a few updates

It's been a while since I posted an update.

We've been busy creating an assignments workflow for our publisher partners, as well as a pretty cool project collaboration page to help journalists and editors work together on all the pieces of a story - the copy as well as any media - and track changes over time.

Very soon, we'll be rolling these out and finally throwing open our doors to the public.

We're also increasing the size of our team, so we should be able to start rolling out changes more frequently.

As always, stay tuned!

stop buying AP Content!

David Cohn tells newspapers... Stop buying AP content! (towards the end of his post).

As I've said before, the problem is not the AP, but really that syndication is a content distribution model that makes less and less sense online. Syndicated content is available everywhere, is undifferentiated, and thus diffuses the benefit that any one publisher gets from using it.

On the other hand, unique content is differentiated, and brings value to the publisher because others link to it.

For newsrooms (at newspapers, at online publishers, or any other news organizations) that can't afford to employ hundreds of reporters around the globe, the future lies in finding ways to more effectively source unique content from a large number of freelancers.

reporterist allows you to manage relationships, transactions, and content with a large number of freelance journalists.

But why shouldn't freelancers just post to their own blog and let the world link to them?

If you believe that your own blog is the best way to monetize a certain piece of content, that's what you should do. Sometimes it is.

Sometimes, someone else (whether another blogger, a newspaper, or an online news publication) will be able to monetize (or distribute) that content much more effectively than you. In that case, you'd be better off letting them publish/monetize/distribute for you.

reporterist can help you connect with publishers who need and want your expert reporting, and can compensate you better than if you were trying to self publish.

We're closing in on a wider launch. If you have a reporterist account already, make sure you've updated your profile with your location. That way you'll be notified when publishers put out assignments in your area. Make sure you also upload your portfolio - that way publishers will have more information to go by when tagging you for assignments.

If you haven't yet gotten an account, sign up for our beta, or wait a little longer until we start letting anyone sign up for trial accounts.

cofounder graduating

Sindya Bhanoo, cofounder of reporterist.com, is graduating today, from Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. She'll be heading to the Washington Post in DC for the summer.

Our recent facelift ran into some bugs - things are pretty broken in Internet Explorer. Please bear with us for a little longer than usual though - we're busy celebrating Sindya's graduation!

facelift

We gave reporterist a bit of a facelift today.

I've been working with an awesome designer over the past few weeks to help give our user portfolios a bit of a facelift. I'm excited at the way they turned out. Still clean and simple, like our old design, but a little more polished than what I could accomplish.

I took the opportunity to also integrate his theme with the logged-in portion of our site. So if you notice a few hiccups in the UI - please leave feedback.

The design changes come at a time where we are getting close to opening up the site a little more. We have a few exciting partnerships coming down the line, providing value and benefit to both our editor and reporter users.

stay tuned, as we start rolling out some of the big changes we've been working on the past few months.

update: yuck. I just found out that the pages look absolutely terrible on windows/internet explorer. I'm missing a few files required for IE compatibility. How embarrassing.

the value-add of Journalism

I just read an article about how Facebook and Wikipedia are better information sources during emergencies (hat tip David Cohn), and it gets me back to something that's on many peoples minds.

What is the value of the Journalist in this world of free-flowing information?

I've been saying for a while that I don't believe that newspapers can compete on timeliness with the combination of wire-services and social media (blogging, twittering, facebook, etc).

For news-as-it-happens, short snippets of information - no matter how badly formatted, how terribly worded, or sometimes even how one-sided - are still extremely valuable. Non-text media (audio/video/pictures) is even more powerful for breaking news (it may be biased, but it's at least more believable).

As I stated here (see the comments),

Gathering 'voices from the crowd' has always been an important part of journalism, and the tools available today make that increasingly easy to do. Blogging tools allow for easy digital expression, and all of the aggregating tools out there make it easy to collect those voices together.

But journalism is also about more than that.

Over the past few months of talking to people in the news industry, I've heard this insistence that the only way to compete is to move to a 24/7 newsroom in which things are posted as soon as they happen. I think that's a mistake.

Underlying that thinking is the legacy of the legacy newsroom. Newspapers have always been vertically integrated as distributer, printer, publisher, newsgatherer, news synthesizer, aggregator, marketplace, and community - and they are still trying to be all of the above.

Instead, I think newsrooms need to start recognizing that each of those roles are distinct. In the face of shrinking newsrooms, they have to pick and choose which of those roles they perform better than anyone else in the world.

