The tone -- and the dress code -- are totally different than those you might find at ONA or Poynter. I'm in stealth mode. (Don't tell anyone: I'm wearing a suit. I actually did drycleaning for this).

Are there some answers here? I'm going to try to find out. What I do find, I'll report back here.

My sense? I may not hear the word "newsroom" or "community" once -- but I'll hear and see a lot of hard numbers about online advertising and local search. That's critical in a week where the Seattle P-I is going web only. Folks at the Nieman Lab say they think that it will take $5M in annual ad revenue to sustain the remaining 40 folk employed there. What I'll try to find out here: is that realistic?

I'll post a recap once the activities have concluded here, but if you want to follow along -- or get your own perspective into the room, feel free to follow me on Twitter, where I'm @lisawilliams.

It's hard not to get all fangirl when going to the Media Lab. I mean, I used to read about this place in issues of Wired back before they adopted rational typography!

We all got brief presentations on three projects at different stages of development. One, Virtual Gaza, took eyewitness testimonies from people living in Gaza and overlaid them on a Google Virtual Earth layer. Another, called Between the Bars, was a still-in-concept-phase project that would enable the publishing of letters from prison on the Net. A third researcher reported on discussions with the city of Boston on the potential for using SMS to distribute information on domestic violence prevention.

So many online media projects are about a single question: "what happens when you increase the messaging capacity?" Wikipedia, for example, answers the question, "what if an encylopedia had many thousands of editors and contributors?" Many citizen-media projects ask the question, "What if stories were not limited by the messaging capacity of a newsroom? (After all, an individual reporter with limited time can only call so many sources, right?).

But these projects had more in common than simply increasing messaging capacity -- they were about increasing that capacity in places where news does not reach, and in places that were "hot" -- politically hot, socially hot, war-zone hot.

When I started my own experiments in citizen media, I also gravitated toward a place where messaging capacity was low -- I started a site for a suburb of Boston that was indifferently covered by the nearby regional daily, and covered well-enough by the local weekly -- but still had no real online community.

But it wasn't "hot." There was little crime in my town; it was and is about as far from a war zone as you can get. There were also few truly "hot" political issues, and I can think of only two or three times where I held a story because I wasn't able to confirm it and I worried that publishing something that might turn out to be untrue would have a significant impact on anyone.

By contrast, the "heat" of the environments and topics chosen by the participants in the Media Lab group meant that the messages sent could have real weight. A false story from Gaza could amount to propaganda; publishing letters from prison might have all sorts of consequences, as could messages to and from anyone in a home where domestic violence is an issue. At the same time, when silence prevails, that has its own consequences, both political and personal.

The visit also made me reflect on what's considered valuable in journalism. A lot is made of the courage to go to hot places -- war zones, stories where a reporter or his employer might face legal action or even arrest.

Turns out that we might be able to get to hot places even from the very, very cool web.

We're encouraging you today to be part of our past, part of our present, and definitely part of our future...Today we are asking you to be part of our future and to shine a spotlight on what our future looks like. But we encourage you to look at our past; go out into the hallway, which is our Pulitzer hallway, and take a look at our history and what we have done.

...As our digital future expands, we have an intense desire to make this experience very personalized...readers have made it clear that they want to comment on the news, blog the news, and share the news. If we can get more people to interact with what our content is, we have a strong headstart.

...TimesOPEN underscores our commitment to engage the developer community with what we come up with day in and day out, and we look forward to what we come up with.

We hope this is only the first TimesOPEN.

TimesOPEN may -- or may not -- be the first software conference put on by a newspaper. (I'd love to hear Steve Yelvington's take on that). What's remarkable to me about Ms. Robinson's remarks is the attempt to link the Times' past -- and its journalistic cred in the form of Pulitzer prizes -- with what developers do. Today? What constitutes excellence in journalism and what constitutes excellence in software? Very, very far apart.

The future is about how those two concepts of excellence interact -- or don't.

For those who are interested, I'll be tweeting more observations of TimesOPEN on Twitter, where I'm @lisawilliams.

Anybody who's paying attention to the state of journalism in the US is aware of the financial crisis facing the news industry. And there's wide agreement on the cause of the crisis: advertising revenue for print and broadcast is declining, and advertising revenue for internet offerings is not rising fast enough to make up the difference.

