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.)

I've been pitching ReportingOn using the same set of phrases for more than a year now, but until I sat down with my new development team earlier this month, it hadn't occurred to me that the entire scope of the project was actually encapsulated in those little slogans.

For example:

"It's the backchannel for your beat."

What's a backchannel? What's a beat?

"...for journalists of all stripes."

What's a journalist? Which stripes?

This is the shorthand I used when we started talking about who we're building this network for, and how we hope they use it.

Backchannel:

It's a place where you can connect with people behind the scenes. Think of an IRC channel (or Twitter hashtag) for a conference, or a message board full of photojournalists critiquing each other's work, or even truck drivers connecting via CB radio to talk about road conditions and speed traps.

We just see the trucks rolling down the highway; we don't hear the conversation.

(Unless we listen in via our own radio, an analogy that I'll have to extend in a later post...)

So in the case of ReportingOn, a backchannel is a place for people to connect based on common interests or needs.

Beat:

In the most traditional newspaper sense of the word, a beat is the topical or geographical area a journalist covers. In a university town, a reporter might cover higher education. A neighborhood blogger might consider a radius of a few blocks their geographical beat. Connecting journalists covering similar topical beats across all barriers and borders remains one of the key goals of ReportingOn.

Journalists:

This is always a tough one. If we're going to invite professionals and so-called amateurs to collaborate, it's important to decide where to set the barrier to participate. I like asking the question "Where do you publish?" because it implies that the user has some intent to share information or ideas with others. But what about readers? Are they welcome here? The answer -- for now -- is probably not, but a different track of development could easily lead to a space for journalist/reader interaction. A more pressing concern, given the interest expressed by public relations practitioners in the project, is how much access to give potential sources to the network of journalists.

"...of all stripes":

Defining the stratified, almost hierarchical layers of journalists has been a critical step in forming expectations about who might actually use this thing. Here are a few of the types of journalists we might expect to show up:

• Specialized reporters at national news organizations
• Beat reporters at major metro news organizations
• Small town community reporters
• Topical bloggers
• Neighborhood bloggers

Which journalists on this list are most likely to ask for help or offer it to a peer? That's the sort of question we're asking to help determine how big a role some sort of 'karma' function should play in the application. When I mentioned Stack Overflow in an earlier IdeaLab post, my mind wasn't just on news commenting systems, but on how to rate and reward ReportingOn users as a motivational tool.

With these definitions in hand we're moving on to writing up use cases and narrative ideas about how these users might interact with the information on the site and each other. That's the step that will get us close to making a list of actual development tasks to be completed. And that's what's next.

This is an update about what's going on with ReportingOn, which is to say, there's not much going on with ReportingOn. For now.

My Knight News Challenge-funded project to connect journalists on the same topical beat with their peers launched on October 1. I continued development work on it through the month of October, and then was completely tackled by a pack of wild bears known as my day job, life at home, and a need for some brief moments of sanity in between the rest.

Now that it's time to circle back around and write a few reports about the site's launch and progress, the way forward is obvious:

I can't do it all myself.

I'll be hiring a development/design team to do the initial work on rebuilding the site to meet my specifications, and frankly, I can't wait.

Although interest in using ReportingOn is high, return visitors are few, and much of that, I think, is due in some extent to the lack of certain obvious features that the service needs to have in place to bring users back. Notifications, replies, messaging, and tie-ins to other, widely-used networks.

Networks like Twitter, of course.

The meteoric, eye-popping growth of Twitter in the 13 months since I first submitted my proposal to the Knight Foundation has been a wild variable in the formula for ReportingOn. The massive (compared to a year ago) adoption of Twitter by journalists should really change the way I think about building a platform for journalists to connect. The "not-made-here" syndrome I talk about sometimes appears to be losing its viral powers, as evidenced by the dozens of news organizations using Twitter to connect with their community and beyond.

So I'm changing the way I think about ReportingOn, and I'll be working through writing a refreshed and refined spec with my development and design team soon.

For more "lessons learned" along the same lines, check out Susan Mernit's "Waist deep in the Big Muddy, or, we're moving on" and Chris O'Brien's recent Idea Lab post about the Next Newsroom project's pitfalls.

If the premise of The Pitch sounds familiar, check out the Copycamp archives for ideas about bringing together reporters and readers.

