A pair of young entrepreneurs — she’s a graduating Berkeley journalism school student and he’s a former engineer for Amazon — have combined expertises to create one such vehicle: Reporterist.com.

OJR discussed where reportage and eBay converge and where they don’t with co-founder Sindya Bhanoo over the phone. An edited transcript follows.

OJR: Why did you start Reporterist?

Bhanoo: I saw a gap in the freelancing industry — the process of pitching an article and getting it published had holes in it. It seemed like with today’s technology it could be done in a more streamlined fashion.

When you pitch an article, you’re waiting to hear back from a specific editor before you can pitch it elsewhere. And in the news industry, timeliness is a big issue. We talked to lots of editors. They were telling us that with cost cutbacks, there is a need for high quality freelance work, but it’s difficult to get trusted freelance work that you can rely on. Editors get something like 500 e-mails a day and they don’t have time to search through all of these to identify the good ones.

So the idea behind Reporterist is a news exchange where freelancers and editors can connect. As a journalist, you can upload your work and submit it to a specific publication — say an article about hiking to an outdoor magazine — and give them two weeks to view the story and decide to publish it. But you can also line up the publications that can have access to it after two weeks. Alternatively — and we’re still working on this — you can submit it to the “marketplace.”

OJR: So if a publication wanted your piece, who sets the price?

Bhanoo: When you’re uploading the article, you can put down a minimum pirce that you’ll take for it. Or you can accept a publication’s default rate for freelancers. We’ve been testing this out in the Bay Area. We got about 13 publications signed up here. When a publication registers, they put information about what they’re looking for, the regions they cover, and the prices they pay for freelance work.

OJR: How does the marketplace option work?

Bhanoo: It’s a feature to come. If you have an article that you wanted to sell, you can choose to pitch it to all the magazines or, say, the five magazines that cover the outdoors.

OJR: Would the editors then bid for your story?

Bhanoo: No, there’s no bidding system built in. The intention is not to turn it into an eBay. It doesn’t make sense to have an auction model, because publications tend to pay at a fixed rate.

OJR: So if a publication could see your story before they pay for it, what’s to stop them from stealing your ideas?

Bhanoo: We did think about that, and we talked about it with a few people. One thing to keep in mind is that when you pitch a story currently, this is something that could already happen. The moment an editor views an article through Reporterist, you know the time that they viewed it. You also can’t copy and paste off the system easily. We also incorporated user commentary using a wiki. We want to create a system of trusted reporters, editors, and publications. The idea is to help people build a reputation.

OJR: Right. I noticed on the demo that reporters can build their portfolios on the site.

Bhanoo: Part of what we’re also offering is a way for generalists to build an online portfolio. There’s also a way for editors to look at your past work. There’s an easy way of letting people view it.

OJR: You launched Reporterist while at school. How did you go about that?

Bhanoo: Last August, we launched it with UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. We talked to the faculty. We did a presentation for them. There was a very distinct need among the students and faculty to find a way to get work published. There’s a lot of time lag between professors contacting editors, trying to refer work for a student. We actually built that into the system. Professors can log into the program and endorse the student with a note attached to the work. It’s a trusted network. The student knows the professor. The professor knows the editor.

The endorsement is for a specific piece of work — a professor saying, “I looked at this story, and it would be perfect for your publication.”

By mid-September, we got the faculty on board and then we decided to expand to existing networks. We went to publications in the Bay Area that already take work from students — the Oakland Tribune, the East Bay Express, the Berkeley Daily Planet, and other regional papers. We signed up editors, showed them how to use it. They were able to see what work was pitched to them and directly download it. There are specific software systems that different newspapers use. We made it really easy for them to download it in whatever format was best for them.

OJR: Did your undergrad background in computer science come in handy in the process?

Bhanoo: I haven’t worked as a computer scientist for a while. My husband did all the technology development behind this. The most critical thing is to identify needs in the system. Keeping an eye out for what’s happening in the industry, understanding where things are going. There’s a lot of change happening.

OJR: Are you making a profit from the site?

Bhanoo: Not yet. The portfolios are free for users to create, but there are capabilities to add multimedia. Depending on how much space you need to store images or video, that will cost you. Compared to other portfolio sites, we think our site is the least expensive right now.

We’ve also built a payment model but we haven’t implemented it yet. When a freelancer sells an article through the system, they get paid immediately from the publisher. We’ll be taking something like a 10 percent cut. In the real world, it can take months before a freelancer gets paid, and the delay is usually paperwork-related. So publications are receptive to the idea of doing this electronically. We’ve implemented electronic contracts. The papers we’ve talked to are pretty interested.

OJR: Where will you take the site next?

Bhanoo: We’ve just opened up the site to the public. Columbia is interested in introducing this to their students. We’re also going to take it to specific groups such as Society of Professional Journalists or the Asian American Journalists Association. We’re going to take it step by step. Right now we have about 60 users.

OJR: What’s been your biggest challenge so far?

Bhanoo: It’s good to get more users, but you want to grow fully enough that you have enough features to keep them. You don’t want to grow too slowly that you’re stagnating, but you have to make sure to sign up users and publications at a matching rate. It’s kind of like a chicken and egg problem — you need users to get publications but you need publications to get users.

