Let's connect the scattered dots.

David Ellison-Bey and I are still up.  The police are still searching outside.  They have the measuring tape out.  A couple of hours ago we heard a crackly crackle of what I thought was fireworks, but David understood was a gunfight.  I went outside when David alerted me to the police lights. I thought, I must get there before they ticket my grandmother's car.

She told me today, don't take her car, it has gone through so much. When I let it overheat two weekends ago, so that the green antifreeze gurgled out onto Devon street, her mechanic explained that it was only good for short trips.  She was afraid that it would break down and have to be towed.  She loves me, but I got that $50 parking ticket last Tuesday at David's house, 6726 S Parnell Ave, in the heart of Chicago's South Side, when I didn't notice the Street Cleaning signs, which I supposed went up that same morning.  The youths on the porch across the street disagreed when I approached them regarding that.  I was fearless.  I said, alert us next time, if you see our cars out, which they surely thought bizaare, but they heard me out.

And my grandmother shook the phone bill at me last week. She said that I spoke too long to Lithuania, but no, I realized that AT&T had billed $100 for my 12 minutes.  When she came back from the hospital, she had told me, could it be that God had brought me to her this summer, just before she fell and broke her hip? She recovered from hip replacement surgery like a beautiful athlete of 91 years, a peasant girl from Lithuania.  Today, she trotted out to the yard with her cane, and I trimmed the bush for her.  I was good, but why do bad things happen to me?  I need to help David, he needs to make his foreclosure payment, and such, and his car is not running. But those are not my problems, those are David's, she says.  Oh, I've been using her car to hop back and forth between her house and David's, but not much longer.  She tells me, as in recent years, that she'll not renew her driver's license, though we hope she might, yet I sense she frets so about her car's life.  You may take it, she relents, but I slip a notch deeper in depression.

Now the car, if that was hers, was diagonal in the street, I presumed smashed. I walk up among the three officers around it.  This is my grandmother's car. And what is it doing here? There was not a nick. I suppose some youths lifted it up, and set it down?  No, it had been pushed out into the street by a car that had rounded through the grass lot, apparently driven by a man who had been shot, who thereby managed to speed away down our one-way street, the wrong way, only to come to a final stop.

I just spoke with a policeman.  Two people died.  He advised me that there will be retaliation, back and forth, with the west side of the 7th district.  Take precautions.

My grandmother's car has a guardian angel.  Everybody else is doomed.

David has a car and a truck.  Neither has run this last half year, but he gets hundreds of dollars in tickets.  I know his street mechanics.  Lovely people.  One is so gentle, so friendly, so mechanically attuned.  He has no car, so David and I picked him up with my grandmother's.  He diagnosed all its sounds.  I showed him Marcin Jakubowski's Factor E Farm videos, the open source tractor and the solar turbine.  We can do that in David's yard as part of the Moorish Cultural Workshop.  We can build that in the empty lot.  Someday, we could buy that lot.  I encourage him, what does he dream of?  Yes, he would love to. I meet his wife. They have been married for thirty-three years, an eternity.  David, you agree? He explains, and without knowing any facts, I am left with the thoughts, that the most lovely human can be a heroin addict, for whom no dream can ever be greater than heroin. Today, I find David at his kitchen table with another adviser, a helpful man who loves me like a brother.  David notes later, this man is a registered sex offender, convicted of raping his wife.  And so the South Side of Chicago is a country of second-class citizens.  The best of us have names, but I can't share them if I want to share the truth, which is to say, hearsay.  The rest of us don't have names, while we roam "freely" on the streets.  Slaves don't have names, I challenged the nameless youth at the corner store.

Christopher Russell came by today.  David told him not to keep anything at the house, but Chris didn't want to hear it.  David's 72 years old, and it's not for him to care for 24 year old Chris, and deal with his tribulations, who shot at who, who steals what, who is after him, where will he spend the night, his baby boy Chris Jr., his baby's mom.  I keep my goodness small.  Some hot milk with honey.  A book on Zen Buddhism.  I drove him to the El with my grandmother's car, when he feared that he might be jumped.  I didn't let him into the house and he got insolent, yet I stood up to him and he backed down.  He asked me to keep after him to do the right thing.  He took me to his Kingdom Hall. I took him and David to the House of Culture, 618 E 71st Str, that creative hope, where Lord Cashus exalted David, the only real Moor in the house.

David, I say, I know that you can't take on Chris and his challenges.  Yet you are my link to him.  You attract him. Thanks to you, I might help him, if others might help me. And he might help us reach out to the youth on the porch. And they might share Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom and Justice, as the Prophet says.

Next to the house with a porch is a memorial.  Now it is a T-shirt on a chain-link fence.  Before there was a pile of stuffed animals.  David was there when he was shot, two years ago.  Walter.

This late-night episode is a retaliation, a memorial, for two men who are so distant.

My name is Angela Antony, and my cofounder's name is Sandra Ekong. We were roommates at Harvard.

Like most things hip and cutting edge, Beanstockd was born in Paris. Sandra and I lived there for 6 months during our junior year in college; it was there that we discovered that we were an unstoppable duo, that snails are ocassionally edible (it's really a personal choice), and that our chic Parisian lifestyle revealed some fundamental problems with the way we lived our lives in America.

After six months of 5 minute showers, air-drying clothing, and 5-dollar bottles of water (quoi?), even we were taken aback by our callous consumption back in the states. The light bulb was the realization that it took only 2-3 months abroad for two non-environmentalists to comfortably adopt a way of life that avoided overconsumption. Our mission became to find a way to recreate the subtle social pressure we experienced while living in Europe that caused us to change our behavior. If we could compel people to make these small, almost negligible lifestyle changes on a mass scale in the US, we surmised, it could make a very decisive difference in the environmental movement. From the streets of Paris to the basement computer lab of Lowell House at Harvard, the Beanstockd Project was born.

Months of debate, dialogue, and due diligence allowed us to pinpoint three major gaps in the environmental movement that we felt were not being adequately addressed: negative stigma, lack of personal accountability, and lack of incentive system (read more here).

Our comprehensive solution: The Beanstockd Project (www.beanstockd.com), a social media project comprised of an online news source (Beanstockd News) and The Beanstockd Game, an environmental competition powered by real-life pro-environmental actions. Beanstockd is led by an incredibly passionate 20+ person team, with a readership hundreds of thousands strong, creating a model of environmental action that is not only novel -- built on socially and psychologically-sound principles -- but highly scalable and self-sustaining. We look forward to your comments, challenges, and ideas as we fill you in on the issues we've overcome and the ones that we face in our rescue mission to save the world, one tongue-in-cheek step at a time.

My story is real, except for the Includer, which may yet some day be real as well. The Includer is a device for Africans or anybody to read and write emails and other texts stored on their USB flash drives. Once a week they might walk the three miles or so to their Internet cafe to upload their emails and download more.

The Includer is the hero of our every episode. I am simply the blogger for the Includer. I am real... so what. Yet I suppose that you matter. I will draw my characters and I will draw you in with them.

Samwel Kongere lives on Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria, in Kenya. He walks three miles, crossing a sandbar, to Mbita Point, on the mainland. In 2005, he used to get online at the butterfly research station. That's what I call "marginal Internet access", which is any kind of limitation on your life online. I can imagine, they could only let him hang around so many hours of the day. Thank you, butterfly researchers, for sharing your access.

Many Africans pay $1 per hour at the Internet cafe. I am heartened that they participate at Minciu Sodas, my online laboratory for independent thinkers. We respond. They do very well. Within a year or two, with the help of one person or another, they may get a computer, a video camera, paid work, emergency assistance, and even fly to a conference in Africa or Europe.

Last spring, I made a list of our participants' endeavors. What might we "work for free" on as I looked for "work for pay"? Thank you to Sasha Mrkailo, our virtual assistant in Serbia, for helping me. Of the one hundred endeavors, about one-third had to do with making the best of the Internet access we have. Joy Tang of One Village Foundation gave us our first such endeavor in 2003, a wonderfully bold vision of Africa and Silicon Valley responding to the AIDS catastrophe with unity centers for village rebirth. That year I took to heart George Soros's Open Society Insitute's call for proposals to create software for NGOs. Thanks to Ian Bruk of Canada, I dedicated three months to propose a social networking kit for activists with marginal Internet access. I went to the island of Vis, Croatia, for a related summer camp, where I was kicked off the island for being too intimidating. My proposal was one of the first to be rejected.

