When you’re a struggling metro daily trying to navigate the world of social media, it makes sense to look to allies in nontraditional places. When the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle partnered with a techies at a local grad school, it found developers enthusiastic to work with old media stalwarts — and even a few who consider ink and paper pretty interesting tech to play with.

This weekend, the D&C and the Rochester Institute of Technology launched their first big collaboration: a city-wide alternate reality game called Picture the Impossible. Its aim is to attract — and mobilize — the young urban professionals that the newspaper wants to learn how to reach.

“A hundred years ago, putting news in a newspaper caused people to take action in certain ways,” Traci Bauer, the D&C’s managing editor for content and digital platforms, told me. “That doesn’t seem to motivate people under 40. The people who write letters to the editor to newspapers aren’t people under 40, they’re people in their 60s. That’s no longer the way to get people to use information and act accordingly.”

More than 1,000 Rochesterians had registered for the game by the official launch this Saturday — three times the number Bauer had been expecting, she said. The participants, who have been divided into three teams, will compete against each other to earn money for three local charities. They’ll earn points through interactive challenges across the newspaper’s platforms, from crossword puzzles in the print paper, to scavenger hunts, to online games. “Picture the Impossible” has its own narrative storyline developed around key innovations in Rochester’s history. The game runs until the end of October, and individual challenge winners, as well as 100 top game participants, will win tickets to a final Halloween bash.

The game’s developers hope to test a project that can cross platforms — print, online, mobile, and community. More ambitiously, they want to see how a more playful, games-based approach can be used to mobilize a community around a certain issue — something that old-school newspapers used to be able to do quite effectively. Keep reading »

In what may be one of the first publisher-owned web advertising collaboratives, a group of progressive media outlets, including Mother Jones, The Nation, and Air America, is launching the Ad Progress Network, a “one stop buy” for web advertising which is planned to debut early this fall. 

The basic idea of an ad network — smaller web publications teaming up to attract advertisers — is nothing new. BlogAds, one of the most popular, has been going since 2002. But Ad Progress is trying to “grow the revenue pie for all these independent media types” with a collaboration that will cut out the advertising middleman, Jay Harris told me. Harris is publisher of Mother Jones and co-chair of the coordinating committee for Ad Progress’ parent organization, The Media Consortium. He’s betting that by joining forces, these sites can achieve the kind of scale they can’t on their own — and thus appeal to advertisers they couldn’t reach independently.

Cutting out the middleman

There are plenty ofexisting networks that unite like-minded web sites — typically small or one-person shops who are happy to hand off the job of selling ads to a third party. Henry Copeland’s BlogAds includes over 2,000 participating sites — from Perez Hilton to Daily Kos to Wonkette — and tries to boost sales by clustering them into topic-based “hives”, like the Liberal Blog Advertising Network or its conservative counterpart. The hives allow advertisers to save time by purchasing ads from a swathe of related sites in one go; 80 percent of the network’s blogs are in one hive or another, Copeland told me. Keep reading »

Shortly after George W. Bush’s victory in 2004, liberal magazines The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and The Nation held a joint crisis meeting. They emerged from the Rockefellers’ old “coach barn” at Pocantico with the goal of collaborating more closely in order to master new technologies, increase the impact of independent media outlets — and not lose another election.

More than four years later, The Media Consortium includes 43 left-leaning independent media outlets, including TPM, Salon, Ms., and Democracy Now!, ethnic media outlets like The Afro-Netizen, and multimedia groups like Balcony Films. They’ve spun off a progressive ad network and are working on a second major study on reader demographics.

I spoke with Tracy Van Slyke, who runs the Consortium out of her Logan Square apartment in Chicago, with a staff of “two and a half” people, some interns, and a budget of less than $500,000 a year. In some ways, it echoes the low-cost, high-reward forms of online organizing that liberal groups excelled at in the 2008 election.

“We’re lean and mean, but we’re really high impact,” Van Slyke said. “We’re not looking to build up a $10 million organization, we’re looking to really build enough support, keep the overhead capacity low, so we can put as much into projects and initiatives and supporting our members as possible.”

Since the Pocantico Conference Center seems to have become quite the cradle for media collaborations lately — I’ve been posting about a proposed network of nonprofit investigative outlets launched there last week — I asked her what lessons she’s learned while developing an independent media network.

From the ups and downs of coordinating the needs of major players and smaller outlets, Van Slyke said she’s distilled five central principles: Keep reading »

An unprecedented meeting of nonprofit news outlets at the Rockefeller family’s estate in Pocantico Hills, N.Y., last week may lead to a nationwide network for investigative journalism. But establishing that network may require navigating tensions between established groups seeking to expand their reach and a new crop of local outfits still uncertain about their long-term prospects. 

