reporterist

a few updates

2008-07-18T07:52:00.001-07:00

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!

2008-05-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-17T08:15:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-15T12:12:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-06T09:15:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-02T06:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-01T05:15:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-21T18:41:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-21T18:31:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-17T06:45:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-07T20:21:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-20T11:13:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-03-01T16:15:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-13T17:04:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-11T11:44:00.000-08:00

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:

Perform an 'act of journalism'
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

2008-02-08T15:19:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-07T10:22:00.000-08:00

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...

2008-02-06T09:40:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-05T14:06:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-13T11:25:00.000-08:00

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:

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Reporterist collaborates with Media News Group papers

2007-11-25T07:25:00.000-08:00

We recently made a successful presentation to about 16 Bay Area newspaper editors from publications like the Contra Costa Times, Oakland Tribune, San Mateo County Times , Times-Herald , Tri-City Weekly, The Piedmonter, The Montclarion and Berkeley Voice.

The meeting was with publications that are part of the Bay Area News Group, owned by the Media News Group.

All the editors were receptive and told us that there is a definite need for relevant freelance work. We've already had more than five stories purchased through reporterist since that meeting, and many more articles uploaded by freelancers.

Freelancers continue to tell us how much they love us. Alison Satake, one of our super users wrote in to say

"Receiving the 'Your article was sold' message made my day. Thanks!"

after she sold a piece to the Oakland Tribune.

If you'd like to be a beta user of reporterist, come sign up for an invite.

Reporting New-News in the Online World

2007-09-16T17:30:00.000-07:00

Scott Karp, over at Publishing 2.0 has a great post about how Google News, and the Internet in general, is affecting the value of wire service content.

Local newspapers pulling content off the AP wire, or Reuters or Bloomberg could once claim exclusivity in their consumer base, even if someone across the country or state was running the same story. But this is clearly no longer the case.

Take for instance, today's breaking news about O.J. Simpson's arrest. The San Jose Mercury News, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel all ran the same AP story, and it's all online.

Karp points out that searches for stories on Google News are increasingly leading readers back to wire stories printed on Google pages.

With this latest development, newspapers are in even more need of original content, and it won't be coming from the wires.

But it will be coming from reporterist...

Private Beta!

2007-08-29T17:14:00.000-07:00

We have launched private beta now!

Our first 60 users (currently open only to selected professional journalists) have gotten invites and are using the system.

More updates soon...

The Calm before the Storm

2007-07-02T10:11:00.000-07:00

With just about two months to go before we release a Beta product to our first partner, things are definitely far from calm here at reporterist.

We've beem demoing our product to newspaper editors who've given us great feedback; some critical, and mostly overwhelmingly positive.

We're also extremely busy preparing for a limited private alpha. What's that? It's where we open up our product to a few people, and let them beat up on it and help find bugs in our software.

And so, even though things have hardly been calm for us lately, experience tells me that things will get a lot crazier soon.

Rob Curley: New Media Lecture Series

2007-05-22T19:42:00.000-07:00

Summary

Wow. That was an amazing talk. I'm bummed that I wasn't able to attend in person and had to settle for the streaming video.
Rob is doing some amazing stuff with new media, and this is the first time I've heard someone talk about not just cool gadgets and gizmos and effects, but actually mobilizing communities and tapping into their passions. Fantastic. I'll have to link to all of these talks when they get archived.

Notes

Rob Curley, Lawrence Journal-World

appx 1 reporter per 1000 circ.

lots of database heavy backends...

game cancellations, information. text messaging for snow closings, basketball scores, tornado warnings.

put up rule sheets.

100s of photos a week. players of the week. (kids). created player cards for the little kids.

reverse published. game stories, photos, etc. in a print publication.

refill the racks every wednesday because of this print publication.

parents, kids, umpires; all blogging!

blogs were run as columns in the print edition.

"Game" now covers a bunch of sports. not just baseball.

Got the connection with the kids.

'Game' all staffed by two interns. Plus two people about 5 hours a week each doing proofreading, etc.

Sports webiste. to take on the 'official' site.
database of all scores. stats.
go to a player. beatwriter's notes on that reporter. stats. the bio looked very different.
- comparative scores.

reverse publish starting 5 stats into print for gameday.

basketball: stats -> last 3 games -> all games.

future-hawks: stats for high schoolers who had signed on.
call the mother of the player; get THEM to enter the stats.

