I taught myself enough Django -- and sought out advice from friends and co-workers with little regard for their interest or priorities -- to launch the first iteration of the site in October 2008. In July 2009, with fresh design and development from the team at Lion Burger, ReportingOn 2.0 launched.

And almost immediately, I stepped away from it, buried in the responsibilities of my day job, family, and other projects. To grow and evolve, and really, to race ahead of the internal and external communication tools already available to reporters, ReportingOn needed far more time, attention, and dedication than I could give it.

Yesterday, I shut down ReportingOn.

In its last state, it only cost a few bucks a month to maintain, but it has more value at this point as a story, or a lesson, or a piece of software than it has as a working site.

To head off a couple questions at the pass:

1. No, you can't export your questions or answers or profile data. None of you have touched the site in about a year, so I don't think you're that interested in exporting anything. But if you're some sort of web packrat that insists, I have the database, and I can certainly provide you with your content.


2. Yes, the source code for the application is still available, and you're more than welcome to take a stab at building something interesting with it. If you do, please feel free to let me know.

• Reporters don't want to talk about unpublished stories in public.


• Unless they're looking for sources.


• There are some great places on the Internet to find sources.


• When they do talk about unpublished stories among themselves, they do it in familiar, well-lit places, like email or the telephone. Not in your application.


• Actually, keep this in mind: Unless what you're building meets a very journalism-specific need, you're probably grinding your gears to build something "for journalists" when they just need a great communication tool, independent of any particular niche or category of users.

Connecting the dots among far-flung newsrooms working on stories about the same issue is something that might happen internally in a large media company, or organically in the wilds of Twitter, but rarely in any structured way that makes it easy to discover new colleagues, peers, and mentors. Sure, there are email lists, especially for professional associations (think: SEJ) that act as back channels for a beat, but not enough, and not focused on content.

(Prove me wrong, kids. Prove me wrong.)

As for me, I'm working on another (even) small(er) Knight-funded side project a few minutes at a time these days. Watch for news about that one in the coming weeks.

Okay, so maybe it's not all that common a career path, but it's the way things have unfolded for Mark Luckie. These days, Mark is a multimedia producer at California Watch -- but you might know him best as the voice behind 10,000 Words. Now he's also the author of The Digital Journalist's Handbook. I recently spoke with him about how he turned his blog into a book.

Ryan Sholin: Mark, I've been following you on Twitter and on your blog for some time now, and you make a habit of sharing what seems like all your secrets, from tools to tips to tutorials. When did you decide to wrap all that together in a book, and how did you start gathering all the right pieces up?

Mark Luckie: I decided to start writing a book in the summer of 2009 when I was unemployed and had lots of free time. I spent weeks in the public library reading through old posts from the blog and reading what others had written about online journalism.

RS: How hard was it to make sure everything that landed in the print edition was evergreen?

ML: It was probably the hardest part... weeding out technologies and topics that could possibly be obsolete right after the book was printed. Twitter lists, for example, are a great tool for journalism, but they just debuted and it would be unwise to include them in a book when they're still so new and journalists are still finding ways to use them.

RS: Right, so instead of cataloging apps and widgets that could vanish next week, you took the approach of building what you call "a comprehensive guide to the fundamentals of digital journalism." But it's more than Photoshop and Final Cut tutorials, right? How do you take a common tool and explain the best practices for journalists armed with it?

ML: Absolutely... there's more to digital journalism than photos and video. There's slideshows, databases, maps and more. When I write, I try to break the topic down as simply as possible and try to omit technical jargon that it's easy to get intimidated by. I try to find real world examples that people can look to and say, 'Oh, that's what that is.'

Many professionals who teach online journalism use terms and examples that the beginning journalist isn't familiar with. It's all about making it as simple as possible.

RS: Let's rewind a bit here -- you wrote the book in the summer of 2009 while you were unemployed and had lots of time. What happened before that? When did you pick up multimedia and online journalism as a passion? (Michele McClellan wants to know if it was after spending time at the Knight Digital Media Center at Berkeley.)

ML: I didn't know there was such a thing as multimedia journalism until I attended grad school at UC Berkeley. I had known how to use the tools like video, photo and computer programming, but didn't know I could combine them with my love for journalism.

It was when I started teaching multimedia skills to other journalists through the Knight Digital Media Center that I realized how much I loved the craft and the ability to tell stories using many different media.

(Editor's Note: The Knight Digital Media Center is a sponsor of MediaShift and Idea Lab.)

RS: It seems natural now, of course, that you can move from teaching in person to your blog to your book. Not sure how many people would have seen that coming five or seven years ago. What do you think might be the next platform for journalists like Mark Luckie that want to share their knowledge with their peers?

ML: Good question. I still think there's a platform for blogging, but I'd like to see people take advantage of the various kinds of blogging like video blogging or live blogging.

I'm a big fan of tools like CoverItLive and Ustream that allow anyone to have live, ongoing discussions instead of static, one-way talks.

And that I think is the future for journalism, too.

RS: Speaking of tools, what's your general advice when it comes to free web-based applications vs. full-featured software?

ML: I rarely ever feature software on the blog, not only because there is a lot of sketchy software out there that can do damage to your computer, but also because it's hard to convince people to download, install, and try full-fledged programs.

I love web-based applications because it's an opportunity to try a new tool without investing too much time and effort into it. If you like it, you can keep using it and if not, you can just kinda move on. Also, if you really like a web-based tool you can always upgrade and grab professional software that offers more features.

RS: Do you think of yourself as someone who practices a degree of radical transparency? What secrets are you keeping for your next book?

ML: I think journalists often ask people some of the deepest, probing, and most personal questions they'll ever be asked, yet journalists are notorious for keeping their professional and personal lives under wraps. I don't see the harm in sharing personal information if it helps someone else out. I'm actually a very private person but I know that ultimately what I do share can potentially help someone else having the same kind of issues.

As for the next book, I never try to think too far ahead. When I went to undergrad I had no idea I'd become a journalist, and when I went to grad school I had no idea I'd leave a multimedia journalist. And I certainly had no idea I would ever write a book. So who knows what the future holds?

RS: Let's rephrase that question about the next book, then. What was the last thing you decided to leave out of 'The Digital Journalist's Handbook'?

ML: The one major thing I purposely left out was detailed tutorials for specific programs (they all exist online). Maybe the next step is a '...for Dummies' series of books, but I focused on what aspects of the programs journalists should use ...