Leading the former camp was Chuck Lewis, founder of the 20-year-old Center for Public Integrity, who favored a broad network of nonprofits that could produce joint investigations and establish itself as a major news brand. “This reflects a major shift in how journalism will be done in the 21st century, and that shift is from the word competition to the word collaboration,” said Brant Houston, former executive director of another stalwart, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and now a professor at the University of Illinois.

The Nonprofit Investigative News Network, as it’s being called, is the sort of ambitious, new project that typically appeals to funders like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which helped organize the Pocantico summit. But that raised red flags for some of the smaller nonprofits at the meeting. “It’s a valid concern to ask if it will take money away from the local members who participate in it,” Joel Kramer, the CEO and editor of MinnPost, said in a phone interview, describing one question he raised in Pocantico.
 
As Lewis recently observed, nearly half of the $128 million in foundation giving to news projects since 2005 has gone to three of the biggest players in nonprofit journalism: CPI, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and ProPublica. (That’s excluding public broadcasting.)

To be clear: Everyone I spoke to, from nonprofits large and small, was optimistic that the network could serve all of their interests. Survival of individual news outlets, through group financial strategizing and collaboration, appears to be the top priority. Kramer and several other attendees from local outlets said they came away confident that the network would help their businesses while requiring only a modest amount of funding to keep itself going. But establishing the network’s brand with a group investigative project will also be a central order of business.

Keep reading »

Planning his Knight News Challenge entry, Joe Boydston followed his own advice: think small. He won a modest $10,000 to develop a desktop application that will allow web-challenged journalists to drag text files into a folder and have them automatically published online. “Someone at the conference asked me if I regretted not requesting more money,” he wrote in an e-mail exchange. “My answer was ‘Why would I? It doesn’t cost that much.’”

During the conference, though, Boydston, vice president of technology and new media at McNaughton Newspaper Group in Northern California, found his ambitions for his project shifting. His original goal was simply to help small community papers — many of whom were using 10-year-old technology like Mac OS 9, he noted — publish stories to the web with less hassle.

“Early on the second day of the conference (during the wiki/semantic-web barcamp led by Benjamin Mako Hill) it really hit me that the value of this project is not found in efficiencies gained by news organizations,” Boydston said. “The real value is in surfacing valuable data online, so that it can be shared with our communities. It’s not about publishing faster or cheaper, it’s about publishing more.”

Boydston started to envision newspapers using his CMS uploader “to create a wiki of historical documents from a newspaper’s archive.” This trove of old articles could be the starting point for crowdsourcing a project on local community history.

“Taking an asset largely forgotten (old archive stories) and building an interactive, engaged online community around it is raising the bar pretty high for small community news organizations,” Boydston said. In this way, he said, he hopes the CMS uploader “will serve both the technology laggards and the innovators.”

The text files published to the web using his CMS uploader will be indexable and searchable. (At this point, the application won’t work for PDFs, video or audio, Boydston said.) “You might think of the CMS uploader as poor man’s DocumentCloud,” Boydston said, “but only in that it facilitates the creation of an easy to use, online repository of information.”

On his web site, Boydston has a sample upload of articles to a WordPress account. For 900 stories, Boydston notes, “The keyword indexing took about 4-5 minutes, but the actual data import was under 10 seconds.”

Newspapers have long viewed themselves as a kind of virtual public space — a place for community members to trade information and learn about each other. New media, however, has largely thrived on specialization: think clubhouses, not the town square.

With a $40,000 grant from the Knight News Challenge, Boston artist John Ewing hopes to reverse that thinking, using digital technology to stimulate old-school public dialogue. It’s a vision of the media as “context providers,” not “content providers,” as Ewing told me over email.

His Virtual Street Corners project will install large storefront video screens connecting two very different Boston neighborhoods, Brookline and Roxbury. These “portals” will give residents of each town a real-time way to talk, argue, share news, or simply watch each other. Video and podcasts of what happens on the screens will be available for download onto the mobile phones of passersby. Ewing said the information shared via the digital screens will be personal and only possibly factual — a real-life Twitter, if you will.

While Ewing sees Virtual Street Corners as a complement to Roxbury and Brookline’s existing community papers, the project is also designed to bridge racial and class barriers that newspapers have often failed to overcome.

At first glance, Ewing’s art project may not seem particularly journalistic; one Knight News Challenge judge called the project “very unKNC,” while others called it the “least newspapery” of the contest’s finalists and a “fun” idea that “probably doesn’t fit into the KNC.”

But the art project that aimed to bring social media back into the physical realm won anyway. As one journalist at the conference told Ewing: “I love this project because the street corner is where news happens.” Keep reading »