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.