The label takes its inspiration from the Greensboro Four, African-American students at N.C. A&T University who sat down at a lunch counter at Woolworth's in 1960. Others joined them, launching a sit-in movement for civil rights across the South.

The Create or Die 2 participants hope to be just as viral.

The first Create or Die gathering was held in Detroit in 2010. The project, part of Journalism That Matters, describes itself as a collaboration supporting new creators of news and information.

Bill Densmore, director of the Media Giraffe project at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said at the end of Create or Die 2 that the event inspired the upholding and spreading of traditional journalism ethics and values, "by any means necessary."

If that means spreading the standards of investigative journalism through hip-hop and biofueled buses, so be it, said participants at the conference, which took place at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

An Unconference

Actually, the "conference" was designed as a structured unconference, with attention paid to things like seating arrangements and story-sharing to build trust and interaction, within a schedule that allows for concrete idea pitches and tours of the community. Journalism was loosely defined, or perhaps redefined, to include mission-driven efforts and storytelling in a broad sense across various platforms.

Peggy Holman, co-founder of Journalism That Matters, and Michelle Ferrier, associate professor at Elon University, were primary organizers, holding weekly calls with volunteers and building an online community before the event.

Holman has been organizing Journalism That Matters programs for years, and Ferrier brought the gathering to Greensboro, to take inspiration from the International Civil Rights Center and Museum and build ties and journalism capacity in the state.

$500 Grants

Three incubators in the center of North Carolina offered support for startups emerging from the conference. Sponsors also offered $500 grants to groups who pitched ideas at the gathering.

Homewood Nation won a $500 grant for efforts to build online and offline community in a challenged neighborhood in Pittsburgh.

Two other $500 grants were combined and went to a creative, diverse group that formed at the gathering.

Members were mostly young, scattered from Los Angeles to Charlotte. They shared ideas, backgrounds and skills at the conference and made plans to launch a new website aimed at letting people claim and control their online IDs.

Create or Die has plans for a biofuel bus tour to spread the word of the project to underserved communities across the country.

Hashtag Still Going Strong

A week out, the conference's impromptu hashtag, #g52, was still going strong on Twitter.

Holman, one of the organizers, reflected on the spirit of the conference in an email afterward.

"If we want to create a more multi-cultural view of the news that is reflective of our changing demographics, we need to shift the mix of providers from the 85 percent of white mainstream journalists that exists today," she wrote. "Yet less than 10 percent of foundation funding is going to people doing online news and information in underserved communities. That's a reason for a wakeup call."

And Ferrier said in an email that the conference isn't really over.

"The gathering is still unfolding," she wrote.

Andria Krewson is a community news editor for The Charlotte Observer and has written about hyper-local journalism for PBS Mediashift. Reach her through http://andriakrewson.com

It's difficult for media people to search any job site these days without running into an ad for AOL's Patch. It seems equally difficult to read media news sites without finding a feature story about Connecticut's MainStreetConnect. MainStreetConnect has appeared in recent days in both Columbia Journalism Review and Journalism.co.uk. Like Patch, the community news organization is hiring, though on a smaller scale as it expands from four sites to 10.

The attention being paid to them isn't surprising: These two companies are leading the charge to create a new, sustainable model for hyper-local, online community news. Both are pursuing a strategy based on scale and local reporting, both are still experimenting and looking for ways to generate revenue -- and both have big national ambitions.

"We've sort of built the car and now we're tweaking it," said Carll Tucker, founder of MainStreetConnect.

Strategy and Some Local News History

For Tucker and AOL's Patch, which now has 83 sites, the goal is to attract advertising aimed at local audiences. They hope to do this by providing content generated by an inexpensive workforce that has been grouped strategically to leverage resources. In that respect, the methods echo the techniques traditional newspapers used during the suburban wars of the 1980s and early 1990s.

In those days, metro dailies fought smaller newspapers in the suburbs for advertising supremacy by providing local news through targeted zones. One of the bloodiest battles happened in Atlanta, when the New York Times bought the suburban Gwinnett Daily News and went head-to-head with the Atlanta Constitution.

The preferred tactic at the time was to flood the zone with inexpensive local content. But in the years since, metro dailies have scaled back circulation and news coverage, leaving a vacuum of under-served businesses and local readers. Those are the advertising and reader markets that Patch and MainStreetConnect are targeting.

"Community business is the worst-served market in America," Tucker said in a May interview I conducted with him. He noted that, "This company could not have been started five years ago" because the vacuum in the local advertising market was not as large as it is now.

Patch executives say that local readers also feel under-served.

"People are way more hungry for news at their local level than even we imagined," said Brian Farnham, editor in chief of Patch. "There's a lot of good sources for news existing at the national level and beyond, but at the local level the cohesive experience is missing."

Site Design and Sharing

Tucker has built his sites with colorful tabs that reflect the vertical advertising markets that were the mainstays of traditional newspapers: "Wheels," "Real Estate, "Food, "Wellness," and "Home and Garden." Those pages hold feature stories that almost always include a local businessperson. These stories are often shared between contiguous sites. The pages also hold business directories for advertisers. The "Wheels" sections at MainStreetConnect sites also display large auto ads.