But my next project, whatever it is, will definitely be based on the response and feedback from this first book, and whatever journalists' needs are.

RS: Sounds like a great idea. Here's the last question: What's the one tip you'd give to journalists that are still behind when it comes to building their multimedia and online skills?

ML: Besides buy the book? ... I'd say don't wait for someone to come around and teach you multimedia skills. If you really want a future in journalism you have to start using online tutorials to start learning some of the programs and then start practicing on your own.

A couple of years ago, there was a huge barrier to learning new technology because of the expense, but nowadays multimedia tools are incredibly inexpensive and the Internet is a free platform where anyone can experiment with various media.

RS: Mark, thanks for taking the time to do this. I hope your book helps out lots of journalists, whether they're freelancers trying to string together gigs into something full-time, or veteran editors looking to learn something new.

ML: Thanks Ryan. I'm excited to see where journalism is headed.

Aardvark

Aardvark allows users to ask questions via instant message, the website, Twitter, and an iPhone app, among other ways. I've used IM for the most part, answering questions about Twitter, iPhone apps, and journalism from time to time, while fending off questions about SEO, and using my favorite Aardvark feature to refer questions to friends.

Here's Aardvark's record of my question about a theoretically sustainable alternative to hardwood flooring, bamboo.

What you won't see on that page are the multiple ways I interacted with Aardvark along the way.

I submitted my question via the website, received the first answer via IM, and spotted the second answer as a push notification on my iPhone before reading it in the app. (My phone just buzzed again with another push notification as I typed that last sentence.)

Aardvark ranks high on the social scale: I'm getting real human answers from real humans with real experience buying, installing, and maintaining bamboo flooring -- and I'm getting the answers via any and all communication channels.

Hunch

Hunch is a different beast. Not content to simply act as a referral service to find someone who knows the answer to my question, Hunch aspires to answer my question by asking me about myself. About my personality. About my hopes and dreams.

Hunch is getting to know me so it can tell me what to do.

But not in a creepy way.

And if Hunch seems friendly, that could be thanks to co-founder Caterina Fake, who you might remember as one of the founders of the rather personable photo sharing network, Flickr.

In a blog post last year, Fake called Hunch a "decision-making site." It's not a place for questions and answers, but a place to climb "decision trees" that ask you the questions in order to determine what your best path of action would be, given the conditions you describe in your answers.

"In addition to helping you climb the decision tree, Hunch asks you a bunch of questions about yourself to find out more about what you're like and what you like. Hunch creates a kind of "taste profile" of you and people like you, which combine with topic-specific questions to deliver a hunch just for you."

So I gave it a shot. A search for "bamboo flooring" lead to the Hunch page for "What type of flooring should I choose?" OK, fair enough.

Next, the system walked me through a series of questions. Pets? Ground level? High traffic area? (For a moment, I felt like a kid home sick from school watching daytime television and its parade of household cleaning product commercials.)

Eventually the possible flooring options were ranked based on my answers. Apparently, I want laminate, bamboo, or tile. So says Hunch.

Quora

Quora is a bit more conventional. Fire up your browser, visit the URL, and ask or answer questions. But it's well-designed, easy to use, and blazingly fast. When I say fast, I mean the whole site feels fast in the browser. Dig around, and you'll find Quora engineers answering questions like "Why is Quora so fast?" But there's another decision the builders of Quora have made to speed things along. They've removed some of the friction of average social sites, making the assumption that once you've logged in with Facebook Connect, for example, you want to automatically follow all your Facebook friends who are already on Quora. Instantly.

Quora feels like a solid piece of software, but the community seems to be heavily weighted toward Silicon Valley entrepreneurial questions at the moment, although I did manage to find one in the "journalism" category that I could answer.

(Quora is invite-only right now. I have 10 I'll happily give away if you're interested. Thanks to Andrew Gritt for getting me in to have a look around.)

What We Can Learn From Q&A 2.0

As we build question-and-answer applications geared toward solving civic problems in our communities, we can pick up a few tricks from these entries into the Q&A 2.0 space.

• From Aardvark, we learn the value of reaching people wherever they are, however they consume and communicate information. Push notification on my iPhone during my commute home? Sure, I consume information that way.

• From Hunch, we learn that if we hand a person a multiple choice quiz, we can record the results and let our algorithm learn something about them to bring to the table when they ask their next question.

• From Quora, we learn the value of frictionless real-time interfaces. Don't assume your application has to follow patterns generated by its predecessors. You're building next year's tools, not last year's.

So. Any questions? How about answers?

That's obvious enough -- just ask anyone using AT&T in an area densely populated with bandwidth-hogging iPhone users like me.

Or ask any Twitter user.

But with the launch of Twitter Lists in recent days, it's now theoretically easier for users, news organizations, bloggers, and companies to create little tributaries off the main river of news. Bu building these subsets out of the main stream, you can find tweets from a group of users, which means a news organization can create a list of reliable sources.

And in theory, this has value, because the list of users has been hand-picked by journalists.

But what happens when everyone makes lists that look the same, full of the same sources?

I started thinking about this because I now find myself on 179 lists. Of those, the titles of 123 include some form of the words "media" or "journalism." That's 123 lists with a lot of overlap.

The same idea ran me down yesterday as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Huffington Post, among others, made Twitter lists related to the shootings in Fort Hood, Texas. (And as I write this, they're all doing it again in Orlando.)

The Fort Hood Lists

There are differences between these lists, but there are also a lot of similarities, as you can see here:

(Click on the image to see the large version. Those lists are from the LAT, NYT, and HuffPo, left to right.)

Now, while they're not identical, there's strong overlap in the type of sources in the first two examples. They're all experts. News organizations. Government. The Red Cross. And, inexplicably, Chuck Todd...

Meanwhile, on the far right, is my favorite list -- the Huffington Post's "Fort Hood Locals." It contains the sort of tweets I was spotting in this search yesterday while I was tracking the story and wondering how many primary sources I could find on Twitter.

Personally, I prefer curating individual tweets, rather than pointing a fire hose of information at the reader. But everyone is experimenting at the moment, and there's nothing like breaking news to get people like me excited about their shiny new toys. As we should be. I just worry that we're going to end up tripping over each other instead of working with each other.

