It seems an obvious statement. But it remains lost on too many Internet entrepreneurs, who will lay down plenty of fertilizer, but who seem unwilling to plant actual seeds.

Last week, a relative who works in the journalism field told me of a pitch he’d heard from a gentleman who’s planned a national network of hundreds of local “citizen journalism” websites. He’d hired a techie to produce a site template (“Which should be ready in four months!”) and was seeking investors to raise money for a national sales staff. As for the content… well, the readers would provide that!

If anyone wants to take bets in another dot-com dead pool, put down March 2008 as my guess. (And that’s assuming the would-be CEO finds a full year’s worth of venture capital funding.)

Last week also brought news of turmoil at Backfence, one of the more notable attempts to create a local “citizen journalism” network. Co-founder Mark Potts returned after other co-founder Susan DeFife left the company, amid reports of lay-offs of up to two-thirds of the company’s staff. (Backfence was one of the local grassroots reporting sites that disappointed OJR writer Tom Grubisich in his round-up of CitJ efforts in 2005 and 2006.)

One might think that thousands of failed newspaper dot-com discussion boards from the 1990s would have taught the everyone in the industry that “if you build it, and don’t staff it, at best, a few wackos will show.” But some managers and investors continue to cling to a new media business model that reads like something written by the “South Park” underpants gnomes:

Step 1. Install discussion/blog software.
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit!

Perhaps this frenzy to create a “reporterless” news publication is simply the logical extension of the disdain that many in news management have had for employing actual journalists over past decades. It’s the ultimate Wall Street fantasy – a newspaper without reporters.

The trouble at sites like Backfence should warn investors considering ventures such as the one my relative’s colleague proposed. Online publishing remains a tough, competitive business. The skills necessary to build and manage a lively online community — the core of any grassroots journalism project — lie outside the skill set of many journalists, MBAs and Wall Street investors. But that does not mean that such skills do not exist.

The most successful and profitable community websites demand every bit as much work as goes into producing a daily newspaper of similar income. Readers do not long contribute smart copy to a website for free without substantial encouragement, guidance and affirmation. A site template and comment algorithm won’t provide that. A community website needs people, leaders who can find the most knowledgeable sources, ask the right questions and elicit thoughtful responses.

Just like a news reporter.

No, an interactive news community does not need as many staff reporters as a newspaper or broadcast station. But you can’t expect a community to grow, and survive, without leadership. And an MBA or Wall Street type without the ability to write or report thoughtfully on a website’s subject matter does not count. In fact, given the tough economics of launching a news website, the weight of an MBA’s salary might itself be enough to sink the project. (See Robert’s Rule #6 in top mistakes made by new online publishers.)

I’m sure that many would-be local journalism entrepreneurs are inspired by Jason Calacanis, the Weblogs, Inc. co-founder who built a network of inexpensively managed topic blogs into a $25 million purchase by AOL. But Calacanis’ blogs still relied on writers with knowledge and passion about their topics to attract the attention of readers.

New local websites that succeed will follow the rules for building strong reader communities and avoid the mistakes made by unsuccessful publishers. They will be the work of writers who know their communities, who are experts in one or more of the various beats within it, and who take the time to draw thoughtful comments and insightful reports from their readers. Whether one cares to call these leaders “journalists” or not.

The sites will not be empty shells, the Potemkin Villages of entrepreneurs with a template and a temporary sales force.

Fake grassroots don’t grow.

Now, go plant some real seeds… and see what happens.

I’ve been watching Google Blog Search’s results for OJR articles, and over the past weeks found them more extensive and relevant than Technorati’s. (Though Google continues to include results from too many bot-written “scraper” blogs for my taste.) Rather than replace the Technorati links, however, I’ve decided to link both Technorati and Google, so readers can choose the better source for their own needs.

We will continue to link Yahoo, as well, to hit backlinks from more traditional websites that neither Technorati nor Google index as “blogs.” (FWIW, I chose Yahoo over Google because Google does not reveal all backlinks to a URL in its normal search engine results pages. And yes, I’m looking at Microsoft’s Live search and might add it at some point in the future.)