Tucker has a deep newspaper background with The Patent Trader, which he said covered 90,000 people over 10 towns before Gannett bought it in 1999. His company, which plans to have eventual affiliates across the country, began with the core of four Connecticut sites, with the flagship, TheDailyNorwalk.com, in Norwalk, Conn. Since mid-May, it has added six sites:

• TheDailyNewCanaan.com
• TheDailyWilton.com
• TheDailyWeston.com
• TheDailyEaston.com
• TheDailyStanford.com
• TheDailyGreenwich.com

The other three original sites are:

• TheDailyWestport.com
• TheDailyDarien.com
• TheDailyFairfield.com

The company's current goal is to expand to 50 sites by the end of the year, with 12 in Fairfield County, Conn. When we spoke in May, Tucker downplayed any competition with Patch, even though Patch is in some of the same territory in relatively wealthy Connecticut. Norwalk had an estimated median household income in 2007 of $70,672, and the national average was $50,233 for that year, according to the U.S. Census. Patch also has sites in Fairfield and Westport, just like MainStreetConnect.

"In no way do we compete with them," Tucker had said. When we spoke again this month, he explained that his company's focus is on covering local people, including local business owners, with the goal of attracting "Main Street moms."

Patch's sites have more subtle design and more social-networking features, such as "boards," which are like Facebook walls and are where readers can send feedback to specific writers. Those writers have profiles that list their current stories and sometimes recent tweets, as well as bio information and a statement of political and religious beliefs.
Patch's focus appears to be more on hard news.

For example, a fire in early July in White Plains, N.Y., injured 33 people and destroyed seven businesses. The Patch news story ran in clustered New York Patch sites: The Rye Patch, the Harrison Patch, the Yorktown Patch, the Scarsdale Patch, and likely others, with local sidebars, video and photos.

Advertising and Visibility Packages

MainStreetConnect's ads are sold as "annual visibility packages." In May, Tucker said the smallest "visibility package" the company aimed to sell cost between $5,000 to $6,000.
In our recent interview, he said the company has found ways to accommodate smaller businesses with less immediately available funds. Some advertising can cost as little as $60 to $70 a week.

"We've widened our net for our smaller advertisers," he said, noting that the company has had local success with real estate ads, hospital ads and banks.

"It's not about a price; it's about what you get for the money," he said.

Tucker explained that the company's visibility packages include extra service, such as a salute to advertisers' customers in the upper right of site pages, in a feature called "Our customer comes first!" These include the company name and a photo and name of a customer.

At Patch, Farnham said the advertising focus goes beyond banner ads to directories and self-service ads as well.

"We think the applications that are most interesting are around our listings operation," he said. "We're sending teams to communities who will go door to door and collect data about those places, structure it in our templates, and have a really rich Yellow Pages."

Yes, They Have Job Openings

AOL's Patch continues to recruit editors and open sites across the country, with sites up in California, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. New sites are promised soon in Illinois, Rhode Island and Maryland. The company was recruiting in early July for more than 20 editor positions in the suburbs of Atlanta and Los Angeles. Farnham, the Patch editor in chief, said the company is looking for tomorrow's journalists.

"It's basically one full-time professional editor, who is the reporter and editor and curator of that site, and they also hire local contributors and freelancers to round out that coverage," he said. "You're not thinking about column inches, you're trying to get up-to-the-minute information out there. Should this be a video or a slideshow or some other sort of multimedia?"

MainStreetConnect is also hiring, on a smaller scale, with ads on Mediabistro and Indeed.com. It is seeking experienced news reporters with five to 10 years of experience, preferably in local newspapers and with local knowledge.

Top staffers get a salary of about $40,000 a year, and rookies get less, Tucker said. His wife, personal finance writer Jane Bryant Quinn, serves as editorial director and coaches journalists on writing skills and headline writing. Twenty newsroom employees produce content for the 10 sites. The stories focus on local people, and the company currently does not rely on user-generated content.

"News gathering is a real profession," Tucker said. "Citizen journalism is a completely false rabbit. It's simply not going to succeed."

Patch, by contrast, solicits citizen contributions for news tips, feedback and announcements and calendars.

What Happens Next?

Both Farnham and Tucker spoke about the move into hyper-local online sites as experimental, with adjustments along the way.

"We're learning as fast as we can," said Tucker, mentioning his local advisory boards and social media.

Farnham acknowledged that Patch is moving into some territory where local online ecosystems are already well formed.

"What we do when we come into a market is certainly not just announce, 'Hey we're the only game in town,' " he said. "What we want to offer is a cohesive comprehensive experience. There is that ecosystem."

Farnham said the company is open to working with others.

"We are always open to exploring ways we can work with existing media outlets in communities where we are launching a Patch site. No option is closed off."

Tucker's company was formed with the idea of franchises or affiliates, and he said partners aren't out of the question. "We have had interesting conversations with many of the major players," he said.