Two Other Takes on Fort Hood Twitter List Efforts:

I encourage you to read two other stories about the Fort Hood Twitter Lists. The first is
Fort Hood Shooting Shows How Twitter, Lists Can be Used for Breaking News" at Poynter. Craig Kanalley's round-up of Twitter use on the Fort Hood story covers the Austin American Statesman's choice to launch a one-story Twitter account, as well as the New York Times list efforts.

The other story is "Fort Hood: A First Test for Twitter Lists" at Columbia Journalism Review. Megan Garber takes a look at Twitter List use by the media for the Fort Hood story. She has this take on the overlap in mainstream lists:

"Yes, there was overlap and redundancy in yesterday's coverage -- the "Fort Hood" lists all generally contained the same local news outlets, the same official sources, etc. -- but, then, that's the case whenever different media outlets cover the same events."

I think there's a problem with that. I don't want to see Twitter Lists become a piece of commodity news.

But I do want to keep chasing after shiny toys...

(Bonus link: Andy Carvin of NPR did a similar bit of navel-gazing and list-counting in this post at All Tech Considered.)

A few weeks ago, I spotted a link to something called deathpanels.org getting passed around Twitter, and quickly traced its origin to Matt Thompson, Knight Foundation interim online community manager and general champion of contextual journalism. (Note: deathpanels.org is an independent project of Matt's, and not affiliated with the Knight Foundation.)

Remembering a conversation that I had with Matt and others at a recent conference, I realized the idea had been brewing for some time.

A few minutes after I looked at the site for the first time, I called up Matt to talk about the idea.

Listen to our conversation

The full transcript of our conversation

Ryan Sholin: This is Ryan Sholin and I'm here with Matt Thompson. Matt do you want to introduce yourself?

Matt Thompson: Sure, once again, Matt Thompson, I'm an online journalist, and the interim online community manager for the Knight Foundation.

RS: Cool, so I, within the last 10 minutes, saw a tweet about something called deathpanels.org, and it looked scary. But Matt and Howard Weaver were talking about it, and I know what both of them are interested in, so I clicked through and I was not disappointed. And I discovered, before I even got to the "about this site" link that explains that Matt was behind it, I fired up Terminal, did a quick whois, and I knew that it was Matt, but I could have just kept clicking and I would have found out. Matt, do you want to explain what deathpanels.org is and why you just put it up and what it's for?

MT: Sure, so deathpanels.org is an expose behind the disturbing details that underpin the current health reform process. And in truth, it's about the disturbing details of the U.S. healthcare system that make health reform necessary.

RS: So, when I open up this site, I get a big scary red thing with like a gothic tattoo sort of Death Panels and a skull behind it. This seems kind of sensational almost, like you're just trying to get me to click through to read the disturbing details.

MT: Right, well, it's targeted, when you come to the site, the whole kind of tongue-in-cheek goal is that you won't know that this is by someone who is very sympathetic to the cause of healthcare reform. But it is playing up the total, I mean the whole "death panels" element of it, the ludicrous "I will not have my grandmother paraded before a death panel" nature of the debate around healthcare right now. I want to play on that element of fear and panic and paranoia to get people to what I hope is actually a fairly sober and, well, friendly, accessible overview of the problems in the current system, what Congress is doing about them, and what are some other good resources to look at for finding our more information about health reform.

RS: So you mentioned more resources. As soon as I click on the disturbing details, and you kind of give it away in the URL because it's "/the-problem" so you're presenting an issue. And the first thing that I see is that there's a lot of links. Can you talk a little bit about why you did that and what that's for?

MT: Yes. Basically my whole goal in creating a site like this is to bring some context to the issue of healthcare reform.

It's difficult -- you'd be surprised that there are just not that many places on the Web that sum up the basic, "these are what the problems are," "these are what some of the proposals for fixing those problems"; that information, [is] sort of buried in a lot of different places around the Web. That said, there are a lot of places around the Web that are doing a great job of tackling tiny pieces of that larger question: what are the problems and how are we trying to fix them?

And so,when you come to this site, after you click on the disturbing details about health care reform, the first thing that you see is a page that sort of summarizes the three overarching basic problems of the U.S. healthcare system, with links to different sources. And these are sources that are in most cases as non-partisan as I can find -- think tanks, non-partisan institutions and what-have-you, that look at different aspects of the U.S. healthcare system and why it's so lame.

RS: And then the next page we get to is the proposals, right, this is how we're going to fix the problem, and it's flagged as "what Congress wants to do" about health care.

MT: Yes. This was a page, actually, when I started creating this Web site on Tuesday night [August 11, 2009], I thought that a lot of this, that I'd be able to find all this in a pretty digestible form, or maybe in a few different links, or I'd just be able to say, "here's the picture, go nuts." But I didn't find anything that sort of summed up the common proposals in a sort of human-accessible fashion. And so I ended up just doing that to the best of my ability: taking the main components of all the different pieces of health care legislation that are winding their way through Congress and summarizing them, with, again, supporting links to different sources, to the best sources that I could find, explaining what each proposal is, why it could help, and what some of the pros and cons might be.

RS: And you've got, especially, these three criteria: "Does it improve effectiveness, does it control cost, and does it increase access" and then some checkboxes below that. And it certainly makes it clear that there seems to be one choice out there that does all three of those things.

MT: Right, and this is sort of an info design thing that might be a little misleading in fact. These different proposals, even if one gets at all three goals of health reform -- improving effectiveness, bringing costs under control, bringing coverage to more Americans -- it may not even be the most important piece of the puzzle. Each of them is important, and each of those three aspects is important, and some of them that just focus on one aspect are as important as the others, but you'll notice that those three things, the three elements -- effectiveness, cost control, more access -- are the same things that I identify in the "problems" page as being the overarching problems with the system. It's ineffective, it's leaving America bankrupt, and it leaves many Americans out altogether.

RS: So in a lot of ways here, you're using the "Death Panels" meme, if you will, to kind of turn it around on the people that are saying a lot of things without any information, and you're providing the information to back up what you think is the right frame for the discussion that we should be having in the media.

MT: Right.

RS: People are going to ask, is it activism or is it journalism?

MT: Yeah, absolutely, and I come out, one of the first things I say on the About page, is I'm a journalist. I identify myself as an online journalist, but I definitely have a perspective on this, which is that I am in favor of health reform, broadly.

RS: And I'm right there with you. So from a theoretical point, I'm sort of interested in [the question]: Does identifying ourselves as journalists, first, does that make it easier for the average person who comes across this site to then say "Oh, OK. I believe what he says, he's got a point of view, but I can tell this is journalistic."