Some of the experts we spoke to registered their strongest concerns about the Bush administration’s aggressive stance toward journalists. “George Bush is exceedingly bad news for this country on almost every front, and one of those fronts is his contempt for the press,” said David Rubin, Dean and Professor of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. “He and his Justice Department, prosecutors, and the whole tone that he has set – are more than willing to use the subpoena power to get sources and get confidential information and basically, in his view, put journalists in their place.”

However, John Hartman, a journalism professor at Central Michigan University, predicted that in 2007, “The Bush Administration will be forced to back off on and drop its investigations and intimidations of journalists and news organizations as it is forced to spend time defending itself from various Congressional investigations, including those that might be preludes to impeachment.” Indeed, there are news reports saying that the President is beefing up his legal team in anticipation of Congressional investigations.

As critical as he is of the President Bush’s actions, Rubin doesn’t share Hartman’s expectation of change; “I don’t think anything changes him.” Rubin said it would not surprise him to see more journalists jailed in 2007: “Not only ultimately jailed, but more subpoenas for information, more subpoenas of phone records – whatever tactics [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales and the Justice Department can come up with, they will.”

Hartman said a Congress led by Democrats will generally be more supportive of press freedom, and may even be open to passing a federal shield law, such as the Free Flow of Information Act sponsored by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.). Hearings were held on the bill last September, but “Congress might pass a federal shield law, but Bush would veto it under present circumstances,” Hartman wrote. “If he decides to govern from the middle and try to repair his public opinion ratings, Bush might allow it.”

But Rubin disagreed, noting, “[T]his is an issue that the Senate and the House have considered regularly since 1972, since the Branzburg case. So that’s almost 35 years ago, they haven’t done it yet. The situation is now far more complex than it was in 1972, now that you have online journalists and bloggers, which raise definitional issues. The mood of the country is not nearly as supportive of journalists as it was back then. The Congress has so much else on its plate this year, and it’s likely to be a highly contentious place that I just don’t think this is going to rise to the surface as an issue to consider. For all of those reasons, I would be shocked if a federal shield law was passed next year.”

In fact, according to a blog entry by CBS News legal consultant Andrew Shelton, Lugar’s bill died in committee last year precisely because Justice Department lawyers wanted to be able to compel reporters’ testimony in the forthcoming trial of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice in the illegal disclosure of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

In the area of copyright law, while big changes are not expected, there are still “many issues, both in terms of journalists reproducing content from copyrighted sources and, more significantly, having their work reproduced without permission,” said Jon Garon, Dean and Professor of Law at Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota. Those issues range from common internet practices that can expose journalists and bloggers to charges of copyright infringement to steps that online media producers may need to take to protect their work.

For example, bloggers frequently embed video or audio from sites such as YouTube or Odeo. But Garon said that even when the original source of the content is acknowledged, those bloggers may still be subject to charges of copyright infringement. While portal sites such as Google Video require that people uploading video to their site attest to their rights to the content they post, Google can’t guarantee that the posters are telling the truth. Someone who republishes that content without a demonstrable effort to prevent infringement can still be sued, Garon said.

Of course, most journalists use copyrighted material under the “fair use” provisions of U.S. copyright law. Those provisions allow for the republication of small portions of a copyrighted work for such purposes as news reporting, comment or criticism, or classroom teaching. The fair use doctrine has a long and venerable legal history, but Garon warned “the parameters of fair use are inherently fact-specific.” Further, as OJR reported last February, some experts are concerned that the improper use of cease-and-desist letters by copyright holders has caused online content to be removed.

According to Garon, one copyright issue that caused some controversy in 2006 will likely be ignored in 2007. That’s the law governing “orphan” works – works published before 1923 for which there’s no apparent copyright holder. Under current law, these orphan works are still under copyright – and anyone who uses them risks a lawsuit. In 109th Congress, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), then chair of the Intellectual Property Committee of the House of Representatives, introduced the Orphan Works Act of 2006, which would permit their use when it can be demonstrated that a good-faith effort has been made to contact the copyright holder. Under fire from organizations representing professional photographers and others, Smith ultimately withdrew the bill from consideration, despite support from the American Library Association and others.

As to ownership issues, according to Hartman, “deregulation that would result in the lifting of cross-ownership restrictions is less likely to happen as Democrats are less comfortable with media conglomerates. Yet Democrats might support legislation that would make it easier for newspapers to survive and allow cross-ownership in circumstances where the newspaper would fail otherwise.”

