Guest Post: Establishing news sites from the ground up

This post is by Polly Kriesman, the self-described “editrix” of theloopny.com and mind behind InvestigateNY.com. The sites are trying to help define new journalism, and are grassroots efforts. We asked Polly to tell us more about her adventures.

- Steve

I am an obsessive journalist the way some people kayak or collect star trek trinkets. I can’t help seeing the world the way I believe it should be written or videotaped or edited. And then I can’t help reporting it.

A bit of a problem with the “legacy media” as some are calling it, is that it is eroding like the sands of time.

And how are some of us trying to solve that problem? By creating our own platforms, our own tiny newsrooms. The buzz term is Entrepreneurial Journalism. Another buzz term is Insanity. But I’m determined.
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Guest Interview: The Twitter Times

Today is guest day. As always, we invite you to send in your ideas for a post. Ideally, we would like the post to be topical. And both of today’s entries are right on the mark. First up is an interview, via email, with Maria Grineva. She is one of the minds behind the excellent web service Twitter Tim.es, which looks at links your friends are tweeting and turns them into a virtual newspaper.

-Steve

First, tell us about yourself.
I am a computer scientist currently working at ETH Zurich, originally I am from Moscow, Russia.

A year ago, we started a company – Semantic Dimension, Inc. together with my friends: two in Moscow, two (me and Max Grinev) here in Zurich and one (Kirill Soshalsky) is located in San Francisco. Twittertim.es is one of our products. Also, we have developed semantic text processing technology that automatically uses knowledge from Wikipedia to “understand” texts.

What is the Twitter Times?
TwitterTim.es is a personalized newspaper built from your Twitter account. In TwitterTim.es you get a concise view of what is being discussed by your friends on Twitter — what is most important right now. The TwitterTim.es newspaper is always up-to-date and is being updated every two hours. What is also important is that we collect not only tweets of your friends but also tweets from the second circle of your friends (friends of friends), so you can still get relevant news but do not stick within your (immediate) community.

How did the idea come about?
We all used Twitter, and were very excited about it. I realized that I get news mostly from reading Twitter. And it is easy to manage your news stream simply by following more interesting people. Max Grinev first had this idea of representing a Twitter stream as a newspaper. It was funny to merge the two things together: Twitter is so new, while newspapers are something traditional. We quickly created the first prototype and I understood that the tool is really useful because I use it and my friends did. When you follow more than 100-200 people you often miss interesting links, and TwitterTim.es helps you to catch up.

What was the biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge is to crystallize the value from Twitter and other social media for traditional businesses. We try to find out how social media can transform businesses into some more effective forms. Being computer scientists, we are developing methods and tools for businesses to find their customers in social media, monitoring opinions spread about a brand, gathering statistics related to the business and more.

Do you see the Twitter Times becoming a business? How will you make money?
We have not tried yet neither putting ads into newspapers, nor charging some fee for the service, and I am not enthusiastic about these ways (of bringing in revenue).

On the other hand, as a result of building TwitterTim.es, we have built a scalable infrastructure for collecting tweets and we can gather a lot of useful statistics. As I said, we are working on new methods and tools to help businesses sieze people’s attention via social media.

Currently we are in talks with a big online retailer. We are experimenting to enrich their traditional online store with relevant content from social media to make the users’ online shopping experience closer to what they get when using Twitter or Facebook. While clicking on a product in the online store, the user would be able to get reviews from blogs, know relevant products, see who of their friends also bought the product and maybe get useful and relevant tutorials from YouTube.

Are you considering expanding to including feeds from other social networks?
Yes, we are thinking about adding Facebook.

What are your benchmarks for success?
At this point, we have built a useful tool. A lot of people like it and use. We are very excited about it and it was an important experience. But our goal is also to establish a stable business model for our company.

What is your long-term goal for Twitter Times?
The Web is changing so fast, so it is difficult to set some very long-term goals.

Should journalists learn programming? An easy flowchart

Courtesy of 10,000 Words, this handy flowchart:

(via Journerdism)

NBCU launches online ad network for O&Os

NBCU has built an online advertising sales network, in another strike against third-party ad sales. The Universal Audience Platform (UAP) group will sell display ads on NBCU’s 10 owned and operated station sites as well as NBC.com and other sites on its network. Mediaweek reports that NBCU “will ’sharply curtail’ selling its inventory via third party ad networks… following the lead of several top publishers such as ESPN.com.