MT: Yeah, it's really hard to say. And this is an area, especially, health reform, where it's difficult to draw that line, partially because the balance of evidence is weighted so heavily in one direction. It is really difficult to say that the U.S. has a good healthcare system, or the best healthcare system, among industrialized nations and provide any evidence to back up that claim.

So, you will notice, the Frontline producer, T.R. Reid, who's behind one of the big media efforts to grapple with the problems of the healthcare system, which is called "Sick Around the World" -- it's a Frontline documentary. T.R. Reid is actually a strong proponent of health reform, and his new book looks at healthcare systems in other countries and comes away with the conclusion that the U.S. should emulate these. So in a way, T.R. Reid, who's definitely a prominent, well-recognized journalist on the issue, is also an activist for this particular type of reform.

It is a tricky line, and I think, especially on a subject like this, [that] saying a lot of things that have a lot of evidence behind them and that you can say are sort of objectively true still sounds like you're stumping for a particular perspective.

RS: Right and it's not necessarily as clear-cut as "the earth is round; the earth is flat," but I'd like to believe for a majority of Americans [that] it's clearly something right, and so as journalists, the question is how do we maintain our skepticism? I'm not going to use the O word but [how do we] maintain our skepticism and yet come up with the right evidence to back up our claims? And I think that you've done that here, and stylishly. So thank you for taking a quick time-out to talk to me. I'm sure that you're refreshing Google Analytics a couple times. Obviously, I think this is a really fascinating piece of journalism, and I hope we'll be able to talk more about it soon.

MT: Hey, thanks for the interview Ryan, and to everyone who's listening. Check out deathpanels.org and spread the word.

But if you spend your days and side projects talking to journalists about interacting with their readers, you tend to look for the right words to get your message across. Or at least I do. Because they're not really "readers" anymore, are they? The people formerly known as the audience? Accurate, but wordy -- and maybe a little too professorial for my usual purposes.

So what do we call the human beings who both consume the journalism we produce and participate in its creation? Are they members in a geographical or topical community of interest? Does that qualify them as a community?

I asked a similar question on Twitter and in a blog post a few weeks ago, and most of the answers were negative: No, our readers aren't necessarily a community. No, you can't slap the label of "community" on a group of people; they have to do that for themselves, or otherwise prove that they're a communal gathering. No, most of our readers are still a static audience, one-way receivers of information.

Geekdad Examples

And then I spotted something in one of the not-about-journalism blogs that I read. Specifically, Wired.com's Geekdad. Here's what Geekdad blogger Jonathan Liu wrote, trying to explain to a friend why he and his colleagues referred to themselves as "geeks" so often in their blog posts. Are they like Diggers or BoingBoingers or Treehuggers? Maybe...

But the other answer I came up with is this: We are a blog in which the writers, the readers, and the subject matter are all the same: it's about the intersection of parenting and geekiness. Our readers are geekdads and moms, and our writers are geekdads and moms. And, in fact, all the new writers (myself included) were readers first who wanted to geek out about their own obsessions. We write about our passions, for people who share something in common with us.

Because I'm a geek/dad, if not necessarily a full-blown Geekdad yet, it makes perfect sense. These are people like me writing about experiences that are either familiar to me, or talking about ideas that I'm profoundly interested in as a member of the community of people who self-identify as geekdads.

So maybe readers have a common topic of interest (baseball, city government, gardening), but a community is the topic of interest itself (baseball players, city council members and local activists, serious gardeners).

Defining Community

I'll take that a little further into the realm of definitions: A community is not defined by its participation in your media product, but by their own experiences which you happen to also be describing, or engaged in yourself.

For a local news organization of any sort, I expect the next question to be whether a geographic location alone is enough to define a community. I don't think so. I do think there's a subset of residents of a place that can form a community, but it might be time to get used to the idea that the people interested in highly detailed process stories coming out of city council meetings are a niche community, and not the broader population.

What do you think? How do you define a community, and is that what you'd call the people participating in acts of storytelling, activism, and/or journalism in your town or topic of interest?

That's what it looked like, and it did some interesting things, but not as much as I would have liked. And so began the process of building 2.0. And with it, the cataloging of lessons learned from the first run.

Here's what it looks like now, almost two weeks after the launch of the new site:

So, what were the lessons that I learned to help make the jump from 1.0 to 2.0? Here's the key slide from the presentation I gave in a few places during the development of ReportingOn 2.0:

DIY has its limits

I was limited by my own skill and knowledge when it came to web development on the first run. I was teaching myself Django in the middle of the night and early in the morning over coffee, gleaning the important parts from a variety of open source Django projects and friends. Hiring a development and design team solved that. And it solved it well. I haven't touched a line of code in ReportingOn 2.0, but with the code I soaked up on the first try, I understand its structure and syntax.

What's my motivation?

(Note the score in the lower-right corner of Joey's avatar.)

A points-based system in RO 2.0 helps feed the egos of power users while acting as a guide, beat-by-beat, to who might have a good answer for your question. There are still leaderboards to be built, and I'm thinking up other ways to use the points system to motivate users, especially as the network gets off the ground.

Twitter is faster than me

Right, so 140-character limits are long-gone in RO 2.0, and the straight question/answer session should (theoretically, at least) make for longer conversations with more depth to them. As has been pointed out more than a few times, Twitter is a good place to start an argument, but a really poor place to finish one. Although I'd hesitate to frame the sort of exploratory, qualitative Q&A that could happen on ReportingOn as "argument" or "debate," I'd like to believe that highlighting a "good answer" as noted by the person who asked the question will help lead to a permanent archive for reporting resources in a way that Twitter simply doesn't do.

To put a finer point on it, if I ask a question of my followers on Twitter and I get a great answer, I get it in a stream of replies that are useful to a certain subset of Twitter users at that moment, but fly right by in the stream and never come back unless I pull them out of the flow of Twitter and display them somewhere. At this particular moment in time, Twitter's search functionality is highly ephemeral in nature, as it starts and stops indexing from time to time, and rarely dips back in the chronology as far as might be useful. So where the quick-answer utility of Twitter stops, the long-term archive of ReportingOn begins.

Translate this?