For both, the focus is finding a way to make money to sustain local journalism. "There's no free press unless it's a profitable press," Tucker said.

To read more stories in the Beyond Content Farms series go here.

MediaShift editorial intern Davis Shaver contributed to this article.

Andria Krewson is editor for two community sections of the McClatchy-owned Charlotte Observer in Charlotte, N.C. She posts at Global Vue and is @underoak on Twitter.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

The CEO of Creative Commons, Joi Ito, is currently teaching a free online journalism class through Peer 2 Peer University, an online community of "open study groups for short university-level courses." The online class syncs with a graduate-level class Ito teaches at Keio University in Japan, and features a UStream presentation and IRC chat once a week.

IRC chat? Yes, the class glues together tools like UStream and IRC, and the platform, which was built on a Drupal base, continues to evolve. P2PU's organizers make it clear they know the tools aren't perfect, so they're using feedback from participants to refine things as they go.

I joined the class at the last minute. The New York Times had written about P2PU in April, as well as other open learning communities outside of traditional institutions. I stumbled across the article while searching the word "edupunks."

A Proposal

The concept of providing coaching outside of traditional educational institutions has fascinated me for close to a year. I'm focused on how professional journalists can share their knowledge with new creators of online content, be they "citizen journalists," neighborhood activists or seasoned newspaper people working on building online skills.

In the fall, I submitted a Knight News Challenge proposal for an online class, 260 Open, with face-to-face components. Students would have been required to produce coverage of civic events, and experienced journalists would have edited their work closely. The concept was designed to not only spread civic knowledge, media literacy and strong journalism skills, but also to increase the amount of news coverage in particular communities.

I proposed that the class use Moodle, an open source learning management system that has been adopted for institutional use in many places, including the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Central Piedmont Community College. (In the end, I didn't receive a News Challenge grant.)

Then, in May, I pitched the concept at the news entrepreneur boot camp held at the Knight Digital Media Center at the University of Southern California. One strength of that pitch was that many others at the boot camp are building news organizations with educational components to broaden the capacity of communities to help cover their own news.

What I needed, though, was a proven business model with customers who can pay.

Certainly, many large media companies are seeking help from their respective communities in covering the news, and the need exists to improve skills in communities that have lost local news coverage. But finding actual paying customers willing to support classes for the public good is a tough nut to crack. As large companies rush to create content to wrap around new online local ads for small businesses, though, perhaps the business model will become clearer.

P2PU

In contrast, P2PU isn't focusing on the business model at the moment. Instead, organizers are building a community, refining tools and experimenting. That's inspiring.

P2PU co-founder Jan Philipp Schmidt explains the concept of the online school:

In fact, Mozilla teamed up with Hacks & Hackers in a collaboration launched at Knight's recent Future of News and Civic Media conference to use P2PU to allow programmers to teach journalists and journalists to teach programmers. Mozilla and P2PU are also launching the School of Webcraft, with a call for course proposals by July 18.

P2PU's current journalism class has shown me that perhaps it's possible to just start, with imperfect tools, even before funding or business models are clear.

In Charlotte, where I'm based, media folks have demonstrated a commitment to peer coaching and support with some journo/bloggers meetups. We just started holding them, with little regard to organizational structure. David Cohn of Spot.Us showed up via Skype for one meeting.

P2PU shows that possibilities exist. It demonstrates the power of asynchronous communication and online tools for learning, as students in Japan go to class at 9 a.m. on a Monday and I listen and watch at 8 p.m. on a Sunday, at the same time. It's quite a time shifter, right out of "Harry Potter."

What's Next

What I'd like to see next: Take the concept to local communities, with tools that individuals can use to easily create independent, civic journalism courses. Those classes could be augmented with local meetups to strengthen ties and build strong networks. Local journalists familiar with the civic and social nuances of particular communities would add unmatched value.

Perhaps there's a business model in there somewhere. But, more importantly, the concept provides more tools for journalists to share knowledge and perhaps help sustain themselves as teachers and coaches, while broadening the capacity for communities to tell their own stories.

Maybe we can make it so. What do you think?

Andria Krewson is editor for two community sections of the McClatchy-owned Charlotte Observer in Charlotte, N.C. She is @underoak on Twitter.

Education content on MediaShift is sponsored by Carnegie-Knight News21, an alliance of 12 journalism schools in which top students tell complex stories in inventive ways. See tips for spurring innovation and digital learning at Learn.News21.com.

While small independents might not yet feel the financial benefits of an increased focus on local advertising, some site owners are seeing increased interest in the content they generate and in the tools they need. Service providers have stepped in, willing to help them for a fee or ad percentage. New tools and networks for inexpensive local advertising continue to sprout, offering the possibility of payouts that will help fuel local news.

Some national players like AOL's Patch have generated attention from traditional media like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and companies have popped up to provide technical services or partnerships. As always, paidContent offers strong coverage of large business moves.