“Dream Team” launches Salt Lake news site

A group of former anchors and reporters is teaming up in Salt Lake City to launch a new web-based initiative called Salt TV. The journalists used to be competitors at three stations. Now they’re colleagues in the effort, which has some startup money behind it. Salt TV (at the awkward URL salttvnet.com) is betting that people will pay to see the folks who used to deliver their news every day. The site, in fact, features its talent not only in a Mount Rushmore-style header, but also along the right rail. The tagline is “The Utah Journalists You Know And Trust.” There are 15 of them working on the site – a heavy staff load as these things go.

Houston station dumps anchors and on-air reporters

Anchors away. A Houston TV station is doing away with anchors and on-camera reporters in favor of a new format called “NewsFix.” The Houston Chronicle reports that KIAH will launch the new show this fall. “NewsFix” will be a pilot program for owner Tribune Broadcasting. Tribune Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams developed the format, which he says will bring the company’s product out of the ’70s and into the 21st century. As you can imagine, not all the employees are happy, with one unidentified worker telling the Chronicle “It will be news for people who don’t watch news, which sounds a lot like opening a bar for people who don’t drink.”

Start your week right with a new job

We have a bunch of new jobs posted here at LR, so check them out. I know people think that summer’s a lousy time to look, but we’re seeing more jobs posted here than we have in a while. For those of you employers looking for new staffers, simply post a free listing right here. LR Jobs: Always Free.

YouTube teams with local TV station

As speculated a few weeks ago, YouTube announced today a citizen journalism partnership with KGO-TV — the first-ever partnership with a local TV station. In essence, it’s a new application of YouTube Direct, which gives publishers the ability to use YouTube to power video uploads. Called ABC7 uReport, it integrates a map with YouTube videos spanning breaking news, events, weather and Bay Area scenes.

“This is a project that aims to cover the San Francisco Bay Area as comprehensively as possible using citizen reported news, videos and photos,” said YouTube News Manager Olivia Ma. “All Bay Area residents are invited to participate in the project by documenting the news and events happening around them.” YouTube is helping seed the effort by reaching out to active users and bloggers in the area, and of course, TV promotion doesn’t hurt, either. As you might imagine, KGO-TV plans to air the best video on TV.

Today’s announcement comes soon after the launch of CitizenTube, a video blog of citizen journalism clips curated by the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Although YouTube doesn’t come out and say it, clearly the KGO partnership is an experiment that, if successful, will be pitched to TV stations across the country. With that kind of focused distribution, YouTube would have no shortage of local news video, which it’s already experimenting with geolocation and “news near you.”

About the Old Spice social media campaign…

It was brilliant. It was fun. It was funny. And it may or may not have worked. The Old Spice Guy viral videos were a testament to what social media advertising should be. However, there appears to be conflicting reporting whether the videos did the one thing that was most important – sell more Old Spice. Jezebel yesterday reported that sales actually dropped by 7%. Today, the source it quoted updated its numbers, and now says sales of Old Spice are up more than 100% in the last month. Sheesh!

Still, the confusion won’t stop me from embedding my favorite Old Spice Guy viral video – the reply to “Anonymous.”

Flipboard: promising new iPad app, but having issues

The best new proof of concept of magazine-as-iPad app has got to be Flipboard. It brings together stories from your social network into an interactive, magazine-style environment. The idea here is that your “lead” stories are those your friends found most important and interesting. (Watch the video below to get an idea of how it works.) The interactivity is terrific. The program is very popular. In fact, it’s so popular that it doesn’t work. Kind of. It still pulls stories from several well-known sources, but the key feature – pulling those stories from your social network into the “magazine” – essentially crashed. The app was so popular that Flipboard couldn’t handle all the requests. So now you need to download a new version of Flipboard, one that prompts you for your email so you can get in on the beta. I’m looking forward to getting my invite and giving Flipboard the full test. Meantime, I still suggest you download the program to get an idea of the possibilities.

Blogger notices BP had Photoshopped picture

A great example of how a blogger spotted something that traditional media failed to notice… The AMERICAblog analyzed a picture of the BP crisis command center and noticed plenty of bad photoshopping. I don’t want to steal too many of his great observations, but here’s just one example of how they changed the shot (note the ridiculously bad cropping around the upper right of the man’s head:

Detail of Photoshopped BP picture

“Normally we only use Photoshop for the typical purposes of color correction and cropping,” Dean said in an e-mail. “In this case they copied and pasted three ROV screen images in the original photo over three screens that were not running video feeds at the time.”

