Why we see journalists as conversation leaders and readers as expert contributors

At De Correspondent, we owe our very existence to our members, since we launched our Dutch ad-free journalism platform after raising a total of 1.7 million dollars with a world record breaking crowd-funding campaign. We encourage our correspondents — who all have their own niche — to tell the stories that they feel are important, instead of just following the hype cycle of the news.

By doing this, we try to go from ‘news’ to ‘new’.

These ‘new’ insights do not only come from our correspondents setting their own news agenda. No, lots of insights are shared with us by our members. This makes sense, since a thousand school teachers who read De Correspondent together know more than just one Education correspondent.

And we’re just getting started. Here’s how we’re trying to turn our correspondents into conversation leaders and our members into expert contributors.

1. We don’t call them ‘comments’, we prefer ‘contributions’

Instead of asking for their opinions, we ask our readers to share their ‘experience and knowledge’. And we don’t say ‘comments’, we prefer ‘contributions.’ This may seem like a minor detail, but the first step to great reader contributions is an articulation of your expectations.

for more advise see 

https://medium.com/de-correspondent/8c234ff5bc53

#Podcast: How 3 women’s magazines invited the reader into the production process

Journalism.co.uk reports:

Connecting with the reader is vitally important for any magazine. To sell copies and build an engaged community it must appeal to the reader, and be in tune with their interests.
This week’s podcast looks at how and why three magazines in Finland (Olivia), India (Femina) and the UK (Company), are using crowdsourcing methods to both further their understanding of the audience, and give their readers a greater role in determining the final issue. Examples include a magazine which produced an edition containing reader-produced content only and another which built an online “co-creation” platform, where the readers helped make editorial decisions.
The publishers and editors behind the magazines share some of their lessons, as well as the potential benefits for the readers, the magazine and advertisers.
We hear from:

• Marjaana Toiminen, chief executive, Bonnier Publications (Publisher of Olivia magazine)
• Tarun Rai, chief executive, Worldwide Media (Publisher of Femina magazine)
• Victoria White, editor, Company

- See more at: http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/2013/09/27/podcast-how-three-womens-magazines-invited-their-readers-into-the-production-process/#sthash.KBYlRiBW.dpuf

Connecting with the reader is vitally important for any magazine. To sell copies and build an engaged community it must appeal to the reader, and be in tune with their interests.
This week’s podcast looks at how and why three magazines in Finland (Olivia), India (Femina) and the UK (Company), are using crowdsourcing methods to both further their understanding of the audience, and give their readers a greater role in determining the final issue. Examples include a magazine which produced an edition containing reader-produced content only and another which built an online “co-creation” platform, where the readers helped make editorial decisions.
The publishers and editors behind the magazines share some of their lessons, as well as the potential benefits for the readers, the magazine and advertisers.
We hear from:

• Marjaana Toiminen, chief executive, Bonnier Publications (Publisher of Olivia magazine)
• Tarun Rai, chief executive, Worldwide Media (Publisher of Femina magazine)
• Victoria White, editor, Company

- See more at: http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/2013/09/27/podcast-how-three-womens-magazines-invited-their-readers-into-the-production-process/#sthash.KBYlRiBW.dpuf

Connecting with the reader is vitally important for any magazine. To sell copies and build an engaged community it must appeal to the reader, and be in tune with their interests.
This week’s podcast looks at how and why three magazines in Finland (Olivia), India (Femina) and the UK (Company), are using crowdsourcing methods to both further their understanding of the audience, and give their readers a greater role in determining the final issue. Examples include a magazine which produced an edition containing reader-produced content only and another which built an online “co-creation” platform, where the readers helped make editorial decisions.
The publishers and editors behind the magazines share some of their lessons, as well as the potential benefits for the readers, the magazine and advertisers.
We hear from:

• Marjaana Toiminen, chief executive, Bonnier Publications (Publisher of Olivia magazine)
• Tarun Rai, chief executive, Worldwide Media (Publisher of Femina magazine)
• Victoria White, editor, Company

