Do something! April 21, 2008

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Lisa Williams and I talked last week about journalists innovating at the individual level. That may seem like an insurmountable task, but look at startups. What makes them work is not the grinding machinery of business processes; it’s people — a mere handful of people who roll up their sleeves and DO.

So we innovate on the individual level by thinking like a startup, but I concede that we won’t “turn the Titanic” (to borrow Williams’ metaphor) without management support.

Author Scott Berkun, interviewed for AIGA, puts it this way:

“Casual Fridays, innovation offsites or giving people copies of Who Moved My Cheese are all nice things, but have zero direct impact on creativity in the workplace. It’s the behavior of leaders and managers that determines how innovative a group is, and most of what enables creativity is entirely free. You can spend a zillion dollars on creativity efforts, but if the basic behavior of managers doesn’t change, you’re wasting your money.”

CEO Chuck Peters has been “walking the talk” for some time. He’s asking if I know yet how I will do this. I have not mapped all of the abyss, but in the darkness I can feel something taking shape, a mixture of content and context creation, aggregated community-generated context and social tools or their best functionalities used to connect with the community.

Every day I learn something from other voices in the dark. Take Furqan Nazeeri’s blog Altgate. His post, “10 Web 2.0 Tips: $75,” speaks to that entrepreneurial, startup spirit. He created a social network for Obama supporters to recycle used campaign material. He did it cheaply and quickly. No teams to build, meetings to hold or spreadsheets to fill out. It’s a beautiful thing.

Lesson for me? There are three types of community members (emphasis is mine): “My guess is that for every 1,000 members, about 900 are lurkers, 90 are participants and 10 are activists. Each of these segments has different needs. For example, blogs are great for activists, but polls can be a better way to engage participants. The lesson here is to think about these segments separately.“

This is why audience discovery is so important and where I’m concentrating my efforts at the moment. What do people want? How can we help? Focus groups start tonight and go all week.

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A ninja has to focus her chakra April 4, 2008

Audience discovery is a part of what I have going on, too, and so I’ll be conducting some focus groups later this month. So I’m learning how to plan, execute and moderate focus groups. Mary Nesbitt (www.readership.org/institute/nesbitt.asp), a mover and shaker at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and its Media Management Center’s Readership Institute, was kind enough to FedEx me some textbook pages on the subject.

I found this point to be true far beyond focus groups: “… the discipline of listening and thinking simultaneously. It is not enough to be an empty vessel.”

Amen! And that doesn’t just apply to people. Traditional media have been unthinkingly using their Web sites as empty vessels, dumping grounds for anything and everything that didn’t fit in the newspaper and, perhaps worse, all the same ol’ same ol’ from the paper.

For a Web site to be successful at engaging its community, it has to have an intelligent audience strategy of its own (because its audience wants something different/more than a newspaper) and intelligent content decisions that point toward that strategy.

Does that include traditional reporting? Video? Audio? Slide shows and Flash? Probably, but don’t ask me. Go ask the audience.

Gazette Web guy Jason Kristufek has his finger on the proverbial pulse of Web 2.0 strategy. Check out his blog for insights: http://wemediaguru.com/ 

We got the beat March 15, 2008

And a third experiment: BeatBlogging.org (www.beatblogging.org). Here, 13 beat reporters, from 13 news organizations, are adding social media — from blogs to Facebook pages to Twitter (http://twitter.com/) — to their repertoire of reporting tools to maximize coverage of their diverse beats. For the best look at how it’s going, read the analysis section: http://www.beatblogging.org/blog/analysis/index.html 

This is the most academic experiment in the bunch I’m studying. It’s actually one of many experiments by NewAssignment.net (http://www.newassignment.net/) The latter was started by Jay Rosen, an associate professor at New York University’s J-school and author of the PressThink blog (http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/).

Speaking of things to watch, Rosen’s blog is worth adding to your favorite feeds.

Faster than a speeding bullet March 14, 2008

Another social media experiment of note:

FastCompany.com (www.fastcompany.com) is the Web site of the business magazine Fast Company. The Web site’s not just a dumping ground, however, for the mag’s content or stuff that wouldn’t fit in the print product. It has a clearly defined topical area and audience, and its own take on online community. Staff content is there, but it often takes a back seat to user-generated content. UGC comes in the form of blogs, forums and user-created groups.

President Edward Sussman explained it in a February post on the Web site. He has high hopes for the experiment’s impact on the industry:

“We think our site will help change how traditional media websites think about online community. It’s shouldn’t be bolted-on to the main website as a side show. And it’s not something only pure-play start ups can do well. In fact, media websites can leverage their editorial staff to develop a deeply engaging conversation with and amongst their community. It’s a model the pure plays can’t even compete with.”

Read the whole post here: http://www.fastcompany.com/article/media-socialhttp://www.fastcompany.com/article/media-social 

Sussman is a busy guy. He has responded, however, to my request for a conversation, and I’m hopeful that I can get it scheduled for late next week. Stay tuned …

Good fences make good neighbors March 13, 2008

As noted before, Gazette Communications is not the first to move into this experimental space. There are many amoeba in the primordial pool, so to speak. Three in particular are interesting to me in relation to social media and content. Here’s one of them.

The now defunct Backfence.com was billed as “Do-It-Yourself Local News” in a handful of East Coast communities. The Web-based business venture (http://backfence.com/) closed up shop last summer because it couldn’t make it as a business, but it was enjoying some success as an engaged online community of users/content generators.

“As a pioneer in the user-generated, hyperlocal field, Backfence hopefully will pave the way for many other efforts to create locally focused online communities,” blogged co-founder Mark Potts in July on the lessons learned in the experiment. Read the entire entry at http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2007/07/backfence-lesso.html

Mark has agreed to give me some of his time next week, and we’ll be talking by phone about the Backfence experiment and how it built its community. Watch this space for an update on the conversation.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about two other experiments of note.

In the beginning … March 11, 2008

So there’s this guy one cube over. Thomas. “You should blog about what you’re doing,” he says. He’s right. How can I experiment in this space if I’m not living here? So here I am.

People keeping asking, “What are you doing?” I’m experimenting on behalf of my employer, Gazette Communications, looking for ways to build an engaged community around local content. My job, says CEO Chuck Peters, is to “create local intelligence” around a topical area. My Holy Grail, he says, is finding the structure to give it form.

Sounds lofty, eh? It is when you consider that, if even some small thing we do here becomes a piece of the puzzle that ultimately “saves” newspapers, we could impact journalism as a whole. How cool. How terrifying. What have I done?!

What I’ve done is given up my job of seven years as features editor of The Gazette newspaper to take a risk. One of my favorite quotes is by W.S. Holt: “History is a damn dim candle over a damn dark abyss.” History can’t help newspapers  find an innovative way to face the future. We have to find our own way.  So I’ve leapt into the abyss.