I agree that there are many upsides to the non-profit path, but it also carries significant management risk. The business environment of non-profits is often deeply misunderstood, even by the managers of tax-exempt companies themselves. More worrisome, boards are frequently ill-equipped to understand the strategic or operational specifics of non-profits, or even unable to read the peculiarities of their balance sheets. (Board Source is a great place to go for those looking to help their boards through some of these challenges.)

For news outlets, non-profit status would eliminate some of the negative pressures of shareholders looking for high margins at the expense of the essential role of news as social glue in a community. But while they don't have a mandate to generate shareholder value, non-profits do have a mandate to deliver measurable social value. Non-profit status is not a pass on the imperative to innovate, no matter how noble your cause, nor how deep your moral certitude.

To fulfill the responsibility that comes with their tax-free status, non-profit news outlets must fight to prove their measurable worth to society. If they fail, and many will, the creative destruction of the social market should sweep them away to make room for new rising social entrepreneurs to take their place.

Virtual Street Corners, my Knight-funded community art project, benefits from the fact that there is an element of symbolism due to the respective histories of the two neighborhoods we are trying to connect. As I noted in my grant overview, "The Greater Boston neighborhoods of Brookline and Roxbury are 2.4 miles apart, yet there is little interaction between them because of divisions of race and class."

This helps create interest in the project. I have received quite a response from people just by invoking the idea of establishing a live 24-hour connection between these two community hubs. Many have said that just having people acknowledge or greet each other is a significant leap forward. For example, here's part of an email I received from a Brookline High School student:

"... I have been working for The Food Project near Dudley Square (Roxbury) for three years, taking the 66 [bus] all the time. It's a terrible cliche, but the Brookline and Roxbury have often felt worlds apart. One of the only other BHS students I've met who had even heard of Dudley Square, know it as "the end of the 66 you don't want to go to" or ask me "Aren't you scared you'll get shot?" So when I hear someone is doing something concrete and creative to try and bridge this gap, it makes me teary happy.... It makes me laugh to think that eighty years ago when Roxbury was more Irish than African American, my grandma went to barn dances under the same roof."

We recently set up a pilot project of Virtual Street Corners to test the concept, and this resulted in some fascinating interactions. It also exposed some potential drawbacks. One participant wrote to me about their experience:

"...there was an odd sense of safety in talking with someone I had never met, about anything. It's as if the virtuality of the whole thing emboldened us to say things we'd never say if we simply sat next to each other on a bus."

Geographically Close, But a World Apart

Many people, after an initial greeting, were unsure where to go with the conversation. It is my goal in this second edition of the project to inspire or provoke people into having more involved conversations and exchanges. I'd even like to see people travel from one location to the other. Despite it being a 15-minute bus ride between these two neighborhoods, it is amazing how rarely this happens. To illustrate this point, I interviewed 25 people in each location. I asked them to draw the path they had traveled that day on a map. The results were even more dramatic than I had imagined. As you can see below, their the paths barely touch.

The challenge is to get them to engage with each other and this project. There are two approaches I am focusing on: effective design and community organizing. I am also happy that a number of prominent academics in the field have agreed to advise me on the project. Francisco Ricardo, a media and contemporary art theorist and an advisor, outlined the challenge well during one of our discussions:

What is helpful is not to be too drawn into narrow/literalistic comparisons between your work and that of others -- the comparison should be conceptual above structural, and in that case, it compares with phenomenological works like Nauman's Live/Taped Video Corridor because what viewers are engaging is not dialogue/non-dialogue, but rather separateness/union. That is the first encounter in the experience, and dialogue happens next. But, alluding to an earlier concern I'd made, Nauman was aware of exactly how long the interaction was to last, and structured the corridor's curiosity factor for 1-2 minutes. Tuning an installation so that what it produces matches the amount of time one would likely spend in it is important in every work that hopes to elicit response. So the time factor depends on the built environment. The most realistic way to approach it is to "engineer" a plausible goal into the experience, some way for visitors to want to exclude external stimuli and distraction while trying to engage in the work.

Creating Visual Cues

During the next couple of months, I will be working with designers to figure out an effective way to use visual cues to draw people into the space, and also create an easily navigated interaction. In the pilot installation, I initially favored a more wide-open opportunity for people to talk about whatever they wished, as opposed to steering the conversation. However, this approach ended up leaving most people at a loss for what to say.

Caesar McDowell, CEO of Dropping Knowledge and professor at MIT, believes that the project creates a great opportunity to address specific issues and urged me to take an active role in facilitating the dialogue.

We talked of a number of possibilities, including posing questions, replaying previous clips of conversations, and providing historical information. McDowell also thought that rather than running the piece continuously, it might create more excitement to instill a periodic countdown along the lines of, "we will be live in X minutes." Another promising solution would be to install question-gathering booths two weeks before the start of the live screens. (This worked successfully for GhanaThinktank in Liverpool.) The idea is that this would get people acquainted with, and thinking about, the project. They could consider what conversations they might like to have, while also becoming familiarized with the screen and space.

Community Outreach

I will be dedicating the next two months to community organizing/outreach. I will be trying to discover the primary issues of important to each neighborhood, and to get people invested in using the project to further those goals. I am very open to tweaking the project to help accomplish the objectives that are revealed in that process.

The other challenge that I face is finding and hiring three "citizen reporters" for each neighborhood. They will bring back daily reports to share over the screen when Virtual Corners is implemented. I'd be grateful for any advice or recommendations you can provide in the comments about this process. I've never had to hire reporters before!

I'm at Day 2 of a remarkable two-day conference that is bringing nonprofits, citizen journalism and social media together in ways I've never seen before.

I'm jazzed, hopeful and intrigued by the challenges ahead. The passion in the room is palpable. The 40 people who convened at the Visioning Summit yesterday in San Francisco, and the 30 participants who are steering the program today, consist of some of the most talented and forward-thinking innovators — nonprofit execs, strategists, journalists — that I've come across in recent years.

Above is the presentation I gave at this gathering, organized by a group of nonprofits in a project called the New Media Lab (there's no public presence yet, just a private wiki). And while its focus is squarely on the role that journalist/media producers will play in our project, I've taken the liberty of extrapolating it to the new roles that journalists should be expected to take up in an age of social media if you work for a startup, whether it's for-profit or nonprofit.

Called Doing Good 2.0: The next-generation's impact on communication, media, mobile & civic engagement [fixed link], it looks at the forces driving Web 2.0 and the next-generation Internet, the role of mobile, the new cultural norms that social media is ushering in, and the role of the New Journalist: how we need to still tell compelling stories about people and causes but how we also need to expand our repertoire in this new arena by wearing multiple hats:

• entrepreneur
• conversation facilitator
• social marketer
• futurist
• metrics & research nerd
• journalist/storyteller

Here are some of the questions we've just begun to tackle:

Should nonprofits create their own media?

What should be the business model for social cause organizations in the future?