OJR: That sounds a little like CNN’s i-Report.

Bhanoo: A lot of sites are opening up to citizen journalism. But we’re trying to create a place where journalists and up-and-coming citizen journalists can sell their work and start building a reputation.

Our larger vision is that it’s the next generation wire service, like an AP or a Reuters. The public wants high quality, relevant news. As the industry’s cutting back, a lot of regions are under-covered. Most of the editors we spoke to say they’re relying too much on AP or Reuters content. At Reporterist, they will be able to look at all these stories and sort them by region or topic. Our vision is to be a wire service for local, topical news.

OJR spoke to Anthony Moor, Dallas Morning News’ Deputy Managing Editor/Interactive [and who is also a member of OJR's editorial advisory board], and swapped e-mails with Leslie White, Dallas Morning News’ Director of Photography, and Christine Montgomery, Managing Editor of TampaBay.com, about why they made the videos and how successful they were in attracting new readers.

OJR: Why a trailer? What prompted the idea? Have you done anything like it before?

Moor: First of all, we shot video as part of the multimedia presentation of these projects. Both “Unequal Justice” and “Texas Youth Commission” had significant multimedia components. “Texas Youth Commission” had a smaller print component, while “Unequal Justice” was mostly print with a small Web component. So since we had the video already, we just decided to leverage that to make a trailer. Secondly, these are large projects even for the paper as a whole. We spent time on them. We wanted to give them as much exposure as possible on the Web.

A lot of our challenge overall as news organizations is to try and attract an audience for these big projects with a public service mission. Our Sunday newspaper audience is already familiar with our work – we already have them. How can we get people who don’t read the paper on Sunday, who haven’t picked up the paper? We want them to become interested and informed by news and information that matters to them. Those projects can be daunting for audience to enter in this day and age because of all the competing media out there. So we need to attract a new audience by using more effective techniques to tell them about what we were doing. The multimedia project of course is a way of getting people to enter into the story.

Secondly, we would like to have them think of the Dallas Morning News as places to go for news that matters to them, whether they’re newspaper subscribers or users of the Web.

White: Our projects editor, Maud Beelman, had suggested that we put up an overview video on DallasNews.com a few days before publication in the newspaper. Our video editor took a crack at it, but it’s rather impossible to sum up a story as complex as “probation for murder” in Dallas County. Early attempts involved having one of the reporters narrate the story.

It was my feeling that it took what we knew to be a dramatic and emotional story and turned it into what was basically a talking head video. We suggested borrowing from our best work in videos (shot by staff photographer Kye Lee) and putting it together to pull our readers back to the site on Sunday, after the stories were published with the full video content.

The end result carried a great deal more emotional impact.

OJR: Did you know from the start that you wanted to put it up on YouTube? Did you put the video up on any other sites?

Moor: I recommended that we adapt it for YouTube as a way to get an audience interested in it. We did post different versions of the video – the YouTube version was more for people who didn’t already have an understanding of our publication.

Apart from the traditional promotions, we didn’t put the video up on other sites. We wanted to attract a new audience but we weren’t sophisticated at all about it. We’d like to take more advantage of that down the line.

OJR: What were these “traditional promotions?”

Moor: The people involved in the project sent out to our own networks, put it on our Facebook pages. We also put the trailer out on YouTube ahead of the project’s publication. The project was set to run online on Saturday and in the paper on Sunday.

OJR: How did YouTube’s style affect the tone of the trailer?

Moor: Our people in the photography department really wanted to produce the video in a very captivating, dynamic, edgy format. We wanted to make you feel not only like you want to look at this, but that you want to put nine dollars down and watch a movie about it. So quick cuts, pounding music, and trailer-like tease in the storyline.

White: Well, we didn’t shoot specifically for the trailer, but we knew the edit needed to be aggressive both emotionally and visually to capture the reader. I think that anyone who has ever seen a few movies has the basic requirements for storytelling in the specific way that trailers rely on.

If you view all the videos from “Unequal Justice”, you’ll see that we pulled moments specifically for the emotional impact and storytelling moments in each.

OJR: How successful was the video in generating interest for the projects? Were you able to track how many people visited the site after seeing the video?

Moor: I’m not sure if we could do that. We’re seeing numbers in the hundreds. It’s not a lot. I’m not going to say that this is a breakout way to reach the audience, but we have to do things like this. It’s not like we don’t understand what YouTube is about. And because of the way that news and info is being distributed on the Web, we have to gain new job skills within our current titles. For example, a traffic acquisition manager – not the types of things that newspaper or website editors do. We thought this is a good way to experiment with that.

OJR: Looking back, what lessons did you learn from making the two videos? What would you tell other newspapers who are thinking about doing this? Any plans to put up more videos like this in the future?

White: I tend to look at the trailers not just as a feature on YouTube, but a way to attract more readers back to DallasNews.com for the whole story. We’ve definitely learned that a “summary video” of an investigation is not going to play as well as the real emotion of the subjects. I think any way you can get readers to your site to read, view and experience one of the newspapers best stories is a win-win. We’ll definitely be doing it more in the future.