Last August, as I walked the post-Soviet streets of Vilnius, Lithuania, I wondered, what could I do differently so that I had a chance of making money and repaying my debts? There are a billion people who can walk to the Internet. It's a good idea to optimize software so they could spend fewer hours at Internet cafes and more hours at offline computers. But the idea was too abstract to explain to funders. They couldn't wrap their minds around it. For that reason alone, I thought to propose a device, a Flash Drive Editor, for reading and writing the contents on one's USB flash drive. As I checked out of the supermarket and saw the Wincor-Nixdorf cash register's 5" black and white customer display, I thought, Wow! that's all we need.

Might the Flash Drive Editor advance all of our endeavors? I thought aloud about each one. Why achieve this or that? Each purpose leads to another. I drew a diagram of all our purposes. Ultimately, they all have us "reach out to the hard to reach", which I suppose is God's purpose. That's why I named our device the Includer.

Our African participants greatly encouraged me that we were on the right track. Yet the confirmation came from Ricardo, a UK engineer who I found through his Sneakernet page at the OLPC wiki. He's a real hero of our Includer. He has written hundreds of creatively technical pages at our wiki. He's helped dozens of Africans get computers and get online. By this time, Samwel was leading a center with 15 computers and training 3,000 women in ICT and entrepreneurship. Ricardo and Samwel are making leaps and bounds in bringing Internet to the region. Ricardo is a pseudonym and I have never met him, but he is real enough for me.

Samwel just returned from one month in Italy, his first trip to Europe, thanks to Maria Agnese Giraudo, Kennedy Owino and the Nafsi Afrika Acrobats. I don't know now if our paths diverge. I want to organize the kingdom of heaven, a culture for independent thinkers, where we work openly to create the world we want. I want a world where people think deeply on their own, but share their work-in-progress at every opportunity. I think alone. I have a lab for that! I want others to think alone, I want to listen to them, I want to think along. Do we have enough for a culture? Do we have enough for the Includer?

Will you be our hero? Will you think along? Live with us, the poor in spirit. Reach out with us! Are you hard to reach? Are you with me? Or against me?

After three months of working with conceptual mockups and user interface flows, we're finally able to click through a set of Web pages connected to a database that generates simple magazine-style PDF files. In the coming weeks and months we'll be sharing more of that with you, starting with videos and, as soon as possible, prototypes and betas that you can play around with to provide feedback. None of these will be the final application -- which launches in March -- but they will allow us to work with the larger community of people who have an interest in Printcasting to help us make the final product that much better.

In the meantime, I'd like to share a little about the team we've assembled that's making this happen, and how we're getting from point A to Z. I'm excited to put the spotlight on them because I know that they're all extremely excited about Printcasting and want it to be a big success. We want everyone to feel a sense of ownership of Printcasting because it's an open source project. That begins with the people I mention below, but you can also get involved (more on that later).

Transition Plans

The hardest and most important thing I've done this year is build a new team while transitioning from my other duties. For those of you who are just now entering your ideas for next year's Knight News Challenge, take note. The planning process for your transition should begin in your head as soon as you fill out your entry form. We started our planning in February of last year when we learned that The Bakersfield Californian was a News Challenge finalist.

While Printcasting was proposed by three of us -- myself, Justinian Hatfield and Mary Lou Fulton -- it quickly became clear that we couldn't all drop what we were doing to make it happen. And we felt that it was paramount to have at least one full-time staff person responsible from start to finish. I began the emotionally difficult job of planning my eventual exit from the exciting social media work I helped start at the Californian back in 2004.

Fortunately, Justinian was ready and willing to step into my shoes, and he remains a trusted Printcasting advisor, stakeholder and friend. And Mary Lou has been incredibly helpful in an oversight role for the company. She will be even more involved in the second phase, when we launch and market Printcasting in Bakersfield.

Finding the Lead Developer

Printcasting sounds like a simple idea, and to the user it will definitely feel that way, but underneath it's a complicated piece of software with a lot of moving parts. While it uses an open-source foundation (Drupal), the most essential components -- the ones that create a magazine using variable content -- are custom code.

We knew that we'd be best off with a full-time staff developer. We found the right mix of skills and passion in Ron Robinson, who had done some contracting work for the Californian starting in January. At his previous job he built a system that lets people create print layouts for books that feature their own photos. He was truly the right person for the job at the right time, so as soon as we got word about our grant we extended him an offer.

Crafting the User Experience

All the rest of our budget (the majority of it) is for contractors. Our most urgent need at first was for conceptual mockups to help us think through the user experience. I began putting out the word for user interface designers as early as March. While we talked to a lot of qualified individuals and firms, I ultimately decided that I needed someone who I knew would understand the vision of Printcasting.

Tom Dellecave, an old colleague from AOL who now operates his own company Second Wind Media, did a great job creating an initial UI. You can see his work in the concept presentation in this video on Printcasting.com.

At this time we also began to think more about the visual look, feel and layout of the PDF magazines and newsletters Printcasting would generate. This is an area where The Bakersfield Californian has a lot of talent, and I was fortunate to get some initial help from staff designer Glenn Hammett.

Writing the Code

During this time, Ron was poring over a 55-page Product Requirements Document I'd written and attempting to fit that into a technical architectural plan. Around the middle of the summer he'd settled on using the Drupal framework, based on its modular architecture and large and growing community. We began putting out feelers for PHP developers with experience in Drupal who could work with Ron as a virtual development team. After once again talking to lots of different companies and individuals, including five which provided proposals based on our specs, we chose Photon Infotech out of Chennai, India.

Before now, the furthest I'd ever personally outsourced anything to was Canada. Working with a company on the opposite side of the globe was and still is new for everyone on our team. After one month we're very happy with the knowledge, commitment and responsiveness we're seeing from Photon, and I'm surprised to find that the Indian developers at Photon are more communicative and customer-focused than some U.S.-based developers we talked to. And while this isn't the only reason we chose them, it's also really great to know that we're getting two full-time developers working on Printcasting for the same cost as one half of a developer in the U.S. or Canada.

I should also mention that having our own full-time staff developer who manages the contract developers gives us the flexibility and confidence to outsource in this way. I feel strongly that it's important to keep the vision of a product very close. Once you have the right core team it makes sense to fill in the holes with contractors whose physical locations are less important.

Designing the User Experience

Once we chose Drupal, we knew we needed someone who could translate Tom's conceptual thinking into designs that would work on any Drupal site. And aside from that, we needed a designer who could create everything from the graphics, templates and themes that Drupal needs to the content and ad templates that Printcasting will generate.

When I stumbled across Don Hajicek, formerly of Boulder Drupal shop pingVision, I knew I'd found someone special. You will get to see Don's work soon, but let me just say that sometimes I think he understands the value proposition of Printcasting better than I do. Perhaps this is to be expected of someone who started out as a print advertising designer in Chicago, competed with his local newspaper using what we now call a "hyperlocal" Web site, and started his own Web design firm.

Don will subcontract as needed to Greg Hines, a developer who understands the ins and outs of Drupal themes and architecture. Both Don and Greg are very involved in the Drupal community, which excites us because they'll be able to help us spread the word about Printcasting to thousands of Drupal sites when it's provided as an open source module.

What's Next?

Thanks to all of the people above, we're now finally hitting a running stride with Printcasting. Among our next milestones are to release a rapid prototype for feedback, launch an alpha before Thanksgiving, and release a series of increasingly open betas between then and February. That will give us plenty of time to polish the edges and -- who knows -- maybe even squeeze in a few extra features before we launch in Bakersfield on March 2.

Join the Team!
I've talked a lot about our team, but it's a lot larger than the people listed here. Do you want to help shape the direction of Printcasting? Join our team of advisors on the Printcasting.com social network. We'll be using the site as a launching pad for testing and feedback. There are 102 members already, and there's always room for more. The more input we get over time, the better the final product will be when we open source it. Hope to see you there!

Last week, the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy arrived in Silicon Valley to hold the first of its three planned community forums. I was asked to speak on a panel that day about "technology and innovation" but hung around for most of the day to listen to the other two panels and the wide-ranging discussion.

This is timely and important work. I've spoken with numerous community leaders in Silicon Valley in recent months who are growing more anxious about what will happen to the quality of civic life if the coverage of local news continues to diminish.

Amy Gahran (who also blogs here at Idea Lab) took up this subject at Poynter's E-Media Tidbits blog where she asked of the commission's work: "How important is local, really?":

I suspect that clinging reflexively to "local" as the paramount criteria for "relevant" reflects a newspaper perspective that was never a good fit for most people, and that never really served most people's information needs well.

But, in fact, that's exactly the issue here: Even in Silicon Valley, there are growing numbers of city councils and counties that are no longer covered. There are school districts barely covered. And local elections are now barely covered with any depth. The result is a growing anxiety that less information about local issues will lead to less civic engagement. Despite the explosion of virtual networks, we still lives our lives in the real, physical world. And there are issues and information that I would argue are vital and distinct as they relate to your personal geography.

