Ah, Davis: home of 60,000 people, 30,000 students, 188 sunny days a year, a 16 percent bike commute mode share and the busiest local wiki in the world.

If I were Omaha World-Herald Publisher Terry Kroeger, I’d be booking my post-holiday flight immediately.

As Gina reported here last week, Omaha’s employee-owned metro daily just bought WikiCity, an Omaha-based Web startup that wants to provide mini-Wikipedias for every city in the country. Creating a cheap platform for evergreen, user-generated local Web content has been tried, um, once or twice before. But with some notable exceptions, corporations have turned out to be really, really bad at this.

Philip Neustrom hasn’t.

Today, the quirky 500-page wiki Neustrom launched with fellow UC Davis math student Mike Ivanov in 2004 has 14,000 pages and drew 13,000 edits by 3,300 users last month, averaging 10,000 unique visitors daily. More importantly, it’s the best way in town to find a lost cat, compare apartment rental prices or get a list of every business open past 10 p.m. Operating budget, not counting its founders’ part-time volunteer labor: about $2,000 a year.

What’s the secret? Neustrom, who now wrangles code for the Citizen Engagement Lab in the Bay Area, was nice enough to tell us.

Keep reading »

Sooner or later — as Diane Sawyer, Jeffrey Wigand or the National Enquirer could tell you — anyone who makes a living telling the truth is going to need a good lawyer. That’s why major metro newspapers carry libel insurance policies the size of Abrams tanks. Their deductibles alone can run into seven figures.

But what if the only insurance policy you can afford is a pith helmet?

Say what you will about the small, nimble news organizations of the future — liability insurance is going to be a problem. I emailed 13 news startups from Atlanta to Seattle to see how they’re handling it; the answer, usually, was that they aren’t.

“We are more or less without a safety net,” wrote David Cohn, of the journalism microfinancing service Spot.us, one of several with similar answers. (He’s gotten lawyers to draw up language that attempts to pass all liability to writers who use Spot.us, but of course that’s no guarantee.)

Insurance companies, of course, would love to sell a safety net to Cohn and other entrepreneurs. But there’s a problem.

Here’s the chicken-and-egg dilemma that any new variety of business faces when it looks for insurance: Keep reading »

This is what a profitable post-paper newsroom looks like:

And this is what it feels like: 15 hours a day, seven days a week, from the 7 a.m. check-in with your spouse-turned-business-partner to the midnight bookkeeping.

No kids, no vacations, no car. No office; your only away-from-home base is a former Main Street antique shop that sells shared-workspace memberships to freelance software developers and the like for $100 a month. No novels before bed; there’s no time. If it’s a Saturday and the Michigan team is playing, you can watch the game, but run back to your keyboard during the commercials, okay?

In the two months since Ann Arbor became the nation’s newest no-newspaper town, there’s been lots of talk about its status as ground zero for the new ecosystem of Web-native niche outlets. But I wanted to know: In a business that’s always been oiled by routine — midnight press runs, 6 a.m. broadcasts, 11 a.m. news meetings, 6:30 deadlines — how will tomorrow’s hyperlocal news professionals structure their day? So, a few weeks after the Ann Arbor News folded, I spent a morning with its most established successor, the one-year-old, online-only Ann Arbor Chronicle, to get a sense for the future of the newsroom routine.

I found a lot of new routines and emerging practices. But more than anything, I found a pair of journalists cheerfully working their minds and bodies raw to make their business an outlier, profit-wise.

Creating 10 heavily reported and edited posts a week, maintaining the site’s daily news digests and gossip feature, editing three regular columnists and selling the ads to support it all requires “literally every waking hour” the couple has, Chronicle editor Dave Askins said.

Askins, 44, “sometimes works through the night,” said publisher Mary Morgan, 48, who says she’s dropped 50 pounds since launching the business last year. “I can’t swing that.”

Could you? If so, here’s a 10-point glance at the daily and weekly routines and rules Morgan and Askins used to build one of the nation’s first sustainable, hyperlocal Web startups. Keep reading »

Go figure: When we’re talking about a new media ecosystem, writers and reporters get all the press. But one in two of the country’s daily print journalists is an editor or a boss. What’s going to happen to them?

Cornelius Swart, the 37-year-old publisher of a respected neighborhood monthly in Portland, Ore., is working on an answer. In a nutshell, it’s this: bloggers, cable-access hosts, neighborhood associations, their distributors or their benefactors will be willing to pay somebody to teach amateurs the ropes, draft their FOIAs, hear their pitches, edit their copy, syndicate their content or manage their software.

In other words, reporting might be so much fun that it’ll be left to volunteers. It’s being an editor that sucks — and it’s being an editor that will pay.