- See more at: http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/2013/09/27/podcast-how-three-womens-magazines-invited-their-readers-into-the-production-process/#sthash.KBYlRiBW.dpuf

Connecting with the reader is vitally important for any magazine. To sell copies and build an engaged community it must appeal to the reader, and be in tune with their interests.
This week’s podcast looks at how and why three magazines in Finland (Olivia), India (Femina) and the UK (Company), are using crowdsourcing methods to both further their understanding of the audience, and give their readers a greater role in determining the final issue. Examples include a magazine which produced an edition containing reader-produced content only and another which built an online “co-creation” platform, where the readers helped make editorial decisions.
The publishers and editors behind the magazines share some of their lessons, as well as the potential benefits for the readers, the magazine and advertisers.
We hear from:

• Marjaana Toiminen, chief executive, Bonnier Publications (Publisher of Olivia magazine)
• Tarun Rai, chief executive, Worldwide Media (Publisher of Femina magazine)
• Victoria White, editor, Company

- See more at: http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/2013/09/27/podcast-how-three-womens-magazines-invited-their-readers-into-the-production-process/#sthash.KBYlRiBW.dpuf

http://blogs.journalism.co.uk/2013/09/27/podcast-how-three-womens-magazines-invited-their-readers-into-the-production-process/

Guardian open journalism: Three Little Pigs advert - video

guardian reporting:
This advert for the Guardian's open journalism, screened for the first time on 29 February 2012, imagines how we might cover the story of the Three Little Pigs in print and online. Follow the story from the paper's front page headline, through a social media discussion and finally to an unexpected conclusion.
http://briefing-media.msgfocus.com/q/14qB9udut9rs24/wv

Who is a Journalist? Here We Go Again…

Digital media Law Project reporting:
When considering whether to grant legal protection for the gathering and dissemination of information, the question should not be the person performing those acts, i.e., “who is a journalist?,” but “is this an act of journalism?” Before the user-generated content revolution, focusing on journalists (i.e., people defined by their institutional affiliations) served as a functional if rough approximation of the true interests at stake (i.e., debate on issues of public concern). That is no longer the case...
...
But professional journalists now share the information ecology with a much wider array of members of the public who care about particular communities and issues. These individuals can often speak from deep personal knowledge and identify important information that others might miss. And from the Rodney King incident forward, there has been recognition that sometimes informing the public is not about education and professional commitment, but about being in the right place at the right time. Institutional media organizations still play an important role in conveying information gathered by individuals to the public at large, but the Internet provides many other paths to an audience. The citizens involved in bringing this information to the public don't need to be called "journalists" for the information they possess to have value (although these people are entitled to respect and are free to argue their right to that title). Regardless of names, the manner in which this information of public importance is gathered and conveyed is entitled to no less protection than traditional newsgathering. 

http://www.dmlp.org/blog/2013/who-journalist-here-we-go-again%E2%80%A6?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CitizenMediaLawProject+%28Digital+Media+Law+Project%29

Jeff Jarvis reporting:

And now the news: Here’s what we *don’t* know at this hour…

I often tell my students that where they see a problem, they should find the opportunity. Well, we’ve been told over and over this weekend that we had a big problem with misinformation after the Boston Marathon bombing. Breaking news, haven’t you heard, is broken.
So I see an opportunity, a big journalistic opportunity. I also tell my students this:
* Journalism should add value to a flow of information that can now occur without media’s mediation — verifying facts, vetting witnesses, debunking rumors, adding context, adding explanation, and most of all asking and answering the questions that aren’t in the flow, that aren’t being asked, i.e., reporting. Let’s acknowledge reality: There’s no stopping or fixing that flow. What witnesses see will be shared for all to see, which is good, along with rumors, rank speculation, and the work of the New York Fucking Post, which is bad.
* The key skill of journalism today is saying what we *don’t* know, issuing caveats and also inviting the public to tell us what they know. Note I didn’t say I want the public to tell us what they *think* or *guess.* I said *know*.