Sounds grim, right? Except there's also an opportunity to create local information networks that could be far better than the ones that are ebbing. Even at their apex, newspapers still only covered a sliver of the news and information that hit closest to home for most local communities.

To tackle this vast subject, the Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute announced earlier this year the creation of this 15-member commission. The commission is being co-chaired by Marissa Mayer, a vice president at Google, and Theodore Olsen, the former solicitor general of the United States, and it includes other such notable figures as Michael Powell, the former chair of the Federal Communications Commission.

The commission is asking three big questions:

*What are the information needs of communities in our American democracy?
*What are the current trends affecting how community information needs are met?
*What changes will ensure that community information needs will be better met in the future?

A version of my remarks are posted here.

But I wanted to highlight a few issues that were discussed that struck me:

*Trust. I wrote about this issue in a column last week for the Mercury News. The question fundamentally is how does a community filter the explosion of information and evaluate which sources are reliable? This sparked one of the more interesting conversations on Monday. It raised a second question about whether there needs to be some new kind of intermediary, or whether we can count on the wisdom of crowds to help establish reputation and trust and responsibility.

*Community information is a broader conversation than just journalism. When people get together to discuss what comes next after newspapers, there tends to be a lot of journalists in the room, and so a lot of the conversation revolves around journalism. Certainly, that's a critical component. But when I think about community information, I think of things like a visit my family made on our way to Yosemite recently. We stopped in a Target in a small town in the Central Valley and at the front of the store were two computer kiosks. They were there because apparently you have to apply for jobs online at Target. But in this digital era, how are folks in that area able to find out about jobs, let alone apply, if they're not digitally savvy?

*Digital literacy. However things evolve, it seems clear that citizens will need a higher degree of digital literacy to be informed consumers or active participants as they choose. I know the Knight Foundation is going through some soul searching about its mission in this changing landscape. But while I don't think we can expect foundations to fund the journalism we need forever, the area of digital literacy seems like a great place for foundations and educational institutions to focus their efforts.

Institutional Problems

Again, that's all true. But collegiate publications don't have the budget to fund innovation like many of the professional papers do. We also don't necessarily have the expertise, the time, or the willpower to actively try to break out of the institutional molds we're stuck in. I think one of the chief problems plaguing the collegiate press is a combination of institutional forgetfulness and inertia.

Every year the people who have been at a college paper the longest graduate, often having established a set of policies and a way of doing things that people continue to use long into the future, even if they are no longer best practices. I understand this happens in a lot of other industries too, but the degree to which it takes place in college newsrooms is highly exaggerated. Students have class, part time jobs, and the newspaper. How do they have time to reexamine the practices and policies they use every day to make them better when they already work OK?

The fact of the matter is that college editors can't sit around and wait for a professional newspaper somewhere to invent an ingenious new way of delivering the news, or break ground on a brilliant new business model. Every college paper has to find the time, energy, and resources to start innovating. Maybe that involves applying for a Knight grant? I'm not sure. But college papers are actually in a better position to reach out to their communities than most larger, professional papers. I think there is a bit of a misnomer out there in the "new media" crowd (of which I am a card carrying member) that simply working on a better website, blogging, integrating video and audio, and adding more interactive content will start to solve the problems of the industry. I think that's largely false.

Community Generated Content

In my opinion everything the new media people are working on equals better journalism, and more accessible content. But it's not enough. Newspapers have to find a way to become central to the exchange of information and ideas in their communities if they want to start making more money. Newspapers need to be more local and more central, they need to offer social network and social bookmarking features, and they need to embrace a certain level of user generated content. That could mean a lot of things, though, so I want to explain how I am going to use my News Challenge project, Populous, to achieve some of those goals.

Right now at UCLA there are something like 800 different student organizations. There are far too many for the students to keep track of, and there is no real tool for these organizations to have a web presence, market themselves, or organize online. There are also no good directories for local shops and restaurants. These are all information needs on campus that need to be filled, and the Daily Bruin is working on doing that through Populous.

The Community News Network aspect of our project aims to provide every student organization on campus with the opportunity to create a website on the Daily Bruin's network. They will be able to do basic things like add members, have a blog, and contribute to a community calendar. Every time they want to do any of that they will be coming to our website.

We're going to fulfill a need on campus by providing this service, and we will also provide our readers a searchable database of the student organizations on campus and create a platform for an all-inclusive community calendar at the same time. And that's just part of the vision. We also understand that we're not the only people that can report on the news going on on campus, and we're never going to be able to cover everything. So we're going to let all of our users create their own blogs on our network so they can write about what's going on around them and in their lives.

An Alternate Business Model?

I think once we accomplish this network, essentially a robust news- and community-focused social network, we're going to be driving a lot more traffic to our website. Will it be enough to increase our online advertising revenue to compensate for our decline in print advertising? Unfortunately, no. That's where another philosophical decision we've made at the Bruin comes in: to use our website to generate support for, and interest in, our print product. They are going to have to work together and complement each other. My hope, and intent, is that once people see the Daily Bruin making more of an effort to engage the community in its news coverage they will be more interested in picking up the print version of the newspaper.

We are also going to redesign the print product to incorporate some of the community generated aspects of our website, and retool it to make sure the news and style of the print product complements, but doesn't repeat, what's online. But that's a whole new entry. My plan to increase the Daily Bruin's revenue has two prongs: one is to support our current business model with increased community interest and through our web presence, and the other is to flip some of the features we're working on into alternate business models.

Hopefully this approach will work out for us, and maybe other college publications can adopt it and start doing better financially. But it also concerns me that we're one of the only college newspapers thinking like this. We might be right, but we might not be, and the more people that are working on these issues the better.

Written with attitude, humor and at times a sense of horror at the mess we humans can make, the site provides one stop shopping for those who enjoy everything from Beyonce to Barack, from the serious to the celebrity.

On any given day, Williams will post an item and links on subjects ranging from an historical overview of the racially awkward comments made by Sen. Joe Biden to the fact that Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps listens to rapper Lil Wayne before he competes.

Some of the most interesting posts are triggered by breaking news, such as after the acquittal of the police officers who shot an unarmed groom on the eve his wedding. That afternoon Williams posted a link to the University of Chicago's Stereotyping and Prejudice Research Laboratory that where you can assess whom you would shoot and how quickly you would shoot them according to their race.

Below Lauren Williams describes her work in her own words.

How would you describe your blog?

Stereohyped is a black-interest blog where visitors can get politics, current events, entertainment, and celebrity gossip all in one place. Depending on a news cycle, some days it will look like a gossip blog and some days it will look like a political blog, but I generally try to stay in the center on the Barack and Beyonce spectrum.

Who is your audience?

When Stereohyped started, I thought the audience would be made up of 20- or 30-something black professional women. I was right, for the most part, but I never could have guessed that beyond the core demographic, Stereohyped would attract so many different readers of all ages, ethnicities, races, and nationalities. The audience is definitely a mixing bowl, and I love that there is a wide variety of perspectives in the comment section.

What are your goals?

Stereohyped is still relatively young in the blog world, and my goals are simple. I would like to see the site continue to grow, attract more readers, and maybe inform a few people and change a few minds along the way.

What are you proudest of?

Before Stereohyped launched, I was very worried that my voice, my style, and the topics that interested me were not going to appeal to a significant number of readers. I was pretty sure that I would eventually have to compromise my vision in some way in order to increase readership and make myself more appealing to a wide range of readers. That hasn't happened. I'm proud that I've been able to remain true to myself and build a steady, loyal readership at the same time.

What is your background?

I have a Masters degree in Magazine, Newspaper, and Online Journalism from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, and I began my career as a newspaper reporter at the Daily Press in Newport News, Va. After a year on the education beat, I decided that traditional journalism wasn't for me and began a switch to the online world that would eventually lead me to Stereohyped.

Do you think of yourself as a journalist?

Yes. Is what I do for a living journalism? Sometimes. For better or worse, bloggers are not governed by the same stringent ethical guidelines as traditional journalists, and there is a much higher premium placed on entertaining readers. This results in a lot of bad information floating through the blogosphere -- bad information that mainstream journalists sometimes pick up! Having a journalism background helps me to wade through this, and if I'm knowingly posting an unsubstantiated rumor I'll label it as such. But just like a columnist at a daily, I'm in the information gathering and delivery business, with a dose of personal opinion thrown in. My methods are different -- although I do some traditional reporting for the blog occasionally -- but the general objective is the same.

Where do you see the future of journalism?