That's true.

It's also a completely inadequate explanation for the waves of layoffs, bankruptcies, and outright closures of news organizations.

There is a journalism bubble. And the bubble has burst.

First, what is a bubble?

An investment bubble occurs when investors speculate on a particular class of company (like newspapers) or asset (like houses) in a way that causes their value to rise far above what that company or value will be worth later.

Investment capital started to flow into US news organizations in the wake of deregulation of the media and telecommunications industry during the early 90's. This deregulation, which lifted limits on how many newspapers, television stations, and radio stations a single company could own, paved the way for radio chains like Clear Channel and Infinity. Radio wasn't the only industry transformed by "rollups" -- efforts by investors to create economies of scale by buying many of the same type of company and putting them under a single umbrella. During the same time period, many newspapers, particularly regional dailies in smaller cities and local weeklies -- were unified into megachains by investors, who then tried to sell the "rolled up" assets at a profit.

Marquee names in the news industry did not have to depend on private equity for investment dollars; they could go direct to the public equity markets. The New York Times Company and the Washington Post had IPOs and issued stock. Some of the rollup properties, like GateHouse, were able to do the same, while other rollups were sold to public or private media chains.

So what's bad about that? Private and public equity exists to let companies raise money to invest in things that they hope will grow their business, right? Well, yes. But what if the company can't meet the expectations of their investors, or can't pay back the debt they take on? Bubbles create unrealistic expectations for the future earnings of a company (or the future paychecks of a homeowner). When the investments don't meet expectations, investors often punish as irrationally as they invested, pummeling a company's stock price, or foreclosing on a home. As a result, the decline of a company -- or a person's life -- happens more hastily and destructively than it would have without the influence of speculators.

Shorter: Big money -- big fall.

You might wonder where the money came from that investors used to plow into the news industry. Many private equity firms get some proportion of their investment capital from pension funds. The largest pension funds in the US are public employee pension funds.

So the bitter icing on this cake is that if you're a US citizen, you'll likely pay twice for the journalism bubble: once for the destruction of your hometown paper, and twice in the form of increased taxes to refill the pension piggybank.

________________

After Matter:

After Matter itself shamelessly cribbed from the fabtastic PressThink.

Today, the Journalism Bubble; yesterday, The Journalism Cloud.

Wikipedia has an entry on economic bubbles, and Moneyterms.co.uk has a cogent discussion of bubbles too.

For a look at how public and private equity has played out in the Boston media scene, see The Long Strange Trip of Grandma's Nickel. The best source I know about on the business of Boston media is Dan Kennedy, who blogs at Media Nation.

If your answer to that question is yes, then there were an untold number of journalists on the Oakland BART train platform on New Year's Day, where they pointed increasingly ubiquitous pocket-size video cameras toward Oscar Grant and BART transit police officer Johannes Mehserle.

The videos these onlookers took show the chilling final interaction between Grant and Mehserle, which left Grant dead, and Oakland in a state of high alert as protesters took to the streets. Clashes with the police have resulted in over 100 arrests.

Oakland is a city exceptionally well-served by placeblogs, but as I scanned them today, many either remain on a particularly poorly timed holiday hiatus, taking advantage of the traffic lull many such sites endure over the Christmas-New Year holiday.

My friend and colleague Susan Mernit recently reviewed the Oakland local media's response to the shooting of Oscar Grant and concluded that they've flunked.

I too was surprised at the dearth of local coverage of the shooting and the protests on independent Oakland sites. Oakland itself is fairly well supplied with placeblogs, but when I reviewed their feeds over the week I wasn't seeing much.

It was odd enough that I went looking, which is when I found what I believe to be the one standout in the Oakland independent local site scene on the Grant shooting, and that's Oakland Focus.

My current theory, gleaned from loading Placeblogger's feed each day and doing the work buffing up and adding blogs to new metros, is that once a city is above a certain size placebloggers don't attempt to replace what they perceive as the work of traditional media outlets. But as newsrooms at papers, local television affiliates, and radio stations continue to dwindle, the "news hole" that characterizes most American suburbs that are covered only thinly by chain weeklies, and rural areas, which may not be covered at all, is extending into major American cities -- like Oakland.