The next Pitch event is on Wednesday Dec. 10, 7 p.m. at Lucid in the U-District. I interviewed Jason by IM on Nov. 20.

Ryan Sholin: How long has The Pitch been going on, and who is involved with it now?

Jason Preston: The Pitch is actually fairly new, as is my blog Eat Sleep Publish -- and they are very much connected. I booted up the blog in May 2008, so, about 7 months ago, and the first Pitch happened on September 18th.

From the very beginning, I've wanted to make ESP a hub for opinion as much as a broadcast platform for my own ideas, and given that Seattle has such a vibrant tech community and there are inherent limitations to just how social a WordPress installation can be, I thought doing a real life event would be a natural fit.

It's still pretty much just me running the show, although I have had one or two people in other cities mumble about starting their own Pitch events -- one in NYC and one in Australia somewhere -- and nothing would please me more to see these popping up in other communities.

RS: What's the structure of the live event? Panels? Presentations? Conversation?

JP: The Pitch is about as free form as I can make it. When you drop by the official event page, you'll see three people listed as "speakers," which is entirely a misnomer.

These three people are people who are, hopefully, knowledgeable about the topic and willing to each give about five minutes of background info, and present a basic opinion about "The Pitch," so that everyone who shows up doesn't need to be an expert to chime in -- we're all starting with a basic level of understanding.

So each event revolves around a "Pitch," which is a basic, hopefully contentious statement about the publishing industry. For example, on December 10th we'll be debating the validity of the statement: "An established newspaper will never be able to provide better hyperlocal coverage than a well-managed neighborhood blog."

Other than that the event is open. I bring a microphone and pass it around to everyone who wants to have their say. I also buy people drinks because I think that makes them like me.

RS: Yes, yes, every time I look at the Pitch page on Eat Sleep Publish I can't help but notice the open bar notes. Is that out of pocket or do you have sponsors for the events?

JP: I was lucky enough to get the first event sponsored, and it looks like I'll be able to do that with the second as well.

It's a little bit tricky to find a sponsor that fits the event, which is important to me. I don't think it would make any sense to have a bunch of journalists, bloggers, and new media types show up and find a publishing event sponsored by Twinkies or something weird.

That said, I'm never going to go back on the offer for free drinks, even if I have to buy them myself.

RS: I'm interested in that breakdown of people who show up at the events; you're expecting "journalists, bloggers, and new media types." You describe yourself as a "social media consultant and professional blogger." Do journalists look at you sideways when you mention that?

JP: Sometimes. I think in Seattle less than in other places since this city is positively crawling with ex-Microsofties who are doing their own startups. Within any two block radius you can find four coffee shops each with eight "social media consultants" pounding away at laptops.

But as a general rule one of the things that I think plagues the publishing industry as a whole is the distrust, sometimes warranted, of "new media." It leads people to avoid trying things at a time when trying "things" is probably the most important part of any business plan.

RS: Is that part of the point of these meetups? You'd think that journalists and social media consultants partying together couldn't be a bad thing to build relationships...

JP: You've hit the nail on the head. I remember reading a New Yorker article eight or nine months ago that described a (ready for this?) ex-Microsoft millionaire who started a company based around filing patents. [Note: Jason's talking about Nathan Myhrvold.]

His idea was that if you get enough smart people in the same room from different backgrounds, patentable "discoveries" are almost inevitable. A problem that plagues medical doctors may be something that physicists solved years so, or an urban planner may be sitting on the secret sauce that makes the Space Shuttle fly at twice the efficiency, and so on.

I think that makes a lot of sense. And I think that there's a lot to be gained from putting old school journalists and publishers (good reporting skills, contacts, and they RUN the freaking business) in a room with bloggers and new media types (who might not know the first thing about journalism, but who seem to instinctively *get* the internet).

RS: Sounds like the right idea. What's the turnout been like so far?

JP: It tends to be around 20 people or so. Which is actually just about the right size for passing the mic around. I'm a little afraid that if it gets to big it will become unwieldy, and then I'll be faced with the really difficult choice of either changing the format of the event or turning some people away, neither of which sounds particularly exciting to me.

RS: The small group definitely sounds more productive than a conference-sized audience trying to unconference themselves into a conversation. What else should journalists, whether they're professionals or amateurs, know about The Pitch?

