NetJourn Summit: ‘Local Pioneers’

Steve Safran October 10th, 2007

The first session at the Networked Journalism Summit in New York City focused on “Local pioneers,” those who took the risk to innovate online. On the panel: Dan Pacheco, Bakersfield Californian; John Wilpers, BostonNow; Jarah Euston, formerly of Fresno Famous, and Dan Barken, Deputy Managing Editor of the News & Observer in Raleigh, NC. The session was conversational, with lots of questions from the audience. I summarized a lot of their questions underneath each person’s name, rather than trying to do a full transcript. Where there is a sentence in quotes, that’s an actual quote. Because this is liveblogging, you may find the occasional typo. My notes, after the jump…

Jarvis intro: Journalism can only expand through collaboration. We used to talk about evangelism, and now it’s about how we can work together. The fondest hope is that we talk about what’s next. The most important thing is that we get a list of things you’re working on next. This is all about experimentation. We have to try things and fail and try again.

Dan Pacheco, Bakersfield Californian: started blogs, citizen journalism sites that are then transferred into print. Was profitable within 18 months. Baketopia social sites created 38,000 friend connections: city of 300,000 people. “With niche oriented sites, people share more with each other if that’s what we tell them that’s about.”

The networks/sites that have a strong brand succeed. If you have a site that sends a strong message about what it is, people will join it.

Jarah Euston launched FresnoFamous.com in 2004 and in 2006 launched ModestoFamous.com. Sites were build on Droopal, allowing users to post caendar events, etc. Neither sites had alt-papers and “…neither city had much of a calendar section, so that was a niche we wanted to fill.” In 2006 the sites were sold to McClatchy.

Jarah has since left. There was a backlash once the site was sold. “People feel like they were part of the community and the community was sold.” Sees something similar possibly happening at Newsvine.

John Wilpers, BostonNow: When we were looking to see how we would set up the (company, we decided) “The way BostonNow could distinguish itself was to reverse publish. We started out asking people to come to meetings of bloggers.o Globe doesn’t believe in it. We started out and people were very skeptical.” After two meetings…. we launched with 100,000 papers and 500 bloggers on the site. We put the bloggers in the queue, editors take excerpts and put those in the paper, along with a link. We promised and will ultimately pay the bloggers according to a scale.

We webcast our news meetings and we can see who is watching. Sometimes they will say “That’s the dumbest damn idea I’ve ever heard. Other times they will say “DId you know there’s a coven of witches who gather on this hill?” and that’s a story to us.”

We found that once we started, other bloggers saw us and said “wow, why shouldn’t I be a part of that?” We put a blogger as the full picture on the front page once.

Dan Barken Deputy Managing Editor of the News & Observer in Raleigh: Was given the charge of trying to increase paper’s networked journalism and push down the wall in the newsroom that divides us from “the people formerly known as the audience.” Share.Triangle.com. “When you set something like this up, you have to monitor it to hear what direction people want to do. One of the things people have shown us is that they like to post photos. So we’ve set up a forum for photographers to talk with each other.”

“Last summer, one of our major projects was to look at the complete collapse of the traffic court system in North Carolina and any semblance of speeding enforcement. In the middle of our reporting we invited the public in with a big display telling them what we were working on inviting them to share their stories about what happened to them in traffic court, their experiences with speeders, etc.” With the story we incorporated their stories and reader photos.

Question: We’re at the grad school of journalism: is there some best practice/tool/way to pass on a philosophy that makes the site better to elevate the conversation?

Jarah: You have to show people what you want. What we saw when we opened the site to UGC was that the crazies would be policed by the community.

I ask John Wilpers if BostonNow is having a hard time getting press access in Boston, a notoriously non-press-friendly town “At first yes, but we are getting access now, even to the Red Sox.” I volunteer to be a stringer at the playoffs…

John Wilpers: I made the mistake early on from excerpting from Bostonist (with credit) in our paper. They wrote to me complaining, posted on their site that BostonNow was stealing. I had lunch with (the Bostonist editor) who said that a funny thing happened - people started calling her saying “Hey - you’re in BostonNow!”

Strong message here is that blogs are helped by print. However, Debra Gallant of Baristanet in audience points out that her site is outpacing newspapers and says she doesn’t think being in newspapers matters that much.