Bloggers faced new legal challenges in 2006, both in the United States and internationally. Josh Wolf landed in federal prison for refusing to turn over unpublished video of a demonstration to a California grand jury. Hao Wu, who was imprisoned for five months by the Chinese government, apparently in connection with video that he was shooting for a documentary about underground churches in that country. Libel suits against bloggers are on the rise. And in December, an Australian court ruled that linking to copyrighted sound recordings can be illegal if it makes it easier to gain improper access to that material.

For Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association, these developments illustrate that many bloggers perform the same newsgathering functions as professional journalists, and thus require the same level of education, access and legal protection. His organization has spearheaded a training and certification program that would ensure that bloggers understand and adhere to high legal and ethical standards. MBA has negotiated agreements that will allow certified bloggers to obtain press credentials to cover such events as government press conferences and briefings.

Finally, “there’s something that’s extremely important in all of this, and it almost never gets talked about, Cox said. “Let’s start with this: Freedom isn’t free. If you’re going to publish – and bloggers are publishers – and you can’t back up what you’re writing with lawyers and resources to pay for all of that, you’re not going to last very long.” That’s why, Cox said, the MBA is negotiating with the insurance industry to offer liability insurance that bloggers can tap in the event of a legal fight. “As blogging and citizen journalism develops over time, you need to have access to this kind of support.”

MacLean credits this online community with both enabling her to increase her opportunities in print and for creating a built-in audience for her new book, “Red, White and Drunk All Over.” With the fresh perspective of her recent excursions on a book tour, MacLean chatted with OJR about the ways the Web has created a synergy that expands the voice of this successful, independent wine critic.

Online Journalism Review: Like many independent online journalists, you started your career in the print world. How did the Web become an important medium to expand your audience and distribute your work?

Natalie MacLean: When I was [exclusively] a print journalist and many of my articles appeared in city-based magazines, friends and colleagues who didn’t live in the that particular city couldn’t read the article or buy the magazine on the stand. I retain the copyrights to my work, so I started by e-mailing about 25 folks the articles, which they would forward. Soon there were 200-300 people who were getting these articles, just through text-based e-mail.

OJR:So what point did you realize you needed to maintain your own website?

MacLean: About a year out, when people who joined [the e-mail list] started asking how can they could get all of my previous e-mails. So every time someone joined, I’d be sending 30 e-mails, to pass along all the back issues, so to speak. I thought this is getting silly; I better archive these somewhere, so that’s the birth of the website.

OJR: Do you have any technical knowledge, and did you design the site yourself?

MacLean:Yeah, at first I was doing it because I used to work for Silicon Graphics in California and my focus was the Internet. I loved HTML but I’m no wizard and my skills quickly became very rudimentary compared with where websites were going. It wasn’t long before I hired a webmaster, then things just kept evolving. The newsletter kept growing, the website’s content and functionality kept growing, and I started using forms to sign up for the newsletter.

OJR: Why do you think that niche topics such as yours do so well online?

MacLean: That’s [a reference to] the long-tail theory from Wired Magazine. I just love that theory. There are probably millions of wine lovers out there from all around the world and the brilliant thing is that we find each other on the Internet. So I get stories from wine lovers everywhere, from the night nurse at the emergency ward in Saskatoon to the water reservoir manager in Tulsa. [I’ve heard from] someone in Afghanistan who is making wine in his basement- I think it’s illegal! The Internet is efficient, and it’s also–I put this in quotes–cheap. It’s not cheap to make a good-looking website and to have forms that work and links that don’t go dead, but still I could never reach all of these people in print, cost-wise or time-wise.

OJR: You have a distinct, humorous tone to your writing that makes something as daunting as wine selection more accessible to those of us who aren’t sommeliers. Does your writing voice change online? Can you adopt an even more casual or conversational tone?

MacLean: Yeah I think so, although I know 78 people whom I call “Wine Lovers for Better Grammar.” They e-mail me every time there’s a misplaced comma. It’s like this giant editorial board. So it’s that contradictory thing of being relaxed and at the same time having an obsessive level of attention to detail, which is fascinating and helps me clean up my work in print.