The concept of giving external support to solo performers seems to have legs. Backfence.com founder Mark Potts recently announced GrowthSpur, which wants to offer a variety of advertising services to small-scale local sites. By analogy, if Potts wants to be a blogger’s surrogate publisher, Swart wants to be their streetwise city editor.

Swart — a former documentarian turned community organizer whose Portland Sentinel has tripled its revenue and doubled its circulation (to 26,000) since he bought it in 2004 — has a history of making the math come out his way. Here are four of the calculations his project, called Portland Media Lab, is counting on. Keep reading »

The air’s been thick this summer with new proposals for taxpayer-supported journalism, from tax exemptions to government grants to endless court battles. This sort of talk ruffles people who are rightly skeptical of government-run media.

But in 2003, as the music industry was disintegrating, lefty economist Dean Baker floated an idea for government funding of journalists, artists and other creative workers that would keep media purse strings out of government hands. Instead, every adult in the country would get a transferable $100 “artistic freedom voucher” once a year, which could be cashed in only by someone putting new intellectual property — anything from databases to photos to drum solos — into the public domain.

Believe in your local transit blog? Send them some free money, courtesy Uncle Sam. Want to stick it to Keith Olbermann? Mail your voucher to Bill O’Reilly.

Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in D.C., acknowledges that his plan would be arbitrary, chaotic, and vulnerable to hucksters of all stripes.

In other words, American media consumers would feel right at home.

Baker wrote in his original proposal:

In exchange for receiving AFV support, creative workers would be ineligible for copyright protection for a significant period of time (e.g. five years)…The AFV would create a vast amount of uncopyrighted material. A $100 per adult voucher would be sufficient to pay 500,000 writers, musicians, singers, actors, or other creative workers $40,000 a year. All of the material produced by these workers would be placed in the public domain where it could be freely reproduced.

Wanting to find out more, I got Baker on the phone, then summoned my inner Deborah Solomon (turns out she’s much nerdier than the real one) and condensed our conversation into an edited Q&A.

Flip below the fold for Baker’s thoughts on good media citizenship, publicly funded voyeurism, and how a local voucher system could turn your town into a journalism incubator. (And please tip your hat with me to Ezra Klein, who’s been talking up Baker’s proposal for years.) Keep reading »

As the web has sliced the general audience into niches, publishers have responded with narrower, deeper content: neighborhoods instead of cities, products instead of industries, subcultures instead of monocultures.

But when audiences get narrower, advertisers get smaller — and sadly, when your advertisers are putting up less than $5,000 or so per ad buy, a professional ad sales staff just isn’t worth its own shoe-leather.

That’s why the race is on to build a great self-serve display advertising platform. In June, Zach wrote about a clever way to use Twitter for this purpose. Today, let’s take a close look at Flyerboard, a national service aimed at mom-and-pop advertisers that caught a lot of press in the spring and is now rolling out to Hearst’s neighborhood sites and MTV’s 500 university sites.

Before we start, here’s a number to pique your interest. At Hearst’s Houston Chronicle, which introduced Flyerboard this spring, Flyerboard generated “close to” $100,000 in new revenue in the first month, according to Flyerboard co-creator Victor Wong.

The big idea: ask advertisers to do something they already understand. Wong, 22, is a Yale econ major with a retro sensibility: He says he reads The New York Times and Wall Street Journal every day. He’s also cofounder and CEO of PaperG, the New Haven-based startup that modeled its first product, Flyerboard, after the corkboards scattered across the campuses of every university in the country.

The photocopied flyers that line those corkboards are simple, cheap and effective, Wong said. And — more importantly — almost every mom-and-pop store in the country knows how to make them. Here’s what a full-size Flyerboard ad looks like: Keep reading »

Beat reporters have always had to guard against going native: seeing stories with the narrow viewpoint of your sources, sliding into jargon, getting tangled in micro-stories that matter only to insiders, losing touch with the general audience. It’s an occupational hazard. Or, at least, it was. Now it may be a funding model.

In media-rich, ahead-of-the-curve Seattle, where the general audience has been splintering for more than a decade, one of the biggest success stories has been a profane, lighthearted alt-weekly upstart called The Stranger. You likely know it best as the home of sex columnist (and editorial director) Dan Savage, but The Stranger some years back stumbled upon an unlikely niche: heavy-duty city hall coverage. Much of that work was done by The Stranger’s perennially award-winning city reporter, Josh Feit, 42.

Now Feit is looking to mimic that formula on his breezy, shamelessly wonky new online startup, Publicola. And so far, against all odds, he’s succeeding — and simultaneously helping to answer a really big question:

If databases can write tomorrow’s cops blotter and philanthropy can fund tomorrow’s big investigations, who’ll finance the day-to-day surveillance of city hall for petty corruption and bad decisions? Feit’s finding out the insiders will.