Meanwhile, Michele McLellan of the Reynolds Journalism Institute has been compiling Michele's List, which categorizes and surveys new local news providers. Along the way, she and her fellow researchers have helped build a new vocabulary defining online local news providers.

"We've come up with broad categories of sites that relate to their mission, their size and reach and their potential revenue needs," she said via email. "The smaller community, micro-local and niche sites see local advertising as their main source of income. Larger sites, the ones I call 'new traditionals' often lean more toward testing a membership model."

With the pace of change, it's valuable occasionally just to take a snapshot of current trends. So here's a picture of local news service providers and new networkers.

Technical Enablers

Instivate, which runs Neighborlogs of Seattle, continues to add customers and build out its Seattle Indie Advertising Network. The network includes at least 10 neighborhood sites and eight citywide sites, including the year-old Seattle Post Globe, born from some laid-off staff of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Instivate has also built a free iPhone app for Seattle crime.

Main Street Connect is offering community journalists the technical support, working capital and guidance to build and maintain community sites with franchise agreements. It calls itself a national community news company. The company's current goal is to expand to 50 sites by the end of the year, said Carll Tucker, editor and publisher, in a telephone interview.

The company's first site is the Daily Norwalk in Connecticut.

"We've experienced absolute and astonishing reader acceptance," Tucker said. Sites use Drupal, Google Ad Manager and Salesforce.com as technical tools, he said, and ads are sold as "annual visibility packages."

Tucker's wife, personal finance writer Jane Bryant Quinn, serves as editorial director, working with both new and seasoned journalists.

The Norwalk site is networked with sites in Westport, Darien and Fairfield, Conn.

Content Networks

TBD.com, the Albritton-owned local online site in Washington, D.C., has announced its first blog partner, ARLnow.com. TBD is scheduled to launch in the summer, and has made key hires in social media.

"We want to provide our users with content that's relevant to them, so we are hoping to build a network of bloggers throughout the metro area, covering individual communities as well as topics of interest across the metro area, such as weather, transportation, entertainment and sports," said Steve Buttry, director of community engagement, in an email. The Washington Post has also been building its relationships with local bloggers.

Two McClatchy papers have put networking into high gear. The Sacramento Bee has launched Sacramento Connect, a network of local and niche bloggers and sites, with a Twitter account pushing out featured stories. The Miami Herald has also been building a network with local sites, some financed by non-profit money. McClatchy follows companies like Hearst, which has long had a Neighborhoods section at Chron.com, with sites that use innovative advertising tools like PaperG's Flyerboard.

(Disclosure: I work for the McClatchy-owned Charlotte Observer.)

TheDigitel.com, a local news site with human aggregation from Charleston, S.C., plans to expand to Charlotte soon. Ken Hawkins, founder and editor, says the site is using funds from an earlier investment by Palmetto Investments to add a couple of dedicated people in Charlotte, with technical support in Charleston. The planned revenue streams are topical websites and website development, he said.

Grassroots Advertising Networks

Addiply, based in the United Kingdom, has built a tool that allows advertisers to bid for and buy ads across a network of local, independent sites. Publishers get 90 percent of the proceeds, and the tool is billed as an alternative to Google Ads.

Addiply is not the only provider of self-serve ads or ad networks for independent local news sites. While many small sites are building their own ads individually and trying various ad server solutions, new, simple online ad tools are proliferating.

It's unclear whether the era of face-to-face ad sales is ending, or whether that space is a hole in the ecosystem yet to be filled.

BlogAds, a pioneering blog ad network out of Carrboro, N.C., is offering a BlogAds advertising deal encouraging bloggers to sell ads on other sites in their vertical, or "hive," for a larger percentage of revenue. The ad network sells to a host of established independent sites, including PerezHilton.com and political blogs on the left and right.

Big Players Going Granular

Though many people are focused on AOL's Patch, DataSphere out of Bellevue, Wash., has been expanding partnerships with traditional television companies to enable local advertising, fueling a need for local content. Raycom Media, based in Montgomery, Ala., joins Fisher Communications in partnering with DataSphere to provide self-serve ads to micro-local websites.

In Charlotte, the Raycom partnership plays out at WBTV with focused web pages for neighborhoods, requests for user-generated content, and with local stories generated and linked on social media with prominent datelines. RSS feeds for neighborhoods are available too.

In the Northwest, the moves of DataSphere and Fisher Communications have not been welcomed by independent news sites.

Figuring Out Advertising

The renewed focus of so many big companies on local advertising could be viewed as heartening, signaling a need for local content to be packaged with local ads. But the advertising puzzle for many local sites still remains a challenge.

"I think there's confusion among smaller site operators about how to best pursue advertising revenue," McLellan said. "Some have made a success of it but others are journalists just figuring out the business side."

She said plans are forming to connect online community publishers around revenue and business issues in September in Chicago. She and Jay Rosen, who teaches journalism at New York University, are organizing Block by Block: Community News Summit 2010, Sept. 23 to Sept. 25. Reynolds Journalism Institute and Knight Digital Media Center are among the sponsors.