Online, all the way. Sadly, I don't think that traditional print journalism will be able to stay afloat as people turn to the internet for their information more and more. And even though a lot of traditional journalists hate blogs and bloggers, I think the two warring groups have begun to forge a symbiotic relationship that will continue to grow. At this point, the younger generation of journalists probably read -- and get their enterprise ideas -- from blogs just as much as bloggers read and get their ideas from newspapers and magazines.

What blogs do you read?

Too many to list! For the fluff, I read all of the major black (and "mainstream," for that matter) gossip blogs. For the substance, I like the Huffington Post and Daily Kos, as well was black political blogs like Jack & Jill Politics. There is a proliferation of style blogs out there that are geared toward blacks that I find pretty addictive, like Shake Your Beauty (full disclosure: my sister writes it), Afrobella, and The Fashion Bomb. Really, I could go on for hours. I subscribe to the RSS feeds of hundreds of blogs covering all different topics. I'm definitely a blog junkie.

How do you get your news?

I get my news from a variety of sources, but the big three are tips from readers, online newspapers and news magazines, and other blogs. I write about 14-15 posts a day, and when I'm not actually writing, I'm scouring the web for news stories and inspiration for original features.

What do you think about the power of the black blogosphere?

It can't be denied! A hallmark moment happened last year with the Jena Six. Before most newspapers even made mention that anything was going on, entire blogs were devoted to this particular cause. The mainstream media would have never taken notice if it weren't for the serious coverage the case was getting on black blogs. The black blogosphere was instrumental in calling attention to the issue and effecting change in the case.

Even though its 2008, it is still a struggle to get "black" topics -- ranging from criminal justice to entertainment -- covered with any sort of regularity or depth in the media. The black blogosphere not only balances that out, it also serves as a constant reminder to journalists that these things are happening in the black community, and people are hungry for consistent information. I'm not talking about the occasional, lazily-reported piece, for which the reporter camped outside of the local black church and area beauty parlors and barber shops for quotes. These annoy me to no end. Do you know why? I don't go to church, and I do my own hair. For that matter, I don't have an absentee father, I don't know anyone who is in jail, and I went to college and graduate school. Most of the people I know are like me. There's a larger community out there than is portrayed on cable news, in the papers, and even on television and in movies. I like to think that the black blogosphere is a microcosm of that larger community.

Since we're dealing with a fairly niche topic mainly involving local government in a small city, we were relying on some initiative from people involved in what the city is doing with the carbon tax money. The kind of engagement we envisioned was people speaking up, having a public conversation. But when it came down to it, most of the people "in the know" about Boulder's carbon tax weren't actually comfortable with taking that step.

Part of the problem is that the people most knowledgeable about this issue, while willing to have face-to-face private or group conversations about the matter, were reluctant to share their thoughts online in a persistent, findable way. That's because most of them have various overlapping commitments and concerns (business, political, social, etc.) that cause them concern when they can't directly control who hears which part of what they have to say. So far, we haven't found a good way to get around that barrier.

While dealing with this frustrating challenge, another intriguing issue arose: Most of these people expressed comfort with being interviewed, even though they are reluctant to speak up directly. We were puzzled by this.

For a long time Adam Glenn and I resisted doing interviews. After all, the point of our project was to engage the community in conversation. Resorting to interviews felt too much like traditional journalism. But now, as our project is nearing its end and we haven't yet gotten much traction in this community, we've realized that our last option is to mediate the discussion in a conventional journalistic way.

So now we're going to try yielding to that preference, by doing video interviews. We're starting to work with three people from the University of Colorado journalism school to interview some of the key people on this issue. We're just ramping up on that phase of the project, and we'll see how it goes.

Why video? We think that video will provide the most direct experience of how people express themselves, and therefore be least like traditional journalism and at least somewhat approximate a conversation.

The psychology and politics of speaking up of your own volition v. getting interviewed is pretty interesting, too.

When you are chosen to be interviewed, it can appear to enhance your importance: Someone thought you were interesting or important enough to ask.

In this audio clip from a recent IT Conversations podcast, Jon Udell interviews Dan Bricklin, president of Software Garden, on audio production. About 40 minutes into it, their conversation turned to how people perceive being sought for an interview or photo as a sign of respect:

In contrast, simply speaking up on your own initiative can appear pushy, vain, or desperate. Consider how, in the book world, self-published books are still commonly stigmatized as "vanity press," regardless of quality. That's changing slowly for some publishing markets and genres, but that stigma is hard to fight in all kinds of media.

Furthermore, being chosen to be interviewed can appear to mitigate your personal responsibility for what you say. Answering a question about a touchy subject can be far more politically palatable than choosing to raise the subject of your own volition.

Finally, many people are still uncomfortable with the idea of circumventing the social authority of mainstream news organizations. This is especially true of government officials and public employees, but it's also true of scientists, businesspeople, and others who rely heavily on authority for making decisions, statements, and deals.

Authority sometimes gets a bad rap in American society. It's very human and natural to seek authority, in order to control your personal cognitive burden (decisions, research, etc.), and to feel the security of belonging to a community bound by shared values. If we could never defer to authority, figuring out what to believe and do would be and endless daily chore, fraught with personal responsibility and risk at every turn. It's simply too much work to make up your own mind about everything in today's world.

The human social tendency to seek authority also discourages many people from speaking up directly via nontraditional or non-mainstream media -- especially on topics that involve their work or professional life. Doing so feels a little bit like you're going to sit at the "geek" table in the high school lunchroom. What will people think if you start hanging out with that crowd? Could it damage your own perceived status?

Lesson learned: For community projects that depend on participation from experienced professionals discussing their work and opinions, starting an open public conversation is probably going to be very, very, hard.

In particular, posing public questions to these people questions and hoping they will respond publicly in kind is likely to fail, because they may feel cornered and defensive.

For most professionals, government officials, and public employees, it may be better to work with their ingrained preference for the hierarchy of media: Contacting them for a private interview, asking them questions, and then presenting an edited version of the answers. Later, some of them may be willing to speak up more. But almost all of them probably will be strongly averse to starting by speaking up themselves.

At least, that's been our experience so far. Stay tuned to see how the video interviews go.]]> http://www.pbs.org/idealab/rss2/redir/idealab/2008/08/resorting-to-interviews-when-c.html http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2008/08/resorting-to-interviews-when-c.html Audio/VisualGovernment & PoliticsParticipationPhilosophy communityconversationgovernmentinterviewspoliticsvideo Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:38:49 -0500 David Cohn

• If you just want the progress report on Spot.Us - scroll to the bottom. If you want to peer into my mind, read on.

If I want to explain my job as founder of Spot.Us in one sentence, I'll just say "I'm fundraising for independent journalists to do local investigations."

Obviously it's much more involved than that, but depending on how much energy I have, it works.

But what's the mission of Spot.Us? Perhaps of any Knight News Challenge project?

What follows won't be a personal mission statement, but could be construed as brainstorming to that end.

Right now I'm fundraising so we can hire a journalist who will fact check the political advertisements for the upcoming San Francsico election. This is, as far as I'm concerned, a good cause. All I need is to find 59 more citizens willing to donate $25. I'm lovingly referring to it now as the SF Election Truthiness Campaign and I have to believe I can find 59 SF residents who would see value in it.

But what is behind this? My real goal (or obstacle) is to convince people that investigative journalism is worth their cold hard cash. My obstacle is not all that different from a citizen journalism venture that needs to convince people doing acts of journalism is worth their spare time.

Part of the problem journalism faces is bad PR. "Big J" journalism is associated with newspapers and broadcast television. Products that are facing distress and are increasingly disavowed by the public. More and more people are deciding a newspaper subscription isn't worth their money. That's fine, but if journalism is a process, not a product - some other form of journalism must still be worth money. Right now getting people to donate time or money to journalism is probably akin to getting people to donate time and money to the library.

(Note: I love libraries and actually worked as a librarian through college. My point here is to convey that for most people, newspapers ie journalism = dull, boring, self-sufficient, homework, etc. That's a problem.)

This chain of thought comes from a blog comment left by Anna Haynes that encouraged me to continue thinking about OhMyNews. We all know the citizen journalism goliath in South Korea. It is still the measurement of success in citizen journalism. But it hasn't translated to the States. What they achieved wasn't the result of some technological breakthrough. It was because somehow in that society journalism became cool.

How did that happen? I have no idea - but that's a million dollar question.

Can journalism ever tap into the same energy as DIY knitting, gardening or tech tinkering?

I'm not talking about a grassroots campaign here - that's for initiatives that are struggling and need to organize people. I'm talking about a cultural shift of magnitude such that journalisms will be something people feel a cultural pressure to contribute to.