Ethically problematic? Totally! But after drawing two bursts of venture capital and a respectable stable of advertisers, a site that appeals largely to folks “in the cubicles of power” totally seems to be working, too. Working so well, in fact, that city hall and statehouse content is now subsidizing Feit’s next goal: beefing up culture coverage to create, more or less, an online-only alt-weekly.

Here’s how Feit spun insider-friendly content into gold, in four simple steps. Keep reading »

Okay, question time: Imagine you’re a major national newspaper whose crosstown archrival has somehow obtained two million pages of explosive documents that outed your country’s biggest political scandal of the decade. They’ve had a team of professional journalists on the job for a month, slamming out a string of blockbuster stories as they find them in their huge stack of secrets.

How do you catch up?

If you’re the Guardian of London, you wait for the associated public-records dump, shovel it all on your Web site next to a simple feedback interface and enlist more than 20,000 volunteers to help you find the needles in the haystack.

Your cost for the operation? One full week from a software developer, a few days’ help from others in his department, and £50 to rent temporary servers.

Journalism has been crowdsourced before, but it’s the scale of the Guardian’s project — 170,000 documents reviewed in the first 80 hours, thanks to a visitor participation rate of 56 percent — that’s breathtaking. We wanted the details, so I rang up the developer, Simon Willison, for his tips about deadline-driven software, the future of public records requests, and how a well-placed mugshot can make a blacked-out PDF feel like a detective story.

He offered four big lessons:

— Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun. Willison started coding one week before the Thursday launch date, teamed with a designer on Tuesday, a system administrator on Wednesday and leaned on everyone in his 15-person department for ad-hoc help on Thursday. But the bulk of the labor would come from Guardian readers.

How to lure them?

Keep reading »

When Adam Klawonn quit his job at a shrinking major metropolitan newspaper in 2006, he did what so many other journalists have: launched an online news operation that looked a lot like a newspaper’s web site, only with less stuff.
 
On The Zonie Report (“A New Kind of News for Arizona”), he set out to cover growth, immigration, the environment. The big issues. “The traditional papers were going local, and they were pulling back their bureaus,” said Klawonn, now 30. “It seemed like it was just wide open.”
 
And from the start, he seemed to be doing everything right — learning enough PHP to slap together a sharp-looking Web site; shooting videos and producing podcasts; painstakingly tagging articles into a dozen geographic categories; looting his bank account for a freelance budget; hiring a New York Times stringer for what turned out to be award-winning environmental reporting.
 
After two years, it was clear: The Zonie Report was — have you guessed, dear reader? — a complete commercial failure. Without a single town to target, advertisers shunned the site. And though Klawonn’s scattered readers gave him 20,000 pageviews a month, they passed on his offer of CafePress mugs and T-shirts.
 
So last year, Klawonn started sketching out the plan that, this week, landed him a $95,000 Knight News Challenge grant: a news service devoted entirely to Phoenix’s six-month-old light rail system. Its working title is Daily Phoenix.
 
Plan B is narrower. Much narrower. Old idea: regional trend stories about migrant labor. New idea: opt-in text alerts about train delays. Old content: “In Prescott, a water war escalates.” New content: the details of every crime within a five-block radius of each rail stop.

Keep reading »

[Our series profiling winners of the 2009 Knight News Challenge continues with Michael Andersen writing about Gotham Gazette's grant for a local wiki called Councilpedia. —Josh]

Every newsroom’s got them: A few dozen gadflies who’ve been in town forever and are proud to have their favorite reporters on speed-dial.

The little team at New York City’s Web-only Gotham Gazette — two reporters, two geeks, and a boss — wants to recruit more people like that. In fact, they want to train them. And they think the way to do it is with a closely edited wiki.

The Gazette’s plan for Councilpedia, a planned guide to the filthy lucre that links real estate and politics on New York’s city council, just made the Gazette the first two-time winner of a Knight News Challenge grant, this one worth $250,000 over two years. (Editor-in-chief Gail Robinson’s team won the same amount in 2007 for a series of educational Web games, such as one that asked readers to balance the city budget.)

The idea is to combine the anyone-can-contribute model of Wikipedia with the editing and fact-checking that marks good journalism. The hope is that by directly enlisting the eyes and ears of the public, Councilpedia will uncover watchdog stories that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

I talked with Robinson, a veteran journalist, and her top geek, Amanda Hickman, about their strategy for launching a topical local wiki. Here are the six most interesting choices they’ve made:

Keep reading »