(Disclosure: Knight Digital Media Center is a sponsor of PBS MediaShift.)

"We're inviting dozens of online publishers to share what they know and learn from others," she said.

Andria Krewson is editor for two community sections of the McClatchy-owned Charlotte Observer in Charlotte, N.C. She is @underoak on Twitter.

This year already began with large companies and investors making moves into hyper-local news. At the same time, experiments with foundation money continued, such as J-Lab's Networked News project. J-Lab also announced another request for proposals for grants for community news startups with a deadline of March 1, and proposals that support or create local news sites have advanced into the second round of the Knight News Challenge. Winners will be announced in June.

A key source for information on the big business moves in local news sites is paidContent.org, which focuses on the business of digital media.
And if you are looking for analysis and trends among independent sites, a great source is Michele McLellan, a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. McLellan is researching community news startups, civic engagement and community building. She also writes for the Knight Digital Media Center's leadership blog and is @michelemclellan on Twitter.

With change coming at such a rapid pace, it's important to take stock of some of the most notable developments from recent weeks and months. Here are the five biggest recent moves in hyper-local news.

Datasphere raised $10.8 million

Datasphere, the company that has helped Fisher Communications of the Seattle area set up and sell a network of hyper-local news sites to compete with local bloggers, announced it has raised $10.8 million in funding. That number is large compared with the common figures of $1 million or $2 million for other local news ventures, and Datasphere's approach stirred up resentment among local, independent bloggers. Datasphere's website also details partnerships with Cowles Media for a hyper-local network in the Monterey and Santa Barbara markets in California, and with Fisher Communications in Portland and Eugene, Ore.

Outside.in raised $7 million

Outside.in, the hyper-local aggregator of blogs and other news sources, also raised a large chunk of money: $7 million in Series B funding, announced in early December. CNN took a stake in the company and will feature feeds from Outside.in on its website, using Outside.in for Publishers. The aggregator, based in Brooklyn, N.Y., also has agreements with other publishers to provide feeds to their sites. In addition, Outside.in is hiring, and has a new community manager active on Twitter who is sharing and soliciting information from local sites.

U.S. Local partners with L.A. Times

The U.S. Local News Network is partnering with the Los Angeles Times for its third local site, covering Orange County. The companies will cross-sell ads and share content. U.S. Local News Network staffers will work out of the Times office in Costa Mesa, according to the paper. For more background, check paidContent's in-depth reporting on the network, which plans to roll out to 40 more cities during the next two years. The president of the company is Chris Jennewein, former online head of the San Diego Union Tribune. His experience includes time with Greenspun Interactive, Knight Ridder, including the San Jose Mercury News and the Mercury Center, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The New York Times partners with CUNY

The New York Times is expanding its collaboration with City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism". CUNY will now assume day-to-day editorial leadership of The Local, the Times' community website serving residents of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, N.Y. Journalism school faculty will serve as editors and work with students to enlist residents to cover news.

The work is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the McCormick Tribune Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Another Times Local site serving Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange, N.J., remains under the Times. Founding editor Tina Kelley was among the journalists who took a buyout from the Times in December. Replacing her is Lois Desocio, a local resident who recently received her master's in journalism from CUNY.

Patch.com expands recruiting

Patch.com, a startup of networked hyper-local sites bought by AOL in May 2009, has listed job postings for regional publishers in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., editorships in California, and other positions in Boston and Chicago.

AOL bought Patch.com for about $7 million. At the time, Patch had five hyper-local sites in its network. In October 2009, "Patch announced ambitious expansion plans for New York state": http://paidcontent.org/article/419-aols-patch-plans-big-new-york-expansion/, launching sites in Long Island and Westchester County.

Andria Krewson is a freelance journalist and consultant from Charlotte, N.C. She has worked at newspapers for 27 years, focusing on design and editing of community niche publications. She blogs for her neighborhood at Under Oak and covers changing culture at Crossroads Charlotte. Twitter: underoak

Sessions will focus on topics like "citizen scientists," crowdsourcing, and the best iPhone apps for gathering and sharing information. The conference is sold out, but plenty of ways exist to attend ScienceOnline10 virtually.

For journalists, the biggest name at the conference is Anil Dash, a pioneering blogger and one of the founders of Six Apart. He's the creator of Expert Labs, an organization designed to help connect experts with government, and will talk Saturday afternoon about Government 2.0.

The conference and its participants have many lessons for journalists, and many participants also have long histories of successful experimentation and community building. The conference has had heavy support from members of ScienceBlogs, a network of 138 science bloggers that recently announced a new partnership with National Geographic. Members of the group began experimenting with reverse publishing to print from blogs way back in 2006 with "The Science Blogging Anthology." The anthology has been published every year since the first edition went from concept to print in about a month to coincide with the inaugural Science Bloggers Conference in early 2007.

The network of bloggers that launched this conference, in turn, grew out of BlogTogether, a community of N.C. bloggers and online communicators active since at least 2005. These scientists, educators and communicators have been tackling many of the same issues that have become critical for the media industry during the last couple of years. Their experiments and successes are worth examination. Here are eight lessons that journalists can learn from the convention and its supporters.