OJR: You both write and edit your work, so how do you ensure accuracy when you source and cite information? You’re saying your readers call you out, and not just on grammatical mistakes–

MacLean: But on other things too, yes. They’ll correct anything. I once wrote an article about kir royale—a drink where you infuse any champagne or sparkling wine with the liquor Cassis–that has a black currant flavor. The black currants are famous around the Dijon area of France in Burgundy and I had misspelled a street name. Someone from Dijon contacted me and said that street is close to where I live, and it’s spelled this way.
I get far more corrections online so the feedback has been far more powerful than the print feedback.

OJR: What tool do you use to distribute the newsletter and what does it tell you about who your audience is and how to engage them?

MacLean: It’s called GotCompany.com. It’s a front-end tool and a back-end tool. I think the interface, the aesthetics look beautiful, but really the power is in the database and the reporting tool. It will tell me how many people have opened my newsletter and I can also see who has clicked on what link.

OJR: Can you tell anything about the user demographic?

MacLean: I can tell what topics are most interesting to people by the open rate and which links are most interesting to people. I stay pretty high level, but it’s only because of the time I have to devote to this sort of thing because I have a full-time journalism slate of jobs for print and then I’m just coming off the book.

I do find it synergistic. Every column I write in print, at the bottom there’s a tag that says for Natalie’s free newsletter, visit nataliemaclean.com. Then, of course, I use the newsletter to help sell the book, then point the book to the website, so I make sure that they’re all linked all the time. These days–especially if you’re trying to sell a book–you have to bring the audience, your readership, with you. [Book] publishers [tend to] spend very little on marketing, so you’re the one who has to develop your readership and then keep communicating with them. If I can’t pump out a book every year or two, at least I’ve been communicating with my readers [online] every two weeks in the interim and I hope they’re around the next time a book comes out.

OJR: Your site offers a modest selection of streaming audio and video. How do these multimedia elements advance the functionality of your site?

MacLean: I think people love to watch TV clips and listen to radio interviews, and people [who visit my site] are clicking on them. It’s an expensive form of information because I have to pay for extra bandwidth for no real monetary return. But now I’m starting to post video and audio clips that are interviews about the book.

OJR: So it also becomes a marketing tool–

MacLean: Yes, absolutely. To me it’s part of a multimedia-rich site, and that’s what I want to provide to the best of my budget and the best of my ability.

OJR: You actively encourage user feedback throughout the site. How do you deal with the volume of response and maintain this intimate relationship with your readers?

MacLean: Well, I get a couple of hundred e-mails a day, but a lot of them are questions that I get over and over again, so I’ll refer people to my FAQ. I think it will get to the point where I can’t [respond to everyone] because I have to earn a living and write my columns, but I like the feedback. I encourage it and welcome it and it’s helpful so I try my best to respond to people.

OJR: How do you select which articles you feature on your website or include in the newsletter?

MacLean: I’m more global in my approach. Now I think about which topics will I take on in print that can be repurposed, so it affects what I choose to write about in print and get paid for. In the past, I selected topics such as best restaurants in Ottawa that are really only relevant to people who live in Ottawa. Now I’m more likely to choose a topic like how to choose from a restaurant wine list that everybody can relate to, no matter where they live.

OJR: You run some Google ads, but otherwise ads aren’t featured prominently on your website.

MacLean: It [earns] three bucks a day for Google ads. That won’t even buy cheap wine! I’m going to look at adding advertising in the next year for related products and services that I think are reputable. I won’t be personally endorsing them. It will be clear that they’re ads and I’ll have someone else handle the booking, payment and invoicing so if a winery wants to advertise, I’m not the one negotiating ad rates while they’re also sending me bottles to review.

OJR: Finally, can you recommend some ways to choose a great holiday wine?

MacLean: Sure! All of my wine picks are on my website. It’s also a matter of your budget and whether you like wines that are full-bodied, medium or light. Develop a relationship with a knowledgeable person at your local wine store and ask what they’re excited about. Also, you can buy a mixed case of 12 within your budget and experiment. Try a new one each time you want to crack open a bottle and I’m sure you’ll find at least two or three that you really like.

There are two main reasons why people repeat such pessimism:

a) They don’t know what they’re talking about and frustrated with the Web.
b) They DO know what they are talking about and don’t want any new competition.

In the spirit of holiday giving, we present the top mistakes made by people in group (a). If you are worried about your future in the print or broadcast news industry, don’t be afraid to envision a future publishing online. Just beware of the traps that have snared many who have gone before you.