This is the Great Unchecked Box on the list of development paths to explore, and it's pretty critical. When ReportingOn 1.0 launched in October 2008, Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking journalists were among the users most excited about it. A few even translated the FAQ into other languages and made all sorts of great suggestions via email, Twitter, and their blogs as to how I might implement some sort of translation tool, or a choice of language for each user.

So how do other social networks handle this? Facebook actually crowdsources the translations of the "chatter" on their site via a Facebook application. (When I say "chatter," I mean the documentation and little bits of stock verbiage that come in between all that content you create on the network.) Now, getting the chatter right is important, but in the case of RO 2.0, it's the content that needs translation.

(Facebook allows users to choose from a wide range of languages to view the social network in, but they translate the text created by Facebook, not the content of your friends' posts and comments.)

The whole point of the network is to bring together journalists in disparate places working on similar beats, so I've rejected any method that divides up the streams of questions and answers based on language. (Of course, a Spanish-speaking journalist would be free to use the existing open source codebase of RO 2.0 to build their own version of the site.)

That leaves something like the Google AJAX Language API as an obvious option. How would it work? Well, if you're looking at a question posted in English, you might have a button that says 'Translate This!' which leads to a little pop-up menu allowing you to choose a language, then the translator would run and display the question in the language of your choice. If you've ever used Google Translate on a web page or a block of text, you know how spotty it can be, but I haven't seen a better solution yet.

Public Relations Sharks

Ah, the sharks. Well, while there's no "tag this shark" button in the system yet, as use of the network ramps up, I'm hoping that any impositions made in answers by my friends in the public relations and marketing fields will simply not be marked as 'good answers' and without positive feedback, the sharks will lose interest.

("Shark" by Jeff Kubina on Flickr.)

But, I think there's plenty of room for a better answer to this problem. One option I kicked around with the development team was to let users "flag" a problematic user; but one flag alone didn't change anything; it would take five or ten flags before the user's answers would either not be displayed to others, or perhaps their answers would be collapsed down to only display their username and a flag. Interested users could click to view their answer, or maybe set a threshold-style switch in their profile to 'always view answers from flagged users.'

What's next?

We'll see. The development team has some bits and pieces of time to finish one or two features on my wishlist, and then the network will most likely stand as-is until either I pick up some more funding to continue work on it, or until some friendly developers submit some interesting patches. I'm eager to see what they come up with, and how the codebase is used out in the wider web.

It's still the backchannel for your beat, but it's an absolute re-imagining of the network.

For those of you who haven't been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it's a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source.

(You can catch up with our progress reports from year one and related concepts right here at IdeaLab.)

The first time out, I built it to be quite Twitter-esque in the hopes that journalists would use it like Twitter, asking questions of their followers and sharing ideas about stories they were working on.

That didn't happen organically, or if it was going to, it was going to take years. So, with the help of a professional development and design team, we've rebuilt the site from the ground up, framed around the act of asking and answering questions.

There's no 140-character limit, but what you will find are lots of basic features that make sense in this sort of social network.

You can "watch" users, beats, or a particular question, viewing everything in an activity feed that brings you the latest questions and answers from journalists, topics, and particular issues you're interested in.

I think you'll like it.

And, as the grant year for ReportingOn comes to a close, we're also making the source code for ReportingOn available here under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. You can use that to build your own backchannel question-and-answer tool for the journalists in your news organization, or even let your readers ask and answer questions.

Where to go from here

1. ReportingOn.com itself is a stunning success, with thousands of journalists asking and answering great questions every day, finding peers and mentors, improving local news by adding context and insight gleaned from others working similar angles on stories in far-flung locales.
2. A media company uses ReportingOn's open-sourced code base to build their own internal backchannel, probably on an intranet, or requiring authentication so they can limit it to members of their own organization.
3. A single news organization uses ReportingOn to do the same thing -- build an internal backchannel.
4. A single news organization uses ReportingOn's open-sourced code base to build a public tool that allows readers, sources, and reporters to ask and answer questions in a sort of open forum.

What else could you do with ReportingOn? Give it a shot, and let us know.

What's next for 2.01 and beyond? We'll let the dust settle over the next few days and figure out which additional features we want to build first, then we'll take a look at our budget and consider the options. Feel free to check out feedback.reportingon.com to get an idea of where we might go next, and add your own ideas, too!

Thanks to everyone who helped get this launch out the door on time and on budget, especially the Lion Burger development and design team, all the friends and colleagues who gave me their input over the last year, those of you that answered my last-minute call for beta testers, and the Knight Foundation staff for supporting the first year of ReportingOn.

So... Any questions?

Listen to the full interview here (15:35) or right-click to download the mp3.

Full transcript follows, with links added:

Ryan: Hey this is Ryan Sholin here, I'm recording this today for PBS Idea Lab, and I'm here with Brian Conley of Alive in Baghdad. Brian, how are you doing this morning?

Brian: Pretty good. A little tired. Good to talk to you.

Ryan: Good to talk to you, too. Brian, I've been following what you've been doing since Alive in Baghdad and we crossed paths in person once in October 2007, but I've been seeing you pop up a lot in the last couple weeks as I follow what's going on in Iran...There's been a lot of talk about Twitter, but there's a lot of other ways that people in Iran have been trying to get their story out. Can you talk a little bit first just about your experience so far with Iran, and with Alive in Baghdad.

Brian: Yeah, so I basically come from the documentary film world. I went to Iraq back in '05 with the intention, basically, of producing a bunch of videos of Iraqis talking about what they were experiencing and that kind of expanded into an ongoing news and documentary program distributed by the Internet for the last three years. And then at the beginning of this year and last year, there was the most recent incursion by Israel into Gaza, and during that time we -- we being some other folks that I've collaborated with -- started looking at other tools that we could use just to get some news out. [That led to the Alive in Gaza blog.]

Actually, somebody later told me that we may have been the only international organization reporting from within Gaza. I don't know if that's exactly accurate, but what we were doing was using Skype and recording phone calls, interviews with...a journalist there, and trying to get emails from various Palestinians who were living there, via our coordinator of Alive in Baghdad, who actually, his family is originally from Gaza, although he's never been there, or hasn't been there since he was very young.

Ryan: So while you weren't on the ground in Gaza, you had connections who were, and were able to get information out, too.

Brian: Exactly, and then we used Twitter to pull in questions from people and enable people to sort of interact with our guy on the ground there. So then when Iran started happening it seemed like a natural fit to try and use the same tools for the folks there, to enable them to basically communicate out. The primary thing that we're trying, that we're pushing right now, is basically a phone number that people can call, get to a voicemail box and record whatever they would like to say, and right now I have a public voice mailbox available via an Alive in Tehran Facebook [group].

