading TV channels. Clearly, this city, which will host the 2014 Olympic Winter Games, is ready to embrace new ways of reporting and sharing information.

The seminar was held on July 30 and 31 at the peak of the hot Black Sea summer, and at a time when the students are on break from their studies. We invited them to come learn about new media and share their experiences and knowledge. Most of the students turned out to be active web users who already had profiles on the leading Russian social networks. That was a good sign.

Presentation of SochiReporter

On the first day, I gave a lecture about the state of traditional and new media. I also discussed multimedia storytelling principles, demonstrated the difference between a newspaper article and a blog post, and talked about how to choose a topic for a blog, build its audience, and make it successful. The students definitely showed interest in blogging. We also focused on international user-generated content and citizen journalism projects, and the way Web 2.0 is empowering people worldwide.

My session culminated in a multimedia presentation about the SochiReporter project: its concept, structure, design, use of Web 2.0 tools, innovative features, and the opportunities the website offers the citizens of Sochi as they prepare to host the 2014 Winter Olympics.

One goal of the seminar was to let the students, who are the most active web users in Sochi, be the first to learn about the project. We also want to give them the tools and knowledge needed to document and report on the changes in their city. SochiReporter is the first ever initiative to build a multimedia archive about the preparation of a host city for the Olympics. We expect to have many contributions from students.

SochiReporter's First Partners

Joining me as a presenter at the seminar was Sergey A. Stalnov, the director of public relations for Kodak Russia. He gave an exciting lecture on the invention, development and current state of photography in the digital age. One highlight came when we discovered that there was a 12-year-old girl in the hall with us. We presented her with a free camera, much the same way that Kodak did in 1930 when it introduced the Eastman Anniversary camera. To celebrate its 50th anniversary, the company gave away roughly 500,000 cameras to 12 year olds in Canada and the U.S.

After that, each student introduced themselves and shared ideas about how they could contribute to the project. At the end of the first day, the students were given 20 portable HD Kodak Zx1 video cameras (they're waterproof, which is an important feature in a seaside city like Sochi) and 10 voice recorders, all of which were provided by Kodak and Olympus, SochiReporter's first partners. The students chose topics and themes to cover using the new devices and headed out into the field. On the second day, they presented their work. These stories and photographs will be the first content available at SochiReporter when the project launches in September.

The students showed a lot of enthusiasm and seem to be excited about the project. "I acquired new multimedia reporting skills at the seminar," said Artem Shehovtsov, a student at the Sochi Institute of Information Technologies. "I definitely think that SochiReporter is a breakthrough, a really timely project for our city, which is now in constant change. I am anticipating SochiReporter's launch [in order] to start uploading my content."

At the end of the two days, each student was given a certificate commemorating their participation. They also received T-shirts decorated with the project's logo and a few words that I hope they will take to heart: "I am a SochiReporter."