1) Doing it for the money

On the Internet, passion trumps professionalism. Yes, smart, disciplined online publishers are making money. It’s to be expected, with the billions of dollars advertisers are now spending online every year. But that can’t be the dominant reason you publish. Readers can smell a publisher who is trying to milk the market and will seek instead someone who publishes for the love of his or her subject. The Internet offers passionate, knowledgeable sources on every topic imaginable. You need to be one of them – not just a journalist with a newspaper buyout package and a business plan.

Over the past year, I’ve spoken with at least a dozen newspaper-dot-com executives who’ve expressed frustration that their organizations are now playing “catch-up” to amateur niche media due to their company’s obsession with maximizing profits, in part by not funding new projects without immediate revenue attached. That policy’s left too many newspapers with seemingly “safe” but overly broad, voiceless websites that fail to engage the reading public, just like their print parents.

2) Casting too broad a net

Pick a topic, whether it be a business, hobby, field or neighborhood, that you know well and can write about with authority. One of the conceits of the news industry is that reporters do not need to have specialized training or knowledge of the topics they cover – they just ask questions and let their sources provide the information.

Of course, this thinking provides a convenient excuse for newspapers too cheap to pay for reporters with real world training in their beats. Don’t let it infect your website. Otherwise, your site will read like too many newspaper stories – poorly informed, unfocused and contrived.

Click through Tom Grubisich’s recent analysis of “citizen journalism” websites for examples of local online news done right… and wrong.

People are ditching newspapers for the Web for a reason, and it ain’t the ease of reading on a computer screen, or even to save 50 cents a day. Readers crave authoritative voices that can guide them through the information overload of modern life. You can be that voice. But you have to know your topic, and stick with it.

3) Not being humble

By this time, Internet readers have learned that communities know more about a given topic than any single individual does. You might be new to publishing online, but your audience is not new to reading the Web. They’ve grown accustomed to interactivity. Sure, you must present yourself as an expert – you must *be* an expert to retain any long-term credibility online. But you must embrace your readers’ collective expertise because part of your new job will be to draw out that superior knowledge that many of your readers have.

In reporting a story for the Web, the interview process does not end with publication. When writing a piece, always include an invitation for knowledgeable readers to add more to the story. Writers who fail to do this invite suspicion that they are more interested in promoting (and protecting) their own point of view, instead of allowing their work to compete in the marketplace of ideas.

4) Taking spam personally

Too many beginning publishers give up on interactivity once the first wave of spam hits their comment section, e-mail in box or discussion board. Don’t take it personally. Look at spam and trolls the way you look at a flu virus: a simple, unthinking annoyance that’s looking for a receptive host.

Like a traveler going abroad for the first time, too many beginning Web publishers lack the necessary immunity to the Internet’s ills. Immunize yourself by either installing filtering software or requiring e-mail verified registration to submit content to your site. If something does slip through, delete it and forget it. Don’t kill the patient to take out the disease.

5) Telling the world what you are doing… before you actually do it

Okay, this could be filed under mistake #3, above. But “old media” veterans seem especially vulnerable to this online faux pas. The old media model for starting a publication required you to raise money to hire a staff, solicit advertisers and print the book. Online, you don’t need any of that. So why issue the press release before you have something to show?

I’ll defer to Markos Moulitsas Zúniga’s analysis of Jim VandeHei’s new website:

There’s one big lesson I learned in my Silicon Valley dot.com days — the more grandiose the talk when launching a venture, the more ill-will it generates and the more knives come out. Google came out of nowhere to take over the internet, despite grandiose claims from the likes of Microsoft. We all saw what happened to the pathetic Pajamas Media, while Daily Kos has quietly risen into a position of prominence. That’s why I’m being low-key in my projects for next year. They’ll be quietly launched. Some will fail, some might succeed. It’s better to let success do the talking than being a boastful oaf before your project is even off the ground.

Flying a while under the radar also allows you the freedom to try new things, without the fear of public humiliation.

6) Throwing money at your site

The economics of online publishing support and reward individuals. Obviously, large businesses can flourish online. But almost without exception (think Google, Yahoo and even MySpace), they started small, established themselves before seeking millions in venture capital and built through strong reader support.

When I talk with people who have had success making money from online content, I see a common attribute: an independent writer who leads a strong community that generates hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of informative, compelling content.