How can the media producers funded by this project work with nonprofits to build a sustainable business venture that connects to their core constituencies?

How do you turn passive audiences into engaged communities?

What happens when you bust the silos that keep us from working together across sectors?

I've signed on as a paid advisor to the yearlong project, which will happen largely virtually. The idea is that the alternative, progressive nonprofits — the National Wildlife Federation, National Civic League, Freespeech.tv, Mother Jones and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy — will assign point people to work with producers selected by San Francisco State's Renaissance Journalism Center.

Leveraging free and open source tools

Some of the ingredients that will be sprinkled into the project's secret sauce: use of mobile; an emphasis on social media; use of high-quality video across multiple platforms (Web, cable and broadcast TV); and business plans from Manas Consulting to make it all self-sustaining.

The goal, in a phrase, is to "help non-profit partners find innovative ways to get their members to engage in conversation, volunteer, subscribe, donate and advocate."

The role of the "New Journalist" — which we're calling media producers — in this project is paramount: The producers (who hail from SF Gate, the Miami Herald, an Emmy-winning documentarian and others) will be sitting down this afternoon to map out how to weave a tapestry out of all these moving parts.

"This is a project for those who like to play around, who are comfortable with things shifting fast and often," Jon Funabiki, founder of Renaissance Journalism Center, told the producers.

During my talk I showed off this heart-tugging video from aglimmerofhope.org as a compelling example of storytelling for a cause and showed off a suite of free open source and social media tools and platforms. I also pointed to a few ahead-of-the-curve ideas for partnerships:

Among those in attendance: Funabiki; fellow IdeaLab contributor David Cohn, founder of Spot.us; Jed Alpert, co-founder of MobileCommons; Arthur Charity, author of "Doing Public Journalism"; management consultant Richard Landry; social entrepreneur Ron Williams, and many other smart folks. Jon Schwartz, who runs a string of progressive nonprofits, is funding the project, and Halcyon Liew organized the proceedings.

With a little bit of luck, we'll figure this out. I'll report back on our progress in the months to come.

These questions are not my attempt to concoct a tactful paraphrase for "How many different ways is it possible to screw journalism up?" Rather, they represent one of the interesting issues we face as we move work on MediaBugs from the project-organizing phase to the "let's build something" stage.

There's a wealth of established practice in the software field for the kinds of data you can associate with a bug that a user finds in a program: how important the bug is, where the bug is located, how work on it fits in to the rest of the project, and so on. In software development, the purpose of the bug tracking system is, mostly, to define and organize the work of fixing bugs.

As we attempt to apply this model to the world of journalism, we find little in the way of similar established practices in our field. Individual news organizations sometimes track their own errors internally, but, as far as we've been able to determine, there is no common, industry-wide nomenclature for categorizing those errors -- no Library of Congress classification or Dublin Core metadata standard.

We're pretty much on our own. So we're doing our best to devise an initial set of categories, knowing that we'll probably need to revise them once we get real data from real users. (We've already drawn much from the invaluable work of my colleague Craig Silverman, in his book Regret the Error.)

Here's the list of categories we're playing with right now:

• misquotation
• mistaken identity
• other simple factual error
• ethical issue
• faulty statistics or math
• error of omission
• typo, spelling, grammar
• other

I'd love to hear what you think of this. Have we left out something obvious? Is this valuable or interesting?

Any set of categories will need to meet two goals:

1. It should make sense to users who are trying to make quick decisions about categorizing the errors they're reporting.
2. The breakdown of the total universe of errors that the list provides should ultimately be useful as we try to understand why errors happen, and how we can minimize them.

We know that there's no bright, shining line one can draw between errors of objective fact and subjective problems with media coverage. Errors don't fall into two distinct buckets labeled "fact" and "opinion"; there's a spectrum between the two.

We want MediaBugs to favor the "fact" side of that spectrum, so our choice of categories is weighted in that direction. I believe this is where we'll find the most common ground between journalists and the public, and make the fastest progress in our effort to bring the two together. We'll know a lot more soon!

Below you will find.

•    How did this start?
•    The connection with the Times.
•    What all this represented in a nutshell.
•    The real test: fundraising
•    The unfolding story: Lindsey's live reporting
•    Conclusion/what can be improved.

How Did This Start?

I first met Lindsey Hoshaw after speaking at Stanford's journalism school about Spot.Us. Our first meeting was uneventful. The only impression I was left with was her time in Los Angeles, which gave us something to connect on.

A few months later, however, Lindsey contacted me about the Pacific garbage patch. It was a story I knew of through Manuel Maqueda, who himself has undertaken recent reporting efforts around plastic in the ocean.

Lindsey explained that she had been given a seat on the boat with Captain Moore, the man who first discovered the Pacific garbage patch. After reaching out to the science editor at the New York Times, she found that they were interested in the story. There was, however, one giant hurdle: she needed to pay her own way on the trip, and getting to the middle of the Pacific Ocean wasn't cheap.

The Connection with the Times

This pitch excelled where many others have gone awry, and for that I must give praise to the Times. In most Spot.Us experiences, the larger a news organization, the slower it is to get approval to try something with Spot.Us because of our radically different approach. In past attempts with mainstream organizations, I've sat in countless meetings only to spin wheels. Those experiences are actually the inspiration for this blog post, "News Organizations In a Battle Against Inertia."

My hat is off the Times. They interfaced with Spot.Us as if they were a lean and mean startup. I spent half a day at the Times talking with various decision-makers who agreed to entertain the idea further if we drafted a pitch. Once the pitch was approved, all we had to do was make it live and let them know. I am still in awe of that process. It contrasts with everything I've experienced with other larger media organizations, and it's a testament to why the Times is not just the paper of record but also leading the charge into the digital future.

What All This Represented in a Nutshell

A freelancer and a news organization wanted to work together, but they needed to grease the wheels with some money. This is not uncommon. News organizations have a shrinking staff and budget. They must rely more on freelancers, but also don't want to burn through the entire freelance budget on a single story. This is one reason why we are seeing less original long-form reporting. Spot.Us acted as the grease. I hope we can continue to grease the wheels between freelancers and the public and with other news organizations.

The Real Test: Fundraising

At the time, this pitch had the most ambitious fundraising goal Spot.Us had ever undertaken. I am happy to say that a new project with McSweeney's and the Public Press may surpass it. Fundraising is never easy, but a few things favored this pitch.

1. Lindsey is an ideal Spot.Us reporter. She is passionate and unafraid to show it. Her desire to report on this topic pours out of her in the Spot.Us video pitch. I only wish every Spot.Us reporter could show their interest in a story like her. Perhaps, in the future, the "video pitch" will be required for a Spot.Us pitch. Furthermore, Lindsey was unafraid to reach out to her network of friends, family and social networking sites to ask for support.