Newspapers aren't the best marketplace - craigslist is.
Newspapers aren't the best community - facebook might be.
Newspapers aren't the best aggregators - google news may be.

So where does that leave newspapers?

I still think that their best asset is their journalists and their editors. The casual layperson like me may blog our opinions, and we may blog about something happening down the street. But I'm never going to go through the trouble of interviewing people to find out what they think, feel, saw, or heard. And I'm not going to go dig through public papertrails or datasets to find the hidden truths. And I'm terrible at citing my sources. And, in case you haven't noticed, I'm a third-rate editor.

So getting back to where I started. I think social media has given journalists one more mechanism for sampling the public - it's a supplement to going out and interviewing people. And I think that's all that it is.

I will still rely on journalists to synthesize all of that noise into something cohesive, and for editors to help organize that into a meaningful (albeit incomplete) view of the world.

berkeley business plan competition

We presented at the finals of the Berkeley Business Plan Competition over the past two days; it was the culmination of about six months of work writing and rewriting the business plan specifically for the competition.

Thankfully, we had an awesome mentor, Nibha Aggarwal, to help us through the process. She taught us a tremendous amount during our few weekly meetings.

We didn't win any of the prizes. All four of the teams - Omniox, Glycometrix, Titan Medical, and Implicit Interfaces all have awesome IP positions (i.e. patents), and did great presentations.

One of the other finalists, Kebima is an awesome event blogging service that actually covered the public presentations. I think that there a lot of really cool partnerships that they could do with some of the people that I've been talking to.

At the presentation, we also premiered a video interview with some reporterist users which is now linked off our home page.

great interactions at news tools 2008

I attended the first day of the newstools2008 conference and it's been fantastic.

I've had amazing conversations with a diverse set of really smart people; all of whom are very open to cool and new ideas. I'm excited for the next few days.

discontent over AP

As I mentioned in an earlier post, editors are generally annoyed at the dynamics of the newspaper - AP relationship.

Among the most vocal were
editors from Ohio, who have created their own little content-sharing network.

I think they'll find that it's even more powerful to start linking to the original newspaper article, instead of copying the article and giving attribution through a byline. That will consolidate views for a given story onto a single website, thus helping them maximize ad revenue potential.

(I couldn't find examples of either linking or attribution on their websites, so maybe it's just a print-only thing? Not sure.)

new american media

I got to meet some of the folks at New American Media today.

I sat in on their editorial meeting and got to spend about 10-15 minutes explaining the reporterist concept and answering questions about how our service works. I was excited to get a lot of positive feedback from people in the room.

reporterist at asne/naa/nexpo

I had the immense pleasure of attending the NAA/ASNE/NEXPO conference in DC this past week. I was more of a "fly-on-the-wall" - listening to and soaking up what editors, publishers, and owners of newspapers were saying; and what other vendors were trying to sell to the industry.

It was extremely educational for me, though it might take a while for me to distill out a list of 'what i learnt'.

Apart from the great bar and hallway conversations I had, the sessions were also pretty good. My favorite was a talk + Q&A about company transitions with the CEO's of Dow-Corning, P&G, and Kodak. The talk by the Kodak CEO was fantastic. He ended by showing a video (embedded in the link - definitely watch it to the end) that was great. Kodak, as you can imagine, went - and is going through - the same kind of transition that newspapers are. All three CEO's had similar themes but the strongest message for me was - focus on your customer, and focus on your core competencies - be willing to change everything else.

I haven't seen the kind of out-of-the-box thinking from newspapers that I would have expected, as there are some really cool things that they could do if they follow that mantra. More on that in future posts.

I was happy to hear the Q&A with AP President and CEO Tom Curley in which many editors voiced their frustration over the newspaper/AP relationship. This is something we'd heard anecdotally from editors we'd talked to, but it as good to have it validated by such a large audience.

reporterist is based on fundamentally different economics from wire services. We believe that offering recycled wire-service stories to readers is useful in print, and may add some value to the (few) online readers that directly visit newspaper sites; but is just undifferentiated content for the rest of us that find news through social media sites, or aggregators such as google news.

And that is why we aren't trying to build up a large database of content for you (an editor) to syndicate or link to. Instead we're building a platform that lets you supplement your newsroom resources by assigning stories to qualified freelancers, or find relevant contributions from reliable journalists, and purchase exclusive rights to that work. (exclusive? yes. exclusive. In the world of online news, geographic restrictions have little value).