JP: Well, I think there are actually a few less-obvious benefits to The Pitch, aside from the usual value of actually showing up and meeting people (commonly and somewhat sleazily referred to as "networking"), including the fact that it's a real snapshot of the community, and an example of the community interacting with an online publication.

Newspapers actually started, I believe, as tools of policial parties, and gradually evolved into their current form. But they've always served as tools to help a community bond together, with the implicit promise that some paper on your doorstep every morning was a *pretty good* way to do that.

But the internet changes all those rules, and it makes it hard if not impossible for a newspaper to serve those same community functions (why check event listings tomorrow morning if I can look them up now on my iphone? same with classifieds, etc)

I'd be lying if I said that Eat Sleep Publish didn't get a healthy boost from being tied to these events. So do its sponsors (I hope). It's stunning to me that so many newspapers don't do more to engage with the community.

Mónica Guzmán, who writes at the Big Blog for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, holds a weekly "office hours" meetup at coffee shops around the city, and usually about 8-12 people show up for a couple of hours and talk about whatever.

But the point is that she's cultivating her community, getting story tips and ideas, and developing a loyal reader base in ways that no other local paper is doing, and the P-I is going to reap the benefits by having a more engaged audience, spending more time on site, and relying more on the P-I as a tool to connect them to each other. Which was and always will be the power behind a newspaper.

Also did I mention there's free drinks?

RS: Thanks a lot, Jason.

JP: No problem, thanks much.

Like this one: Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow is a service where programmers can ask and answer questions.

That's all. Not too complicated when you describe it that way. But hidden in that description is a valuable system of voting and rating, where users earn points (call it Karma if that seems familiar) for asking and answering questions.

The most novel thing I've found about the site so far is that the user who asks a question can flag the correct answer, which then gets nailed to the top of the comment thread full of possible solutions. The user who submitted the right answer? Extra points for them.

So it's one part Slashdot, one part Digg, and a lot of thought about the value of voting systems as a way to filter content.

I've spent a lot of time talking about commenting systems for news sites over the past few years, and it usually comes down to a choice between ratings systems (think: Digg) and identity systems (think: Facebook).

How much value would a vote-for-the-right-answer recommendation engine like this have to a news organization? To a local community?

See also:

• Mahalo, a Wikipedia of sorts edited by paid employees. (Here's a page on Tofurkey.)
• Uservoice, a feedback tool for your online news startup among other things. (Here's a uservoice for the incoming Obama administration.)

While I was going through that process of refining the idea and deciding which features were crucial and which would just be gravy, it turned out that a lot of other people were trying to solve the same problem, although not strictly with journalists in mind.

Here are some of the ways you can build a backchannel for your newsroom today, if not necessarily your beat, without ReportingOn:

The Prologue theme for WordPress

If all you need is a way to bring together short updates by a small, set group of people, put up a WordPress blog on your own server with the Prologue theme in place, or use WordPress.com to host it, especially if everyone involved already has an account there.

You'll get a front pages with recent updates, user pages with their updates, tags to use for something like "beats" or "projects" or "groups" -- plus all the usual bells and whistles for WordPress that are available via plugins. Another feature: As with all WordPress blogs, you can always make it private by throwing a password on it, restricting it to internal use.

Verdict: I like it, and I love WordPress, but this really isn't the way to make new connections, it's a project management tool to keep track of what everyone in your office or newsroom or virtual office is working on.

Present.ly

Present.ly Introduction from Intridea on Vimeo.

First things first, let's get this out of the way: This is going to cost you money if you're going to make it useful to a group of more than five people. But it looks like a very well-designed user interface, with features like a mobile site and an API that uses the Twitter API convention out of the box.

This thing is built for enterprise use, inside a company, to be stable and pleasant to work with. That said, again, it costs money. $14/month gets you 15 users, $39 gets you 40, $99 gets 100.

Verdict: Pretty, but probably not worth the money unless you need a mobile version of an internal status-sharing tool tomorrow.

Yammer

This TechCrunch50 winner operates along the same lines as Present.ly: It's Twitter for your corporate network. Set up your own network with the e-mail address domain (say, newspaper.com) as the key to entry.

The pricing model is interesting: Yammer is free, unless you want administrative control over users (say, to delete folks who leave your company?), at which point, you'll pay a dollar per user per month if I'm reading it right. Lots of features here, with iPhone and Blackberry applications, IM interface, and easy friend and tag following.