Also, people can message me via twitter.com/baghdadbrian and then for people who are more private or who have family, they just want to share one voicemail box...we can set up a specific number for any individual. Beyond that, we're looking at other tools. I've learned a little bit about how Students for a Free Tibet have gotten video out of Tibet. So there's one tool I'm sort of sharing with people privately. Then there on Alive in Tehran we have a list of tools Iranians can use to communicate securely. So basically, right now it's a lot of organizing and working it.

Ryan: So, to get information out and have it be valuable and valid, part of that is protecting, for example, that phone number, protecting the message and the exact numbers that you're using, otherwise...Do you feel like it would be prone to the sort of -- I don't want to say abuse -- but the broad range of uses that a Twitter hashtag is subject to because it's completely public?

Brian: Yeah, so the thing about it is that we do have a voicemail box that's completely public. I'm more concerned about that number getting shut down...or that number being tracked, sort of listened into. All those recordings go to one source, and I can listen through them, or have somebody else on our end listen through them before we post them, so that way we can decide where to post them. At this point, unless something is really offensive and abusive, I'm pretty much planning to publish anything that I get there. I may create different categories or different sorting functions for it. For the website, I might create a pro- or an anti- category for the blog.

Right now, we have one guy who's been using the tool repeatedly, and he's just basically doing an update about what he's experiencing there, so that I'm just posting directly to the blog. And otherwise, to some degree, it's just a question of like, I don't know exactly how the technology works on Iran's end, but we know we've heard a lot about their Internet filtering capability. And it actually seems, surprisingly, that landlines may in fact be the safest mode of communication out of Iran right now. Other than encrypted email, which is, unless you do it right, you could end up screwing yourself without sort of realizing.

Ryan: So, this seemingly Dark Ages landline communication that's actually the most secure way to get a call out, once that gets out, you just said you're kind of moderating them. Where are you posting these? I know you mentioned you've got a call with somebody else just after this. I mean, are you trying to reach large news organizations and get out to places like NPR and the BBC to get this on the radio?

Brian: Yeah, I feel like I should be doing that, but right now, given that I've only had one guy who's regularly posting, I'm sort of trying to stay a little bit outside of the establishment press, and sort of say, 'here's a tool that we're giving people.' I'm hoping that people will come to me -- like what happened with this interview that I'm doing next is somebody from BBC's Pods and Blogs show and we'll see how it goes. To me, this is a long term view. That is: How do I start organizing now and get as much done today and [also] stay on this and keep it running, once everything kind of settles?

Honestly, I think that we have to look at the history, and recognize that in 1979, this so-called Islamic Revolution was actually a widespread, multi-ethnic, pluralistic uprising against the Shah, and it just so happened that the conservative Islamic faction was able to effectively control communication, silence its opponents, and come out on top. And that's really a question we have to be sure about today -- at Alive in Tehran, we have no interest in supporting one political candidate over another, or one political party over another. I'm literally just trying to figure out a way to build trust with Iranians and get them the tools to be able to report and speak about what's going on in their lives.

If somebody just wants to call and say "Hi, this is a message for my family in San Francisco, and I want them to know that I'm OK," that's fine with me. The hardest part of this work is getting people on the ground to take ownership and recognize that I'm not doing this with an ulterior motive. My goal is to get people to recognize that they have a voice, they have the tools, and whatever I can do to support them, I will. Obviously, at some point I need to be able to pay my rent and support my family, but that's not really the interest at the moment.

Ryan: You're trying to give these people a voice to get their message out at a moment where it's crucial and it's incredibly difficult...for those of us on this side of the ocean to figure out what's accurate and what's reasonable and what's reliable in terms of sources.

Brian: Right.

Ryan: But you're obligated, also, to play the role of the human editor for that. But on the other hand, you've got the difficulty of trying to get the people on the ground to use the tools.

Brian: Yeah, exactly. And I don't speak Farsi. I speak Arabic, but I don't speak Farsi. I don't really have any contacts there. I have a couple of contacts, it's sort of funny, because we did look into trying to set this up, back in...a couple of years back, sort of looking at doing a project in Iran, with a couple of filmmakers who are known over here and in the blogosphere. I got the impression that nobody wanted to be associated with a project called "Alive in Tehran" because it was too political. It seemed political, inherently.

And it is to some degree political, because we're making this statement that we don't necessarily need the foreign press to go and say "Live from Tehran, this is what you need to know." There are people who live in Iraq, they know what's going on. Especially in places like Iraq where so many people were educated as engineers, and were highly educated, they may not be journalists, but they know how to use the scientific method -- who, what, why, where, when, and how -- it's not hard as long as you can commit to it and be held to account by an editor. Or a fellow collaborator.

Ryan: So how is getting people on the ground involved different in Tehran than it is in Baghdad? In Baghdad, you were there -- you were there in person handing out cameras.

Brian: That's a big part of it, and also that I spent a year just learning about Iraq before I went...and learning about the culture and the people on the ground, and all that sort of thing. On the other hand, now with Alive in Tehran, I have three or four years of proven track record. I'm pretty sure that Alive in Baghdad has won more awards in Internet video than any other program. I have proven integrity that I can stand on. I can say to people on Twitter or on Facebook or wherever, 'My full name is Brian Conley, go to Google and search for me. I'm not the surfer, and I'm not the British comedian. I went to jail in China and I went to jail in Mexico and I went to jail in the United States, all to be able to support this ideal." And I think that goes a long way.

Ryan: Right, you definitely want people to click the first link [in the Google search results] and not the second two.

Brian: Yeah.

Ryan: Let me rewind for a second, can you tell us a little bit about Alive in Baghdad? And then we're going to wrap up and tell people how they can help you out now.

Brian: Alive in Baghdad had been until recently a weekly program about life in Iraq produced by Iraqi journalists and documentary filmmakers. At the beginning of this year, beginning of 2009, we sort of ran into a wall with funding. With Obama being elected, people's eyes were moving away from Iraq, and that made things difficult. We've had some trouble with translators who moved on to other work. And then we've had trouble locating other translators, given the small money that we're able to support for translating our content. We're still working on getting translation happening regularly again and hope to be producing soon -- hopefully by the beginning of July.