It's that very atmosphere that may embolden the writers and creators of local sites once they come upon the realization that depending on the day, the story, the neighborhood, they may not be competing with Goliath: they may have no competition at all.

This was not the case with the Grant shooting, but I can easily imagine the day when the attention from the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle recedes, and that will be a day like any other in Oakland: one with plenty of things to write about and with the web's infinite news hole.

That's what David Samuels wrote about John Coster-Mullens, the author of a book-length work on the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

You know what's surprising about this? The man who's being accorded this respect is not and never has been a journalist: he's a truck driver.

2009 looks to be a year of involuntary adventures for so many in the newsroom and out of it. And as Ellen's post, Couch Potatoes and Journalism Culture points out, an army of volunteers is unlikely to replace what we're currently losing as newspapers shrink or fold.

Yet the strange tumult keeps turning up buried treasure. When I started Placeblogger, I really never thought we would find so many placeblogs, and yet, there they are, and we're still finding them. Yesterday we got thousands of items from over 3,000 placeblogs. And we discovered more placeblogs (and got a bit of spam, too). What you can see at Placeblogger is not a replacement or a substitute, but I remain astonished each day as I watch the feed go by -- of cat pictures and storm reports and writeups of town politics. I'm astonished that they are there at all, and that they are there in such glorious profusion and variety.

No, it is not a substitute or a silver lining. It will not put journalists to work and it does not have a dental plan. I am sorry that we have no cures to bring from the undiscovered precincts of the Internet. And though I would love to conclude on an upbeat note, it seems to me that 2009 will have quite a few people out of work.

What do you think 2009 will bring for journalism?

I've been working on Placeblogger, a 2007 News Challenge Winner, with Tish Grier, over the past year and a half. Like a lot of technical projects, Placeblogger had a ski-jump-like curve of complexity and features; when you're making something new online, you often do a ton of work in the background before anyone sees anything at all.

That's one of the things that makes our most recent release so satisfying; it's a great moment when you, and users, can see and feel the changes you've been working so hard on.

Like Chris, I had assumptions at the beginning of our work that proved incorrect, the biggest of which had to do with hiring for the technical aspects of our work. If you're building out a new service, website, or piece of software, you have a number of options:

1. DIY. This costs the least money, but depending on your level of sophistication, is the least predictable. It's not always possible to predict how long it will take you to learn what you need to know to get the job done.
2. Small-bore outsourcing. Break your job into pieces, and use your personal network or even sites like eLance or Rentacoder to get the work done. This is fast and can be effective -- but only if you're really clear about how the pieces fit together.
3. Large-bore outsourcing. Look for a complete team that has experience working together and includes the skills that you need, from technical architecture, to database administration, to design and UI work. This is reliable, but not always fast, and you pay a premium for the integrated service. If you choose wisely, you'll get excellent quality work, because effective teams are often effective because they have very high quality individual players.

We ultimately chose option #3. While I still think this was the best option for us, I now realize that we neglected the option of bringing on what I like to think of as a "technical cofounder." I can say quite honestly that I did not think that we could or would find a technical lead for our project who would be as passionately committed to it as we were (how many people are there who are really passionate about local blogs? Now, how many of them are excellent PHP coders and UI designers)?

Tish Grier, who is Chief Community Officer for Placeblogger joined with me in doing some mentoring for people who applied to the 2009 News Challenge, and one of the things I counselled them to do was to start the teambuilding now, and don't count out the possibility of a civic-minded programmer joining your team.

Most nonprogrammers have no idea how to communicate their idea for a new feature or a whole new website in a way that's going to be useful to the person who's actually building that site. Here are thirteen tips to get you started on the road to fluency:

1. Learn how to write a spec. One of the biggest frustrations for a coder is working up a version of something and then hearing from you, "No, no, that's not what I meant." Writing down what you want -- in detail, and feature by feature -- is a mark of your respect for a coder. Having a written spec will let you work with a better class of coder, and, more importantly, it will force you to really think through your idea. Don't use anybody's preprinted form for this, but do read Painless Functional Specifications, a series of four short essays from noted software guru Joel Spolsky on how and why to write up your ideas.
2. View and Do. Once you start writing up your idea, you might find that the end result feels distressingly like an unrelated laundry list of features. One of the best ways to give your list of features some structure is to break them out by user role, and then, by asking, what can the user view and do on this page?
3. Clip, Clip, Clip. Use a screen capture program to let you make images of parts of websites you like. Programs like SnagIt for the PC and Snapz Pro for the Mac let you draw a box around anything on your screen and save it as an image.
4. The World's Worst Wireframe. You probably think wireframes are something done only by people with very fashionable glasses and the word "designer" on their business card, and you'd be right. You're not going to make wireframes, you're going to make Very Bad Wireframes. You should be able to draw a picture of what a page or a dialog box looks like on your site, and these should be included with your spec. You can do these by hand, but you'd probably get a lot out of using a wireframing tool like AxureRP for Windows or OmniGraffle for the Mac. These are like specialty drawing tools where the clip art contains things you'd expect to see on a web page or in an application.
5. Self-Enclosed. Your idea must have a beginning and an end. If you start hearing yourself say the word "platform" and begin to believe that it could do an infinite number of things, stop and take two weeks off.
6. Modest. Keep your initial projects small. A project that adds one feature to pages on your site -- say, a thumbs-up, thumbs-down rating for restaurant reviews or articles -- is bigger than you think.
7. Code Freeze. Once your coder starts working, resist the temptation to add more features.
8. Land of the Mashups. One good place to get ideas is the list of APIs at Programmableweb.com. API is short for Application Programming Interface. Many sites on the web have APIs that let you pull data or even features from another site on the web onto your site. If your site is commercial, be sure to read the terms of use carefully; if you want to try something as an experiment, contact the site whose API you plan to use and ask if you can use their service on a limited basis while you're experimenting.
9. Communicating Without Calendars. Scheduling meetings is a pain. Decide up front on a fixed weekly time to talk with your coder and stick to it, even if you talk between meetings.
10. What's Interesting to a Coder? Ask your coder what tools and programming languages interest them; ask about any side projects or previous projects they've done, even if they don't seem related. Whenever possible, let your coder use tools and techniques that are of interest to them within the context of your project.
11. Code on the cutting room floor. Most of what a coder produces in their lifetime will end up being thrown away, either because poorly organized projects mean they write code that is never released, or code that is used is eventually decommissioned. Think about how you'd feel about this situation. If possible, consider licensing terms that allow the coder some degree of continuing ownership over what they wrote, as long as it doesn't interfere with your project or your business.
12. How it works vs. how it looks. In general, the person who will define whether your sidebar boxes have rounded corners, or whether you should use a light or dark background on the page is not the same person as the coder. Talking about the "look" of your application will waste a coder's time if that's not part of their job. As part of writing your spec and making your wireframes, you should be able to keep how your site or app looks and what it does separate in your own mind.
13. Hello, World! Being able to write even the simplest program in virtually any language will help you understand and communicate with a coder better. Pick up Chris Pine's short and delightful Learn How to Program and try a few of the exercises for yourself.]]> http://www.pbs.org/idealab/rss2/redir/idealab/2008/04/13-ways-to-talk-to-a-programmer005.html http://www.pbs.org/idealab/technology/#004387 Best PracticesTechnology communicationdesigndevelopmentprogrammersprojects Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:38:46 -0500 Lisa Williams The web offers news organizations whole new ways to present complex stories to readers, but even the emergence of free tools hasn't made online databases or Google Maps mashups a daily commonplace in your average news organization's website. Often, that's because the effort involved in building a rich, complex visualization is just too high for it to become an everyday occurrence.

    But what if those days are coming to a close? Enter ManyEyes, a free service created by one of IBM's research labs that allows near-instant interactive visualizations of a data set. Your Excel spreadsheet of public job salaries and perks never looked so good.

    Best of all, the resulting visualizations are, like a YouTube video, embeddable in any web page, so you don't have to feel as though you're distracting readers by sending them to a new site with a new interface: they'll see these nifty interactive visualizations right on your own pages.

    Here's an example of a visualization based on data from Boston Magazine's annual survey of area schools:

    I was introduced to ManyEyes by Emily Lin, who demonstrated it at a meeting at the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT's Media Lab. Emily is a grad student in the TIE program at Harvard School of Education. Emily is working on a project to use Many Eyes in a high school English classroom.