We all think journalism is important, but we are bias. All too often in the journalism blogosphere we take this notion for granted. That somehow journalism is cool and important and it's a shame if it disapears. Sadly, I don't think the rest of the country feels this way. I fear that local reporting from newspapers could dispaear over the course of the next decade and normal every day citizens wouldn't blink twice.

Sorry for the skeptical rant. But hey, it's good to get this stuff off my chest.

• Status Update on Spot Us!!!!
  

Current Mood: Busy, optimistic (despite post above) and juggling a few balls including.

(a. fundraising: http://wiki.spot.us/election

(b. Design for Spot.Us

(c. Legal for Spot.Us

(d. Always learning more things.

Details

(a. So far very happy with my decision to bootstrap the starting point of Spot Us instead of waiting till October for a big "ta-da" launch. We have two more pitches that we are fundraising for - the election fact-checking truthiness campaign being a very exciting one. More pitches to come soon, but at this stage, I'm taking them one at a time from reporters I know.

(b. I hope to put up wireframes on the blog for all to peer at. It depends on how comfortable the designers are with that. I prefer sausage making being public, but I can understand their concern. At the very least - know we are making progress. Scheduled to launch in October (fingers crossed).

(c. I am almost officially fiscally sponsored by the Center for Media Change which is run by Hal Plotkin. Long story short: To be a nonprofit I needed somebody to be my fiscal sponsor. If you check CMC's one project right now: ReelChanges.org, you'll see why this is a match made in heaven.

(d. Studying: Crowdfunded and user-created advertising. Absolutely fascinating!!!!! SaysMe.Tv. These guys are taking video blogging and finding a way for everyday citizens to share the cost of getting it on local cable television. Crowdfunded public messages. Makes me think ala-cart content isn't such a crazy idea. One very notable political use of SaysMe.Tv already

Here are the thoughts I shared with him in full (edited to remove redundancy now that I've added links to previous postings).

Q: When you worked in newspapers, especially at a larger metro with a mobile staff like the Mercury-News, did you feel that reporters and editors were well-connected to the communities that they covered -- engaged in the community and in conversations with citizens that led back to better news coverage. If not, how did journalism suffer?

A: It's hard to speak for others. But my impression was that we were fairly well connected to the tech and local government folks, and less so to others. There were obvious exceptions, including several local columnists.

For me, the conversation started quickly. I was writing about technology in a place where a lot of it was being invented and improved, and everyone I covered had email early on. The readers were not shy about telling me what I was missing or getting wrong. That was when I realized (duh) that they collectively knew vastly, vastly more than I did -- and what a great opportunity I had as a result.

When I started a blog in 1999, I started hearing from even more folks. Tech was and is more than ever a community of interest, not just geography, and I was learning things from a global audience by that point. I can't overstate how much the blog was valuable in expanding and deepening the conversation.

None of that was to the exclusion of standard reporting, such as picking up the phone and going to see people in person. I got some of my best stuff over lunch tables in Palo Alto, Menlo Park and San Francisco, and in hallways at conferences.

But count me in as a huge believer in the value of online tools to deepen ties especially with communities, local and global.

Q: What did you learn with Bayosphere and in researching your book about the walls between journalists and citizens in their communities? Do you have concrete suggestions for breaking down those walls? Should their be limits on what types of activities a journalist should take part in -- i.e., political activity (some journalists like Len Downie don't vote, as you probably know)?

A: If we're talking about breaking down walls between traditional journalists and communities, we're actually making some progress. Whether it's too late to matter is a separate issue, but it plainly won't hurt.

As I've suggested before, newspapers in particular can have a huge leg up on doing this, and have more options. But broadcasters can do some of these things, too.

The first thing, whether you're a newspaper editor or broadcast news director, is this simple test: Go to Flickr, Technorati and YouTube and search on your community name. You will find a parallel universe of media, being created by people in your community for themselves and each other. Then see what's happening on Facebook and MySpace and other social networks. And see what old-fashioned (!) email lists, such as Yahoo Groups or Google Groups, are covering hyper-local topics. (Our old Palo Also neighborhood, consisting of several hundred homes, had a mail list where people regularly broke news of interest there, news that would never have risen to the attention of the Palo Alto paper, much less the Mercury News or Chronicle.)

Second, stop pretending your organization is an oracle. It's not. You don't know everything, and even if you did you couldn't publish or broadcast as much as you'd like to. Pointing to outside sources of information -- especially local blogs and other media -- is a great start. It doesn't mean that you endorse what these folks are saying or vouch for it, but it does mean that you recognize that others in your community are creating media with at least some information other people might want to see. Be the portal to everything. Point widely beyond the portal on individual stories and topics, and not just to source material, which more and more organizations are finally doing. Point to your competitors' best stories when they beat you on something local. (I routinely did this on my blog, pointing to the SF Chronicle, NY Times, WSJ, trade journals and other tech outlets, because it was what my readers expected. I sent them away to the best stuff I could find, and they kept coming back because they knew I'd do that.)

Third, make sure your audience can respond and, in many cases, join the journalistic process. Comments are only a start. Moderation is a fine idea, but use a light touch. My rule for conduct is simple: We'll be civil. We can disagree sharply, but we will treat each other with respect. Beyond comments, do what more and more organizations are (belately) doing: Ask the audience for information that can lead to better journalism. But if you're turning people into unpaid freelancers, don't be surprised when they start posting what they know on their own sites, not yours.

Newspapers have at least two more huge opportunities.

First is to open the archives, with permalinks on every story in the database. Newspapers hold more of their communities' histories and all other media put together, yet they hoard it behind a paywall that produces pathetic revenues and keeps people in the communities from using it -- as they would all the time -- as part of their current lives. The revenues would go up with targeted search and keyword-specific ads on those pages, I'm absolutely convinced. But an equally important result would be to strengthen local ties. (Note: I discussed this in much greater length in 2005 in this posting, "Newspapers: Open Your Archives".)

Second, expand the conversation with the community in the one place where it's already taking place: the editorial pages. Invert them. Make the printed pages the best-of and guide to a conversation the community can and should be having with itself. The paper can't set the agenda, at least not by itself (nor should it), but it can highlight what people care about and help the community have a conversation that is civil and useful. (More on this in another 2005 posting, "Where Newspapers Can Start the Conversation".)

BTW, one word for the notion of journalists not voting: ridiculous.

I'm sure there are plenty of doubters who think newspapers are a lost cause at this point when it comes to innovation. Fine. But it's important to understand that this question is one that any news organization, newspaper or not, must be asking itself. Whether your newsroom is a mainstream media goliath or a virtual community news organization, it's important to make this question a central part of your organization. Why? Because the era of news we've entered is one of constant change, at an ever increasing pace. Nobody can say for sure what is next. But I can guarantee you that even if you create the ideal news organization today, it won't be the ideal in a few years.

So it's important that no matter what size your news organization you find the capacity to innovate. If 100 percent of your newsroom's time is devoted to just producing your current products, then you're already doomed, even if it isn't immediately apparent. This is true whether you're a traditional newspaper newsroom, or an online first newsroom.

Last fall, I sat on a "Newsroom of the Future" panel at the Berkeley School of Journalism with the managing editor of Salon.com. I'd always looked to Salon as a Web pioneer. But things looked different from where she sat. She noted Salon was struggling at the moment because its platform and its organization were geared toward a Web model of publishing from the 90s. As a result, they were having trouble adapting to a world where social media and social networking and user participation had emerged as major forces in recent years. The constraints on employees' time and financial resources were making it difficult to adapt. Her laments sounded similar to the ones I hear from traditional newspaper newsrooms.

So you can be online first and still fall into the same trap that newspapers did by failing to innovate and experiment. Just look at CNET, the Web news pioneer that stumbled in recent years and was recently bought by CBS.

In fact, I think that it's worth pointing out that newspapers' failure to innovate is hardly unique. Critics often want to make newspapers out to be a special case of failure, that somehow their inability to adapt to a new landscape is unique. But it's not. Far from it. It's the classic fate that strikes any once-dominant company when the world turns upside down. It happens all the time in world of technology. Look no further than Microsoft, which after more than a decade, is still trying to adapt its business to the Web, as evidenced by its ill-fated bid to buy Yahoo (another company that's failed to innovate). The Redmond giant can't let go of a legacy product (Windows) enough to reorient itself to where the market and its users have gone.

I don't point this out to let newspapers off the hook. Indeed, the criticism is warranted. But the notion that they're alone in this failure creates an unnecessary layer of self-defeatism that creates one more barrier to innovating: Newspapers have failed to innovate, and therefore can't. I don't buy it.

But how?

I'm going to circle back around to focus on Dan's original question about newspaper newsrooms.