It's just been difficult going, and we really want to keep this thing going, but people in Iraq, we've always paid, and we need to be able to keep paying them to be able to keep that work coming. So it's really just a question of priorities and funding right now, and looking at some different things. But I definitely want people to know, it hasn't been regularly updated in the last few months, but Alive in Baghdad is still going, and we are still trying to keep producing new work.

Ryan: What kind of avenues are you looking at for funding? Non-profit? For-profit? How do you go about it?

Brian: Well, my wife and I just had a baby, and we've been on leave for the last several months.

Ryan: Congratulations!

Brian: Well, because of that, not much has moved forward, but I'm probably going to be looking into grants and that kind of funding. Most of our funding so far has just been donations, and every so often getting a deal to license our content, or to produce work for someone like the BBC or Sky News. But as the attention to Iraq has dropped, even more dramatically than it already had previously, it's been getting more difficult. I think really the best way to move forward is going to be to set up a not-for-profit organization and maybe to support all of this content collectively through a larger grant.

Ryan: That sounds really interesting. So let's get the URLs out there again for the people who are listening to this, and I'll get them into the post as well. Where can people find you, and where can people find Alive in Tehran?

Brian: Alive in Tehran is AliveinTehran.org and you can find out more about my previous work at AliveinBaghdad.org

SmallWorldNews.tv is our organizational website, where I'm mostly writing about theory and thoughts about journalism and different media tools that exist and how we can use them more effectively...Also, if people in Iran want to email posts to go directly to the blog, they can email to aliveintehranpost@gmail.com.

Ryan: That sounds great, Brian, thank you so much for your time today, and I hope that you're able to get a lot of the message out about what's going on in Tehran.

Brian: Thank you for having me.

Photo of Brian Conley by Simon Bierwald via Flickr.

I'm extremely psyched to report that we're on track for a July 1 launch of the second phase of this Knight News Challenge funded project.

As a quick refresher, ReportingOn 1.0 launched back in October 2008, as a rather Twitter-like backchannel for beat reporters to connect based on common interests.

Some pieces of the first iteration worked out well, and some of them -- well, we learned a lot.

What's next? Launching version 2.0 on July 1, releasing the open source Django project powering ReportingOn, and working with news organizations and individuals to get them involved, with the hope that they'll be ready to collaborate based on their common interests -- and their common need for context, mentorship, and answers.

Watch the screencast, and please, add your feedback and comments here -- I need your answers, too.

You can find Paul on Twitter or follow the project's progress at the Help Me Investigate blog if you have questions for him, or leave a comment here.

In San Jose, I gave a short talk on ReportingOn as part of my requirements at San José State University's School of Journalism and Mass Communications, where I've now finished up a graduate degree. The audience, mostly made up of my fellow grad students and the faculty, had some great questions and feedback for me, much of it focused on how to work with/around the likely presence of public relations and marketing pros who could flock to an open system full of journalists neatly divided up by beat and location.

A few weeks later, I attended BarCamp NewsInnovation in Philadelphia -- BCNIPhilly.

I could spend a few paragraphs here talking about how much I enjoyed the BarCamp (un)conference format, where attendees signed up upon arrival to lead discussions in a classroom setting at Temple University, and sessions bloomed throughout the day as the conversations worked their way into the hall, then back into a wider conversation. I could spend a lot of time on that, actually, but I'll just leave it at this: It was the most productive journalism meetup of any sort I've been to yet. It's going to be extremely difficult the next time I have to sit through a panel of "experts" opining on abstract concepts.

Here's the presentation [PDF] I gave in Philadelphia before the conversation really got going. It's about ReportingOn's launch, progress, and current state of re-development. Matter of fact, it's embedded right here. (Full-screen mode works best.)

The discussion in Philadelphia was fantastic, with plenty of working journalists, students, thinkers, and educators in the room.

Here are my notes from that conversation:

(Please feel free to add your own questions and answers int he comment thread on this post!)

• Q: How will users build their network? (As in, how will users figure out who/what interests them?)
  • A: Well, that's where forcing users to choose a few beats on signup and displaying some popular/latest stuff in a lot of places will help.
• Q: So will I be able to import my existing social graph?
  • A: Well, hey, y'know, sure, we can make that happen, but the idea here is to connect with new people outside your existing social graph. You want to find people with valuable information/experience and add them to your social graph.
• Q: Hey, so what happened to that idea where you were going to populate this with Twitter? Like, "@reportingon water quality in Long Island #water #longisland" ?
  • A: Every time you tell someone they're Twittering wrong, a LOLcat dies. Meaning, hey, yeah, you can get a few core users to adopt the syntax you need to parse, but not many of them. Why don't I ever use Foamee to "owe" someone a beer on Twitter? Because it's hard as heck to remember the required syntax.
• Idea: RO2 looks like an evolution of message board systems.

• Idea: RO2 looks like a beatblogging tool, something a single reporter or small group could use as an element of the backchannel they're trying to build with their own sources.

• Note: Good explanation of a backchannel: "Twitter is the backchannel for [NAME OF CONFERENCE]; ReportingOn is the backchannel for your beat."

• Note: Mention of college media newsrooms resonated with student journalists. Thinking about tailoring "an introduction" section for the presentation to better present the problem to the specific audience.

• Note: Every time I use my "Your real competition is the Web" line, people perk up. They get that.

• Note: People dig the Phase 2 mockups. They seem to like the new direction, and the look of it.

So, what do you think? Take a look at the presentation and add your feedback here. What's catching your eye? What questions haven't I considered? The developers are in the lab, putting the pieces together. I can't wait to see what happens next.

A dozen or so whiteboards later, the Lion Burger team is actively putting together mockups and the beginnings of the database for what we're calling "Phase 2" of the project.

And it's a huge rethinking of what a "back channel for your beat" looks like. While it's been easy to tag the initial version of ReportingOn as simply "Twitter for journalists," journalists already have a Twitter. It's called Twitter. And the goal was never to create a database of journalists working a certain beat for the benefit of public relations practitioners and social media managers, although that unintended use certainly has a few influential folks interested.

No, the goal was always to give journalists -- whether they're a neighborhood blogger or the Baghdad bureau chief at the Washington Post -- a place to ask questions about what they're reporting on.

The shift that we're making is a move from asking "What are you reporting on?" to asking "What do you need to know about what you're reporting on?"