    ]]> http://www.pbs.org/idealab/rss2/redir/idealab/2008/04/manyeyes-data-rich-features-on-the-cheap005.html http://www.pbs.org/idealab/audiovisual/#004375 Audio/VisualTechnology center for future civic mediagoogle mapsmanyeyesmashupsvisualization Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:01:34 -0500 Lisa Williams Journalism is becoming a high tech industry, and that means that career norms for journalists are approaching those of high tech workers -- shorter job tenures, working for smaller companies, and much more. Here are ten things that can help journalists survive Web 2.0 with their sanity intact:
    1. High tech is a boom and bust industry. We get laid off when the economy is good, and we get laid off when the economy is bad. Investors get fed up and pull the plug on small companies; at big companies, the CEO must, on ceremonial occasions, throw a few sacrificial victims to the volcano gods on Wall Street. We don't even take it personally anymore. If it weren't for layoffs, we'd never take a vacation. If you value your sanity, have some savings and don't take out big mortgages.
    2. Jobs are temporary. Friends are forever. High tech offers reincarnation without having to die. The person who's your boss now is someone you'll hire as an employee later; then they'll be your boss again. Everyone gets recycled. Act accordingly: you will see them again.
    3. Nobody has the right qualifications. If you think you aren't qualified to work at Google or Yahoo!, you haven't worked there. People with all sorts of backgrounds have jobs at high tech companies. The best way to get a job at the New York Times is to start by getting a job at Facebook. Bring your values to online companies; bring your skills back to news companies. Repeat.
    4. Company loyalty is obsolete. Think projects, not companies. Look for interesting projects, not prestigious companies. You'll stay with a set of ideas for a decade or more; those ideas may get housed in half a dozen companies during that time. Companies can't and won't provide stability, and even prestigious, exciting companies have a ton of boring, dead end jobs.
    5. Time is on your side, but only if you take it. Why pick up that "Learn to Build Google Maps" book if you don't know how long it will take for you to be able to do something useful - or even if you'll be able to do something useful when you're done? Set your goal-orientation aside for an hour or two a week for study and experiment with something that excites you without any practical expectation of results. On the job training just makes you an expert in something you don't love.
    6. Breaking things is a privilege. Progress is about alternating breaking and fixing. Anything 100% working is 100% dead.
    7. RTFM. It's all they really teach at MIT. Yes, read the, uh....fine....manual. The whole thing. Really.
    8. Write the manual. No manual? Write the fine manual. Your newspaper website lets users blog...and has no manual? No video tutorials? Why not? Create the documentation and you don't just know it - you wrote the book on it.
    9. Narrow comprehensiveness. The web rewards narrow comprehensiveness - "everything about something."
    10. Make it free. Traditionally, the news industry has taken stuff that's free - public information, for example - and made it worth money by adding editorial value. On the web, the most successful companies don't build, they collapse. They take something that used to cost money and make it free. What costs money in your region that you can make free? Craigslist isn't the only one that can play that game.
    ]]> http://www.pbs.org/idealab/rss2/redir/idealab/2008/04/ten-things-journalists-should-know-about-surviving-in-a-high-tech-industry005.html http://www.pbs.org/idealab/best-practices/#004362 Best PracticesFinancial Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:15:47 -0500 Lisa Williams Massive layoffs with no end in sight. Wave after wave of acquisitions and mergers fueled by the excesses of artificially cheap capital. Widespread fear that an entire industry and its contributions will stall or simply stop.

    This describes the news industry today, but it also described the high tech industry in the late eighties and early nineties. Digital Equipment Corporation laid off people by the tens of thousands; Data General and Apollo Computer sank beneath the waves; Prime Computer fought off a hostile take-over attempt by corporate raiders only to die of its wounds; there was no Sam Zell to step in for Prime. IBM and Hewlett Packard survived, but never regained their roles as central innovators in their industry.

    I am not a journalist. Today, I run a site that others often call an example of "citizen journalism," but I am a high-tech person from a family of high-tech people. My parents met over a minicomputer; my marriage comes with free lifetime technical support; our kids will know their emacs from their vi. I haven't gone anywhere, but your profession, journalism, has drifted steadily closer to mine. What's happening to you and yours now - layoffs, being out of work, thinking about taking up teaching, wondering if your kids should follow in your footsteps - happened to me and mine a few decades ago, and it made for a few miserable Thanksgiving dinners paid for with unemployment checks and spent with laid-off aunts, uncles, and cousins.