Verdict: Yammer probably makes a ton of sense for a large, distributed news organization like a national newspaper or a cable news network. As long as everyone has the same e-mail domain, it's easy to build a web of workgroups, whether their offices are across a river from each other or on the other side of the world.

Backpack Journal

So this is a 37signals product built into Backpack, which means it's designed to do a small number of things and do them incredibly efficiently. So it's useful on its own, and if you're already using Backpack or Basecamp or Campfire, it should be easy to integrate into your workflow.

Backpack Journal should work well for small group work and long-term projects. The calendar built into Backpack makes it easy to track who's doing what when, so if you're spending two months on an investigative piece that's going to run 40 inches long with two sidebars, a slideshow, two videos, and a database, this would be a great way to track everyone's progress.

Pricing for Backpack starts at $24 per month for 6 users, $49 for 15, and $99 for 40, so this might not be the most cost-efficient option out there.

Verdict: If you're already using 37signals services, this is a fantastic addition to their suite of productivity tools. If you're a small team, Backpack might be a good buy, as long as your team commits to using it. If no one signs in and posts updates, checks off boxes on the calendar, or tracks progress of pieces of your project, it's not a very productive productivity app, now is it?

Further Inspiration

So far, much of the public reaction to ReportingOn has been filed under "Twitter for Journalists." Ideally, I'd like it to differ from Twitter in more than a few ways, and I've been actively looking for inspiration as I develop features that serve to connect journalists of all stripes in a more productive and deeper way than following each other on Twitter allows.

And yesterday, I took a look at blip.fm for the first time.

While Twitter asks "What are you doing?" and ReportingOn asks "What are you reporting on?" and the above list of microblogging tools for enterprise asks "What are you working on?" blip.fm asks this: "What are you listening to?"

Great, so it's a music discovery engine, where you can listen to the songs your friends are listening to, but here's the part that really impressed me: They took the logic of a discovery engine like last.fm, where you might create a "channel" based on a band you like, and extended it to set you up with a set of "DJs" to follow when you first sign up.

So, a feature that's now on my list for ReportingOn, after the ability to follow "friends," is to add a few "beats" to your profile when you sign up. The application should automatically outfit you with "friends" who happen to be the 5 or 10 journalists who use those beat tags most often.

I'm getting excited about that feature as a way to make programmatic connections and add some serendipity that scales.

The Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking media blogosphere appears to be truly excited about the idea of Twitter para periodistas, even as I try to differentiate from Twitter as fast as I can.

Pablo Mancini, interactive services manager at the beautifully designed El Comercio of Lima, Peru, interviewed me by e-mail yesterday. Rodrigo Orihuela handled the translation, so if your Spanish is up to the task, you can read the exchange posted on their group blog, Amphibia.

Here's the interview in English:

Q: Is ReportingOn living up to you expectations for the first few days? I guess you have a some kind of targets you want to meet.

A: Well, there's a few things going on, now just six days into launching ReportingOn in what I'm calling a public beta of the site. Behind the scenes, I'm up early in the morning adding functionality as I learn more about Django every single day, and with live content and users banging away at the site, it makes it much easier to see what works, and what's necessary to do next.

I expected that a lot of my friends in the media blogosphere would join, but not have much to say, which makes sense, because this is a really a tool for on-the-ground reporters, so I'm not surprised at the high ratio of users to updates so far.

Q: It seems there are quite a few non-US journalists, several of them from South America, among the first 100-odd users. Had you counted on so many non-Americans joining so fast?

A: The biggest surprise of the first week, which you and your colleagues are the evidence of, is the huge turnout from Spanish and Portuguese-speaking journalists. I'm scrambling to come up with an intelligent way to deal with the different languages on the site without creating too many divisions between users based on their location. As a researcher, it's really exciting to me because it's what we might call an "unintended use" of the site, and as a developer, it's exciting to have a sudden need to push something up the feature queue in a hurry.

Of course, I have to thank Dario Gallo and a number of other bloggers in South America and Europe for writing about the site this week.

Q: How many people work on ReportingOn? (Including development, design and all the build-up stuff.)