http://buzzmachine.com/2013/04/22/and-now-the-news-heres-what-we-dont-know-at-this-hour/

The Guardian’s new GuardianWitness app opens up reporting to the masses

TNW reporting:
Guardian News & Media, the Guardian Media Group division responsible for publishing Guardian.co.uk and Guardiannews.com in the US, has announced a new platform enabling the public to submit content directly to Guardian journalists.
GuardianWitness has been launched in partnership with UK mobile operator EE, and lets users share videos, pictures and text directly with the Guardian’s editorial team, as well as peruse contributions from other GuardianWitness users.
Though it’s launched in partnership with EE, it seems this is purely a branding/sponsorship exercise, as it’s available to anyone on any mobile network.

How it works

You can access the app via the Web, but there’s also native incarnations for Android and iOS. To contribute content to GuardianWitness, you need to create an account, either using your existing Guardian credentials, or through your Facebook and Twitter details.
The Guardian actually posts ‘assignments’, inviting users to post content based on themes – for example, when Britain experiences unseasonably bad weather. Editors set a range of assignments each week, covering news, sport, culture and life and style.
http://thenextweb.com/media/2013/04/16/the-guardians-new-guardianwitness-platform-opens-up-reporting-to-the-masses/

People Magazine Launches Custom Social Platform

Folio reporting:
As more and more women turn to social media for information and interaction, so is People magazine. The Time Inc. title has launched “Your Turn” within its website—its own social platform that allows users to contribute to and share with People.com.
By visiting YourTurn.People.com users can upload photos for various “challenges” that are tied to engaging news or trending topics on the site. To participate, a user shares images from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or a desktop computer. Submissions are also collected from different social networks by using a People.com determined hash tag that coincides with a specific challenge.
“We’ve been collecting user photos over the past few years—we’ve offered a lot of different challenges for readers, from Halloween to show us your cute pets,” says Janice Morris, managing editor for People Digital. “But we never had one place to house all the images and we never did it consistently, instead treating it as a special event. We wanted to give readers more of a turnkey platform to work with because it’s so easy to upload now with all the social tools, and hash tags make it easy to share and communicate.”
To take advantage of the presidential election buzz, for example, People asked readers to share pictures of themselves voting. Using the hash tag #YTIVoted, users could tweet or use Instagram to share their images with the magazine, which were then uploaded to this social platform in the “Share Your Voting Pics” challenge section. Morris says the brand hopes to roll out a new challenge everyday, though testing is still taking place to determine the best frequency.
http://www.foliomag.com/2012/people-magazine-launches-custom-social-platform?utm_source=Daily+Buzz+from+eMedia+Vitals&utm_campaign=1f6768aede-nl_DB_11_16_2012&utm_medium=email#.UKelTYXXrRs

EveryBlock President: Economics of Hyperlocal Editorial ‘Broken’