    When our central institutions blew up, people asked many of the same questions I hear among journalists today. Without these institutions, who will fund the mission? How will we attract the talent we need to make the transition? Just as journalism without newspapers seems inconceivable now, it seemed inconceivable to many then that innovation could continue without the might, resources, and sheer heft of the companies that formed the core of the high tech industry. Who would write the next operating system? Create the next generation of microprocessors? Today, journalists ask how democracy will fare in a country without a robust free press. Then, technologists asked how the United States could retain its leadership position without big, powerful computing companies.

    There's no underestimating the pain of the tech implosion: people who got laid off expected to be out of work for a year or more; people lost their houses, got divorced, left the industry entirely; lucky ones took early retirement packages. To make matters worse, many of them had deep loyalties to the companies they worked for and spoke with pride of the "HP way," the "IBM way." The breakdown also wasn't sudden: from beginning to end the dismantling took nearly a decade.

    We decamped from the Titanic and dispersed in every direction in a fleet of kayaks: small, self-propelled, and iceberg-proof. We learned to be loyal to our friends and to the ideas and ideals that we had genuine passion for: because it was our friends who were going to pull us out of the cold water, and our ideas that would get us going again after a setback.

    What we discovered, of course, was that innovation survived the death of its institutions. Only ten years after DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen stepped down amid layoffs, Google had its IPO. If you are reading these words on the Web, both of us are the beneficiaries of LAMP, the "web stack" that serves the vast majority of websites to browsers across the world. An acronym for its components - Linux, Apache (a web server), MySQL (database), and PHP (scripting language) - each started as the contribution of an individual and is maintained by a distributed cast of thousands. The central innovations of the web today don't emerge from the labs of giants but from the dorm rooms of kids. And on them is built a big and varied industry with, yes, actual paychecks.

    Do not mistake this message as a prediction that the news industry's current misery is mere stage-setting for a glorious resurgence. It isn't.

    As the web, software, and news become a single industry, the stability and security we knew when our founding institutions were big and strong are gone and will never return. Gone with them are the sclerotic bureaucracy. Gone with them is the feeling of giving up changing anything because you can't even figure out how many people to ask for permission. All of these and more are as dead as IBM's dress code of blue blazer, red tie, white shirt.

    Good riddance!

    On the decks of a career Titanic, you don't have much choice but to sit back and let others ensure your safety and set your course. With a career in a kayak, you can and must set your own direction and learn the skills to keep yourself safe. You'll discover what thousands upon thousands of tech workers discovered: you can do great work outside of an institutional, big-company context, and you can make a living doing so. High tech companies didn't own innovation; the innovators did. News organizations don't own journalism: journalists do.

    [This is an expanded and illustrated version of an essay that originally appeared in Nieman Reports. Up Next: Ten Things Journalists Should Know Now That Their Industry Is a High Tech Industry.]

    ]]> http://www.pbs.org/idealab/rss2/redir/idealab/2008/04/journalism-will-survive-the-death-of-its-institutions005.html http://www.pbs.org/idealab/philosophy/#004361 FinancialPhilosophyTechnology businessdownturnfuture of journalisminstitutionsjournalismlayoffsnewspaperstechnology Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:38:06 -0500 Lisa Williams

    How can technology improve on even the best journalistic work and help journalists hold officials to account? In the first of the News Is Code series, we take a look at the recent Pulitzer won by Dana Priest and Anne Hull of the Washington Post for their series on conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

    ]]> http://www.pbs.org/idealab/rss2/redir/idealab/2008/04/news-is-code-1-attack-of-the-podium-weasels005.html http://www.pbs.org/idealab/technology/#004358 Audio/VisualBest PracticesTechnology journalismpulitzerwapowashington post Sun, 13 Apr 2008 11:12:03 -0500 Lisa Williams "People misunderstood what we mean by innovative -- they looked at what won last year and applied it to a kind, cute, delightful new content area that made us just cry when we had to reject it."

    -- Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation, speaking at the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society about the process of judging applications for Year 2 of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge grants.