What I don’t see is someone who first hired a staff, including editors, reporters and ad reps. Nor do I see someone with a large marketing budget, buying advertising in offline media to draw attention to their site. In fact, when I speak with people who followed that path, I inevitably hear complaints about how “no one’s making money online,” and a series of excuses for why their venture failed.

Make sure you have enough in the bank to support yourself for a few months while you get the site up and a community going. Increase your chances for long-term success by denying yourself the extravagances of additional reporters, editors or a support staff until you understand what you truly need, and have banked the money to pay for them.

7) Using misleading traffic numbers

Every Web publisher wants to measure his progress. Traffic numbers provide a real-time measure of your site’s popularity, which can later translate into revenue. But too many rookie publishers (and online advertisers) get a distorted view of a site’s popularity because they don’t understand the vocabulary of online traffic measurement.

a) “Hits:” This statistic is worthless. A “hit” is nothing more than a request to a Web server for a file. The problem with this statistic is that a single webpage can include dozens of files: the page itself, plus every stylesheet, external script, logo, graphic file and photo displayed on the page. A webmaster can double the “hits” for his site simply by doubling the number of graphics used on his pages.

b) “Page views:” This statistic is better than “hits,” but still easily manipulated. The trouble with page views is that a huge percentage of traffic online comes not from human beings, but automated agents. Search engine spiders, spammers’ robots and clipping service agents can account for more than half the traffic on many websites. If a publisher looks only at his server logs and does not filter all automated agents from his report, he is grossly overestimating his site’s popularity among actual people.

c) “Unique visits:” This is a better test of a site’s traffic. A spider might view 1,000 pages when it comes to a website, but it will count as only one visit. The best publishers still filter automated agents from their unique visitor reports, but even if they do not, this statistic provides the best “apples-to-apples” metric for comparing website popularity.

Don’t rely on server logs to measure the popularity of your site. Install some tracking service on your site, at the very least Google Analytics (which is free), to get a real picture of where you are. And educate potential advertisers about these differences, so that your competition can’t land a sale with their bogus “hit” statistics.

8) Unrealistic goals

Use these lessons to remain sober as you embark on your Web publishing adventure. Embrace the Web’s interactivity and make it a resource to enliven your reporting and writing. Don’t expect to get rich, famous or win awards. Focus instead on building a relationship with your readers that develops a useful publication, filled with engaging information that they will not want to do without. Don’t expect any of this to happen overnight, either. Use realistic traffic numbers to project your ability to earn revenue (or attract financial backers). Then keep your expenses below that level… or be willing to admit that your website is a cash-draining hobby.

Let’s hear from other online publishers! Add your advice using the comments button below.

I decided to speak to Calvin Tang, the co-founder of Newsvine, a next-generation news personalization site that tracks reader habits and serves up articles that those individuals might actually read. I wanted to find out how news personalization sites have changed and if they are ready for people like me.

Tang talked about the improvements and the hurdles facing news personalization, and what refinements we might see over the next few years.

OJR: In a broad-brush stroke, what is Newsvine hoping to accomplish?

Tang: There were the three major things that we are going after. First, our aim was to set out to automate the collection, organization, and syndication of the exponentially growing pool of content available on the Web. With the rise of the blogosphere and personal publishing, it seems that there is becoming an ever-increasing amount of content out there.

The second thing we set out to do was to leverage the base of people in the world who had a story to tell but who also lacked an easy way to use publishing platforms and get an audience. Not everybody in the world is tech-savvy enough to set up his or her own blog. That’s why the first wave of citizen-generated content out there was very tech-heavy.

Our third aim was to give people a way to interact with each other in meaningful ways on topics of shared interest and to also be able to discover new material and authors as a result of this interaction.

OJR: How close has Newsvine brought this “Daily Me” concept to reality?

Tang: I would like to think that Newsvine is at the front of the pack as far as personalization of news but I think we, and the industry in general, have a long way to go. Some of our more long-term initiatives involve setting up our systems so that people can get their news in an ever-more increasingly efficient manner. I think that as the amount of content grows it becomes more and more important to organize that in a meaningful way.

OJR: What do you mean by more “efficient” and “meaningful”?