Street Fight reporting:
Between Patch’s beta redesign, NextDoor’s big funding round in the spring, and the Guardian’s hyperlocal news project, N0tice, continuing to expand in the U.K., the hyperlocal news landscape appears to be converging on the idea that hyperlocal information needs to be social. Meanwhile, adding to noise in the local content space, the Journatic scandal in the early summer thrust a set of new hyperlocal plays into the spotlight, raising questions about the sustainability of models which looked to data and technology to replace the heavy costs of editorial content. While the trend line appears to be pointing to a model founded in social, the role of data in editorial, and user-generated content remains very much up for debate.
EveryBlock, one of the earliest entrants in the hyperlocal data space, rebooted in 2011 after being bought by MSNBC.com in 2009. The pivot shifted the product’s focus away from its roots in data aggregation toward a more interactive product centered largely around user-generated content. This past summer saw some major changes for EveryBlock’s management — NBC Universal acquired MSNBC.com; meanwhile, EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty announced he was leaving the company in late August.
We caught up with EveryBlock’s president, Brian Addison (who will be appearing at the Street Fight Summit in two weeks), to discuss the state of the space, and the role of data, editorial and user-generated content in the future of hyperlocal news.
...
While data was at the core of our product when EveryBlock first launched, we found, over time, that it kind of has a niche appeal. In a way, we need to return to the question of what consumer need are we trying to address with this data? How much value do we as a reader place with that type of information? With EveryBlock, some of our users value that, almost raw, data. And it drives more value if you put some editorial around it. But for us, data still plays an important role in what we do but we’ve shifted our focus from the aggregation and organization of that data to a set of community features that have driven our growth from our redesign about a year and a half ago.
http://streetfightmag.com/2012/07/02/journatic-ceo-accepts-blame-for-blockshoppers-fake-bylines/

Longform journalism is thriving

Poynter reproting:
... Online readers don’t shy away from long stories, says Mark Armstrong, founder of Longreads and editorial director of save-for-later service Pocket. In fact, data, page views and experience have shown they crave the deep read. And while the source of a story clearly plays a role, a reader is going to be more concerned with whether their friend gave it a nod on Facebook than if they saw it on a prominent publication’s homepage.
“I think people are increasingly agnostic about where exactly they’re reading something or what print edition it came out in,” says Longform co-founder Aaron Lammer.
That’s not to say that name recognition and the track record of the publisher and writer aren’t still important, Armstrong says. They’re just now part of a greater equation that includes who else is recommending it and whether the reader trusts that recommender’s taste. After clicking through a “READ THIS NOW” link on a friend’s Twitter or Facebook feed, the reader is then more open to what comes next from that site.
While much has been made about BuzzFeed posting cat photos and investigative profiles on the same site, Shafrir doesn’t think readers will be too concerned with the eclectic mix.
“I think people adapt much faster than we give them credit for,” Shafrir says. “There’s no handwringing of, ‘Should I read this serious, political story on BuzzFeed? They also have cat videos.’ I don’t think that’s a consideration point on the part of most readers.”
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/190421/as-longform-finds-a-new-home-at-buzzfeed-perhaps-its-a-good-gateway-drug/

How to Follow New York Fashion Week Online

mashable reporting:
Building off success from past seasons, many brands — roughly one-third showing at Lincoln Center — will live-stream the unveiling of their Spring 2013 collections on their websites and Facebook pages, as well as via video platforms such as YouTube and Livestream. Still more will upload backstage footage via their Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Pinterest accounts.
Meanwhile, members of the fashion press will churn out 140-character reviews and mobile snapshots live from the shows, while posting longer, slideshow-accompanied reviews on their respective news sites.
With so much to choose from, following Fashion Week online can feel nearly as overwhelming as attending in person, which is why we’ve gathered the best resources for enjoying the festivities online and via your mobile phone. If there’s any we’ve missed, please let us know in the comments section below.
http://mashable.com/2012/09/05/new-york-fashion-week-sept-2012/

A Bold Experiment: Sending Citizen Reporters to Cover National Conventions

mediashift reporting:
For two weeks every four years, the media and the politicos gather for the insider's ritual of selecting a presidential candidate. Really, it's an opportunity for them to party, schmooze and show the special interests, who support their cause, a good time. The role of the citizen in these pageants is, at best, as passive consumer.
So, what happens when you toss in a pair of citizen reporters, and put them on national television asking the one question that conventioneers don't want to answer: What are you doing to get money out of politics?
We launched the Digital Citizen experiment in July 2012 to find out. The big idea is to find citizen journalists to cover the 2012 elections from a citizen's point of view, with a focus on an issue we know Americans care about: the corrupting influence of money in politics. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from May found that "most Americans [75%], no matter what their political party, believe there is too much money in politics ..." The poll showed that 76 percent "feel that the amount of money in elections has given rich people more influence than other Americans."
The first experiment will be a series of reports from the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., August 27-30 and the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., September 3-6. The past months have been spent locating partners and finding potential reporters. We are creating a process that will reveal whether the citizens' voice can make a difference in the national dialogue, even -- especially -- when the political and media powers want to ignore what the people have to say.
But first, we had to find and train the reporters.
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/08/a-bold-experiment-sending-citizen-reporters-to-cover-national-conventions236.html?utm_source=MediaShift+Daily&utm_campaign=bae0f3e65a-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email