Weather:

national weather service feed. But instead of just getting in the feed. pick 36 different landmarks. "wind blowing from 'blah'"

animated playbooks after each game.

fan said: you're giving away our playbook. (but they were reminding them fo the good plays)

live chats. cellphone alerts. 24,000 signing up for updates.

importance of mobile. sms.

bought an xbox. simulated a game. and pulled video from the XBOX game simulation.
every week, the stats of the players in the game were updated and accurate.

las vegas prediction vs. xbox prediction.

scanned in a bunch of old letters, old video footage.

regardless of the device, you should still go to the same place (newspaper) for information about KU sports.

naples, FL:

podcasting didn't really work in lawrence. how do we make the podcast sound 'real'?
copy desk put together the podcast.

only local news on the website. why bother trying to out-cnn cnn? in the print product, they're only getting a single product. but online, people browse a bunch of stuff.

so only focus on local news. forget the rest. (online).

the reporter that wrote the print story was interviewed for their story for the next day. as a podcast. became wildly popular.

"The internet is about people's passions" - if you have an uber basketball team in your backyard - you may want to cover that.

podcast was about 2 hours of total work if you added it all together.

high school game scores would come in via reporters calling in.
sms sent to people when scores changed, or at end of game, or whatever.

podcast had impersonations on it.

video podcast starting running on local cable. (really good quality)

some games shot with 5 cameras. most games shot with one camera.
videographer would interview the reporter at the end of it all.

suddenly a high school sports podcast turned into something that *everyone* was watching.

20:44

election coverage. the 'candidate selctor' - tool to help you pick the candidate!

per neighbourhood coverage : how did your neighborhood vote? (by voting precinct)

device independence. cellphones, ipods, psp.

naples wine festival. largest single day charity event. raised 13 mill in 2 hours. all to local charities.

'The story of record' - the longer story that didn't have to be on deadline, and made it into the archives.

- auction expensed by fancy dinners.
- dinners hosted by rich people.
- flash presentation about who hosted, who catered (which chef), which winemaker was flown in, what was being served for dinner, + video coverage.

reporters calling as things were being sold.

how to cover this event? start with how it's going to be covered in new media, and then work backwards - reverse publish to print.

looking for journalists that can do everything. audio/video/etc. fearless.

database of every home sale between 2003-2005. not enough zip codes though. Broke it into neighborhoods. Did each of the 100,000 home sales by HAND.

the database was built for the journalism but not for our readers.
readers want to know what the home next door sold for.

rebuilt the database so that it would updated weekly. serve the readers. not the journalists.

built by a single developer.

everyone contributed to this project. series that ran every 6 weeks.

Studio 55 - daily newscast.

all tv news from naples came from ft meyers.
but that wasn't enough coverage.

wanted to build a newscast that you could watch on the beach (while sunning yourself)

documentary is closer to what newspaper on video would look like.

training: one month of production before anyone saw it. don't fix your hair. just be a journalist. let the pretty boys be on tv. it was working. 1st segment ; trad tv.(it was going to run on tv)

2nd seg; longer interviews. 5-10 minutes with local conngressman. forget the weather. just say the his' and lows. and tides. a bad way of putting it., but almost like an infomercial for why the newspaper kicks butt.

washington post: on Being. videos every wednesday. blog.
has to be normal folks. 90 minute interview edited down to 2 minutes.

naples daily news; culture changed in one year. 5 people who would help us to start with. by the end of uit - 5 people who were holding out.

so what lead to the newsroom changing?
- first newspaper where the top editor really cared about online
- sports department bought in early, set an example, publisher rewarded them.
- lots of positive encouragement. treat them like rockstars. publisher would visit.
- debut of podcasts
- publisher ordered 50 ipods with custom engraved naples newsroom logo. 50 best online contributors got those. pretty cool.
- 20,000 bonuses.
- changed everyones title from writer to reporter. i would change it to journalist in hindsight.
- had to mention what new media stories would go with the story. photos? history? polls? you HAD to list that down.
- had to record all the interviews. just record. don't edit.
- read the reader comments.
- reporters would email the commenters. ask them for followups.
- reader comments turned into sources. happened every day.