Moor: I do think that down the line, newspapers will need to consider, within either the editorial apparatus or in marketing, creating a job where your responsibility is to ensure that articles are search engine optimized. That person will also have to get your news and info out on new platforms like iTunes, Digg, Drudge, Google News, NewsVine, and so on. If you think about how much news we push on a given day, if one article needs to be distributed through all those channels – how are we going to manage that?

OJR: What’s new and unique about Politifact?

Montgomery: While fact-checking isn’t new, fact-checking statements presidential candidates make on the campaign trail and then actually making a ruling on the veracity of the claims is different. A lot of political coverage merely repeats what the candidates, pundits, support and opposition groups say and the readers are left to figure out for themselves what’s true, sort of true or outright false. When Politifact editors select a claim to fact-check, they dig deeply, going to original sources and documents. We try to be transparent in our reporting by linking to source docs whenever possible. We database all the claims and our rulings, making the site very easy to search. We have six different rulings, by the way, ranging from “true” to “pants-on-fire” liar.

OJR: Why a music video? Whose idea was it and what prompted the idea? Have you done anything like it before?

Montgomery: Definitely our first music video. Here’s how it came about: Our Marketing department was putting plans into place for marketing Politifact.com, using tried and true means like in-paper ads and some radio spots. We knew those would be effective in reaching our core newspaper readers and people interested in politics. But Politifact.com is the kind of site that makes politics accessible and interesting to lots of people. Especially young people, we thought. So a few of us on the editorial side started brainstorming ways to get the word out in a more viral way — that is, ways that would be easy for people to share with each other. It was about that time that the Obama Girl videos (one and two) were such a hit on YouTube. One idea lead to another and before we knew it, we had an original song called “Gimme the Truth,” composed by one of our metro editors. It was catchy!

Then one of our web editors with excellent video skills story-boarded an idea for the video. We booked a place to shoot the video, built and gathered the props, got dozens of people from inside and outside the company interested in participating, and shot the thing in a day. Editing took a couple more days. From idea to launch, it took about one month.

OJR: Did you know from the start that you wanted to put it up on YouTube? Did you put the video up on any other sites?

Montgomery: Yes, we made this video for YouTube specifically. We also seeded it on over a dozen other video sites, such as Crackle (where it was featured as their top political video for some time), Yahoo!, MySpace and MetaCafe. It has appeared on our main site, tampabay.com and is still linked off the Politifact.com home page.

OJR: Tell me about the newspaper staff involved in making the video. What special skills or interests did they have that made the idea work?

Montgomery: I mentioned the metro editor, Chris Ave, who is a musician/songwriter in his off time — and has a cameo appearance the video as guitarist/back-up singer. The Web editor is Adrian Philips. He had run his own video business before joining the Times in 2005. He came up with he storyline, shot, directed, and edited the video. His editor Anne Glover, helped gather props, manage the project and rally the troops throughout the organization to appear in the video. The only special skills those staffers needed were a sense of humor and the willingness to give up part of their Saturday. We hired a local producer and singer to record the song. Our singer appears as the lead in the video, the song’s producer is playing bass in the video. Playing drums in the video is our media critic, Eric Deggans.

OJR: How successful was the video in generating interest for Politifact? Were you able to track how many people visited the site after seeing the video?

Montgomery: So far the video has been viewed more than 200,000 times on YouTube. Unfortunately, we can’t track how many of the viewers then clicked to our site. We did see a week-over-week spike in Politifact.com traffic of 67% when the Gimme the Truth video was featured on YouTube’s homepage. Of course, it was also the week we hosted a GOP debate in our hometown and we were doing a lot of other promotion of the site. That said, I’m thrilled with the response and consider it a successful marketing effort.

OJR: Looking back, what lessons did you learn? What would you tell other newspapers who are thinking about doing this? Any plans to put up more videos like this in the future?

Montgomery: We learned that YouTube is indeed an effective way to reach people in a way that traditional marketing can’t. We learned that we can do “serious journalism” and poke a little fun at ourselves at the same time. As sort of atypical as “Gimme the Truth” is as promotional content, it does a good job of showing people what the site’s mission is all about. What would I tell other papers thinking about doing this? Go for it. It was a lot of fun and it gave many of our staffers a fresh outlet for their work. Also, all in all, it was a fairly inexpensive endeavor.

In Red: The Next Generation of American Writers – Teenage Girls – on What Fires Up Their Lives Today, a new collection of personal essays gathered by writer and editor Amy Goldwasser, a bevy of fearless young women have cut-and-pasted their thoughts right onto the page.

Their writing is guided by only one principle: No thought is too trivial or too strange to shout into the World Wide Web. You wish your identical twin sister would lose weight so she’d be as pretty as everyone says you are. You hate how TV stifles family conversations and then you hate that, as you’re writing this, you are not getting up to turn it off. You think of grinding as make-believe sex. No matter the subject, these girls write only to the beat of their hearts.

Many of the essays were dashed off in a matter of minutes. Some were pieced together from over 50 e-mails. All of them make for tasty, unprocessed reading. OJR chatted with Goldwasser over the holiday break. An edited transcript follows.

OJR: How did the book begin?