A: One. And thousands. Which is to say, while I'm the only one with my hands in the code of the site, I've benefited greatly from the work of others in the open-source community, especially Django developers, some of whom have personally helped me solve individual programming problems.

Part of my personal goal for ReportingOn is to prove that one excited journalist can create something useful online without a computer science degree or much training at all.

Q: What is ReportingOn's business model?

A: There isn't one. This is a non-profit project funded by the Knight News Challenge with the goal of improving local news by connecting journalists to the people they don't talk with enough: each other.

Once the site is running on its own with a healthy set of features in place, I'll open-source the code and invite developers and journalists to improve on the idea and launch their own versions of the site. For example, a large news organization with staff spread across the globe might benefit from an internal version, or a topical journalism association focused on something like science reporting or covering education could use their own version of ReportingOn to focus on even narrower beats within their fields.

Q: How do you see ReportingOn in a year's time?

A: Well, I certainly hope that it's a vibrant network full of conversations that are useful to reporters who might be new to a town, a beat, or looking for new angles on an old story, but at the same time, I won't be disappointed if something better comes along to help journalists of all kinds make these connections.

I have a long list of things to polish, add, tweak, revise, and rethink, but it was time to open the site up to users and let them help me figure it out.

Last time I wrote about the options I was considering for Web development, I was leaning toward Django and away from Drupal.

Here's why I gave up on Drupal for this project and moved on to Django:

Drupal is a fantastic content management system out of the box, with little -- if any -- programming knowledge required to get started, but I found it to be extremely difficult to mold into the application I was building.

Did I need the structure Drupal came with for users, posts, archives, feeds, and comments? Probably. But there was a whole bunch of other baggage, like all the WYSIWYG block and module organization that I wasn't as comfortable with. My first instinct was to start from scratch and build my own theme, but I quickly realized I needed to build my own content types. And views. And the file system was confusing to me, coming from WordPress. Plus, although the Drupal community is full of awesome people building awesome modules, I still couldn't figure out how to do a few simple things, like create a content type with a maximum length (say, 140 characters).

On the other hand, as soon as I started digging a little further into Django, I found an active community of developers working on projects similar to mine.

Why? Is it just because Django is still new and shiny? Maybe. But the fact that developers interested in services like Twitter and Friendfeed were building their own tools in Django with similar functionality made all the difference as I looked for open source projects and pluggable apps to incorporate into ReportingOn.

Here are a few of the Django applications that have been involved in my development process in one way or another:

• Finisht: Nick Sergeant's "done" list for "developers who do things." (On Google Code)
• Pinax: James Tauber is the lead developer on this project, which, frankly, is pretty all-encompassing. If you're seriously considering building any sort of social network or content management system in Django anytime soon, I highly recommend you take a close look at all the work that's already been done on Pinax before you start reinventing any wheels. Check out Cloud27 for a demo of what this system is capable of with all its bits active. (On Google Code)
• Django-Tagging
• Django-Profile

Plus, the Django community and my own network of online friends and acquaintances has an enormous amount of overlap, so I've been inundated at times with offers of help, hints, tips, and flat-out answers to my questions about Django.

The Drupal commmunity? I certainly know a few people there, but without an exception that I can think of (correct me, please), they're developers first, and journalists second. Which is fine, except that I'm really trying to maintain ReportingOn as something built by journalists, for journalists.

Why? Well, while a primary goal of mine is to make ReportingOn a repeatable process -- in this case, a relatively self-contained Django application that anyone can run on their own server -- I'm really trying to make this something repeatable by journalists with little programming experience. And that describes me, too. I have a few years of experience working with WordPress and other platforms, but most of the "programming" I've done has been strictly copy & paste, trial & error.

In fact, I expected the "programming" part of building ReportingOn to be far more difficult. In July, when I told Adrian Holovaty I was seriously thinking about using Django for my project, he said: "I didn't know you were a programmer." My response: "Well, I'm not. I didn't think you had to be." And Adrian suggested a book about learning Python called "How to think like a computer scientist" that I haven't read yet, because I've had an easy time of picking up bits of Python by reverse-engineering other applications and walking myself through every tutorial and screencast that I've found.

It wasn't that hard to wrap my head around Django's file structure, or the model-template-view pattern. Frankly, it was harder to get certain accessories to Python running in a development environment on my laptop, but once I moved the app to a production server at Webfaction I had much, much better luck.