- embrace the changing role of newspapers.

what does an online managing editor do?
- knew/coordinated when a story had to be posted early.
- live chats - it's harder to say 'no comment' to someone than to a reporter.
- know when a story needs additional content (poll, message forum)
- archives can help with current news. untapped asset.
- understand alternate delivery. tornado = send an SMS!
- need an awesome writer.
- just do it.

doh. couldn't make it there today so watched live stream. but i got cut off at the end :(

Multimedia Storytelling: Spring New Media Lecture Series

2007-05-22T12:30:00.000-07:00

Multimedia Storytelling

San Jose Murcury News - Richard Koci Hernandez

12:31: Audio Viewmaster from childhood = multimedia. story with sound.

It's about the story. The technology, etc. is not important.

Frontline: Jeff Jarvis clip.

"My Camera Bag" - no more still camera. HD Video.

history of mercurynewsphoto.com

used to be lots of photos in the paper. then papers got slimmer, smaller. no room for photos. nyt, washingtonpost were visual leaders in term of multimedia a few years ago.

Knight said no. multimedia not part of the gameplan.

12:39

didn't know any html or flash anything. decided to do a mockup. hoarded fast computers for a while. on their own time. built a mockup from scratch.
no one wanted to put it up.
bought a domain name, paid for out of photo budget.

realized that they could track what people were looking at.

started being linked to from the main site.

100K unique visitors p month.

still paying a separate bill for hosting.

2 people in 'multimedia department'

find one thing you really like. focus all your attention on that piece. practice that.

HD frame grabs are important. running these on the front page.

Why Video?

one tool. many platforms. HD Video.

no one asks what kind of computer a story was written on. You're moved by the content. Same thing with this stuff.

"we are still storytellers"

mppa awards were not solely awarded based on the pictures. but on the entirety of the story.

"take your own approach, invent. we have an opportunity to change the rules."

(good advice. reporterist is doing just that)

traditionally the 'online department' were technies and not journalists. but they don't know how to tell a story.

just as photographers are learning to be better reporters, reporters are learning about photography. it's no longer us vs. them.

"good audio narrative is the foundation of great multimedia journalism"

Q: can you get good audio with the video camera
A: Audio equipment is expensive and you get what you pay for. $500 mic. Seinnheiser ME66. (not like cameras). Never rely on the camera's builtin audio mic.

resources:

soundslides (nyt,ap use it)
interactivenarratives
zonezero
transom.org
thedigitaljournalist
multimediashooter.com
lynda.com
book: in the blink of an eye, walter murch
book: the laws of simplicity, maeda

Tools

powershot s3
sony hvr aiu
olympus ds2
edirol r09 (don't get the black one - it has problems) - digital audio recorder.
sennheiser me66 - zoom lens for audio.
fission: $32 ; better than audacity
visualhub: $23 (video conversion)
slideshowpro.net
flashden.net

record at highest mp3 quality.
truth of the matter: most people listen to it on a pc speaker.

used to throw it into quicktime.
now use flash. (most people have flash)

MediaStorm: Spring New Media Lecture Series

2007-05-21T19:58:00.000-07:00

Summary

I was nothing short of wowed by the demos that Brian did. And I love their mission: "to be the Life magazine of our generation." They're definitely creating some powerful stuff. And I could hear ooohs and aaahs from around the room. So there's definitely a market for his kind of journalism. I love that they are self funded and not VC funded. Definitely check out some of their work (I went back and added links to the pieces below, or you can just get to them from their homepage

Live Notes

Brian Storm from mediastorm

past: msnbc, corbis

storytelling, and what it means to be entrepreneurial.

20:00 what should mediastorm be?
- the life magazine of our generation.

collaboration. why can't one person do it all?
(demoing an interactive presentation)

everything done in final cut. want the television to be the viewing device.

(iraq)

20:10: audio + photo. real opportunity there. photo gives context.

this is the kind of piece that you need to see, maybe not want to see.

another piece "1976" - just music. about cuba...

20:13 - cuba piece has gotten a lot of traffic. brings people in and makes them look at the other stoies.

How do you get people to care about aids in africa? give them a voice. let the subjects speak for themselves.

Example: Bloodline (AIDS in Africa)

(the audio/photo mix is overwhelming)

20:26: bloodline was five years of coverage.

It started as prints on a wall, but it wasn't a narrative. there was no voice. let them tell it.

Q: Did she do all of it? (Kristin?)
A: yup - she shot video along the way. wasn't her focus. photography was. people need to do it with intent.

Revolution isn't in the photography medium. It's just the distribution cost and the cost of the equipment.

The sandwich generation. commisioned piece for msnbc.com. "20 million americans are sandwiched between kids and parents."
photo;/audio/video.