How National Geographic Used Cowbird Storytelling Tool to Tell a Reservation's Whole Story

mediashift reporting:
Sometimes, it takes more than one storyteller to get a story right -- especially when the subjects of the story are members of a community that often feels misrepresented by media.
Thanks to multimedia storytelling tool Cowbird, photographer Aaron Huey and National Geographic were able to collaborate with the people of the Pine Ridge Reservation to jointly tell their story to the world. The result: the Pine Ridge Community Storytelling Project, a companion to the August 2012 cover story in National Geographic magazine.

The Roots of a New Storytelling Approach

After working with the Oglala Lakota people for seven years, Huey felt their stories couldn't adequately be conveyed in the pages of a magazine.

"To make a really great narrative [in print] often means only telling the story of a couple of people, and trying to use those stories to tell the larger story of the community and where it's going," Huey said. "That's often confusing for the community itself. People always asked me why I couldn't fit in something about the all-star basketball team, or the scholars going on to college. Everyone wanted something specific and claimed that I was missing the entire story because I didn't have those things. They felt like they were misrepresented. They felt like for decades in the media, they'd been misrepresented."
While on a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, Huey reflected on this storytelling dilemma. He tried to build a multimedia platform himself that could be used by National Geographic, but he realized quickly that he didn't have "the money or the expertise" for the job. But when he discovered Cowbird, an online storytelling tool developed by Jonathan Harris, Huey knew it was just right for the stories he wanted to tell...

Publishers Turn to the Crowd

digiday reporting:
It’s not everyday that a publisher is sold for $175 million. That’s why Turner’s purchase of Bleacher Report raised some eyebrows.
The lesson of Bleacher Report’s success, and that of Huffington Post’s as well, is it pays for publishers to take a page out of the platform playbook and get other people to create content. Bleacher Report, which relies on some 6,000 mostly unpaid writers to crank out about 1,000 articles a day, has raised $40 million since 2007 and brings in about $30 million a year in revenue. If Facebook and Twitter have taught publishers anything, it’s that it’s nice to have hundreds of millions of people cranking out content without calling out sick or asking for a raise.
Two old-school publications, Golf Digest and The Washington Post, are trying their hands at turning to their audience as content creators. They both bet they can augment their solid brands with low-cost (and, hopefully, high-quality) content created by the masses — for free.
Golf Digest has created Golf Digest Course Finder, a crowdsourced site that gives user recommendations — from text to photos — blended with editorial from the magazine about golf courses around the nation. Tapping into the collective reader, which ComScore puts at 505,00 uniques in July, is a new phenomenon for the outlet. According to the publication’s brand editor Bob Carney, in the past, the hurdle to comment was too high as the site’s primary function was to generate subscriptions, not engage its readers.
“If you get in a relationship with someone, sooner or later, they’ll like what you’re selling, and chances are you’ll be in contact with them,” Carney said. “If you put up a wall first, you won’t get interaction, and in the long run, they may not subscribe anyhow. So it’s been an education for us. It’s much more open, and we’re starting to appreciate the content people are getting us.”
The Washington Post is also taking a crowdsourcing mentality with its new aptly named site, “Crowd Sourced.” There are two verticals, a social technology page which looks at the influence of social media in society and an American competition page focused on business innovation. How it works: Post reporters pose a question to its readers on the site, and the readers answer and vote on the best responses.
While other traditional publishers have tapped its readers for help — remember the Sarah Palin email dumps – relying on readers to provide content that helps inform and shape the news is a novel idea.
http://www.digiday.com/publishers/publishers-tap-the-crowd/?utm_source=Daily+Buzz+from+eMedia+Vitals&utm_campaign=46cd410cfb-_nb_DB_08-09-2012&utm_medium=email