None of this is to say I'd recommend against using Drupal for any number of projects. 12seconds is one of the most impressive things I've seen built in Drupal, lately, and it certainly doesn't feel like Drupal when you're using it.

But for me, as a proof of concept that a journalist with just a little programming knowledge can build something interesting on a low budget (all I've paid for so far has been Web hosting), assembling ReportingOn in Django was the way to go.

Rosen and others are calling for journalists of all stripes (professionals, amateurs, citizens, bloggers, etc.) to use a #spinewatch tag on Twitter and elsewhere to call attention to whether or not the professional press covering the home stretch of the 2008 presidential election is standing up to stonewalling candidates or sitting back and repeating their talking points.

In an IM interview today, Jay said:

"The premise behind spinewatch is more this: It's hard for me to see how you can have a more legitimate or consensus practice in campaign journalism than fact-checking the empirical claims candidates make -- in ads, speeches, interviews -- as they compete for votes. In other words, if the press cannot at least do that, what is it good for?"

The full IM transcript after the jump...

After all, ReportingOn borrows a great deal from Twitter, and I've been writing about the exponentially growing micro-blogging service for around a year now.

I can't help but notice that a commenter or two seem to think that anyone actually takes is seriously when Twitter asks its base question of "What are you doing?"

This is what makes it easy for those who haven't sipped from the Tweetstream to write it off as crap for tweens.

Actually, that's the first time I've ever heard anyone call it that, but you get the idea.

So without further prologue, here are five ways to gather and report news with Twitter:

1. The low-hanging fruit: Tweet your headlines. Use Twitterfeed to push RSS to Twitter. Breaking news is best, but feeds from niche sections are best. Bonus points: Skip the feed and add tweets by hand when there's an interesting comment thread, a poll, a video -- something special to alert on with a well-crafted tease.
2. Dr. Obvious: Live-tweet an event. First of all, stop thinking about Twitter as a place on the Web, and start thinking about it as a platform for publishing. Use services like Flickr, Utterz, or a variety of mobile Twitter clients to publish audio and photos in your stream along with text updates. Embed a widget on your home page or the relevant event package page, or republish the RSS feed in any format that makes sense for your site. Getting this set up during a fun event (think: state fair) will make it easier to run in a hard news situation (think: election night). Bonus points: Use Twitter as an easy way to report late high school football scores on a Friday night. Interview the coach with your phone straight to an audio-to-Twitter service for a near-live broadcast after the game.
3. Birds of a feather: Gather intelligence from the crowd. Use hashtags for upcoming events or ongoing issues and encourage readers who tweet to use those tags. Embed the feed from the tag on the event package page on your site. This works with reviews and local businesses, too. Bonus points:
4. Data mining: Find the sources in the noise. Follow keywords (think: names of local politicians, cops, and business owners) related to your beat and you may find new sources in the chatter. Contact them by DM on Twitter even if you can't get them to return your calls of e-mails -- if they're a regular user, they won't be able to miss that connection. Bonus points: Republish public Twitter streams of conversation about local news on your site.
5. Network effect: Use Twitter followers as a focus group. Reach out to the early adopters in your town (find them by subscribing to Twitter search feeds for the name of your town or your news organization) and use them as a sounding board for upcoming coverage and new features on the site. Bonus points: Governor coming to town? Ask the local Twitter users to submit their own questions.

Add your own suggestions in the comments.

If you still think Twitter isn't something you could use at your news site or as a part of your local news project or organization, check out these resources:

• Erica Smith keeps a running list of Newspapers that Twitter, including monthly data on their follower and update numbers.
• Twitter recently purchased the best search engine for Twitter.
• The Twitter Fan Wiki is full of everything from explanations of Twitter etiquette to a set of links to technical instructions on using the Twitter API in your choice of processing and templating languages.
• Twittermap is an incredibly simple way to find local Twitter users.

Add your own suggestions for reporting with Twitter in the comments -- and be sure to include your Twitter ID to make new connections.

I'm ryansholin.

Q: So, what's ReportingOn?

A: ReportingOn.com will be a simple way for journalists to update their peers on the stories they're working on right now. Tag your 140-character-or-less updates with the beat you're on, and find peers reporting on similar beats to make connections, introduce yourself to potential mentors, or discover an unsung hero.