In an ideal world, of course, newspapers would be investing like crazy in new people, new tools, and new ideas. It'd be great if, like Google, we gave everybody one day each week to work on their pet project. (Though frankly, I'm dubious even Google has much to show for this celebrated program). Unfortunately, newspaper companies have become ensnared in a string of mergers, acquisitions and sales that have created mountains of debt while adding nothing of tangible value. Combine that with the current state of the economy, and it's pretty much a given that management isn't going to spend any money. Tragic, but true.

On the other hand, if innovation were simply about money, Microsoft would have quashed Google long ago. Right?

No one can simply order up innovation on demand. Wish as you might, the innovation fairy won't sprinkle pixie dust on your newsroom while you sleep. But you can encourage innovation, nurture it by lowering barriers, supporting those employees with entrepreneurial drive, and providing a fertile environment for their ideas.

So, let's start small. Here are five steps for promoting innovation in your newsroom:

1. Make it a priority: Management needs to make it crystal clear that innovation is now a central part of the organization's mission. It's no longer something that employees do on the side, or when time permits. Beyond making that declaration, management needs to incorporate it into the way it evaluates everyone in the newsroom. "What did you start this year?" should be just as important a question on annual evaluations as the journalism produced. Promotions should favor people who have a track record of launching new initiatives. And while opinion on this tends to be divided, I would also assign someone to be a director of innovation. This creates an alternate channel for the rank and file to take their ideas for cover, especially when they're hitting roadblocks elsewhere.

2. Create a process: Establish an official system for considering new proposals. Commit to accepting a set number each quarter, or month. If you want to be brave, establish a committee to evaluate them that includes members from outside the newsroom that have certain specialties, like a venture capitalist or a serial entrepreneur. For projects that are selected, set up clear milestones and expectations.

3. Foster new collaboration: Tear down as many walls, both literal and figurative, in the newsroom. Find new ways to get people from different areas to work together. This includes editorial and business side (Sorry, but it's long past time to kill this sacred cow). And look for opportunities to regularly mix in people from the community. The goal should be getting as many people as possible to be interacting with people they don't typically encounter as often as they can. Get people out of their comfort zones and routines, and get them talking and meeting, both formally and informally, with people from online, advertising, operations. Change the entire seating arrangement so that each person is surrounded by people from different departments (a photographer next to a reporter next to a sales rep next to a Web producer). When people need to have department meetings, then can gather in temporary spaces. Innovation is often sparked by random conversations between people of different perspectives that create new moments of insight. Do everything possible to create the opportunity for such moments of serendipity.

4. Offer incentives: Newsrooms should, but won't, offer financial incentives. They should, but won't, offer bonuses or revenue sharing for ideas that prosper. But there is one commodity even the most tightfisted operation can offer that will seem like gold to most employees: Time. Anyone working at a newspaper these days is working at 110 percent capacity. In many cases, their managers are fine them trying just about anything, as long as they keep doing everything else. That's unrealistic and unsustainable. Instead, for proposals that are accepted, offer the employee a set amount of time to focus solely on that project and set aside their usual duties. You'll have folks banging down your door for the chance.

5. Evaluate and learn: Review progress regularly and ruthlessly. It's important to know when to pour more resources into a project that's blooming, when to make adjustments to a project that has promise but has underperformed, and when to kill a failed idea. I can't tell you how many times I've heard a middle manager said they're worried that if they support the launch of a new project that it might live on forever as a resource drain even if it's a total failure because no one will take responsibility for killing it. Every newsroom needs to learn how to stop doing the things that don't work. Alas, it's easier said than done. Trying new things means being okay with the fact that most won't succeed. The only thing that matters is learning the right lessons. And making sure that the people whose idea tanked know that you can't wait to hear their next idea.

Literally, I was just preparing to post this late Tuesday night, I received a tweet from Dan as part of a conversation we were having where he said of newsrooms: "But I concede lots are behind. The thing is ... many have innovation "sleeper cells," so there is hope of revolution."

Agreed.

So those are mine. Let's hear yours. What tricks or strategies have helped promote innovation in your newsroom?

One thing that we can both agree on 100% is that advertising that is not fair and honest is incompatible with the goals of journalism. But where we don't completely understand each other yet is over the idea of what advertising actually is, and what it can be.

So for the purpose of this post, I'm going to intermittently substitute the problematic term "advertising" with the phrase "business marketing." Regardless of how you feel about the ability of advertising to fund journalism -- and I will be the first to agree that the current models are clearly crumbling, especially for newspapers -- I don't think anyone will disagree that businesses have the need and even the right to get the word out about their services.

The whole basis of business marketing, of which advertising is one piece, is the need for a business to deliver messages about its products and services to a target market. Marketing is essential to the very survival of a business -- something I've experienced firsthand in launching and promoting 10 niche-focused community sites and publications from scratch in Bakersfield. We tried everything from Google Adwords and flyers, to having booths at events and reaching out to local bloggers.

Every one of those activities cost time and money, which is to say that they all cost money since my time was paid for by The Bakersfield Californian. When we continued to invest in those activities, site traffic and usage blossomed, and when we didn't it started to fall. That was business marketing, and that's really what I mean when I use the term "advertising."

h2. Responding Postively to Relevant Ads

But there's another aspect to business marketing: people like to see ads for products they like, and some even pay for that privilege. Over the years, I have noticed that many journalists cringe at the fact that lots of newspaper readers see advertising as valuable content, especially in the Sunday paper. The core of this audience for newspapers is women who look for specials and coupons, but the phenomenon is not limited to them. I know quite a few guys who look forward to the weekly Best Buy insert so they can stay up to date on new tech toys and HDTVs and get them when they go on sale.

The reality is that we're all consumers and we like to buy things that speak to our needs and tastes. For that reason, we respond positively to business marketing that matches our interests, and we ignore or respond negatively to messages that don't match our interests -- or messages that annoy us. A good example of the latter is the "Are you overweight?" Facebook flyers that disproportionately target middle-aged women, and "Get in shape" ads that target 36-year-old guys like myself. Yes, I feel fat and need to get in shape, but reminding me of that doesn't make me feel good about your business and, in fact, makes me want to ignore and boycott you.

So why are so many journalists who confess to being distrustful of advertising talking about how to improve it -- including people like me who came out of newsrooms and pure online community? Because the print display advertising that used to fund the journalism product is faltering. At a Knight Digital Media Center leadership seminar I spoke at last week, I heard one online newspaper editor say that he'd gone as far as getting approval to hire his own ad salesperson within the newsroom. He was willing to do that because he wasn't satisfied with the track record of the advertising department, whose failure to grow revenue was requiring him to lay off reporters.

The larger context for this trend is that news organizations are dependent on advertising to continue to produce good content. But the advertising model that's still paying most of the bills is out of synch with the direction that online business marketing is going. It's difficult to see how locally-sold online advertising can fund journalism when advertising is so much cheaper and efficient on the Internet. If you want to learn more about why, read up on media consultant Vin Crosbie, who points out that eliminating a printed paper would remove 90 to 95 percent of a newspaper's revenue but only reduce expenses 40 to 50 percent -- thus putting a newspaper in even worse financial shape.

h2. Novel Ideas for Funding Journalism

But the bigger issue is that Internet advertising is just too dang good for the good of journalism. When you compare the cost of a Google Adwords marketing campaign, in which you pay only for the 1% of people who are actually interested in what you're selling, to that of newspaper ads, in which you also pay for the 99% of people who most likely won't want to buy your stuff, the end result appears clear. Relying solely on targeted local online advertising as it exists today -- and especially the Google model, which works great for Google due to its global customer base but yields less for one geographic area -- is not going to cut it. We need new models, and more of them, to continue to fund the audience-based activities that drive our local value. 

That's what leads people like David to come up with novel ideas like Spot.us, where individuals in a community volunteer to fund specific stories because they think they're important. And it's also behind the idea of Richard Anderson's Village Soup, which charges advertisers a set monthly fee for the right to publish messages about their products and services to a local community, and also publicly converse with a community. The LJworld Marketplace does something similar by charging a monthly fee for enhanced business profiles. We plan to follow that path in Bakersfield with enhanced profiles in our Inside Guide. (The only reason we haven't done it yet is because it's taken much longer than expected to build a directory of 26,000 businesses in town -- if you're considering such a directory, don't underestimate how much time it can take to get it right).

Printcasting will pursue a hybrid revenue approach. I will be posting more about this as our ideas start to take shape, but the underlying principle is to make it easier and cheaper for local businesses to get their messages out on the street in community-produced print publications than is possible with the local newspaper. We're doing this not just to make a buck, but also because the health of local businesses is important to us. If you think advertising is evil, think about how you feel the next time your local bookstore goes out of business because it couldn't compete with Amazon, Borders and Wal-Mart. Efficient, targeted local marketing is absolutely critical to the survival of the local franchises that help define our communities.