2. The Times followed up our initial efforts with a story of their own, "Many Checkbooks One Newspaper." The piece by Clark Hoyt examined the growing role of public support in journalism and highlighted Lindsey's pitch. I would never speak on behalf of the Times, but I like to think this was their way of putting out a test: "if we ask, will you give?" The answer was a big "yes" from a variety of folks for a multitude of reasons. Some donated in support of the Times. Others did because they knew of, and want to know more about, the garbage patch. Perhaps others donated just because of how fresh Spot.Us seemed; and perhaps others did so because they connected with Lindsey as an individual

Regardless, we raised $6,000 on Spot.Us before I could even go in and change the fundraising goal to $10,000 (the amount Lindsey truly needed). We used Facebook Causes to get the remainder.

The Unfolding Story

Once funding was secured, Lindsey didn't rest. She blogged regularly throughout her experience - including using a satellite phone to get online while on the boat. She saved her best photos for the Times upon her return, but she did not ignore the interest of people that supported her trip. She kept them involved and engaged. The best wrap-up of her posts from the ship can be found here.

The best pitches on Spot.Us are those that treat their subject as an unfolding story. KALW's "Crime Courts and Communities" pitch is another great example of this "beat blogging" approach.

Conclusion/What Can be Improved

Spot.Us needs a new design. There, I said it! (We've gotten started).

We need to express our mission clearer, and improve functionality/features of the site (new designs coming soon). We are far from perfect. This is not a post to simply pat us on the back and claim/whine, "if only more reporters were as open as Lindsey, or more news organizations as willing as the Times  Spot.Us would be the best thing since the Walter Lippmann." That sentiment would not only be naive -- it would shift the burden of improvement from Spot.Us to the culture of journalism.

Spot.Us does represent a fundamental shift from traditional journalism culture. While that is a hurdle for us, it is something we must overcome by highlighting exemplary projects like this, and figuring out how they can be repeated. With that in mind, this case study would be incomplete without the following section.

We Need

1.    Other ways to support reporting. There are other ways to support reporters beyond whipping out a wallet. Distributed reporting can be huge, and Spot.Us should dabble in this. Perhaps we will shift from "community funded reporting" to "community powered reporting" or "community supported reporting."

2.    Facebook, Twitter and more. The Times article would not have had a big impact without Twitter.

3. A clearer way to articulate what is going on with every pitch to any visitor that comes to our site.

4. Your ideas!

Finally

When done properly, M&E begins with the grantee setting out clearly the objectives of the grant, the activities necessary to achieve the objectives, and the resources applied to make these activities happen. So, for example, blogging for Idea Lab is an activity. An objective might be to create a thriving community, or to help guide the way for community news in transition.

For our Knight project, the objective is a bit more specific: to create open source tools that make community news and information easy to visualize. Activities include mapping existing tools, surveying users for specific unmet needs, coding, testing, translating, demoing, fixing, etc. Our primary resource will be the Drupal community, which is also one of our project's main beneficiaries. Ideally, we will create a virtuous circle.

The grantee is expected to have a clear causal logic, setting out how the activities will achieve the objectives, and identifying verifiable measures to assess performance against targets at each level: resources, activities, and objectives. Especially objectives. It is important to do this well, because far too often the project gets underway and the grantee loses sight of the objectives. They end up obsessing about performance as it relates to activities and resources. This is natural because activities are much more easily controlled and measured than the messy causal chain leading to the objectives. The donor, meanwhile, is mostly interested in the objectives. These differing centers of attention are the root of most donor-grantee disputes.

By starting out so early on M&E -- essentially before the grant even begins -- Knight is demonstrating how these tools can be used for partnership and management, not merely bean-counting. Our opportunity as the grantee is to embrace their challenge of partnership.

October 12 was a day of high emotion; it was finally time to thrive under pressure. I got home from work, rushed to my friend's house, and cracked open my laptop. The goal was to brainstorm like crazy, write up some solid project descriptions, and submit as many Knight News Challenge grant applications as possible over the three days I had left. Thank goodness fate had a better plan: the deadline was extended.

Now that we all have another two months, I'm going to take a few steps back and try to combine my formal education in information systems with my Knight-sponsored crash course of journalism's ongoing transformation and the lessons I've learned from three years of applications. I hope that the resulting guide will help you come up with some good ideas of your own. Remember, there is no limit to the number of applications you can submit. (Note: I won a 2007 Knight News Challenge grant for $15,000 to blog about
"connecting people, content and community.")

Well-designed solutions require well-understood problems. When brainstorming ideas for your News Challenge application, the first step is to write down a long list of complaints. (This also works if you already know what you want to do.) What do you want to change? What isn't working well today? What isn't happening that should? This list will give you a starting point, and will make sure that the ideas you come up with will have a real purpose.

Complaints might start from your own personal experience, but you need to expand from there because the true gems come from a fusion of imagination and research. Here are some ways to gather information:

• Talk to people. If you are looking for new problems, ask people you know what they would change. If you are looking to better understand one that you have already identified, ask if the problem exists for them and why. Their insights could provide the spark you need to turn a potentially good opportunity into a great one.
• Pay attention to buzz. Read what other people are saying about your issues. I can guarantee that as you read this there are members of the blogosphere discussing their own trials and tribulations with new media. This will help you get a general understanding of how people fit into the way things work, where they see opportunities for improvement, and which direction the crowd is moving.
• Know the current process. You can't change something without knowing what it is you are changing. Even if you plan to completely redefine the status quo, you need to appreciate and learn from the way things work now. There will always be something worth incorporating or maintaining.
• Explore the cutting edge. What are the front-runners doing, and what problems are they addressing? The cutting edge is known for being risky because nobody is sure of the best solution. Look at the problems that they are addressing and add those to your list. With any luck, you can think of a better idea.

The more you understand the tools available to you, the more effective you will be at finding creative applications for them. Ideally, you want to get to the point where you can have an intelligent conversation with a programmer, but for now it is enough to just have higher-level knowledge.

For each technology you think you might be able to use, figure out:

• How it works. While you don't have to be able to program, you really should have a general idea of how the magic happens. So long as you know what the tool is called, you will be able to find an accessible guide. Just remember that Google is your friend here.
• What it does. Tools tend to have an intended purpose, although often it's a very broad one. Be sure to understand what that purpose is. You can start by looking at its website and see what its creators say. Also try to find out which existing sites have used it, and examine what they have done.
• What it could do. Once you get a basic understanding of a tool, you can start to get creative and think of ways to use it that its creators never would have thought of. This task is all on your shoulders, but you can always scour tech blogs like TechCrunch or SlashDot to find examples of how people can push the limits.

If the technology is at all popular there is probably a community surrounding it. Once you find it, create an account and join the party; there will be people willing to help you learn.

You have a list of tools and a list of goals, now it is simply a matter of creative application: find out how to achieve those goals with the technologies available. Brainstorm as many solutions as you can for each problem, and be sure to dream a little bit here.

