NetJourn Summit: What’s needed, what’s next

Steve Safran October 10th, 2007

So a morning of ideas and idealism comes down to practicality here at the Networked Journalism Summit, as Jeff Jarvis hosts a discussion called “What’s Needed, What’s Next.” On the panel were Mark Potts, the founder of Backfence; Debra Gallant of Baristanet and Scott Clark of the Houston Chronicle’s Chron.com. This has been the most interactive, Q&A-intensive session so far.

Question: What do you most need?

Mark Potts, founder of Backfence:

(Self deprecating) A business model. I thnk we’re all very close, but I don’t think anyone has it yet. When you understand what it really take to do this, it can be very expensive. Local advertisers are very interested in doing this, but you have to strip all the costs out.

Debra Gallant of Baristanet.com
Faster technological help, there’s always more that can be done, things that can be better. I recently joined Author’s Guild that has health insurance. Maybe there could be libel insurance.

Scott Clark of the Houston Chronicle’s Chron.com

Technology for us is also an issue, helping us to manage this stuff and helping the user to interact. Compensation models for our staff and the communities we’re working with. And because we’re a newspaper, as we’re trying to produce this web format, presentation models that are different in the newspaper from the web.

Jonathan Weber of NewWest.net
New ways of marketing, new ways of getting the word out to increase penetration. When you look at marketing, even if you have a little money, it’s not always obvious how to spend it. Journalism as a profession and trade has a weak management culture, and management is increasingly important. A key to the access of NewWest is that my #2 is a brilliant manager.

Question: You mentioned that your site may not be scalable. Does every business have to be scalable?

Debra: I wonder about that myself. When you’re in this field you feel like an idiot if you don’t become Google. On the other hand, I look at the things that are scaled in our culture - Burger King, McDonalds - and I don’t like them. So I’m thinking about expanding incrementally.

Question: We’re assuming these communities are neighbors and local. But MySpace isn’t about physical neighbors. Are we going about this wrongly?

Potts: I do think there are these shared interests in local communities.

Clark: Communities is one of these funny words. We are story driven. The community is not people who happen to live in the region - it’s people who are interested in a common idea.

Question Mark Fisher Washington Post: The issue of comfort with anonymity. How have you dealt with anonymity in your projects.

Clark: There are spaces where anonymity works on our site and spaces where it doesn’t. The visitor to our site needs to have a comfort on the site as to where the anonymity is. Where we start to talk about hybrid journalism we have different standards and anonymity may not be appropriate.

Potts: We did everything we could do discourage anonymity. We asked people to use their real names when they picked a username and about 50 percent of them did. I think local is different because you want to know who your neighbor is and you want your neighbor to know you’re there.

Gallant: I don’t mind anonymity for tips. I am coming to dislike the anonymity of comments more and more.

Questioner proposes to organize information based upon where a person is sitting right at that point. Have people come up with interface/tagging/geocoding to make this possible?

Potts: In a lot of cases the data isn’t there yet. (Public information isn’t up usually in real time.) That’s one of the goals, but we’re a little bit ahead of the data now.

Point from audience member Chris Lydon: I think what we need is a sense of a larger architecture of human conversation that can attack bigger monsters. I don’t think more coverage of the Red Sox is a big human advance.

PottsYou’re going to see a lot of independent journalists pop up, especially now that they’re being laid off. I’m optimistic about where we’re going.

Jarvis: We need to listen to the debates on the blogs more. We also need to understand the business of journalism and the sustainability. We need to figure this out next as a group, whatever they may be.

Question: How do you attract capital?

Potts: Maybe a journalist doesn’t know how, but maybe a laid-off salesperson does. You have to bring that experience in. You have to think about how to make it sustainable, otherwise it’s a hobby.

Weber: There is a lack of business culture in the journalism world. I don’t believe that non-profit and government funding is the savior of journalism. One thing that people underestimate - raising money is hard. It is a lot of work. Starting a company is a lot harder than being a staff reporter and you have to bust your ass for a long time. Overnight success can take five years.