At Digital First, pop-up newsrooms take to the road

WanIfra reporting:
Beginning this summer, residents of towns, suburbs and sprawling counties across the US are liable to stumble upon something resembling the above-described new media tailgate party – also known as a pop-up newsroom – at a local sporting event or community get-together.
The fully loaded newsmobile is just one of several crowdsourced ideas intended to place reporters face-to-face with the people for and about whom they write.
At the turn of 2012, Steve Buttry, the Director of Community Engagement and Social Media at Digital First, challenged all of the newsrooms under the company's umbrella to come up with fresh ideas for engaging with and serving their local communities, according to a post by Randy Parker, Managing Editor of the York Daily Record, on the YDR Insider blog.
In early May, Digital First published a press release announcing that it had selected 12 winning proposals whose community newsrooms projects would be realized. “We want all our newsrooms to engage their communities in multiple ways – on our websites, social media, blogs, text messages and print products, but also in person,” Buttry said in the press release.
http://www.editorsweblog.org/2012/07/02/at-digital-first-pop-up-newsrooms-take-to-the-road

New operating model, new website: how Le Monde plans to connect with online readers

wan/ifra reporting:
With the debut of its redesigned website, French national daily newspaper Le Monde combined enhanced visual media and user participation in hopes of creating a more social news experience.
Le Monde.fr, the third most trafficked media site in France, launched its new format on Monday, as previously reported. Features of the site include more space for visual media, categorical tabs for each section of the news and a live chat window.
Editors Weblog spoke with Le Monde.fr Editor-in-Chief Alexis Delcambre about his primary goals for the newspaper in the online realm.
Social networking and the news
“The first objective is to improve the editorial formats that we’ve been experimenting with in our newsroom for a year,” Delcambre said.
One such new format is the “Live” feature, a chat window that appears on the home page of Le Monde.fr. On “Live,” users can ask questions of Le Monde journalists or make comments about certain topics, with journalists responding to their queries in real time. Delcambre said the feature is an innovation in France.
“It is inspired by chat windows that exist on Facebook and on Google Docs, just like a chat with a friend,” Delcambre said. “We sought to reproduce this format on our site so that when one participates on “Live,” one can have a dialogue with our editorial staff.”
As we previously reported, regional Swedish newspaper Norran offers a live online chat box, eEditor, in which users can suggest story ideas to journalists in the newsroom. UK daily The Guardian also recently began a Newsdesk live feature, in which journalists post breaking news and which stories they plan to cover on a daily blog for readers to see.
Delcambre said that “Live” aims to add an interactive dimension to the Le Monde website. Live chats not only allow users to question the editorial staff, but help journalists to better understand what information their readers want, he said.
The newsroom staff monitor the comments, choosing which to respond to on “Live,” he said. The task of responding to the questions posed in the chat window, while designated by time slots, is often a collaborative effort, he said.
http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8672091774752856243#editor/target=post;postID=4025588323270999487