For each solution you need to be able to explain:

1. What it would do and how it would be used.
2. How it could fit in and what it could change.
3. How it would incorporate technology and/or people.
4. What assumptions would have to be met and how you would meet them.

You will probably find yourself coming up with new tools, new processes, or (more often) a combination of the two. If you're having trouble, try looking at how people are solving problems in completely different fields. Maybe you can learn from their work. Just remember that you don't need to know how everything fits together just yet.

This is when you descend from the land of the theory and optimism and take a close look at the world. You have some ideas already thanks to your list of solutions, but there are plenty of others to be found; plus, not all of what you have will work. What looks promising? Which ones can you cross off the list?

Some things to think about:

• Who are you dealing with? You need to understand your stakeholders (i.e. the people who would be impacted by your project). You want your solution to provide them so much value that they will be willing to donate time -- and maybe even money. At the very least, they need to be willing to try it.
• What is your competition? There will be direct and indirect competition, but you need to know about both. This will help you differentiate your idea from what is already out there, and it can also force you to further develop your solution into something even better.
• What resonates personally? You are going to need to explain why you are the person to take this idea and make it a reality, so figure out what you bring to the table and make sure you can get excited about it. It won't be enough to say, "I thought of it!"

To get funding from the Knight Foundation you need to be able to convince the world that what you have is a genuine opportunity. It should have the potential to redefine landscapes.

Take your most promising solutions and try to envision their implementations. What is going on behind the curtains? What kind of synergy can you create? Even though you are getting more concrete, don't get bogged down in unimportant details -- you are still brainstorming here.

Think in terms of process (how things get done), objects (e.g. "news article," "user contributed question," or "media clip") and user roles (e.g. "journalist," "editor," "consumer," or "judge"). How will the objects interact? How will each role fit into the system? Refine this line of thought with your previously researched understanding of your stakeholders, the current state of affairs, and the technologies available.

By now you've probably conjured up something spectacular, and filling out that first round application will be a breeze. With any luck you will have enough inspired thought to submit more than one. Good luck!

1. Good and fast: If you went for good and fast it most likely means you hired top notch folks. This is a boon to any website project starting out -- but it also means you need to watch your cash flow because it won't be cheap. Unless you are rolling in cash, the cost should be a concern. Still, going this route can save you money in the long run. If you are able to get something to market before you cut off development, you'll be able to lean on what you've produced and it will work reliably. In contrast, I know plenty of projects that went with option number two...
2. Fast and cheap: If it works out then you've won the lottery. Again, I'm not saying quality is impossible here. But I personally know projects that went the fast and cheap route and in the long run it hurt them. What they ended up bringing to market failed. Most users are not as forgiving as they are to Twitter. If your site breaks, they won't come back. It often takes an organization twice as much money and time to build a stable website if the initial site was built fast and cheap. If you are not a tech-minded person, you might wonder why everyone doesn't outsource or go with the cheapest labor out there (and there are cheap developers on the market). Think of this scenario: you could pay an Amish wood craftsman to build an heirloom cabinet that will last generations, or you can get something from Ikea that will last two to five years and require some assembly and maintenance on your part --but will cost a tenth of the price. There is no right or wrong answer. It often depends on where you are in life. When I was in college it was Ikea all the way, baby! In either case the trade-offs are apparent. That's the difference between options number one and number two.
3. Good and cheap: The typical scenario here is that you have a great web developer (an Amish craftsman of code) who is ready to donate some of his/her time to your project. This is great. It means you can get quality at a cheap price. But this also usually means the development comes at a pace dictated by the volunteer, not you. Set all the deadlines you want in your mind -- the reality is that you're at their mercy. Again, this isn't a bad thing. It's just a trade-off. The good news is that when something does finally get put out, you'll have quality and it won;t have broken the piggy bank. If you aren't in a rush this can even be ideal (for example, maybe it's something you are working on as a volunteer as well).

Now, as promised, below is a sneak-peak at a rough redesign of Spot.Us. (It's very rough -- see the Spot.Us blog for details).

During the first meeting I gave the following presentation about my experience funding citizen media projects over the past two and a half years.

HiperBarrio began when a Colombian media professor teaching in Norway met a librarian in the small town of San Javier La Loma on the outskirts of Medellín, Colombia. It is part of Comuna 13, which was one of the epicenters of violence during the 80's and 90's. These days the town is mostly safe, but the only thing that outsiders knew about this place was its violent history.

The librarian wanted to record and share the small town's cultural history. So he taught ten of his regular library users how to blog, make podcasts, and short video documentaries. The project has become ridiculously successful. They have since secured more funding from local institutions, and they were cited in a proposal by the Fundación Empresas Públicas of Medellín, which led to a one million dollar grant from the Gates Foundation to build on the work that HiperBarrio has proved successful. Gabriel has since been invited to Chile to share his knowledge with their national library network. They won the Ars Electronica Award in digital communities this year and a 10,000 euro prize. These ten initial participants are now trainers who are paid to give workshops in other marginalized villages on the outskirts of Medellin.

In contrast, one of the Rising Voices grantee projects that so far has struggled to make an impact is Blogging Since Infancy, the blogging project of Plan Ceibal in Uruguay. Plan Ceibal is simply too large of an organization and too much bureaucracy stood in the way of quick and effective implementation.

These individuals belong to Foko, a citizen journalism training initiative and community of bloggers in Madagascar. They first began their work not too long after DreamWorks released their 2005 animated film by the same name. A group of Malagasy bloggers living in the diaspora was tired of the fact that the only international awareness of their home country had to do with cartoon animals. So they partnered with a few social groups - including several English language clubs - based in different parts of the island, and showed them how to blog.

They were mostly writing about what donors would consider "non-serious" content. Occasionally they would post short videos about environmental and social challenges in Madagascar, but a lot of the content is what would be considered diary writing. Then something unexpected happened: on March 17 a coup deposed president Marc Ravalomanana. 15,000 protesters took to the streets, many countries froze their aid programs, and misinformation was frequently spreading on the airwaves of the radio stations that managed to continue broadcasting. Amid all the chaos, this group of Foko bloggers became the go-to sources of information for the international press. They were featured on CNN live, the BBC, New York Times, and Reuters.

Looking back at it, Foko is an excellent example of what John West from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting called "pre-crisis training". It also underscores the importance of 1.) citizen journalism training programs, 2.) the translation and contextualization of local content for a global audience, and 3.) networks of media groups so that local voices can be amplified and understood when breaking news hits. A few months ago Malagasy bloggers and traditional journalists met to discuss how both can work together more effectively during times of crisis.

3) Act more like a social network and less like a parent

Funders are in a role to promote co-learning and collaboration among grantee projects. I recommend focusing on creating a sense of community among your grantees, but also make sure to bring in outsiders so as not to become exclusionary. Focus less on oversight and making rules, and more on encouragement and making connections.