We know that around 60% of businesses in almost any city can't afford to place ads in the daily newspaper -- what's now referred to as the "long tail" of advertisers -- but they can afford the rates of our 6 smaller niche print publications. You would think that online ads in niche products would be perfect for them, but we've found that online is still a hard sell (this is also seen nationally, with only 22% of small businesses marketing online in any way in 2006/2007, according to Intuit's Steven Aldridch. Many also prefer the smaller publications because they reach a more defined audience.

One of our goals for the end of Phase 2 of Printcasting (September 2009) is to have at least 100 niche publications that are produced by the community and printed on home printers. In addition, the Californian will print and locally distribute a subset of those that show the most promise in exchange for the right to sell additional ads into them.

h2. Printcasting's Advertising Vision

Our vision is to make local niche advertising as easy as posting a blog entry, or posting something in Craigslist. We'll give them a way to type in very simple messages that appear in both the PDFs, and the versions we print and distribute around town. They'll then choose the publications where they want their ad to appear, or let us choose publications that match their target demographics, and their messages will automagically be turned into very nice-looking display ads. It's similar to the approach of Village Soup, but with some back-end magic that makes these messages look great automatically in printable magazines.

Why spend all this time making ads look great in print, using online tools? For all the talk about ads on Web sites and even cell phones, nothing is more powerful for a business in a small local community than seeing someone walk in the door with a printed coupon it paid for.

Are Printcasting ads, and Village Soup conference-room-floor style marketing feeds, and Spot Us tip jars going to save journalism? I'll answer that right now: no! Because not any one of these approaches alone is going to come close to replacing the millions of dollars in local ads that a typical printed newspaper produces. But I'm fairly certain that each one of these efforts will tap into new revenue streams that the daily newspaper has never gotten before.

It will require new innovations like these, plus many, many more, to preserve the news function of local communities. I think the fact that more of us "content types" are working on such ideas says a lot. We care so much about quality local journalism and community information-sharing to put ourselves out on a limb and experiment with new models. I hope that all of us would agree that the time has come for more true innovation in revenue to come from the advertising departments at newspapers (and from without). If you have such an idea, I urge you to submit it to the 2008/2009 News Challenge.

It's my sincere hope that our successes, failures and resulting iterations inspire more people from all disciplines to not just discuss, but actually do something that answers the question on everyone's mind: How will we continue to pay for all this journalism?

The difference came when you looked at how those stories were covered on the web compared to the "traditional mainstream" media. In the end, that was perhaps the most interesting aspect of the controversies because it was illustrative of the pros and cons of both forms of media.

While some in the "mainstream" media struggled with how to characterize Jesse Jackson's off-camera and ill-advised remarks to a fellow panelist during a taping at the Fox News Channel, bloggers and members of listservs immediately began debating whether the remarks signaled, or should signal, a generational shift.

To its credit, The New York Times did tackle the issue of the shifting political landscape in the African American community. Yet, in a move that called into question the piece's credibility, the reporter chose not to quote any African American sources on the subject, opting instead to rely on the expertise of failed presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale's presidential campaign manager and a white professor from Emory University.

The last assured us that harsh words from Jesse Jackson would in no way cause the African American community to turn its back on Obama and then went on to recount an anecdote that left you wondering what it had to do with the Jackson-Obama flap.
"He recalled being in a restaurant in Georgia that was giving away tickets to an Obama event recently; 50 people, most of them African-American, were still standing in line even though the tickets were all gone," The Times told us.

Over on the web, the response, if you knew where to look, gave much greater insight into what people in the African American community were actually thinking. " The 32-year-old blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this on his blog:

My Dad is gonna kill me. But here's Jesse -- on Fox News no less -- telling some other dude that he'd like to cut Obama's nuts out. Nice. I'm not even sure this hurts Obama in anyway. Even Jesse's own son condemned him. There is a certain strain of the civil-rights era that really just needs to have a Jack and Coke and call it a day. It's not that we aren't grateful. We so really are. But this is getting embarrassing...

Both accounts agree that Obama was not hurt by Jackson's remarks. However, it struck me that reading the mainstream media was sometimes like eavesdropping on a conversation strangers were having about you while reading the web was very much like having an important conversation that you are fairly certain no one else is bothering to listen to.

Neither provides the public with the entirety of the information it needs to understand what's at stake and to make informed decisions. And both remind you of how disengaged we can be from each other in this country.

It was that disconnect that the New Yorker got caught up in when it attempted to take on some of the erroneous ideas people have about the Obamas. The problem, as many pointed out, is that it's very difficult to satirize a community you don't have much contact with.

With newspaper and broadcast staffs still between 75 and 85 percent white and the country's population a little over 30 percent people of color, it's not a surprise that there is a disconnect between the journalists and those they cover. Nor is it a surprise that people of color are using the web to create a more robust and nuanced conversation. The trick is going to be in finding a way to bring our separate conversations together, no matter the medium.

In the research on media effects, one of the most fully developed findings is what is known as the "mean world syndrome." Research finds that the average citizen grossly over-estimates how dangerous her neighborhood is because she reads the newspaper and assumes that the crime reports are actually a sample of the whole and thus amplifies them accordingly. In practice, a higher portion of violent crimes get reported than most people assume, although there are statistical biases as a result of the under-representation of crimes based on the race and class of the victims.

A larger problem is created by the over-representation of crime and the under-represented of everyday acts of kindness and generosity. The news often shows us people acting at their very worst without allowing us to see those moments where people help each other out. How might this under-reporting of good deeds also contribute to the mean world syndrome?

This is a question which is guiding a new research initiative being launched by Alyssa Wright, an MIT Media Lab student who is affiliated with the Center for Future Civic Media. The center is a collaboration between the Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies Program and has been funded by the Knight Foundation. As one of the co-Directors of the Center, I've listened to lots and lots of proposals for projects that might enhance civic engagement and community consciousness, some good, some bad.

Alyssa's project, Hero Reports, is among one of the very best I've heard. It's practical enough that she's already begun to implement it in New York City. It's provocative enough that it's already begun to attract media interest. It was featured several weeks ago on WNYC The Takeaway. And it is suggestive enough that it has generated great conversations with everyone I've mentioned it to.

Wright says the project was inspired by New York's "See Something, Say Something" Campaign in the wake of 9/11. The campaign sought to solicit everyday citizens in New York City to be on the look out for suspicious activity. They became, in effect, agents in the war on terror. Maybe playing this role left them feeling more in control over their situation. Or perhaps, the act of performing this role left them in a permenant state of alert and anxiety, depending on your perspective. Given how broad the mandate is, it is no surprise that the city received many many reports. One recent advertisement boasted that the government had received 1944 such reports. The New York Times found, however, that very few of these reports resulted in arrests and that the bulk of the reports were directed at brown people whose suspicious activity mostly consisted of being brown in public.

Often, we see what we are looking for and our cultural biases literally color what we see. A campaign that invites us to look for suspicious behavior forces us to scrutinize our neighbors for signs and symptoms of terroristic activity. So, Wright wants us to reverse our lens and look for people who are doing things that are socially constructive. She wants us to find evidence of the good conduct that surrounds us all the time and bring it to greater public attention - the person who goes out of their way to help someone else, the people who intervene to stop a domestic dispute or a violent act, the people who give up their seats on the subway to accommodate a passenger with special needs, the person who cares enough to contribute to the homeless or give directions to someone who seems lost.

She is collecting these reports via her website and she's investigating news reports of everyday heroicism that she reads in the newspaper trying to flesh out a portrait of the ways that her fellow New Yorkers are making life better within their communities. She is also deploying state of the art mapping tools to construct accounts of "everyday heroicism" in different neighborhoods, hoping that they can be read alongside maps which show crime rates and other negative factors, to give us a fuller sense of the places where we live.
Ideally, such maps can become a source of local pride as people work to improve the perceptions of their communities by doing good deeds.

What follows are some of Wright's reflections about the project:

Hero Reports was inspired by the "See Something, Say Something" Campaign in NYC. What disturbed you about that campaign and how do you see Hero Reports as responding to that concern?

Alyssa Wright: I was in New York on 9/11, and I was very scared. In its wake, I saw myself start to evaluate safety with different checklists. And it's still "different" than it was before. Just today, I was on a subway car and there were all these men with luggage. The trigger goes up. "Why are there so many attended packages on the train?" but then I pieced together another, probably more likely, story. It's the end of a 4th of July weekend and a lot of people travel at the end of a 4th of July weekend. And oh right. I'm on the subway
that goes to the airport. It's all about context but after 9/11 and after the anthrax scare in particular, the only context I absorbed was fear.