20:42: (that was amazing. very touching.)
a lot of writing goes into this. how did the narrative match the visual? in terms of technique. where he's shaving; audio + photo (but not the video). herbie was naked all the time :)

how do you use motion + moment best together (video + still). the apex of the narrative: he's losing his house. the sound of stuff crashing and then the still.

the mediasotorm platform:

MGM lion road = mediastorm logo. that turns into the page. tactile page.

transcript for hearing impaired. but also helps with the editing.

transactional process: buy the book off amazon. license images, buy film, etc. buy song: click on it, it goes straight to itunes.

viral email collab is key. also dig/deliious/technorati/etc. Special promotional images for bloggers.

Distribution:

- visual newsletters. try to live up to the brand.
- rss
- myspace: weird. but go where the audience is
- flickr feed of the promotional images

(one guy in russia created a viral effect for them)

podcast in itunes.

video is a great starting point.

iTunes: game changing.
apple tv: gets you to the 8' experience.

iPhone is twice the dpi 162 vs 76dpi (didn't know that)

Business Model

Multimedia Agency: allows them to syndicate content. License content. E.g. slate. promotion on msn.com AARP.

online auction to syndicate the premier. bid on the right to premier. just like ebay.

20:56 : flipbook about kurds in iraq.

21:01 : had the detail on each scene in the flipbook as well.

Production: working with a bunch of huge players: nat geo, msnbc, slate, aarp, la times, ...

~~Brightcode~~brightcove - helps the video come in superfast. (showing a piece on Darfur)

another technique: vh1 popups-style.

21:04: nat geo project. wildlife refuge in chad.

21:14 able to take what was layed out in a magazine and give life to it. another interactive thing: google earth + zakouma = interactive.

Q&A

Citizen Journalism: Knight New Media Lecture Series

2007-05-21T12:24:00.001-07:00

Summary

Training all the newsroom staff with multimedia paid off big time when the vtech shooting happened. People were at least somewhat familiar (if not proficient) with all of the equipment. But not being proficient was okay - the key was to help readers be part of the experience asap.

Sadly, there was actually no mention of 'citizen journalism' during the lecture. Maybe the talk was mistitled? The crooked road multimedia piece was pretty cool.

Notes

Hosts: Seth Gitner and Lindsey Nair from The Roanoke Times

- 97K circ
- 5 mill page views a month
- 400K - 500K visits a month

Find a person who's interested in online storytelling, train anyone who wants to learnt. Give staff the skills to think in a multimedia mindset. Reporters regularky recording audio with photographs.

Got reporter involved. Weekly piece called 'everyday heroes'

anyone in newsroom is already trained to tell stories. Apply that to audio + photographs. How to sequence it all together to tell a story.

(Note: I think I'm the only one blogging here. ironic)

Lots of experimentation required. Recognize the failure, keep trying. Audio podcasts didn't really work out for them. Moved it to video podcasts.

Interactive demo: The Crooked Road. Crooked Road - pretty cool - can listen to each instrument, break down the music into tracks. tourism podcast - drive the road yourself and listen to it when you get there.

Lots of people involved on one project. 3-4 month project. 5 day series with double-truck. but didn't get the feel of bluegrass.

Lindsey talking about the TimesCast

- home grown daily videocast. dec. 2005.
- volunteered for it

- sneak peek of stories.
- entertainment
- weather

watch the tone. important.

meant to be interactive. include a lot of links. polls, surveys. 'weather guest' everyday. salem highschool cheerleading squad, bands, animals from the zoo, all sorts of people.

reporter buyin - iffy at first. naysayers, iffy. compromising integrity. lighthearted. opinion changed over time.

- features reported, web producer, editorial assistant, online entertainment editor.

(showed an example cast)

get a teleprompter. it's worth the 2K investment.

greenscreen - can do some fun with it. (showed a demo of a halloween videocast)

only one person's main job. everyone else does it on the side. About an hour out of each person's day.

script in by noon. 11-12 guest. cameos in advance sometimes? 3:30pm is when it goes up.

200-500 viewership.

some spinoffs - MusicCast (band every monday), SportsCast (about 1 week lifetime).

first band - death metal. tiles in studio began to fall.

greenscreen: artists just draw a background and that's it. TalkSoup-ish feel. sports department comes in and watches. mainly because the two people already *have* an audience. get their audience from the columns onto the online side.

need to figure out ways not just to build this stuff, but to market it.
Bring in bloggers to do the weather. E.g. Aerobics blogger comes in and does the weather + an aerobics routine. She posts that on her blog. Maybe her fans will come to the roanoke site.