Goldwasser: I started the project because I’d been volunteering at the Lower East Side Girls Club, teaching writing — helping with college essays, plays, podcasts. I was really impressed with the originality of the writing. I work as a magazine consultant during the day, but I was finding the writing from the girls more exciting and varied than the professionals I was working with. We adults kind of know how to perform, and things become so formatted. The leads are fairly similar. The epiphanies always happened in the same places within the same word count. The girls, though, they write what they want to write instead of what someone’s telling them to write.

So I was trying to bring it into my work at the magazine — combining my day job and what I enjoyed volunteering with. I tried to get a girl writing column in various magazines and that didn’t work. And you can’t just reuse the writing three years later because they outgrow it: A 17-year-old will disown what she wrote when she was 14. And I was feeling terrible that I was wasting their work. In March 2006, I decided to take a sabbatical and do a call for essays to see once and for all if it would work.

I knew that to sell the idea, I needed the actual essays. So I sent out an e-mail to a few dozen friends and asked them to spread the word. I got 800 essays in six weeks. That’s the difference between the young writers and the professional writers — the girls write on the spot. They’re creating these bodies of personal written work daily. Blogging and social media have taken away the fear of putting something on paper.

OJR: How did you work with the writers?

Goldwasser: I’d tell them to write about whatever they want. I’d maybe offer a little direction, like tell me about a few things you’re into. The girls would respond, then I’d pick out one of the things and I’d get a completely new essay in an hour. They saw this kind of personal writing as an outgrowth of blogging. You know, I’m furious about the NEA report that said Americans are reading less and less. It fails to acknowledge new media. The girls in the book don’t consider themselves as writers. The Internet takes the preciousness of “writing” away. If you could see these essays annotated — some of these were cut and pasted from 50 e-mails. Especially with the girls, they’ll write, “He’s cool.” And I’ll say, tell me why. Tell me three cool things you’ve seen him do and hear him say. You do have to pry out the specifics. A positive that comes from all the Internet use is that nothing’s trivial. They have opinions on everything. There’s nothing weird about blogging about a movie they just saw or . It’s making more interesting writers — chroniclers of the everyday. Writers know that the key is to wake up and write every day. The girls already do that.

OJR: How do the girls feel about their most intimate secrets published?

Goldwasser: In a way, they weren’t concerned enough. It’s another thing the Internet has done — they’re so used to being published that I almost had to take many steps back and go to great lengths to make sure they know what they’re doing. Online, you’re using a username. This is different. You’re putting this into a book forever in the adult world. Their kids and their grandmas will read this. I think they handle it fine on the Internet, but when you transfer this to a book, things are a bit different. They put their full names on their essays. We had to change other distinguishing characteristics — for example, I couldn’t show off who was from the small towns.

OJR: Would it have been possible to do this book if it were teenage boys writing?

Goldwasser: That’s the big question right now. I started with girls because it was easier — it was an experiment from home. This is just the first book in a series. There’s going to be one about boys and then maybe by geographic locations — like a New York volume. One of the cool things is that every one of the 58 authors has a blog. The website is really at the heart of it. It’s a full-on social network like Facebook. Girls and boys can submit work — including photos or videos — constantly. We’ll connect them with professionals, an editor or music supervisor. The “best of” will be published in professionally edited books. Separating media is a very adult imposed thing. The girls — they don’t see the distinction. They just work in multimedia. We’re also looking into adapting Red for theatre.

I think the Internet is the best thing to happen to book publishing, and I’m quite upset about that Doris Lessing quote ["… the Internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc…"]. The younger generation does buy books and they buy books regularly. And they talk to each other. Everyone’s bemoaning the death of the book review. I feel like this generation — they’re all natural reviewers. They’ll start looking to each other more. It’s been so cool to watch it happen.

OJR: Do you think there is a lack of female voices in online journalism?

Goldwasser: The thing that really gets to me is the lack of female humor. There’s this idea that for women to be taken seriously they have to be serious.

OJR: Has the book been met with any negative reactions?

Goldwasser: People are uncomfortable with female sexuality. One girl, Eliza Appleton, wrote an essay on grinding [republished on Salon]. People got really upset with her. On the message boards they were saying where’s her mother, and things like that.

Another thing is adults really want to label the girls. We’ve gotten these false charges, like why are the girls from New York all white and liberal? That’s just unfounded. This book is as multi-anything as any collection. If a girl doesn’t write about race, people assume she’s white. It’s a weird reverse racism.

LiveScience “did a good job of keeping an often static subject fresh and new and you really had a sense they are on top of it,” according to the ONA press release. The judges also lauded the site’s “top-notch use of multimedia” and mix of user and expert voices on a topic that “can get static and old very quickly,” according to Ruth Gersh, co-chair of the 2007 awards.

What’s their secret? OJR chatted on the phone with Anthony Duignan-Cabrera, Editorial Director of Consumer Media at LiveScience’s parent company, Imaginova, to find out. An edited transcript follows.

OJR: What do you do at LiveScience?

Duignan-Cabrera: I oversee what types of stories we’re using, and if we can bring new partners. I’ve been with Imaginova for eight years. It’d been launched as Space.com, and I’d always been interested in space.

OJR: What’s LiveScience’s mission?

Duignan-Cabrera: We make science not boring. We think science news should be relevant, funny and engaging. The reader should come to the site and leave smarter after five minutes.

OJR: How are you better than your competitors?