4) Leave comments, make suggestions, don't hide

For some reason many funders feel that they shouldn't be seen in public interacting with their grantees. I think that they are also afraid that they will write something that they might later regret. That's OK - we all make mistakes and as long as you're humble about it, internet users are more forgiving (and less attentive) than you would think. I have yet to see anyone from any of the organizations which fund Global Voices (with the exception of Kristen Taylor when she worked at Knight) leave a comment on what we publish. Engage, interact, show that you care, don't be anti-social.

5) Don't waste their time with unnecessary paperwork

Much of my job is simply to act as a buffer between the lawyers, researchers, accountants, and auditors who want to maintain their institutions, and our grantees who are trying to do innovative work in communities with few resources. I know the psychic burden of trying to navigate through the various paperwork-lined hallways of bureaucratic mazes. It is enough to prevent almost any project from succeeding.

6) Invest in risk and learn from failure. Don't fund repetitive white papers that no one reads

This is the point I want to emphasize today. Citizen media is still a new field and most funders don't like to invest in a new field until they feel that they have sufficiently researched it. The research is costly. Big-name academics like Henry Jenkins and Jonathan Zittrain and are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to come up with self-evident (though barely comprehensible) conclusions, including that there is an online participation gap and that generative technologies are good.

This money can be and should be invested more effectively.

At Rising Voices the micro-grants we award are so small (between $2,000 - $5,000) that we are able to easily invest in high-risk projects that may seem doomed for failure. One such project was "Think Build Change Salone", which aimed to develop an internship program to place Sierra Leonean youth (including ex-combatants) at select development NGO's and then pay them a small stipend to blog about their experiences. It would have been an ambitious project anywhere in the world, but we must remember that at the time of the project Sierra Leone was ranked the least developed country in the world, and is still recovering from a brutal decade-long civil war.

In the end, the project did no pan out. But from a funder's perspective, Vickie's fascinating report about what went wrong and what went right during the project is absolutely worth the $2,000 we invested. Rather than funding costly research (almost always by western academics) about the challenges to local development, it is better to invest in high risk, local projects and learn from the challenges they encounter.

(As a brief aside, I'll mention that three other high-risk projects we have invested in are 1) Ceasefire Liberia, which has trained avid bloggers in Monrovia, 2) Nomad Green, which has established a committed group of environmental citizen journalists in Mongolia, and 3) Drop-In Center, which has helped give voice and credibility to Ukraine's nascent harm reduction movement. All three should have failed, but succeeded because of the passion of their coordinators and participants.)

7) Invest in what you're interested in. Build networks of expertise

This is especially true for intermediary funders like Rising Voices. You'll notice that many of our grantee projects are based in Latin America. This is, in part, because I speak Spanish and I spend a lot of time there. Grantees shouldn't be selected solely on the whims and interests of funders and program officers, but on the other hand, I believe it is healthy for funders to invest in projects that they can and want to help find success.

You do this by building networks of expertise. Again, this goes back to "act more like a social network, less like a parent." Encourage international conference organizers to invite participants to speak on panels. Encourage your grantees to focus on their relationships with local institutions - after all, local citizen media projects should be funded and sustained by local groups.

Personally I don't know too much about the field of AIDS prevention and HIV/AIDS activism. But it was clear after our first round of micro-grants that there was considerable interest in the use of citizen media to improve communication and advocacy efforts around the rights of HIV-positive individuals and the activities of HIV/AIDS-related NGO's. So we let a core group of passionate activists use our chat room, brand, and network to organize. We also provided a small amount of funding to produce a guide on "Blogging Positively."

The success of the initiative shows the importance of what Ivan earlier called the network effects of digital media. Because these activists were able to tap into the Rising Voices network, they also benefited from the Global Voices network, which helped amplify their cause, translate the guide into other languages, get it into the hands of local NGO's, and connect with the BBC and other mainstream media outlets.

9) Have fun

Mikel Maron works on international outreach for OpenStreetMap, an open-source Wikipedia-like version of Google Maps. He organizes events in Palestine, India, Kenya, and elsewhere to show citizens how to use basic GPS devices to build open-licensed maps of their communities. But he calls these events "mapping parties" rather than "workshops" our "capacity building events." The point is to have a good time, and to develop some valuable information in the process.

I know this sounds like something a young person feels compelled to include in his presentation, but the reality is that the return on investment for fun is extremely high and under-recognized by funders. One of the most difficult activities to fundraise for at Global Voices is our annual summit where our tireless volunteer authors and translators from around the world come together once a year for discussions, strategizing, workshops, and most importantly, to have fun. A couple years ago we asked our volunteer authors what incentivizes them to work so hard on Global Voices without receiving pay. A few of them mentioned the importance of giving greater voice and representation to the citizens of their countries. Others pointed to the benefits of belonging to a global, supportive community which values free speech and tolerance. But just about everyone said they hoped to be invited to the annual Global Voices Summit. If a funder is willing to invest in three days of fun, the return on that investment is a year of valuable content from volunteers based all over the world.

I will end with what I see as a need in the space of new media development. Even though it is easy to glance at YouTube and make the assumption that everyone under 30 knows how to produce a video in less than an hour, in fact, there is a severe shortage of individuals who have both the ability to produce digital media, but more importantly, the know-how and experience to teach it to others in an effective and responsible way. Production techniques should be integrated with media literacy discussions and a strong ethical framework which includes privacy issues, respect, and tolerance.

We need to train more trainers, and we need a directory of experienced new media trainers which is categorized by geographic area, language, and area of expertise.

The Bay Area News Project has a web site and a Twitter feed. The San Francisco Chronicle had a story. And so did the New York Times.

There are few details available about the project, in part because they haven't really been worked out. But the news is emblematic of something much larger going on across the country. As various people try to figure out the future of news, the non-profit model has gained substantial momentum.

This struck me last week while I was attending the two-day UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google.

Presenters from the non-profit journalism world gave some interesting insight into how the model works and, in some cases, doesn't. It left me with a sense of the challenges the Hellman project faces to get off the ground and have an impact. The odds are against most start-ups. And that's no different for non-profit news organizations.

A 'kvetch-free' journalism conference

The Berkeley-Google conference was devoted to exploring the intersection between technology, news, and business models. It was organized by Alan Mutter, who blogs at Reflections Of A Newsosaur. You can find Alan's opening thoughts here, and his takeaways on having what he called a "kvetch-free journalism conference" here.

Besides being hosted by Google, it was presented by the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley and the Haas School of Business at Berkeley. Sponsors included The Koret Foundation, Google, and the McCormick Foundation.

There were lots of interesting tidbits about various technology trends. For notes on the conference, you can search Twitter for #mts to see all the tweets (and there were a surprising number of tweeters there). The tweets were also being captured by live bloggers on day one and day two. There were a lot of interesting thoughts on things news organizations could be doing more efficiently or effectively to increase traffic, engagement, and advertising revenue. But, frankly, there wasn't much that sounded revolutionary or that would move the needle.