Oh, is that all? This is actually a fine example of why news organizations should not take photo handouts. You don’t know (unless you’re a hawkeye like this blogger) how the picture has been altered.

Public station KQED rolls out local news initiative

San Francisco’s KQED Public Media has announced a major undertaking to expand its news and “provide more high-quality original coverage of Bay Area civic and community news. According to the company’s press release, the initiative will be cross-platform, with original reporting elements on KQED’s radio, television and new site KQEDnews.com. And at a time when layoffs are nearly the rule in news, KQED is hiring eight new staffers to expand its news coverage. KQED radio will add a remarkable 10 newscasts, going from six to 16 over the course of a day. KQEDnews.org is going to beef up its reporting, adding more local coverage, a news blog called “News Fix,” traffic and weather.

Avoid “mission statement creep” with the Cereal Box Exercise

NPR's Patrick Cooper

Simply put, The Cereal Box Exercise lets you envision your brand as though it were a box of cereal. When you’re shopping, there are lots of brands that you have to choose from. What makes you pick one over the other? These are the same questions people have when choosing a TV or radio station. We’re in the product business, after all. What’s wrong with taking a lesson from packaging.

What is The Cereal Box Exercise? In Cooper’s words, it’s “an arts and crafts project.” But it’s more than that – it allows you to envision your brand and your product in a new way without, as Cooper says, letting “missions statement creep” get in the way. I’ve read my share of mission statements, and they can be absolutely deadly. But if you’re limited to envisioning yourself as a box of cereal, you had better be interesting.

Here’s how to do The Cereal Box Exercise:

1. Take a regular box of cereal.
2. Cover it with blank paper.
3. Start decorating it with your brand
4. Don’t be satisfied with just cutting and pasting your logo; have images and text that reflect your brand
5. Remember to make it exciting – you’re trying to sell your station!

Undertake The Cereal Box Exercise and you will learn more about what your team thinks of your station’s brand than you would in a dry mission statement exercise. By putting brand discussions into a new context, you’ll look at your brand through a new lens.

Here’s Ours:

DC political site takes top prize in Knight-Batten awards

The DC-based website Sunlight Live from the Sunlight Foundation has won the top prize in the Knight-Batten awards. Sunlight Live won $10,000 for “…add[ing] journalistic punch to a carefully orchestrated government event, adding context and insight to the proceedings… they don’t stop at merely shedding light on the behind-the-scenes proceedings of government – they go a step beyond to make it fun and engaging, creating a social experience around the event.” The site’s tagline is “Making Government Transparent and Accountable.” There are a variety of features on the site, including blogs dedicated to the BP oil disaster and Transparency Data. Winners of the $1,000 Special Distinction Award were:

MedCity News growing fast, ready to expand

With a team of six veteran journalists and a powerful board of advisors (including Lauren Rich Fine), MedCity News focuses on medical industry news in Ohio and and Minnesota. The site is only one of three “products” offered, however. MedCity News Service and MedCity News Custom give the company a diversified revenue source, in addition to the high CPM advertising the dot-com site has been able to generate.

Chris Seper co-founded the site with Mary Vanac. Both are veterans from the Cleveland Plain Dealer and are part of a growing trend of new media ventures targeting niche business topics with newspaper talent. (TechFlash and Xconomy are two other examples.) I interviewed Seper via email this week to find out how it’s going.

When did the site launch?

Mary Vanac and I walked out of The Plain Dealer on Dec. 17, 2008 (took buyouts from the paper) and started the next day in the corner of a marketing company owned by one of our early investors. (more…)

Yahoo partners with Gannett for local advertising push

Even though Yahoo has a lost a significant amount of its luster over the last decade (picture steel rusting in a 10-year rain storm), the online company is still fighting for market share. On top of the company’s recent acquisition of Associated Content, a content production platform for semi-pro freelancers, Yahoo announced this morning a partnership with media conglomerate Gannett to take a bite out of the local ad market.

All 81 of Gannett’s local publishing outlets and 7 of its Broadcast Division sites will begin selling ad space on Yahoo web properties  this quarter. The partnership highlights Yahoo’s continued push into local advertising, a largely untapped and fertile marketplace for the digital media company. (more…)

Local paper charges readers to browse obituaries

Fresh on the heels of a story posted by my LR colleague Cory Bergman about paying fees to leave online comments, is news that a local paper in Pennsylvania is charging readers to view death announcements. The obituary section of LancasterOnline.com now has a paywall.