1. Civility matters.

One session at the conference will tackle hard questions about online civility and debate, and why it matters. The session is led by Janet Stemwedel, Sheril Kirshenbaum and "Dr. Isis," a physiologist at a major research university who blogs but fiercely guards her real identity. Discussion and links are available at the conference wiki.

2. Diversity is worth tackling.

Sessions at the conference, which is being held just before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, will include diversity in science and technology, reaching out to underrepresented individuals in science, and figuring out a way to reach across generations.

3. Real relationships sustain online relationships.

This conference was born as a result of relationships built through BlogTogether.org, an early, active group of bloggers loosely based in North Carolina's Research Triangle area, and in Greensboro, N.C. Conferences created by the group have brought in champions of citizen voices such as Dan Gillmor, and have attracted support from traditional media executives like editor John Robinson of the Greensboro News and Record. An early national conference started by the group, ConvergeSouth, was the brainchild of blogger Sue Polinsky. At this conference, one session, The Importance of Meatspace, will explore the power of real-world connections.

4. Niches work.

Science bloggers, by definition, target relatively small audiences. Cognitive Daily, for example, focuses on peer-reviewed developments in cognition psychology, which could be considered a niche of a niche of a niche. The blog's "About" page says, "The research isn't dumbed down, but it's explained in language that everyone can understand, with clear illustrations and references to the original research." The blog, produced by a husband and wife duo, Dave and Greta Munger of Davidson, N.C., does seek levity. There are "Casual Friday" posts that deal with subjects like the use of curse words, annoying online restaurant menus, and emoticons. It has been consistently publishing since at least January 2005.

5. The discussion of pros vs. amateurs isn't over.

In science, as with journalism, the role of scientists (or journalists) is still evolving. What exactly is a "citizen scientist"? How do they differ from the pros, and aren't the pros "citizens" as well? How do science or journalism bloggers fit within the information ecosystem and, thanks to the explosion of content, whom do you trust? Where does government fit? One session at the conference will deal with citizen scientists, and longtime blogger and conference organizer Bora Zivkovic also has a roundup of the sessions focused on journalism. For further reading, check out Dan Schultz's Idea Lab post outlining what journalists can learn from citizen scientists.

6. Can people document while they participate?

Three people involved with the great Pacific garbage patch research effort and its related media coverage will discuss the melding of real-time science, non-profit advocacy, outreach and journalism in a session, Talking Trash - Online Outreach from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Can someone participate in research and still report that research? Can someone be an advocate and still produce trusted information? How will society fund journalism that covers specific research? And did funding from the innovative Spot.Us project work well as a way to publish a story in the New York Times about the garbage patch? As a related issue, how can information about research reach ordinary people?

7. Networks and trust are crucial.

Links, blogrolls, citations of sources, guest blogging, and the older technique of "blogging carnivals" build trust and develop networks that pay off. Trust, reputation and "personal brands" remain crucial components in the search for information, and those elements help readers filter the deluge of data and information. The thriving ScienceBlogs site shows the power of branding and networking. But a flip side exists: How can laypeople learn critical thinking and use skeptical questioning to better evaluate sources and information? Two conference sessions deal specifically with trust: How does a journalist figure out which scientists to trust, and Trust and critical thinking.

8. Experimentation and transparency pay off.

You might expect a group of scientists to embrace experimentation. But this group in particular explores new ways of sharing information transparently, opening the process to people in other fields and locations. A concrete example: The reverse publishing of science bloggers' posts required an element of financial risk in order to share information with a wider audience. Organizers are also using the conference wiki and social media tools like Flickr, Second Life, Twitter and Facebook to promote and share the conference in a broad way. Specific sessions deal with Open Notebook Science, and the Open Dinosaur Project, an effort to crowdsource the digitization of data.

Correction January 14: A photo caption incorrectly referred to Anil Dash as Anill Dash.

Andria Krewson is a freelance journalist and consultant from Charlotte, N.C. She has worked at newspapers for 27 years, focusing on design and editing of community niche publications. She blogs for her neighborhood at Under Oak and covers changing culture at Crossroads Charlotte. Twitter: underoak

Experiments with new advertising technology are popping up everywhere. Websites are trying to reach smaller, local advertisers that have been underserved for years by legacy media. This local and hyper-local ad market will be a significant part the future of journalism, says Jeff Jarvis, author of "What Would Google Do?" and associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York.

Even Twitter is dropping hints about its advertising plans. Founder Biz Stone said the company is not considering text and display ads for Twitter's home page, but he told Reuters on November 25 that the company plans to make money with "non-traditional" advertising. Stone didn't define what non-traditional ads will look like, but here are five examples of new tools that websites can use to make money from advertising.

5 Tools for Automating Local Ads

1. PlaceLocal: A new, hosted solution that allows publishers to automate local ad creation and sales. It's operated by PaperG, a startup led by Victor Wong, who is taking time off from Yale to develop his business. PlaceLocal automatically builds customized ads for any local business using just its name and address. The tool can even create a landing page for a small advertiser, Wong said in an interview during which he demonstrated the tool.