It was the discussion about non-profit models that I found most intriguing. Not because I necessarily believe that's where the future lies, but because at this moment so many others clearly do. There are enough emerging or current non-profit experiments that over the next couple of years we should have a pretty good sense of whether or not this model is relevant and sustainable.

The NPR Model

One of the speakers at Google was Ellen Weiss, the senior vice president for news at National Public Radio. Weiss, who has been at NPR for almost two decades, summed it up nicely when she said that the non-profit model seemed a bit like the "flavor of the month."

For better or for worse, non-profit news organizations represent a big departure in terms of business models from the for-profit mainstream model. In a way, it seems like some of this push is driven by a sense of resignation that a new model can't be found to reinvent for-profit news. I don't buy that. But, clearly, others do.

The highest profile non-profit effort to date is ProPublica, the investigative journalism organization. There's also Investigate West, Voice of San Diego, and Minnpost.com. Already in San Francisco, there's The Public Press and California Watch. There are many, many others out there.

In an era of financial challenges, the so-called NPR model seems appealing to many newsrooms. But Weiss delivered a little reality check. Of NPR's $166 million budget, 40 percent of that comes from member stations and 30 percent comes from corporate sponsorship. NPR gets no money directly from the federal government, Weiss said.

She noted that folks from a traditional media background don't always understand how hard it was to build that model. In NPR's case, they've had 35 years. Of ProPublica, she pointed out that the organization was started with a large personal donation, a "lightning strike," as she called it. But they haven't proved they have a sustainable model.

The problem is that if the non-profit model catches on too much, then what little money that exists to support these organizations will be stretched too thin. "One girl selling girl scout cookies is cute," Weiss said. "Two are okay. Three or more is just annoying."

Her bottom line: "Will non-profits save us all? They're an essential ingredient. But I doubt it."

Texas Tribune

Another fascinating non-profit presentation came from John Thornton, a partner in Austin Ventures and chairman of the Texas Tribune. Thornton is hoping to launch the Tribune next year, and has raised $3.5 million of the $4.5 million targeted. Just last week, Thornton announced he'd bagged another $750,000.

But that money really is just a start. Thornton provided a lot of useful data and shared his spreadsheets with the conference. According to his calculations, the organization needs to raise $1.3 million in donations every year to support a newsroom of 10 full-time journalists.

Thornton said people donate $20 million each year to dance non-profits in Texas. From that perspective, he said getting $1.3 million each year doesn't seem like big hill to climb.

We'll see.

Perhaps the most cautionary tale came from Geoff Dougherty, a fellow blogger here at Idea Lab and founder and CEO of the Chi-Town Daily News. Dougherty's grant was to "recruit and train a network of 75 citizen journalists -- one in each Chicago neighborhood." But despite his efforts, Dougherty said at Google that the support from the local philanthropic community didn't materialize to sustain it.

Last month, Dougherty announced Chi-Town was going to re-launch using a for-profit model.

Bay Area News Project

All this brings us back to Hellman and the Bay Area News Project. UC Berkeley Dean Neil Henry gave a short presentation at Google, but he didn't reveal much more than had already been announced. Here's what we do know.

The goal is create a news organization that employs full-time journalists, perhaps anywhere from 10 to 15 to start. They hope to leverage KQED's fundraising experience. And they're exploring a partnership with the New York Times to provide content for that paper's new Bay Area edition.

Beyond that, there are lots of blanks to be filled in. The first step is to hire a CEO and/or executive editor to actually map out what this organization can and should be, what it will do, and how it will operate. This is a tall order. And an expensive one. I had been telling folks that to find someone with the right set of skills and experience, they'd have to be paid well over six figures in salary.

Then I saw Mutter's post that included information about the top salaries paid to ProPublica editors. Editor Paul E. Steiger got a whopping salary of $570,000 while the number two editor pulled in $296,370. Whoa. That will eat up Hellman's money right quick.

This leads to my own reality check: $5 million sounds like a lot. But it's not. Not when you're talking about starting an actual news organization with paid reporters. The same day the project was announced, I happened to be visiting a start-up in San Mateo called Caring.com, which produces content related to elder care. The CEO said he needed to raise "a little money" to get through the next year, about "$5 million or $6 million dollars." That would sustain an online-only content start-up with a staff of 14 that already has a growing revenue stream.

All of this is to say that $5 million is purely seed money. KQED and the other parties are going to need to put serious fundraising muscle behind this. They still need to hire a CEO, executive editor, and staff. It's going to be some time before it's having any impact on the ground.

The reaction to Hellman's project has ranged widely, and I must say I'm quite surprised. On the positive side, David Cohn weighed in with advice for Hellman, including to hire folks who think "web first."

But not everyone was giddy. Popular local blogger Greg Dewar, who writes the N-Judah Chronicles on the Njudah blog, tweeted: "this Hellman/KQED/UCB J School thing sounds like a disaster in the making, at least for us who don't have wealthy financiers..."

And Suzanne Yada tweeted: "@mediatwit I am only officially speaking for myself re: Public-Press. But yes, I feel like Hellman ganked our model & left us to dry TBH." The Public Press, for which Yada does some work, had been operating through bootstrapping and small grants.

The East Bay Express worried that this project "threatens traditional news media in the Bay Area, because it will rely on 120 journalism students at Cal who will work for free."

I think the fears of the other local and hyper-local news start-ups are valid. Hopefully, the organization will take a collaborative approach that builds the news ecosystem.

Finally, if you want to hear from some of the folks involved in Hellman's project, check out this interview from KQED's Forum:

On one level, of course, the middle-initial rule was, even then, a pretentious holdover from a bygone era of compulsivity, and today those lonesome capital letters are less and less commonly seen in print and on the web. But there was a sensible rationale for the practice -- one that's worth remembering today, at a moment when the public's faith in journalists' ability to get simple facts right has tested new lows.

When I'd complain about the bothersome middle-initial requirement, this is, roughly, the lecture I'd hear from my editors:

"If you have to ask your sources for their middle initials, you'll also end up double-checking the spelling of their names. That's good. And when readers see that you've taken the trouble to put that little detail in, and get it right, they'll figure that you've been equally conscientious about all the other facts in your story. That's even better."

In other words: the middle initial didn't matter much in itself; it was a pledge to the world that you were willing to sweat the small stuff -- and therefore that you could be trusted.

Little Faith in Media

I was thinking about those middle initials as I read the dismal findings of the most recent Pew Research Center survey of Americans' attitudes toward the news media. It seems that our collective faith in the simple competence of news professionals is at its lowest level since the Pew folks began tracking these numbers 25 years ago.

"Just 29 percent of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight," Pew finds, "while 63 percent say that news stories are often inaccurate." And only 21 percent of respondents said they think news organizations are "willing to admit their mistakes."