Duignan-Cabrera: Our competitors – the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, and other mainstream organizations that reach a broad audience – their news has a lack of irreverence and that “gee whiz” factor. Some of the things they cover are obscure for the public. We want readers to think: I should care about that – whether it be global climate change or how things work in the workplace.

OJR: Can you give some specific examples of how you respond to your readers?

Duignan-Cabrera: We looked at what science stories are very popular among our competitive set as well as at general subjects that are hot right now. We tweak our coverage and watch where our traffic goes.

Last year, we gave our site a major redesign, which took six to eight months. We made accessing our stories easier, especially the top 10 lists and image galleries. We’re expanding how our reporters use our blogs. We increased our environmental coverage, because we realized there was an interest. We always pay attention to how people are going through the site. We track the stories and how the users use the stories they read to go through our site.

OJR: What’s your advice to journalists trying to improve their sites?

Duignan-Cabrera: Pick a concept, and then observe what your users like and what your competitors are not doing. If there’s a need, fill it. If the readers want more of something, give it to them. Depending on the topic, they might want more pictures or video.

We make fun of things that are dry. We have them take quizzes. We cover the top 10 ancient capitals of the world, taboos, and myths about sex.

OJR: I recently covered a panel discussion at Annenberg that featured scientists and science journalists, and there was a lot of talk about how inadequate science reporting is in general. Some people blame on the public being science-illiterate. What are your views on the state of science journalism?

Duignan-Cabrera: The scientist, the academics that live in their ivory towers depend on public funding, and the only way to get support is to engage the public. That aside, not everyone’s an astrophysicist, and there’s a way of explaining the coolness of it that entertains as well as educates. Learning should be fun, not funny or goofy, or exploitative. It shouldn’t be like cod liver oil! It should be “neat” and “cool” and all those different adjectives.

Our company did a http://www.ojr.org/?p=1409 News forum Topix seeks to power local conversation in every city in America. It announced Tuesday a deal to provide MediaNews Group with online discussion and article commenting capabilities for each of the publisher’s 61 daily newspapers.

OJR chatted with Topix CEO Chris Tolles about how the partnership works and what it means for the future of citizen journalism. Below is an edited transcript. [Note: Topix is a financial supporter of OJR. As a result, OJR editor Robert Niles did not participate in the reporting or editing of the story, which was edited by OJR graduate assistant editor Noah Barron.]

OJR: What happens in a Topix and media company partnership? What’s the benefit to media companies?

Tolles: It’s a no-brainer for them. They get content up without any work on their part. There’s additional ad inventory. And there are opportunities down the road for them to actually integrate their journalism and the commentary – using forums as a place to get stories, to take the pulse of the community.

The opportunity in the partnership is to work with several different large networks and a massive audience that federates between them, and to monetize that.

OJR: You take the comments on newspaper articles and cross-post to Topix sites.

Tolles: Right, if someone comments on an article about the New England Patriots in MediaNews Group’s Lowell, Massachusetts newspaper, it appears in the Lowell paper as well as to the New England Patriots section on Topix and on the Topix local page. Likewise, a comment on the Patriots page on Topix will also go into the newspaper page. It feeds off each other to create greater utility out of that same comment, filling up empty room. It also drives more traffic back to the original story.

OJR: Have you learned lessons from previous partnerships that you plan to apply to MediaNews Group?

Tolles: We want to make sure that we engage with their local sites quickly. Essentially, the more input and feeling of participation that the people who work there have, the better they’ll feel. I think that’s the biggest lesson. The other challenge is for us to figure out how what we’re doing isn’t just an adjunct of what they’re doing, but rather central to their mission.

OJR: Are people at newspapers resistant to the integration?

Tolles: Not on the online side, but I don’t think I’ve ever met a news editor that likes unedited comments on their site. News editors would want to vet every comment, which would kill the whole system.

OJR: Are you looking at other partnerships? What are you doing in the future?

Tolles: We are. We are also working on another product, a hyperlocal editing platform. On Topix, we have a “wires” page with a whole list of articles we’ve crawled from the Net. We also have a “news” page that can either be automated with an algorithm to figure out the top story every couple of hours, or managed by an editor who pulls stories from the wires or the Web to create a custom news page. This page is centered around a subject or topic. Ideally you get three or four people from the community to take charge of this and an editor who walks in once in a while to make sure nothing’s wrong. It’s a way to create a micro-targed news section with very little editorial on top of it.

For example, if the LA Times wanted to create a page for Silver Lake, you could have an editor feature the paper’s Silver Lake stories on the site, solicit comments, and solicit first person reporting from the community. We have a whole system to manage all that. We’re working to provide that syndicated product to other people now.

OJR: The upside of those pages is obviously matching them to local advertising.

Tolles: Monetization, absolutely. It provides a way of creating more product for less money. MediaNews Group and Topix share revenue from ads on the comment and forum pages.

OJR: Let’s talk about your competitors. One of them is Google. In August, Google announced that they were asking people featured in news articles to comment. What’d you think of that?

Tolles: I was very worried about that. But if you’re only going to allow people featured in the article to comment, then it’s going to be a boutique, hand-cranked feature that requires a very, very high editorial touch. And Google’s not the high editorial touch kind of place. That was launched three or four months ago, and I don’t think it’s had any effect. Google’s our number one advertiser, and they’re a great partner of ours. I just don’t think they’re going to compete with us in this area.