Old Dogs New Tricks and Crappy Newspaper Executives

Digital First reporting:
Speech by John Paton: 
It’s an embarrassing display played out time and time again at conferences where our industry heads look like aging ingénues at Stratford declaring they can still play Juliette. And nobody has the heart to break it to them.
Or worse still, mediocre journalists, wrapping themselves in the flag of long-form journalism, to deride the value of social media as a reporting tool. A tool they don’t understand or care to understand.
And then having to watch them use that ignorance to dismiss the phenomenon of participatory journalism.
When I hear these hacks cry out that their work can’t be reduced to 140 characters I always think – if only – and pine for the useful hours I could get back in my life if spared their thumbsuckers.
And while these false, zero-sum arguments play themselves out, Rome burns.
And in the United States of America, where I work, the fire is burning faster and fiercer than ever before.
Since 2005, the U.S. newspaper industry has lost more than 60% of its advertising revenue and so many jobs no one can accurately count them.
And while this is not yet the story in Canada, I would say the only difference between here and where I work in New York City – is time.
It’s not like the Internet isn’t coming to your town.
...
In 2012, in the US, it is expected there will be more advertising on the web than in newspapers and by most estimates more Americans now access their news via the web than print.
The customers have spoken.
But are we listening?
I would argue not nearly hard enough...
If you haven’t read Shirky’s essay Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable and you are in the newspaper business then brother let me tell you – you are not paying enough attention.
His message is simple:
“If the old model is broken, what will work in its place? The answer is nothing. Nothing will work. There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the Internet just broke.”
And his message is clear:
You don’t tinker or tweak a broken model. You start again anew. And I would add build upon our foundations.
To do this you have to let go of those things we once held true. Like:
- We are the gatekeepers of information.
- That we are the agenda setters and that we decide what news is and what is not.
- And that we keep the Outside world outside and only let in the chosen few – people like us.
http://jxpaton.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/old-dogs-new-tricks-and-crappy-newspaper-executives/

Gray Lady Takes the Local: Inside the NYT’s Hyperlocal Efforts

Stretfight reporting:Like many major media companies that have tried to go hyperlocal, the New York Times’ efforts at small-scale online journalism have been notably mixed. Its main initiative in recent years, The Local, (several small blogs focused on a couple of towns in New Jersey and the Fort Greene/Clinton Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn), launched in 2009 as a section of NYTimes.com, staffed by professional journalists. Due to financial cuts, in January 2010, the blogs changed management, and lost their Times staffers. Baristanet took over the New Jersey outlets, CUNY’s j-school oversees the Fort Greene Local, and NYU’s journalism program handles a subsequently launched East Village version. The blogs are still affiliated with the Times.
Mary Ann Giordano, an editor who oversaw the Times’ recent forays into hyperlocal, continues to provide suggestions and work with the editors of The Local. Over the past year, however, she has spent most of her time focusing on SchoolBook, an ambitious effort to use data and community input to create a conversation space and resource for the New York school system. SchoolBook — like the several Local sites before it — is an experiment. But the important thing is that the Times is willing to take a risk.
Street Fight spoke with Giordano about the past, present, and future of the Times’ hyperlocal efforts; her hopes for Patch; and why the Times is in the hyperlocal game “from a distance.”
How have the Times’ recent hyperlocal efforts gone, particularly as regards The Locals?
We did pretty well in getting things going. People really liked the idea of a news source. We ran The Locals for almost a full year when there were cutbacks here, but we really were devoted to the sites and the news. We wanted to keep it going, so for Fort Greene/Clinton Hill, we found a partner in CUNY, at the Graduate School of Journalism. They’ve been running the site day-to-day in partnership with us. We could not find a similar partner for the New Jersey site.
We just felt after six months of running it on our own that we weren’t really developing it. We didn’t have the resources to learn anything new..
http://streetfightmag.com/2012/01/11/gray-lady-takes-the-local-inside-the-nyts-hyperlocal-efforts/

Ladies' Home Journal Lets Readers Write the Magazine

adage reporting:
Crowdsourcing has been common in advertising for some time, but in a highly unusual move, it's now vaulting the wall at the venerable Ladies' Home Journal, which is planning to turn over many of the pages in its 128-year-old publication to work written by readers.