Finally, I was very encouraged by the positive response that I got from editors I talked to about what reporterist is doing. I look forward to working with more of you in the coming months!

capital conference '08

I'll be attending Capital Conference '08 in DC next week. If you're going to be there, leave me a note, and let's grab a beer.

Finalists

reporterist is now a finalist in the prestigious Berkeley Business Plan Competition. We are one of 8 finalists narrowed down from 25 semi-finalists, and over a 100 entrants. I believe there is a good mix of live sites and in-the-works concepts. We briefly met some of our fellow finalists from Kebima - they look like they have an awesome alpha. Good luck guys!

We presented to a panel of judges (from the VC/investor community) yesterday afternoon, and the results were announced at about 7pm. Preparation involved many hours of ms-office-ing.

Happily, I can now get back to building you a better product (for a short time - then we have to take another detour and prepare for the finals!)

looking for a senior engineer.

reporterist is looking to hire a senior engineer. We recently received some seed funding to help us accelerate our development.

Many newsrooms are forced to lay off quality reporters and rely more on wire service stories. The number of places that fund primary reporting and produce investigative journalism is shrinking - and these are increasingly owned by a few large companies.

As a citizen of the world's largest democracy, and a permanent resident of the world's most vocal democracy - this trajectory scares the crap out of me.

Call me a dreamer - but I believe that reporterist will help change this trajectory. And that's precisely why it's a great time to be innovating in the media industry.

We are starting by creating an efficient market for news that rewards accurate, timely, and reliable content. This will increase the diversity, quantity, and quality of original and unbiased news that gets published.

Soon we will start work on a platform that will make it *even* easier for smaller publishers to create high quality news publications.

If that's a vision that excites you, read on. You can find out a bit more about our team here. If you

• have a solid computer science background


• are comfortable programming in Ruby/Java, but know pointers like the back of your hand


• have, ideally, spent several years working with scalable systems

then shoot me a note at innovate-at-reporterist-dot-com.

uncle sam causing delays

We still have a lot of invite-requests that we have not responded to. My apologies. I think we're going to have to stop trying to respond personally to even some of the requests, and start sending out a lame automated email.

Also, March 1st requires tax filings, which requires us to have all of our books in order. Being a startup, that's something that we're still learning how to do efficiently. So I'm going to have to take a break from all of the fun product-development and customer-service stuff and bury my head in accounts for a few days.

Crowdigation

I've been meeting on and off with John Curley to exchange thoughts on journalism, and about how/where reporterist fits into the larger picture. John is amazing to talk to. He's engaging and insightful both on very tactical stuff ("What would editors think about electronic payments?") as well as more strategic stuff ("We want to enable an ecosystem of people contributing to the news creation process. What might that ecosystem look like?").

Towards the end of our conversation this morning, we did a little back-and-forth that ended up with a thought that was very clarifying for me - which I'd like to share, even though it may be obvious to some...

Many people use the term 'citizen journalism' to refer to tools such as twitter, faves, digg, or to the act of blogging or posting a photo online.

Why? I think it's because soliciting and aggregating voices has always been an important part of journalism. I wrote the following comment on the OJR story the other day:

Gathering 'voices from the crowd' has always been an important part of journalism, and the tools available today make that increasingly easy to do. Blogging tools allow for easy digital expression, and all of the aggregating tools out there make it easy to collect those voices together.

But journalism is also about more than that. And we'd like to provide a platform and revenue model for those people who are willing to go (and passionate about going) the extra mile to dig deep on a story, or to actually go interview someone.

I posit that the term 'citizen journalism' should be used to refer to the fact that technology has made it easy (it was always possible) for people not traditionally identified as 'Journalists' to do two things:

1. Perform an 'act of journalism'
2. Share that act with a meaningful audience

On the other hand, the tools and technologies that allow people to create, publish, and aggregate content should be called 'crowd sourcing' or crowdigation ('crowd content creation and aggregation'). Crowdigation tools are great for citizen journalists, but it's not at all the case that they constitute citizen journalism.

So where does reporterist fit in?

It IS a tool for citizen journalism and for citizen journalists. It is not a crowdigation tool.

beaming

One of the most exciting things about the past few days, apart from the sheer volume of invite requests we've gotten, is the wonderful words of support and encouragement.

I cannot describe to you how motivating it is to have been working on this for literally 18 hours a day for the past year, and to suddenly get this amount of validation.

We're going through the requests we've gotten in mostly chronological order, and sending out invites one at a time.

When I get a chance, I'm going to put up some of the notes we've gotten.

new users

We're slowly going through the invite requests we've gotten, and we're glad that some of you have already started creating portfolios, as well as using our tools to pitch work to editors.