Q: When you say "journalists," who are you talking about?

A: Anyone who publishes news, information, or commentary at a relatively stable spot in print and/or online. That umbrella should cover reporters at the Washington Post, photojournalism students with a blog and a school paper, and independent bloggers who focus on a certain topic. Ideally, the journalists in question have a definable beat, whether it's geographical or topical, and they're doing original reporting of some sort.

Q: So it's a social network? I already belong to a few of those...

A: You can call it that if you want. If it's a social network, it's one based on beats, which doesn't exist just yet. There are plenty of blogs, social networks, and discussion boards based on craft, and there's Wired Journalists for general professional networking, but no public place for journalists to flag themselves as, say, an education reporter who frequently writes about standardized testing, and find other reporters working the same beat.

Q: So what am I supposed to say about the story I'm working on?

A: As much or little as you want. Maybe you just want to mention something general about your story and tag your update with your beat to let your peers know what you're up to. Or maybe you have a question that needs an answer, or you're bored with all the "usual suspects" sources and you're looking for an introduction to an expert with a different point of view. You'll probably get exactly as much information out of ReportingOn as you put into it.

Q: What if my competition picks up on what I'm working on and beats me to the story?

A: Really? You're still worried about the paper across town? OK, no problem, just don't included much specific information in your updates. But really, ReportingOn is probably going to work much better if you're writing an investigative/enterprise story or a feature. I'm not sure how well it's going to work for breaking news, unless you're just looking for a source or some help making sense out of freshly released data.

Q: OK, where do I start?

A: So glad you asked. ReportingOn is currently in development, but you're more than welcome to follow ReportingOn on Twitter and send it updates. Also, there's a spot at www.reportingon.com to enter your e-mail address. I'm collecting those, and when there's news about the site, I'll send it out to the list.

Of course, for me, that means I'm spending time early in the morning and late at night exploring different options, creating mockups, ditching everything I've done and starting over again.

Here's a few paths of exploration I've been down lately:

• Drupal: Drupal 6 isn't ready for what I need it to do. The Views and CCK modules aren't up to speed yet, or maybe I just haven't found the right set of instructions yet. That brings me to my biggest complaint about Drupal: Although there's a huge open source community gelling around it, no one seems to be writing documentation that makes anything terribly clear, from installation to creating content types in CCK.
  
  
• Django: This is certainly the most challenging track of development I've taken, starting to learn Django from online tutorials and the Django Book (the free online version at the moment). One of my problems with Drupal is that it's over-featured by default. I find myself trying to undo a lot of default Drupal behavior. Hence, the Django path. I figure I can write the views and models myself, only including the puzzle pieces I need to get the job done.
  
  
• WordPress: Speaking of getting the job done, the WordPress Prologue theme combined with a few other elements (maybe bbPress?) could do it. But at a cost, and I think the cost is both in extensibility and repeatability of the application. Either way, doing the small amount of work necessary in WordPress to get a prototype running might be worth it to put up a proof of concept and let one group of reporters or bloggers have at it to beat on the theory behind ReportingOn, if not necessarily the final branch of code.
  
  
• HTML mockups: This is something I highly recommend. If you have the skill to write a simple, flat HTML page with a stylesheet, you have a working template for your project that any developer can understand. If your skills are sharp enough, the mockups you build can serve as the templates of your final design, wrapping the database-driven code that's doing the heavy lifting. The crucial purpose of these mockups for me is to get a better idea of which features belong in the core of the site at the first public launch, and which should roll out later if necessary or logical.
  
  

Which leads to a word on iterative development:

At the birds-of-a-feather group at the MIT meeting of Knight News Challenge winners in June, the conversation covered iterative development, choosing a platform, and hiring developers, among other sidebars.

While the conversation was going on, I was crossing features off the back-of-a-napkin sketches I had been working on. That Digg-esque scoreboard of topics in various mockups I've put together over the last year? Probably not in play. A list of featured reporters on the homepage? Doesn't seem necessary.

So now I'm working on fresh HTML mockups to try and finalize which features I'll bake into the first release of ReportingOn. That way, I can make a decision about a development platform with a solid specification in my hands. Normally, that's the sort of thing I'd need to create to pass on to a developer.

In my case, I'm planning to do the majority of the coding myself, but that doesn't mean I can skip any steps in the process.