    ]]> http://www.pbs.org/idealab/rss2/redir/idealab/2007/11/how-to-make-a-foundation-cry005.html http://www.pbs.org/idealab/philosophy/#004183 Philosophy berkmankebbelknightnewschallenge Tue, 13 Nov 2007 13:17:11 -0500 Lisa Williams Debbie Galant of Baristanet has launched the Baristanet Book Club, opening with an author interview conducted by Jay McInerney:

    So, why is Jay McInerney writing for Baristanet?

    It starts with the precipitous decline in book reviewing by mainstream media, a trend documented here and much fretted about by authors, reviewers, and publishers.

    As an author, I knew about this. But who thought I could be part of the solution? Well, Paul Bogaards, a Glen Ridge resident, avid Baristanet reader and executive at Knopf, did. In mid-September, he invited me to a lunch with representatives from the Association of American Publishers and the National Book Critics Circle, and by the end of the meal, The Baristanet Book Club was born.
    

    Check out this video of Galant shot by JD Lasica, where she talks about Baristanet, likely the most successful independent hyperlocal site in the US:

    MPEG-4
    • Windows Media
    • Flash (with deep tags at MotionBox that let you skip through parts of the interview)
    Length: 28:48
    ]]> http://www.pbs.org/idealab/rss2/redir/idealab/2007/10/baristanet-book-club-launches-with-jay-mcinerney005.html http://www.pbs.org/idealab/audiovisual/#004138 Audio/VisualBest PracticesFinancialMarketingParticipation baristanetbook reviewshyperlocalknopfvideo Fri, 19 Oct 2007 12:16:07 -0500 Lisa Williams Placeblogger launched on January 1, 2007. Done on a shoestring budget using open source tools, Placeblogger let people find and see the large and growing number of placeblogs -- weblogs devoted to a particular geographic community.

    Placeblogger's origins can be traced back to a lunch in an Italian restaurant in San Francisco, in June of 2006. I was seated with Jay Rosen of Pressthink and Dan Gillmor, author of We The Media and director of the freshly-minted Center for Citizen Media. Jay asked me, "How many blogs like yours do you think there are?" And, just pulling a number out, I said, "A thousand. In the US." And I began to add to the list of great placeblogs I knew about, like Baristanet in Montclair, NJ, or Universal Hub in Boston, ones that had inspired my own local site, H2otown.info.

    As I began to build the list, I discovered that there were many more placeblogs than either Jay or I imagined. But they weren't easy to find -- often they were buried in search results. It was Susan Mernit of Yahoo! that gave me the idea that what I was doing was more than just a list of sites: it could be a service. Something modest and useful that let people search the sites by location, subscribe to their feeds, browse headlines, and most importantly, visit them. That was the genesis of what I now think of as Placeblogger 1.0.

    Six months later, Placeblogger was live, and H2otown was ticking along, and I was realizing that I was reaching the limits of the kinds of projects I could do as an individual. To go to the next level, I needed to work with other people, and I started to work with Teresa Hanafin, Bob Kempf, and Jason Butler of Boston.com, the online wing of The Boston Globe on adding interactivity and hyperlocal focus to the Globe's online presence.

    But with the support of the Knight Foundation's News Challenge, Placeblogger got a team of its own, and a chance to go to the next level, from something modest and useful, but largely based on well-known technology, to making a new contribution of its own: Placeblogger 2.0.

    What we're working on is exciting -- but it's the first thing that has ever put has put a crimp in my blogging. If I'm not working on Placeblogger, or talking to the others who are coming on board on the project, I'm thinking about it. But even in the era of perpetual beta there is some wisdom in waiting until something is ready. I look forward to revealing what we're doing, and the backstory behind it, as we bring pieces of it live.

    Even though much of my brainpower is currently yoked to parts of our project that are not yet fit to blog, I know there are things that we should be talking about. Perhaps the most important is this one: As journalism becomes a high-tech profession, one essential skill will be learning how to be an effective partner with programmers -- even if you're not a programmer yourself. (Yet).

    ]]> http://www.pbs.org/idealab/rss2/redir/idealab/2007/10/placeblogger-20-taking-local-to-the-next-level005.html http://www.pbs.org/idealab/technology/#004130 Best PracticesTechnology citizen journalismhyperlocalplaceblogger Wed, 17 Oct 2007 02:52:20 -0500