Viral - other means of getting an audience to them.

how does it fit into hard, breaking news?

- special series for election night.
- updates every half hour.

interview forum. conversation as the election progressed. 13 updates till 2am.

carbon monixide leak - no entertainment news that day.

vtech shootings in april - decision was to streamline things. drop all links. just have someone out there giving the latest updates.
- such a huge event for the paper - not sure how to integerate that into the timescast with all the other resources being diverted elsewhere.

how were the shootings covered froma multimedia side:

- escape of michael morva (inmate). went to hospital killed guard, and was on the loose in vtech. in august (?). killed some people. rolling news update at that time. reverse chrnological. served as 'practice' for tech shooting.

April 16 - 22
4mill pageviews, 1mill unique visitors. 1.5 visits.
normal: 6mill pageviews and 400K unique visitors in a MONTH.

They put all video on a sister paper's site.

(it sounds like they didn't know about amazon S3 - oh well :) )

roanoke times housee. students went out with video cameras.

huge media event. roanoke times tried best to cover it how they could. timescast, developing processes around that. getting news in earlier. the studio... all that infrastructure helped get the converage for the vtech shooting. because people were already proficient at that.

broadcast outlet called their editor. for footage. what's satellite? what's ftp? they weren't talking the same language. press conference. video featres. slide shows. 360 panoramic. trying all this stuff out on the fly.

cnn was doing all the latest updates. so they needed a different angle. 'hugs' clip.

also had a single point person who could pull in all the updates and coordinate. Not just writing straight news updates. but sprinkle in scene setting things - that are important to local readers but maybe not the national community. Voices from regular people.

Regular updates. It's okay to say "we don't know this." eg. cnn had an incorrect death toll; they updated it.

put up pdf's of the front pages. the rolling updates combined with the front pages made the updates a lot better. had all of the information there earlier. get new leads.

partnered with washington post. univ. video. able to use some of their content on another side. It's about getting the story out; doesn't matter where it came from.

Q&A:
-how did the rolling update work out?

summary at the top + rolling update with timestamps. worked pretty well..

what was the election coverage viewership like?
- not sure.

Q: test/measure/learn mantra is repeated. how do you maintain commitment of editors and landmark - how do you sell the business on the idea of keeping with this?

(they didn't really answer the question). plenty of opportunity to move with this and see what next. keep innovating. fortunately management understands that.

New Media Lecture Series

2007-05-21T12:22:00.000-07:00

The New Media Knight center at Berkeley has a Spring New Media Lecture Series. I'm going to try to catch some of the events over the next day or two. I inadvertantly missed the first lecture; a little upset at myself about that. Hopefully we'll have some live-blogging coverage from a few Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism students.

I'm not sure that the topics are directly relevant to reporterist's mission, but they are certainly interesting.

Update: I live-blogged the first day of lectures. Videos are also being streamed live by Berkeley.

Here's notes from the first day:
- Citizen Journalism
- MediaStorm

Top 10 reasons newspapers are sinking online...

2007-05-09T11:03:00.000-07:00

Mike Markson from topix has written an article about why newspapers are sinking online.

It's a great roundup. And even more reason why you should stay tuned for what we have to offer.

I really want to talk more about what we're doing because I'm just so excited about it. But as I've said before, one of the reasons I'm not is that time spent talking always seems to takes away from time and energy spent executing.

I'll let the product speak for itself when it's ready.

Update: I re-read the old post that I linked to above. I'm happy to report that the second reason I wasn't talking about the product (that we wanted to talk to customers and know that we're barking up the right tree) is now much less of an issue. I'm now quite comfortable that we are barking up the right tree.

Welcome!

2007-04-21T13:36:00.000-07:00

Every company has a big dream - one that often supersedes its product and certainly its founders.

Even as the world around us constantly changes, we pine for the same information that our forefathers did when they opened their morning papers - depth, variety and truth. This is what we dream of at reporterist - the I-can't-live-without-it "morning paper" (though it may not be read on paper or in the morning).

To find out more, you'll have to stay tuned. We've been in stealth mode and super busy developing a product, meeting with potential customers, drafting workflow chart after workflow chart and surviving on that proverbial cup of coffee from the cafe next door.