Michael Kinsley has maintained that public dissatisfaction with the media stems more from ideological fervor than from discontent with "trivial" errors of fact. But I think Kinsley is too quick to discount the cumulative impact of the vast number of small mistakes that go uncorrected every day in the media. The correct spelling of any particular name, or the inclusion of an accurate middle initial, may be a "trivial" matter -- but what if it's your name or initial?

Journalists ought to stop making excuses and pay attention to what the public is actually saying, rather than what they want to hear. This isn't about red state/blue state partisanship or the imperiled newspaper revenue model, or any other excuse that journalists might try to summon in their own defense. It's about the very survival of the news profession.

At a time when the traditional business of media is embattled and the Internet is upending old patterns of creation and distribution, journalists have staked their future on a promise of professionalism and reliability. "We're more trustworthy than any random person with a cell phone or a blog," they're saying. Meanwhile, though, the public is saying to the newsroom, "Sorry, we don't buy that. We don't trust you to get things right."

That's quite a disconnect. And I don't think it will be fixed by more rhetoric and debate. If journalists are to win back the public's trust, we need something a little humbler: a more open and effective process for correcting mistakes, however trivial -- one in which journalists can expect to hear about their goofs in a civil fashion, and the public can expect to see results once they point out a problem.

That's what we have in mind as we begin the work of building MediaBugs, an experimental public forum for the reporting and repairing of errors in news coverage. There's still a ton for us to learn, and I'll be writing here, as well as at the MediaBugs blog, about our findings.

While we won't ask participants to use their middle initials, we will, I hope, share some of the passion for detail and accuracy that drove that venerable custom.

Spot.Us is expanding to Los Angeles and we are doing so with USC's Annenberg School of Journalism. Needless to say, we are very excited about the opportunities and possibilities. The main Spot.Us homepage will aggregate pitches from both the SF Bay Area and Los Angeles regions. You can go to Subdomains to find pitches specific to those regions: la.spot.us and sfbay.spot.us.

As many know, I grew up in Los Angeles (Hamilton High School anyone?) so this is a bit of a home coming for me. I will remain up north running the Bay Area Spot.Us - but will be working closely with folks in Los Angeles building up our SoCal presence.

What Does This Mean?

We will continue to move forward. If the Los Angeles launch goes smooth there is no reason we couldn't expand to another city soon. This can be done in partnership with another organization (media company, university, etc) or just by Spot.Us itself.

It has been 10-months since Spot.Us officially launched with support from the Knight Foundation (who remain fantastic supporters). There have been a few highlights in the Spot.Us world.

• I first announced that I was working on Spot.Us (winning a Knight News Challenge my advice on that here)  . The site launched five months later.
• Six month "state of the spot" after our official launch - including a list of some thing's we'd been up to
  
• Spot.Us starts to build a strategic business plan (as a community). - We will have another one of these open brainstorm meetings soon!

We have been observing and learning along the way. Without a doubt the concept holds. In fact, we've been joined now by other community funded reporting sites (Global For Me, PayyAttention, KickStarter, ReelChanges and others). But only Spot.Us focuses on local, long form reporting. To my knowledge we are also the only one that is situated to work with multiple news organizations at a time to collaborate publicly with citizens or each other.

As such - that is what you can expect more of from Spot.Us: Focusing on our strengths, providing services to news organizations that want to participate, creating a new marketplace for freelancers to sell their work to the public or organizations and for community members to take control and set the news agenda themselves.

Agile and Iterative Development Begins Again

Long time Spot.Us community members will know I am a big believer in agile and iterative development.

• Launching a site and being iterative
  
• Eliminating the fear of being open and iterative
  
• Growing a community and being iterative
  

Unfortunately - we've strayed from this mission for the last 4-6 months. But it isn't for lack of want - more like lack of funds ;)

I am happy to announce that we have new developers at Spot.Us who will be working closely with me to take the site to its full 2.0 vision. I want to thank Hashrocket for the development on the site so far. They are, hands down, a FANTASTIC shop to work with. I would recommend them to anyone looking for Ruby on Rails work in a heartbeat and I hope to work with them again soon. I consider them not just colleagues but friends.

But for the immediate future I am excited to be working with two developers (they'll be introduced soon) who will work on the day-to-day of the site, getting it in a position for what we need to do.

What We Need To Do

SO MUCH!

• There is a list of site development needs (feel free to add, please don't delete). This includes some redesign and some needed features.
• There are incredibly ambitious projects to support - pick your favorite. Donating just $10 can make a HUGE difference.
• Define what Spot.Us is and what Spot.Us isn't: a higher level conversation that we will be having with advisors and the community.
• Figuring out the three sided market: Community members, reporters and news organizations. We are a service organization for all three. But three sided markets are tough to pin down. I am convinced it can be done.

Personal Thought and Rant

Along with the press release I get to write this blog post and it would be a missed opportunity not to reflect on the last 1.5 years of my life and the last 10 months since Spot.Us officially launched. I am more dedicated than ever towards the concept of "community funded reporting" and Spot.Us as a tool to accomplish that. I do believe it will be a part of journalism's future no matter what name we call it.

But I have also come to realize that there is no silver bullet. Journalism needs multiple revenue streams. That is also why I believe "content is King, collaboration is Queen." It isn't an either/or scenario with citizen journalism and I've spent hours upon hours thinking about what these terms all mean. In the attempt to zen out on all this I've learned from many people. I want to thank them all and I want to thank everyone that has been a positive influence on me and Spot.Us so far. In truth Spot.Us belongs to everyone that participates in it. So if you think we are doing okay - give yourself a pat on the back. You are making it happen, I'm just a conduit.

Most Africans don't have computers or access to the Internet. Cell phones are a different story.

So why aren't journalism schools around the continent integrating the use of mobile devices fully and squarely into their courses? It's a question that could also apply in many other places -- even in places with access to computers and the Internet.

Answers to this challenge were provided in Grahamstown, South Africa last week, when MobileActive's Katrin Verclas, a Knight grantee, ran a workshop with a selection of African journalism teachers at Rhodes University.

Participants were brought together under the auspices of another Knight project, the Knight Center for International Media at the University of Miami. Veteran multimedia teacher Rich Beckman put together five days of high-powered training for a handpicked group from countries as diverse as Sierra Leone, Kenya, Senegal and South Africa.

The group learned about audio-driven slide shows by MSNBC's Jim Seida, and online video storytelling by the University of Westminster's David Dunkley Gyimah. Debate around digital ethics was led by Sam Terril from the University of Miami.

But it was the session with Verclas that brought home the obviousness of why there should be a strong focus on mobile in African journalism schools. Take Muda Ganiyu, head of the Lagos Polytechnic, who told colleagues that he had seven video cameras for 1,200 students. Video-enabled cell phones, he pointed out, could fill a rather large gap.

He proved this point when he and colleague George Nyabuga used a cell phone to capture dramatic images and video of a shack being set on fire and the arrest of the alleged arsonist -- all while out on a workshop exercise.