We have a bunch of features in the pipeline, so definitely stay tuned.

a quick note...

I'm really excited at the buzz around reporterist.

I blogged recently with the intent of writing more about what we do; but I've since been really busy iterating on the product and meeting people.

If you've signed up for an invite - please be patient.

Getting some press

The Online Journalism Review interviewed us this weekend. Here's the reporterist interview.

It's a pity that the title pitches us as an eBay for news - because Sindya is quoted as saying

The intention is not to turn it into an eBay.

But that's okay. It captures a bit about how we're starting off. I'm in L.A. right now, and had the pleasure of having some an awesome conversation with E. J. Wilson - the new dean of USC's Annenberg School of Communication.

I also got to chat with Robert Niles - the editor of the Online Journalism Review. It was great to hear about the industry from his perspective, as well as get solid validation for what we're doing at reporterist.

I love the sense of urgency at USC, regarding the need to rethink how journalism is taught and practiced. It's definitely an exciting time to be in this space.

Emerging Trends in Journalism

After a closed and private beta at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, reporterist is ready to start opening its doors to many more journalists.

We've been very quiet when it comes to describing exactly what reporterist is. So I thought I'd take some time to talk about our thoughts on journalism, and where reporterist fits into that picture. I'll try to do this in small chunks over the next few posts.

Your comments are most definitely welcome.

Great News

When I think about what has traditionally made people follow a particular news publication, I think of three aspects:

1. Reporting: Probably the first, and most obvious thing is the quality of the reporting itself. Timeliness, perspective, objectivity, thoroughness... all of things that make for a good story and increase the trustworthiness of a news brand.


2. Selection: Slightly more subtle is the selection of news. We look to great news organizations to tell us what's important in the world. Sometimes it's like taking medicine. For example, I may not really be interested in all the stories in a given issue of The Economist, but I will read at least the first few paragraphs of each story - and usually try to read it cover-to-cover just because I have entrusted that the editors at The Economist to tell me what important things happened in the world this week - for some definition of important.
   


3. Editorial: I know many people that get the paper only to read the editorial pages. Those regular, 'expert' opinions, were once only available in the opinion sections of newspapers.
   

So how has that changed?

1. Editorial: Probably the most obvious change that has been talked about to death, is the ability for anyone to have a soapbox to stand on. I'm standing on mine right now. And so is every other blogger out there. For almost a decade now, but most definitely in the past five years, newspapers no longer determine who gets up on their soapbox. I could go on and elaborate; but you know the drill. The topic of blogs and democratized publishing has been discussed to death over the past five years so I'm not going to elaborate.


2. Selection: There has been no lack of buzz around the topic of selection, either. As information becomes abundant, we need ways to make sense of an filter it. There are many approaches to this:
   
   
   • Traditional, human powered: There's nothing wrong with having human editors. Most people still rely on human editors to tell them what's important. That's a big part of what newspapers and magazines are selling you.
   
   
   • Populist: "Read what everyone else is reading." digg comes to mind immediately. Most news sites now have a 'most emailed' and 'most viewed' list of articles that approximates the same thing. I'm assuming that Google factors this into the stories shown on their page.
   
   
   • Social: "Read what other people read". Slightly different than reading what everyone reads, is some subset of that. This includes awesome social bookmarking sites like faves, the link sharing features of sites like facebook and, don't forget, just sending your friends a link in email.
   
   
   • Categorization: Whether it's by tagging (del.icio.us) or topic search another way of selecting what to read is by looking for particular topics.
   
   
   • Recommendations: Findory was an awesome news site, started by an ex-amazonian, that used a "people who read this also liked to read..." approach to news.
   
   
   
   There are undoubtedly others that I haven't mentioned - the point is that there are many really smart people trying to figure out new ways of helping people sift through the vast sea of content out there.
   


3. Reporting: There are some great new initiatives in reporting. User Generated Content is another buzz-phrase that most people are sick of hearing. But there's oh my news, CNN ireport, msnbc's FirstPerson and all of the examples of citizen journalism during and after the Virginia Tech massacre, the Minneapolis bridge collapse, and hurricane Katrina.
   
   But I still believe that there is still not enough emphasis placed on actual reporting.
   
   Citizen Journalism has been an awesome source of information during times of crisis, when amassing community support around issues, or in specific areas such as technology.
   
   But most blogs out there are still reactions, commentary, and discussion based on stories that are reported by traditional media and wire services.