LancasterOnline.com, the online news affiliate of Lancaster Newspapers Inc,. launched the obituary fee on Monday. Out-of-county online readers will be charged $1.99 per month, or $19.99  per year, if they view more than seven obituaries in a month. Local online readers, subscribers, or any out-of-county readers who only look at a few obituaries a month online will not be required to pay a fee.

Now that I have provided a little backstory, it’s time for me to riff here a bit. How common is it for out-of-town readers to view the obituaries setion of a local paper online? It strikes me as something that happens rarely if ever. Trying to charge out-of-town readers to view more than seven obituaries in a month seems pointless. Why would an out-of-towner read them in the first place, or ever look at more than one (perhaps a long lost friend or teacher)? How much money could Lancaster Newspapers Inc. possibly make from this initiative?

Even if a person had the desire to read countless obituaries on a local paper’s website, would he really go so far as charging his credit card to so? How would he explain it to his wife if she happened upon the $1.99 fee?

“Honey, I got caught up reading obituaries on LancasterOnline.com. I just couldn’t stop after the seventh one, so I paid $1.99 to read more. Feel free to log in and read as many as you want for the rest of the month.”

Community paper to charge for… comments!?

That’s right, the Sun Chronicle, a small Massachusetts paper, will begin charging users a one-time fee of 99 cents to post comments on the site. The user’s real name, from the credit card, will appear on the comment.

The paper has struggled with comments in the past, and the publisher says he hopes the new plan will “eliminate past excesses that included blatant disregard for our appropriateness guidelines, blind accusations and unsubstantiated allegations”.

Hmmm, I have my own doubts, but I’ll ask, will it work?

20 percent time: the way to innovate

Google gives its engineers up to 20 percent of their work time to experiment. Imagine that – you get a full day per week to work on your wildest ideas. Imagine if TV and Web producers had that kind of time. What could we develop? What wild ideas could come out of your company? Maybe we can’t afford to give everyone a full day a week to noodle around, but shouldn’t there be at least some time put aside for the effort? From the Google Blog:

“The 20 percent time is a well-known part of our philosophy here, enabling engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren’t necessarily in our job descriptions. You can use the time to develop something new, or if you see something that’s broken, you can use the time to fix it.”

20 percent time works, too. Fully half of the products to come from Google have come out of 20 percent time.

Maybe you work for a company that just can’t make this happen. No problem. Set aside your own 20 percent time. Celine Roque at WebWorkerDaily recently wrote:

“Before you schedule your 20-Percent Time, remember that the number shouldn’t be taken literally. Allocate the time that works for you. You can take one day each week, an entire weekend, or even 30 minutes each day. Personally, I like to start my day working on a personal passion project. It gives me fuel to work through the rest of the day. Plus, it eases me into a heavier workload ahead — after all, if I make a mistake on my personal project, none of my clients will suffer.”

I find blogging first thing in the morning to be an excellent use of my 20 percent time. Digging up stories, curating and sharing are all part of my morning. Am I innovating? Not exactly. But I’m building my personal brand (and, hopefully, the Lost Remote brand) and that has led me to great speaking and consulting gigs. It’s my hope that my 20 percent time (actuallly, more like “10 percent of the week” time) helps educate and inform.

Encourage your staffers to innovate on company time. Yes, I know, most will say they’re too busy already. But incentives are wonderful things, and I know of a TV station that offered $500 to anyone who could come up with an innovative, cost-saving idea. The employee gets $500, the company saves far more, and everyone wins.

Right now, we’re too busy playing catch-up. We should be all about innovation. Find creative ways for your staffers (and you, too) to make time to pursue their crazy ideas. The rewards will be 100 percent worth your time.

(This piece originally appeared on the RTDNA.org website.)

Pennsylvania highway signs to get Times Square treatment?

California isn’t the only state that thinks digital out-of-home media could solve budget problems. Fresh on the heels of news that California was aiming to launch a digital license plate advertising network, the State of Pennsylvania announced its plans to bring advertisements to electronic highway signs.

Pennsylvnia has joined California and Florida in asking the federal government to waive  regulations that prohibit advertisements on overhead and roadside messaging signs. In contrast to the ill-conceived digital license plate plan championed by California state Senator Curren Price, bringing advertisements to state-operated highway signs is both practical and feasible. The project could be activated in a short period of time, thus offering  each state a clear path to profit. The advertisements are projected to bring in $150 million annually for each state.

In addition to the legal hurdles that each state faces, having to earn concessions from the Federal Highway Administration and state legislative bodies, anti-billboard activists are trying to thwart the proposal.  (more…)