That's where influences like Stack Overflow come into play. What's the best way to organize and surface questions from journalists about a given topic? That's a question ReportingOn (Phase 2) hopes to answer.

In my post about Michele Ellson and The Island of Alameda I heard an important question, or at least a great example of the problem we're hoping to help solve.

Michele was answering my question about advice for other journalists with thoughts about covering their own neighborhood online, when she wrote this:

"I've found covering local news to be a lot more challenging than I expected, and in some respects a little more challenging than covering an issue beat. For one, you have to be able to speak intelligently on everything from education policy to municipal finance to, in my case, environmental cleanup issues." [emph. mine]

Although it's a different path -- former beat reporter turns general assignment blogger -- than we might expect, Michele eloquently voices a need: She's working a new beat, and she has questions about issues that are new to her.

But those issues might not be new to you. Think you can answer her questions?

I'll be looking for newsrooms and individuals to help test Phase 2 of ReportingOn soon. If you're interested, let me know.

So what does life after newspapers look like, especially in major-metro-adjacent neighborhoods?

I asked one reporter-turned-blogger about the local news site she started after leaving the Bay Area Newspaper Group, the chunk of Dean Singleton's MediaNews that includes the Oakland Tribune and a squadron of other papers up and down the San Francisco Bay.

Michele Ellson, who I worked with in Oakland when I interned on the investigative and enterprise-heavy regional desk there, launched The Island in February 2008 to cover the city of Alameda, a 10.8-square-mile land mass in San Francisco Bay.

Her first lede? I live here.

Michele answered these questions by e-mail this afternoon:

1. When you left your job as a reporter, did you have any plans to get back into journalism? What drove you to start covering local news in Alameda?

I left my job to have my second child, in May 2007. But I did have plans to get back into journalism. Part of the reason I left was out of deep frustration with the direction in which newspapers were headed. And I was intrigued with the possibilities of working online, specifically with the opportunities that it presented to sort of change the news that gets covered and change the way that news gets covered.

I started covering local news for two reasons. One is practical: With two small kids at home, it's what I can do. But another is that local news really isn't being covered well by papers right now. Their resources are shrinking, and with papers becoming more corporate, I think the focus on being local and having a commitment to a local community sometimes is not there.

Having this online platform has offered me the opportunity to offer that commitment. I also think that in terms of creating a business plan and making a site pan out financially, having a local news site that covers one communities or a few small communities - places that can be covered by one or two experienced people - might be easier to support financially than a metro right now.

2. Take us through a snapshot of a typical day at The Island. Are you out on the beat reporting? Working the phones? Managing content and comments?

All of the above - while taking care of two kids.

Today's schedule included stops at two local cafes for a piece I'm running on local coffeehouses, a tour of our former military base for a project on redevelopment plans there, pictures of environmental cleanup taking place there, a stop at a local boat business to check out a tip.

Right now I'm catching up on e-mail, reading comments, updating my main story for the day and checking the local papers and blogs for news. Tonight I'll probably sit down for three or four hours, something I do five nights a week, to write tomorrow's stories.

3. It looks like you're running this on WordPress with a sort of magazine-style theme right now. Can you tell us a little bit about the decisions you've made about your publishing platform and what sort of thought goes into it?

After dragging along for almost a year on Blogger - which is really limited - I spent some time looking at the different WordPress themes to see what was a good fit for the look and feel I wanted for the site and also the amount and type of content I was looking to support.

I chose WordPress because it seemed like a good midpoint between ease of use and quality of presentation, and I think it has kind of an industry standard look about it that legitimizes it in the eyes of my readers. I had looked at some of the more newspaper-y themes but didn't feel like I could generate the content at this point to support something with that much air in it. At some point I'll probably want to upgrade so I can have fixed pages - with their own unique second and third columns - for links and stuff like that (and for ads).

4. What's the revenue model so far? I see some banner ad positions -- any other ideas? Have you thought about a local business directory, for example, or taking donations?

I just upgraded to a page with ad spaces, so for me, the first job is getting those boxes filled. If I can do that, I'm basically earning what I was getting at my last reporting job.

The next step would be to find other avenues for advertising. I think the big thing I could do here would be to put together a real estate ad page, because that's where the money is in our city. Obviously, with the market being where it is, that's not a short-term strategy. But I'm operating in a bedroom community, so I think that's where the money is going to be.

I am also offering classified ads, so that's a small revenue opportunity.

5. What's the one piece of advice you would give an out-of-work journalist with thoughts about covering their own neighborhood online?

Be ready to work. Hard.

I've found covering local news to be a lot more challenging than I expected, and in some respects a little more challenging than covering an issue beat.

For one, you have to be able to speak intelligently on everything from education policy to municipal finance to, in my case, environmental cleanup issues. And people are so invested in these local issues they aren't shy about letting you know when they think you've messed up -- in the most personal and derogatory terms possible, I might add.

That's another thing that I think was a shock for me in moving from print to online - the shift in what your readers want and expect from you in terms of their psychic needs (which shift from information to attention-getting, sometimes) and the kind of engagement they anticipate. I figure it'll take a lot of work for me to fine-tune that engagement level.

Thanks, Michele.

...

A few resources I'd recommend for former newspaper reporters looking to get started online in their neighborhood:

• BeatBlogging to find out what's working for reporters blogging their way to success inside and outside conventional news operations.
• Placeblogger to get indexed and track what other neighborhood bloggers are up to.
• Outside.In to track blogs and news in your town.

I spoke with Suzanne Yada today about the chat, why it's so important to bring the faculty to the table, and what she thinks they can learn from their students. Suzanne is one of the CollegeJourn moderators, and a student at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University. (Full disclosure: I'm still finishing up my graduate degree in the same department.)

(Help transcribe or translate this video at dotSub.)

More

• The live chat starts at 8 p.m. EST on Sunday night at CollegeJourn.
• Follow @collegejourn on Twitter, plus @suzanneyada, and some of the other journalism students and educators helping to set this up: @laurenmichell, @hidama, and @cicm.
• CollegeJourn asked how journalism schools can better prepare students for the real world, and you answered.
• Want to jump into the video conversation about that question? There's a Seesmic thread that has you covered.

(Hat tips to Kristen Taylor and the Knight Pulse crew for the side-by-side Skype video recording idea, which I've poorly executed here, and to @benleis of The Campus Buzz who started #collegejourn as a live Twitter chat in the style of #journchat.)