OJR: Which competitors are you worried about then?

Tolles: There’s no one person doing what we do. Yahoo! had comments on all of their articles until last December. They have a lot more resources that could be aimed at us than Google. They don’t mind putting content on their site. So they have all the pieces to build a much more effective weapon against us. They just have not done so.

Pluck provides comment sections to newspapers, but they don’t have their own websites. They compete for partner business.

OJR: Up until earlier this year, Topix didn’t use human editors. Why’d you add them?

Tolles: Topix has gone for a volume strategy – getting the most people who can participate in your online community and trying to automate the process of moderation to take out true horror from the commentary. The same automated system we use to aggregate and categorize news content, we use in the commentary space. We hide about 10% of all comments before they ever hit the site. We optimized the automated system for growth. If the comments are too horrible, then people stop commenting. If you take too many comments out, then you don’t grow as fast.

We’re about freedom of speech, but a newspaper, for example, might have a much different editorial sense. We’re OK with hot-blooded comments. Some newspapers aren’t. It comes down to making a better product.

There’s a cultural problem: Newspapers don’t want to see bad comments. An editor is almost viscerally offended by an insensitive comment. We’re not. If you come in with the attitude that 1% of comments are great, then the challenge becomes how to escalate the good comments out of the mass of bad commentary.

OJR: Enter citizen journalism?

Tolles: The New York Times is not going to emerge fully formed out of a comment system, but the New York Times isn’t the desired result either. Ideally, with citizen reporters – I don’t want to say “journalists” because “journalism” has certain ethical and stylistic burdens – you’ll see several different reports of the same thing, and you, as the reader, will have to make the decision yourself on what really happened, what’s true and what’s not. A newspaper generally tries to provide an analyzed result, a fair and balanced report of what happened. What the Internet did to travel agencies, it’s going to do to journalism. Travel agents used to have recommendations for hotels, now they say, “Go choose yourself. If you make a mistake, it’s your fault.” An article becomes the start of a product, not the product itself.

Reporters aren’t graded on how many people read their articles. They’re not judged on whether their articles made money. In the last decade or two, reporters tend to think the Pulitzer is the ultimate recognition. Pulitzers are decided by other journalists. At the end of the day, what does that matter? Getting commentary, getting people excited, changes what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to create the most politicized, polarizing article possible. You want to get right in the middle and throw a hand grenade. That’s what people used to do in newspapers.

The beauty of this is maybe we’ll help bring journalism back to its origins. The golden age of newspapers was when they made you angry or made you happy. They weren’t boring. They heart of journalism is not where it is today. Fox News is the closest thing we have to real journalism. It’s successful.

If you’re going to do something, do something that people will like. I’m sick of this idea that journalism’s a priesthood. It’s not. The First Amendment covers all of us, not just journalists. There are no specific privileges that journalists should have that aren’t afforded to everybody. Why don’t you just do something that people will want to read and talk about?

The Internet being the first mass two-way communications medium gives you the opportunity to get people involved. The way to do that is to talk about issues that no one wants to talk about that have historically caused the most commotion. That’s what newspapers should do. Instead, newspapers say: Let’s not talk about the homeless in San Francisco because people are going to be upset. No, the goal is to get people upset. That’s what citizen journalism brings to the party. That is destiny. There’s no fighting it. That is the way it will be.

OJR: But we’ve seen recently how citizen journalism can lead to tragic results. Are there ethical problems with building a platform that enables something like that to happen?

Tolles: I believe in the purloined letter approach. You need to make sure that there’s an information overload on any given person so it’ll take a lot more to ruin their lives. There are limits of what I want to see online, but those limits are a lot different than what a typical newspaper editor would have. You have to honor the scale of the problem. If your requirement is to have no bad comments, then you’ll have four comments on your site. I’ll have 80,000 a day. At the end of the day, I’m a big fan of supply and demand. Those are the real laws of the world. As long as there’s a demand, we’re going to create a supply. If your religion prohibits you from dealing with reality, you should probably change your religion.

OJR: Is that the general feeling in the Web 2.0 community?

Tolles: Web 2.0 is all about bringing people into the conversation and making the media, the product of Hollywood and New York, into the starting point of more interesting conversations.

As for the commercial aspect, well, I think journalists should all be publishers. They should all be responsible for bringing in an audience and monetizing that audience. If you’re disconnected from that, then you’re inherently not understanding your profession.

OJR: Lastly, do you have any plans to expand globally?

Tolles: We rolled out Canadian news a couple years ago. Probably would have been better if we rolled out in the UK because the advertising dollars are higher there. But I don’t think we have any plans to go global more than to license our stuff to a foreign partner. We’ve had several conversations with large publisher coalitions in other countries – we might sell the Topix system in the German language, for example. But there’s enough market in the US to be successful.

The thing is, how do you get newspapers to think about communities as an opportunity? MediaNews Group looks at it like they’ve got to do this. That’s pretty forward thinking.