The technology builds an ad using algorithms, and by searching databases and the web for reviews, photos, or entertainment listings. It also filters out any content that has a negative tone. The tool allows advertising representatives or publishers to easily build ads on spec and use them as a sales tool, Wong said.

"Some of our partners are using it to crawl their own databases," he said. The tool can be deployed on a publisher's ad servers or run separately, and payment to PaperG is based on a revenue-share basis, he said. "If customers aren't buying ads, we won't make money," he said. "If they are, we will make money." Several media properties are testing the software, Wong said, and a public launch is planned this month. PaperG raised $1.1 million in its second round, from people like the former Boston.com publisher Steve Taylor and Mark Potts, CEO of GrowthSpur, according to paidContent.

2. Dynamic ads: Offered by TheDigitel in Charleston, S.C., this tool allows advertisers to change ad content dynamically via a text message, Facebook or blog update, or using a Twitter or Flickr photo feed. "If you can feed it, our thing can eat it," claims TheDigitel's website. Advertisers fill out a form to create the ad and designate which parts are static, and which are dynamic.

3. Flyerboard: A virtual bulletin board that enables small, local advertisers to create flyers that are then distributed to hyper-local websites. This is another offering from PaperG. The tool, which lets readers share the flyers on Facebook and Twitter, is deployed at sites like the New Haven Independent, Boston.com's Newton, and some of Hearst's local sites, like The Woodlands in the Houston suburbs. Flyerboard is a permanent widget installed on local sites, and revenue is shared between the site and PaperG. Wong said Flyerboard has generated 1% clickthrough rates for ads on some hyper-local sites, outperforming traditional advertising.

4. Real time ads: These are delivered at MinnPost.com, a non-profit site covering Minnesota. Joel Kramer, CEO and editor of the site, showed off the concept during a panel at the Online News Association conference in early October. MinnPost champions the ads as a simple way to avoid creating specific messages just for one website. Rather, small advertisers can harness an RSS feed from an existing blog or business tweet stream. The text is displayed on a widget at MinnPost.com, with a link to a pop-up page displaying the text with images and links to originating websites.

5. Self-serve ads: Multiple examples of self-service ad vendors exist for print and the web, such as the Instiads offered through Neighborlogs, a placeblogging platform based in Seattle, and PageGage. Also, AdReady is used by The New York Times. A partnership for a self-service ad network was announced in September between the Tribune Company and MediaSpectrum.

Most of these services offer hosting and billing assistance in exchange for a percentage of revenue. Other companies, such as Trafficspaces, offer advertising software-as-a-service with monthly fees. Trafficspaces has also launched a free version with sponsored ads. Another ad management company, isocket, is in private beta with TechCrunch, and recently received $2 million in seed funding. Mobile self-serve ad tools have sprouted up as well, such as Zeep Media, which sets ad prices via auction, and Mojiva.

Sharing Space

Beyond the new technology offerings and platforms, traditional media organizations have begun sharing ad space with smaller publishers, borrowing the ad network concept from digital natives like the Blogher network of independent blogs for women. The Miami Herald, a McClatchy newspaper, has launched a Community News Network and is partnering with local websites for content on the Herald's site and sharing ad positions on those pages.

Andria Krewson is a freelance journalist and consultant from Charlotte, N.C. She has worked at newspapers for 27 years, focusing on design and editing of community niche publications. She blogs for her neighborhood at Under Oak, writes occasionally as a Tar Heel mom at The Daily Tar Heel and covers changing culture at Crossroads Charlotte. Twitter: underoak.

TheDigitel.com was launched by Ken Hawkins in June 2008, and recently received its first round of venture capital funding from Palmetto Investments & Exchange Group.

Hawkins and his team are now deciding where to expand next. In keeping with its community philosophy, TheDigitel has even asked readers to vote for its next destination.

Hawkins spoke about the concept of "context aggregation," using wikis to engage readers, and other topics shortly after the funding was announced in October 2009. Here's an edited version of my interview with him.

Can you say how much funding you received?

Hawkins: It's not huge, but it does give us the momentum to 'break out' of the test market in Charleston and start expanding.

Talk about the process of finding your investors. How much control will they have?

Hawkins: The investors were pointed our way through a mutual contact at another
local company, BeliefNetworks. I still retain more than a 'super majority' of [TheDigitel]. However the investors bring not only cash but more of a business background, something journalists are often lacking.

Are you hoping to generate revenue from normal online ads or contextual ads? Can you or will you take donations?

Hawkins: Well, the business model at its heart is very familiar: display ads. Obviously that's a tough market, and we do want to pursue sponsors. It allows us to have a real relationship with the area's best businesses. Done well, it could help the businesses, the readers, and us. Done poorly, and it would just be bad.

Ultimately I really want this to be a non-profit. We're not in this to get rich. We want folks to find the best in coverage, be it a local photographer or the local media giant.