Second-Rate Technology

"What about the problem that cell phones don't usually have as high end capabilities as specialized video cameras?" asked Verclas.

She then answered her own question: "Having second-rate technology to tell a story is better than no technology at all."

More than that, participant Harold Gess argued that journalism teachers need to focus on storytelling; the technology is secondary to this task. So, if a cell phone can enable students to learn to tell stories effectively, that amounts to mission accomplished.

Ayesha Ismail, another participant, added that the value of teaching students to use the power of their phones is that they can then do reporting at any time, and not be constrained to times when they booked out a school's scarce equipment.

That point brought home the importance of students learning to use -- to the fullest extent possible -- their own phones.

Highlighting the value of capitalizing on having a communications tool in your pocket, Verclas herself snapped pictures on her cell phone of a smashed window at the local newspaper, Grocott's Mail. Overnight, thieves had stolen a TV set located in the window bay that had been part of the Knight-supported Citizen Newsroom, launched the previous week during the Highway Africa conference in the city.

Newsroom co-ordinator Michael Salzwedel and editor Steven Lang had also grabbed a picture on their cell phones with the aim of posting it online and generating community discussion around the crime.

Reporting by SMS

Back in Verclas' class, another participant, Brian Garman, proposed that classes on mobile journalism should start with the most basic of a phone's capabilities by teaching the principles of reporting via SMS. Courses could then move to images, audio, video and multimedia packages done on -- and sometimes for -- cell phones.

Garman also argued that when students have access to higher-end equipment, they tend to replicate familiar genres and formats. Conversely, if they are required to experiment with the new medium of mobile, there's a greater chance that they could drive change.

This point put the participants at the workshop into temporary pause mode, the reason being that using cell phones for journalism is as new to them as it is to students.

As realization of the possibilities set in, it was almost as if the room became energized with light bulbs flashing, brainwaves churning, and spirits soaring.

In assorted projects for Verclas during the day, the group came to grips with practical production using cell phones. They came up with pretty creative content, such as a documentary made in French using cell phones, as well as the shack fire story.

Innovative Use of Cell Phones

The groups also cooked up clever schemes for using cell phones in innovative ways. One idea was to sign up people during the 2010 World Football Cup in South Africa and, using a signal sent via text message, trigger an avalanche of user-generated photos of what was happening at that given moment in time.

Another proposal was for software tools that would enable an entire audio slideshow to be edited, compiled and compressed for upload on a cell phone. A third idea planned to enlist carriers to load phones with social mobilization images and audio, which would kick in to users when calls were made or received.

It wasn't all blue skies, however. Verclas highlighted the importance of context in that powerful cellular carriers can determine what lives or dies on their network. Along with that, metadata about locality can be abused, prices are insufficiently regulated in some countries, and privacy can never be guaranteed.

There's no problem in acknowledging the downside. Journalism teachers need to convey the negative aspects to students as well as the positive potential.

And thanks to the workshop, they know they can do both.

I left the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association Summit of newspaper publishers and ad managers Thursday just as two executives from the Associated Press were winding up their presentation on the new AP News Registry.

The new initiative, announced in July, contains two key components:

• All AP stories will be released online wrapped in a new microsoformat that includes rights info, who created it, etc.

• The wrapper also will carry a built-in "digital beacon," or tracker, to monitor use of the content by others to track usage and compliance. (As I understand this, the content is not encrypted but carries a lightweight bug technology.)

As a social media consultant and journalist who spoke at the summit just an hour earlier, I asked whether the dialogue and AP's plans were public information, and Kevin Walsh, AP's Kevin Walsh, Vice President of Marketing, responded, "It is now."

AP's plans were met with the predicable negative reaction in the blogosphere (see, for example, the comments at bottom of this article). But AP should be credited with its transparency during this process, and from what I heard at the summit, its plans make a lot of sense. Thousands of sites are unfairly piggybacking off the work of journalists, and if newspapers and news organizations like the AP are to survive, there has to be a mechanism for compensation.

As an internal AP document titled Protect, Point, Pay - An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News put it: "The evidence is everywhere: original news content is being scraped, syndicated and monetized without fair compensation to those who produce report and verify it."

Fair use won't be easy to define

It's a topic I have some familiarity with, having written Darknet and reported on Hollywood studios and media companies' reluctance to embrace their digital future. At the time I wrote the book, there was widespread music file sharing (there still is) but also an increasing recognition that the original Napster was misguided and the music industry needed to devise legitimate forms of compensation for the artists. (Apple's iTunes and Rhapsody are among the companies still trying to create a frictionless business model.)

My view on the new AP initiative is similar: Some reuse of AP's content is socially and legally acceptable, but there needs to be limits. What will matter, in the end, is how this plan will be carried out by AP and the cooperative's members. If they go too far and claim "all rights reserved" around the first two sentences of every AP article, the blowback will be enormous. Fair use exists, and in the past the AP has paid too little heed to those concerns — even though AP reporters rely on the same fair use doctrine in their reports nearly every day. (For example, I didn't get the AP's permission to use the graphic at the top of this post.)

Todd B. Martin, AP's Vice President, Technology Development, reassured the publishers in the room that the intent of the news registry isn't to go after every blogger who borrows a snippet of an AP news story.

Instead, Martin said, "We're not going to stop a blogger from cut and pasting an article. But we are giving you visibility into the 20,000 other domains where your content appeared and the top users and where it was monetized. So you can get a list of the top 100 [infringing] sites with over 100,000 views, and then facilitate business development opportunities" with the sites in question. The registry, Martin said, would help create new business opportunities and products and also buttress more rigorous legal enforcement of the AP's intellectual property.

That business development, presumably, would go something like this: You're taking our content without authorization. Sign up for a subscription, remove it, or face the legal consequences. It sounds as though AP will be creating a new category of subscribers that falls short of a standard membership subscription.

I asked the first question: When a blogger or third-party publisher reproduces part of an AP story on his own site or blog, how much borrowing is permissible? What is the cutoff point between fair use and a trigger mechanism that requires a subscription payment?

"We're focused on removing the ambiguity around the use of our content," Martin responded. "The registry will help you decide whether that use is permitted or whether it's a business development opportunity" requiring payment.

Which, of course, doesn't answer the question at all. For a simple reason: There is no bright line. But I do agree with AP on this: There is a line at some point. It comes down to context: reasonable lightweight borrowing vs. patterns of appropriating reportage and photographs for profit. It appears AP and its members will take things on a case-by-case basis until some conventions and rules of the road are established.

Recently in his MediaShift blog, Mark Glaser did a brilliant job of exposing the unscrupulous practice of sites like Gawker and site scrapers that reuse copyrighted material without authorization, payment or transforming it in a significant way: Using the 'Steal-O-Meter' to Gauge if Stories Steal or Promote.

It's a conversation we've avoided for a long, long time.

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.