What got me thinking about a project, were 3 rather contemporaneous events:

1) How people responded to cherry blossoms. When I walked around with cherry blossoms, I was under the radar. I was a girl, white, wearing makeup. And yet I was walking around with a backpack that looked like a weapon. People didn't "see something" let alone "say something."

2) I went to Madrid and learned about March 11 bombings. And I rode their metro. And guess what. They still had cans to throw away garbage (the MTA got rid of most garbage cans, the few remaining are supposedly "bomb proof") AND they weren't surrounded by instructions to say something. I'm not sure when it happened, but I left that trip CONVINCED that because of its history, Spain can recognize the encroaching signs of facism.

But then there's 3) --> the follow-up in the See Something series. "Last Year, 1,944 New Yorkers Saw Something and Said Something." I can't recall the first time I saw the initial 'See Something, Say Something' campaign, but I do recall the first 1,944. It was a bus. And as I watched it go by, I turned and said something to the effect of: "What the f--- is that? What the hell does that number mean?"

And that's when things became a bit comical. Like the farce was over. I mean, are we supposed to be impressed by that number?

These three combined with another lesson from Cherry Blossoms, the power of the Iraq Body Count (IBC) database. I am forever in debt to Hamit Dardagan who started keeping count of news reports. Now that was a number I wanted to see. And that was a number that gave context. They took what already existed and aggregated. Together these left-to-the-archives reports found new "life." A life whose range included my exploding backpack and a Bush speech citing IBC as his body count reference.

I see Hero Reports akin to IBC. Essentially Hero Reports starts with collecting what already exists -- the stories of everyday heroes. That aggregation holds the possibility of for social change, and the seeds for many other projects. Artistic, academic, political, economic.

But back to my thoughts about See Something: The campaign makes me feel caught in the role of civilian detective. In its most dramatic version, they tell me I can be a hero no different than the army solider, engaging with the monster on the ground. But even as I reject that version, my vision and behavior is effected. I'm caught in a dichotomy. Having grown up in the '80s, all of this feels soooooooo much like the war on drugs.

I believe that the MTA had best intentions. If there was ever a time when New Yorkers needed to know that they had agency in the city's security -- that they weren't helpless -- it was after 9/11. Whether intentional or not, the campaign has nonetheless been proven ineffective and most activism done in response has been critical in nature. Its important to have critical work, it has a strong place in the dialog. But because this is a formula that we have been doing for much longer than the war on terror, we also need to build another formula. So Hero Reports offers an alternative approach.

You've used the suggestive phrase, "Everyday Acts of Courage," to describe what
you hope to find through your project. Give us a sense of what you mean by this concept?

Wright: Everyone can be a hero -- cape and all. At its beginning, I was very much inspired by the battles of Terrifca and Fantistico, dueling real life superhero and villain, that roam the streets of New York. They were not waiting around in silence or stirring in anger. They were taking matters into their own hands, and bringing the extravagance of camp into a dialog with the civilian detectives.

In my opinion, the term "hero" has been co-opted by institutions like Hollywood and the government. The firefighter is the hero. Iron Man is the hero. Because these her stories are so enrolling, the everyday person does not need to be heroic. Our myths set it up so that its a loss and not a gain, to get involved. Our misinterpretations of equity (e.g., should I help the old lady across the street, or will she be offended), our laws (e.g., the Seinfeld Good Samaritan Law) and our technologies (e.g., the iPod) create an attention span where we select not to see others. And if we do see, we decide it is someone else's responsibility to help in an accident, someone else job to put out the fire; someone else's good nature to return the wallet.

We are constantly trained not to get involved, and this is gendered and classed in particular ways. And we continue to build systems that support this lack of involvement. It helps explain, why I find myself pissed off at people -- and at myself -- all the time. Why the hell does this man need to spread his knees three feet wide while we're all packed in like sardines? Why the hell does this woman on crutches have to stand against a pole? And why doesn't anyone say anything? Why don't I say? And why when I saw an accident on 14th street, why was my instinct not to help?

Hero Reports proposes to value the opposite.

What is a Hero Map? What do you see as the value of mapping where "everyday acts of courage" occurs?

Wright: In its present iteration, a Hero Map is the positioning of a Hero Report to a GPS location, and correspondingly a neighborhood. This mapping gives the heroic moment a collective memory, which in turns gives the Hero Report political and economic weight.

Typically an heroic moment, particularly an everyday heroism, has a very narrow frame. These moments are not connected to each other, but appear as disconnected blips on the radar. When they do appear, the attention is on the self and the individual. What did it take for said person to take that risk? Would I do the same? It does not reflect other cultural factors like race, gender, and class. This focus on the individual stops any possibility of these moments gaining a larger perspective, and cultural impact. By aggregating them, and mapping them, we give the heroic moment weight. This weight can be placed back onto a community, a cultural bias, and a neighborhood.

For instance, consider the power of the Hero Map in how we evaluate real estate. In the search for a home (aka apartment) one might look at crime rates, school systems, transportation access AND hero statistics. How would this inclusion change our priorities? And our economy? The perspective fits into a more general trend of aggregating neighborhood specific, qualitative data. Rottenneighbors' search for local dirt is directly relates to potential power of Hero Reports. But also sites like Outside.In and Everyblock illustrate this trend of filtering importance through geography. It's as if ranking systems are no longer as useful.

You are hoping to present 1944 reports of civic heroism to the transit authority. What's the significant of that number and how far along are you towards meeting that goal?

Wright: The significance of this number is still being investigated by conspiracy theorists. The MTA claims that 1,944 New Yorkers Saw Something, and Said Something. It's an objectless number that can easily translate into racialized forms of perception. But this objectless number, also makes it useless. And comical. What does 1,944 number mean? In a city of 8 million?

I'm fascinated by the number's lack of context, its classified nature, its broadcasting with pride and perhaps most circuitously its connections to D-Day. (Read here the letter Eisenhower wrote to the troops.)

Because of this fascination, one goal of Hero Reports is to collect the same number of reports into a book and present it to the mayor. How such a book will be curated/edited
is still unclear, but at its heart, it would be a transparent narrative of security.

We are 300 into this goal number, but much more are needed, before we being to edit. (And editing here being akin to what the MTA did. About 4000 New Yorkers actually said something.)

What is the most interesting story you've received so far? What kinds of incidents are you hearing about the most?

Wright: Actually, I find what I'm hearing the most to be the most interesting. A LOT of things happen with taxi drivers. This is significant because the majority of taxi drivers are the skin color (brown) most targeted by this campaign. That means, that while only brown people were arrested in this See Something campaign, brown people are the city's most consistent heroes. This reinterpretation of a community bias I extremely powerful.

Another recurring theme is "proof" that a personal hero story wasn't as impossible as it seemed. From my personal archives, there are two examples of this.

The first is a story about the stones of my engagement ring falling out and the women who dropped on their knees to help find it. For me, this incredible moment is re-enacted with a story from taxi driver and his finding of a passenger's ring.

The second is when on a cold winter night transfer, an out of service train gave myself and a friend a subway ride home. This illegal moment of courage was verified when a transit worker told me of the time when he was out of uniform, and a train picked him up (not written up yet). He concludes with: "See! We're not so mean. We're people too."

Besides the patterns, there are some amazing stories. A number of the more dramatic are covered in the press, and I've taken the content from such news articles. The latest in this category is someone giving birth on a subway platform. Here, the media did cover how strangers came together to make it happen. (Though I suppose something would have happened regardless) Most times, however, the media coverage of these dramatic stories neglect the heroes. For instance, the other week there was a pitbull attack. When I interviewed him, the man had a story about police incompetence and expressed amazement towards a neighborhood. When this man screamed "Help!" it wasn't a Kitty Genovese moment. People came pouring out of their home to help. "And Louis was amazing." Now there's no mention of Louis in the news coverage. Louis doesn't sell.

Part of Hero Reports is to spin Louis's story so that he sells. Turning the ordinary into the extraordinary. That's what Hollywood does, when Hollywood does it well. It is at the heart of novels, theater and comedy.

Its about the framing. Tackling how this sort of everyday heroism can sell is the challenge of Hero Reports. ("Sell" here not being synonymous with "make money," but rather sell meaning, create cultural weight and urgency.) Hero Reports is more likely to fail than succeed. But personally I think technologists (especially at the Lab) should be taking on such challenges and such risk. We're so afraid it's not going to work, that we don't play with failure. And when it comes down to it, not only do most things not work, but by not tackling these questions we contribute to this society of suspicion and isolation.