Are you an aggregator, or are you a news organization?

Hawkins: All media outlets are aggregators either in whole or in part, depending on how broadly you define aggregation.

Our site engages in a mix of primary reporting about simpler things -- 'Band X is playing at Venue Y' or breaking crime and traffic news -- and a blend of aggregation that I'll call 'context aggregation.' That means we both go digging for media sources used by other media and wire services, and [we are] offering a sort of 'reporter's notebook' about who's talking about what, and what this means in the broader scheme of things. Those are things our younger audience often doesn't yet know.

One of the things folks seem to appreciate is that we don't assume that you've read the prior story, so we stitch in relevant back links. In essence, we report on the multitude of reporting. At first, this would seem to add to information overload, but it actually helps by giving the reader more perspective.

So our aim is to connect, and not to re-report the news. Sometimes, this context aggregation is simple, and sometimes it's much more involved. For example, we just recently did a complicated election roundup with lots of links.

What kind of traffic do you generate?

Hawkins: This month, we served up 57,242 page views, which is about on par with our usual 60,000 a month, and 21,351 visits. Only 11 percent of the traffic comes from Google. Forty percent is direct traffic, 9 percent comes from Twitter, 8 percent from Facebook, and so on.

We've developed a highly local market that comes to us directly instead of a Google in-and-out market. Seventy-two percent of visitors are in South Carolina and 53 percent are in the metro area.

You have no Google ads. How do you manage that?

Hawkins: One thing that separates us from most new media ventures is actually being in the community. This not only helps us with community coverage, but also gives life to more standard advertising opportunities and frees us from the low CPM rates of Google.
Ultimately, we also want to develop local ad networks that allow good local bloggers to make some real cash off page views. We have the ad tools.

When did you initially launch, and how long did it take you to prepare?

Hawkins: We spent months planning the launch on paper (I'll say four months of casual conversation, and two of real planning). And then we spent about two months to build the Drupal-based site, which has been an ever-evolving design.

How large is your staff, and how many community contributors do you have?

Hawkins: We're a group of three staffers writing, with about 20 occasional community contributors.

Tell us a little bit about your staffers. Does anyone ever take a vacation?

Hawkins: I'll focus on the two that are in it for the long haul. Amanda Click was a marketing intern who stayed with us. We aim her mainly towards the soft news that is often so important to communities. She's been with us nearly a year, and carries the food, entertainment and features beats. She's 22.

I have more of the traditional news background, having been in papers for eight years, most recently at The Post and Courier in Charleston. I came from an infographics background and consider myself an information designer. It's something that drove me to create the site. I'm 29.

No vacations yet. But we hope someday.

Talk about your strategy of asking Twitter users and online readers to vote on your next city. What kind of response have you had? Which cities are you considering?

Hawkins: We had about 100 responses through just two plugs on our Twitter account. We're hoping that this will be somewhat viral, with passionate [people in different] cities getting behind the idea. We'll eventually plug the campaign from our site and talk directly to other bloggers, but it will be a process. Right now, Charlotte has taken a dominating lead of nearly 5-to-1.

Do you have any plans to increase capacity for traditional journalism, with deeper stories and paid reporters and editors?

Hawkins: To do more 'traditional local journalism' is not our end goal. It's our belief that there's plenty of it out there, from traditional and non-traditional sources, but that folks have a hard time finding and understanding it. That said, if a reporting doomsday does come, we're laying the foundation to be able to do traditional reporting tasks.

Your photo credits link to sources on Flickr. How much time does photo-mining take? Do you consult with Flickr users first? What kind of responses have you had from the photographers?

Hawkins: We feel it best to link to Flickr photo pages to get the photographer more exposure. We also feel this is most fair to the reader, who would probably want to see more photos.

It's a fairly non-painful process to mine, taking about five minutes on average. We normally don't pre-consult. But thus far we've received nothing but thanks for our usage of photos, particularly in the local circle.

Your open community feature allows almost a wiki-like interface. Can all your content be edited by anyone who signs up? Has that ever created problems?

Hawkins: It basically is a wiki with a gatekeeper. An editor reviews changes before they go live, and it's only been a good thing. We get all types of contributors, from typo fixers to writers of full stories.

A big inspiration for the workflow and cost-saving necessity of this was a piece by Information Architects.

What kind of challenges have you faced?

Hawkins: Our most interesting challenge has been demonstrating how we are not a pure aggregator. For so long, the online field has been [filled with] just three types of players: blogs, traditional media, and aggregators. So it seems the natural assumption is for folks to think: 'Which of the three are they?' As I said, we're a blend, which gives context. In six months to a year, I think it will be all the rage.

Andria Krewson is a freelance journalist and consultant from Charlotte, N.C. She has worked at newspapers for 27 years, focusing on design and editing of community niche publications. She blogs for her neighborhood at Under Oak, writes occasionally as a Tar Heel mom at The Daily Tar Heel and covers changing culture at Crossroads Charlotte. Twitter: underoak.