The new look with the March issue

The current look for Ladies' Home Journal

Starting with the March issue, LHJ editors will cull much of the magazine's material from posts on DivineCaroline.com, a sibling at Meredith Corp. that lets consumers upload their own stories, as well as from the magazine's website, its Facebook page and other digital channels.
The magazine will still use fact-checkers and include experts in fields such as medicine and beauty, but it will start with consumers where it can. "We really flipped this model," said Editor-in-Chief Sally Lee. "Usually content creation begins with an editor. We have content creation that begins with a reader."
While other publishers have dabbled in the practice, its adoption by Ladies' Home Journal, a title that guarantees advertisers an average paid circulation of 3.2 million, is significant since it is the largest traditional media brand to commit to so much user-generated content on an ongoing basis. If it's successful, other mass-circulation titles may follow. "I've been asked a lot about whether we foresee this becoming a model that other magazines will start to implement," said Diane Malloy, publisher of Ladies' Home Journal. "My answer is, 'Gosh, yes, I think everyone is going to sit up and take notice.'"
The magazine says the changes were driven by research revealing that readers wanted a greater role in filling its pages. But the move could also help LHJ, which competes in the very mature category of women's service, improve its traction with advertisers.
An accompanying revamp by design firm Pentagram will signal the shift and include a new Ladies' Home Journal logo that shrinks "Home" to small type and overwhelmingly emphasizes "Journal."
http://adage.com/article/mediaworks/ladies-home-journal-lets-readers-write-magazine/231966/

Journalism as service

 A discussion paper by Melanie Sill, Executive in Residence, USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, December 2011. “The Case for Open Journalism Now” is a hopeful yet pragmatic argument for journalism’s future as a public good. It addresses a basic question of the digital age: with information flowing everywhere, how does journalism provide value? The answers lie in a new orienting idea for journalism that is transparent, responsive and enriched through vibrant two-way connections with a networked universe.

Happily, open journalism is more than a notion. It is a set of practices fast gaining traction and earning notice. Some advances focus on social media interaction, in-person convening and contributed content. Others are making news work more transparent and responsive. These experiments point the way to greater trust and accountability for news providers, who after all seek to hold others accountable.
Yet, to bring real change, we must reorder the fundamental processes of journalism toward the goal of serving communities—readers, viewers, listeners and customers. We must focus first on service and only then on platform or product.
Open practices can also increase journalism capacity. For instance, the collaborative and problem-solving mentality of open-source software has connected with the established knowledge-sharing of investigative reporting specialists, extending the reporting’s reach. Collaboration is being embraced by small enterprises serving communities in valuable new ways and by large organizations that once ignored each other’s work. News providers are taking tiny steps toward networking with non-journalism organizations that see information as part of their public mission.
http://www.annenberginnovationlab.org/OpenJournalism/overview

 

New BreakingNews.com adds stream of user tips for crowd ranking

Poynter reporting:
News as a public process, rather than the polished output of a magic journalism box, is one of the big ideas in journalism innovation. But what exactly does that look like?

The new homepage of BreakingNews.com has a stream of incoming tips and suggested stories.

The people at BreakingNews.com are taking a stab at answering that question in a redesign launching Thursday afternoon. The site’s main feature remains the same — a center column aggregating the world’s latest breaking news stories, as picked by editors. But a new column to the right has a raw feed of unverified story leads the audience can help to sort through.
This acts as a “real-time inbox of tips,” which come through the website from users or through Twitter from about 160 news organizations who signed up to submit tips by including #breaking or #breakingnews hashtags. Site visitors can upvote the most urgent items to call them to an editor’s attention. The goal is speed: to identify important news with the community’s help faster than a few editors could on their own.
“We’ve hired a 24/7 team of editors who immerse themselves in this with three screens and are tracking every bit of news they can find … but at some point we’re going to reach a natural upper limit,” Breaking News director Cory Bergman told me. “We’re only going to see an increase of eyewitness reports posted to social media — we know this is going to balloon over the next few years, and we really need the crowd’s help in being able to identify it.”
http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8672091774752856243#editor/target=post;postID=4230630697105569599