Welcome to the agora of the 21st century: 10 Questions is a people-powered platform for presidential politics created by Andrew Rasiej and Micah L. Sifry of techPresident and high school physics teacher David Colarusso, who also runs a site called Community Counts. Anyone can upload a video question for the candidates. The public votes on the questions it wants to see answered, and the candidates respond to the top 10 questions.

Will such a forum bring the democracy of the Internet to politics? OJR spoke on the phone with 10 Questions co-creator and self-described “technical guy” for the site, David Colarusso. An edited transcript follows.

OJR: 10 Questions is based on the technology of your site, Community Counts. How did Community Counts get its start?

Colarusso: Back in the beginning of this year, YouTube began spotlighting individual candidates on its page by posting a video of the candidate asking the community a question. YouTube users were then invited to submit video responses. Lastly, the candidate responded to these responses. For example, the first question was by Mitt Romney: “What do you believe is America’s single greatest challenge?”. I submitted a response, and luckily, the first two candidates replied to my videos.

It became obvious to us users after a while that there wasn’t a good mechanism for the candidates to understand what the community valued. We thought the community should have some say as to what they wanted to see the candidate respond to. So we said, why don’t we just survey everyone? That turned into Community Counts.

When the YouTube/CNN debate came along, I had the tools necessary for people to vote on those questions. We got a good deal of press coverage. We had a lot of users: 30,000 votes by 6,000 voters. That got the attention of the people of techPresident.

After the debate was over, we thought about what we wanted to see happen, and that turned into 10 Questions.

OJR: How is 10 Questions different from the YouTube/CNN debates?

Colarusso: There are some rather profound differences. The primary one is that we’re doing this as a people-powered forum, not a debate. It’s a discussion with the candidates. The YouTube debate allowed people to ask questions, but CNN had the ultimate say in choosing the final videos. YouTube also took away the features that let users see their peers’ most popular videos. Community Counts allowed the users to vote on the questions themselves, to prioritize them. We pose the question: Do you think this should be asked of the candidates? Community Counts shows that when you ask that you get serious stuff.

Another difference is that we offer the ability for the community to comment on the candidates’ replies and to rate whether the question was answered.

OJR: As of this morning, 10 Questions had about 76,000 votes and 160 videos. What is the traffic like? How do you add traffic to the site? What do you expect in the final week?

Colarusso: We’ll probably get about 100,000 votes by November 14. The videos come in spurts as different groups get interested.

The idea of leveraging the wisdom of the crowds – that a group of people together can make better decisions – works when the crowd is diverse. The two ways we try to get diversity is to make the audience very large and to reach out to different populations. We have a collection of 40 cross-partisan “sponsors,” such as the Huffington Post, Hugh Hewitt, DailyKos, BET. There is no financial relationship. The sponsors let their readers and viewers know what’s going on over here. We have a nice mix of left and right voters.

OJR: How can you tell the political leaning of your visitors?

Colarusso: We can only say where they’re coming from – our main referring sites (our sponsors) have a nice mix.

As for traffic, there are different drivers. Up to today, we’ve seen three major spikes. (We can tell by looking at the history for each of the videos – the top two videos would show these spikes.)

The first spike was our initial launch. In terms of unique individual visitors to the site, we had about 5,000. There was a peak of 7,000 visitors per day during the launch period.

The second spike in traffic, with a peak of about 11,000 individual visitors to the site, was on October 29, during Barack Obama’s MySpace/MTV dialogue. We had worked it out so that the top ten questions on our site at the time would be asked. MoveOn.org sent an e-mail to their users telling them to vote on videos. It generated a lot of attention and traffic. The result was that a question on net neutrality shot up to number one, and it’s still currently the top video. The following week there were discussions on the legitimacy of MoveOn.org. They were accused of “astroturfing”. We don’t think it’s the right characterization. Sending out an e-mail asking people to vote doesn’t guarantee that everyone will vote.

We do have safeguards on our site – only one vote per IP address allowed. At the end of round one [on November 14, when the top ten questions will be submitted to the candidates], we’ll start an auditing process to further refine those safeguards.

This last weekend, there was another spike of about 6,400 unique visitors, resulting in the question, “Is America unofficially a theocracy?” climbing into the current number two spot. A blogger had posted an entry asking his readers to vote on two questions on religion and politics. It took off like crazy after someone dugg the blog entry. It got a couple thousand diggs, and generated a lot of traffic. So in the course of the weekend, it pushed these questions right up to the top 10. Certainly this is not astroturfing. This is not an organized e-mail list. People came and stayed around to vote on other questions.

We’re big on being transparent. We’ve been blogging each day about the traffic. As of today, we’ve had about 65,000 unique visitors total since the site started. We’re pretty happy that these individual people came to vote, and then stayed around to vote on other videos. On average people voted on about three videos. That’s promising.

In the last peak, there were fewer unique voters but more voting. It’s interesting to see how these numbers are correlated. This is the mystery of the Web – how people participate.

OJR: Have you any idea which campaign is more Web-organized than others, in terms of submitting videos to the site or getting their supporters to vote?

Colarusso: It’s a tricky question. You see, you might have a small group that’s good at mobilizing its members – but it has few members. I can tell you that over the life of the site, we’ve got in the top ten list of referring sites (in rough order): digg, blogspot [both from last week's spike], Crooks&Liars, MSNBC, Hugh Hewitt at Townhall, TalkingPointsMemo, HotAir, and Conservative Grapevine.

OJR: One of the hot topics surrounding the democracy of Internet-based forums is: Are the questions better? Smarter? More original? More relevant? What are your thoughts?

Colarusso: I think they’re definitely diverse, and that’s one of the main things we’re trying to get at – a sense of what our community, our visitors think are questions that should be asked. So it’s hard not to succeed with that rubric [laughs].

It’s interesting to note that these questions are different from the normal questions. I think that means they’re adding something. Policy-specific questions, such as net neutrality, or questions about whether America is unofficially a theocracy are obviously what this community feels strongly about.

OJR: What can journalists learn from this public forum?

Colarusso: An interesting question, but hard to answer at the moment. This is something that has to run its course. There could be another spike tomorrow and everything could change. This will work best when we have the most number of users participating. That’s when we’ll have the most diverse sample. The lesson might just be that there is a desire on people’s part to have this access to candidates. We see a lot of student voices, students asking questions. We see the participation of people who might not normally feel like they have access. It’s entirely egalitarian. We’re not promoting any one viewpoint. We’re just letting people decide. I think people very much appreciate that feeling that what you get is the will of the community.

OJR: Will the informal style of Internet home videos put an end to the sound-bite-driven style of politics on TV?

Colarusso: One of our goals is to provide a forum to allow politicians to move away from sound bites. It has to do with what we’re looking for. With all these debates on TV, candidates say they don’t get the chance to give nuanced answers. We’re giving them a month to submit answers. They’ll actually have to live up to that.

Additionally, having the community rate their answers lets the candidate know that they have an engaged community. And we hope that that will also provide an impetus for a more substantive answer.

As far as the informality of the questions, I think the main benefit is to put a human face on people who ask the questions, to make people feel more engaged when they are watching someone that looks more like them.

OJR: Is anyone analyzing or tabulating all the questions you’ve gotten?

Colarusso: We’re keeping tabs on it – trying to give commentary as we go. We’re providing data on votes and history. I’m definitely interested in seeing what the final tally looks like. There’s a lot to glean there.

OJR: Walk me through MarketWatch’s milestones over the last 10 years – what the industry was like and your thoughts as editor-in-chief at each point. You joined MarketWatch in 1999. What was it like to be an online journalist back then?

Callaway: Well, back then, no one in mainstream media took online journalism seriously. In spring 1999, a radio host asked me on the air if I could think of anything lower on the food chain than an online journalist. No one is looking down their noses at the Web anymore. I believe it’s the biggest change the world has adopted – first by the readers and then by the media.

OJR: What prompted you to leave Bloomberg for MarketWatch?

Callaway: The excitement of building something in the online world. I was fascinated by the Internet, and MarketWatch was a new company. It had been up-and-running for two years before I joined. Things were very primitive. We had a very primitive webpage – in fact Microsoft had developed the platform for running yearbooks. I think at the time we had 20-25 journalists. We have about 100 today.

But our biggest goals back then are essentially what the biggest goals are now: to level the playing field. We aim to recreate the experience created by Reuters and Bloomberg for free on the Web. We try to move at the same speed as the people on Wall Street.

We are four times the size now, but every day we compete with those same competitors. Those are the companies that break news on a global basis, 24 hours a day.

OJR: In 2001, MarketWatch was one of the first websites to install an introductory message ad unit with Budweiser campaign. Why did you do that?

Callaway: We were very nervous because we thought readers would hate it. We talked a lot about how long we’d allow them to run. Back then, a couple magazine sites were doing them, some entertainment sites. Now everyone is doing them.

OJR: In 2003, MarketWatch acquired VirtualStockExchange.com, an online trading game site.

Callaway: Right, it was a website put together by college students. We used it to build out the community aspect of MarketWatch so that our readers would not only read the news but also be part of the action. It was a unique thing. It had plenty of online games not too different from fantasy football or baseball. CNBC also had big online games section, actually even bigger than VirtualStockExchange. We got a respectable amount of traffic on it.

OJR: In 2004, MarketWatch partnered with Thomson Financial to license your financial news content for institutional use.

Callaway: 2004 was a big one for us. MarketWatch originally catered to a retail crowd – it was started for small, active investors – individuals who couldn’t afford big news services. Thomson didn’t have a news service, so they came to us and asked us to create one. It doubled the size of the news operation. Thomson was running Dow Jones; they lost Reuters, and they wanted to have more than one news service.

OJR: In 2005, MarketWatch was acquired by Dow Jones.

Callaway: A huge event. It’s worked really well in the last three years. Dow Jones is a 100-year-old, preeminent company for sophisticated investors and folks on Wall Street. They wanted our readership.

Dow Jones now has the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones news wires, Barron’s, and us. Among the four, MarketWatch is closest to Dow Jones news wires – the editorial team focuses on real time news. But we work very closely with them. We appear on their site, and they appear on ours. Within the empire of Dow Jones, we maintain enough editorial independence to keep our readers happy, while helping them with their product.

OJR: And of course, in 2007, Dow Jones and News Corp. announced their merger.

Callaway: It’s not yet closed so I can’t say much about it because I honestly don’t know what will happen.