Tang: I mean there are two problems to solve and because you have to solve them both, it becomes difficult. One is that people don’t want to get certain types of information. They want their international news but they may not want sporting news, or something like that. And as a result there are services out there that are narrow in terms of topic–like a site that’s all technology news. That’s good but that can’t be your only news site. People like to discover things that they might enjoy reading but they didn’t necessarily know that they would before they were exposed to it. So giving them a way to sift through the large body of content out there is one problem.

There is also the type of news that everyone should generally know about. If there is a huge event in Iraq that is going to impact our domestic and foreign policy, a reader should have access to that. Now whether or not you spend a lot of time reading about it that’s another question. We think that bringing you the top news is one of the important things. That’s why we present our site with traditional media content right next to citizen-generated content. We don’t favor one or the other. We think that they are complementary in many ways.

OJR: Newsvine obviously doesn’t have the overhead of traditional news organizations because Newsvine does not have a staff of reporters and editors per se. What impact do you think sites like Newsvine will have on the quality of journalism when traffic flows to Newsvine rather than traditional news sites that also depend on advertising to support the reporting process?

Tang: I think that eventually all traditional media companies will have to rely on some form of citizen reporting, partly motivated by financial reasons but also because of access. While the quality of reporting from the average citizen is typically of a lower ‘quality’, in the traditional sense, I think that this is offset by the timeliness and unfiltered nature of accounts offered by citizen media. Traditional journalism will always be a part of the equation, but a combination of new and old media coverage yields a flow of information from event to consumer that is greater than the sum of its parts. It is for this reason that we don’t take sides between traditional media and small media. I believe that consumers will benefit from a convergence of the two models, and that the long-sighted media companies will adapt accordingly.

Take the recent incident involving the UCLA student who was Tasered. Prior to the existence of video-enabled mobile phones and youtube.com, I think we, as consumers of news, would’ve been further from the truth and less affected by it. However, without the follow up research and reporting by professional journalists on the officer’s background, we would be left with an incomplete picture of what led up to the incident.

Currently, a good deal of the reporting done by citizens is largely incidental, a byproduct of proximity, chance and personal initiative. Moving forward, I think economics and consumer appetite will convince publishers to actively procure citizen reports on specific topics or events. Meantime, Newsvine’s base of contributors from around the world grows and improves continually, ready to meet that demand.

OJR: Your users are also providing links and summaries of articles people can click on, sending traffic to those news sites…

Tang: Yeah, absolutely. We have a very liberal linking policy. We don’t do things to keep you on our site. We are happy to send you off to wherever the best information is hoping that a good user experience will bring you back. I would say that’s at the heart of the Newsvine model. There are many sites out there that provide AP news; there are many sites out there that provide links to other content. But Newsvine essentially is a crossroads of content where a rich discussion happens. So I would say that the number one thing we strive for is to create rich discussions around content.

OJR: So who is taking part in the discussions?

Tang: I guess there are a few different definitions of active users. The majority of the visitors to our site just read articles and that is to be expected of most sites. Participation at most sites is somewhere in around one or two percent. At Newsvine depending on your definition of participation, that rate can be much higher. So about 15 percent of our users are actually actively voting and commenting around the site. I would say another four to eight percent are seeding links and one or two percent are writing original articles. That number is low as expected because it is hard to write articles.

OJR: And even more generally, who are these people?

Tang: we have a good proportion of college students on our site but we do have an older crowd. I would say people in their 20s and 30s are probably at the center of that long curve but we have users all the way up to their 70s as some of our most active users.

OJR: Are you getting people from all over the US or also from around the world?

Tang: I would say that we definitely have a heavier presence here in the US and one of the reasons for that is because the AP is a little bit US-centric in terms of their news coverage. But while our viewership is more skewed towards to the US, if you look at our top contributors, there is a very wide mix of people from around the world.

OJR: Do you think newsreaders ready for this concept or do you think these are all the early adopters?

Tang: Since March, when we had our public launch, we’ve been moving beyond early adopters. We’ve had month over month growth for the last six months and we’ve tripled our traffic since May. And a lot of that new traffic is your traditional news consumers. That’s who we are aiming for.

We are not really trying to compete with other sites that employ the newer types of technology and newer sorts of models. We are going after the crowd who is used to getting their news from CNN and MSN, NBC, and Yahoo News.

That intention is built into the design of our site. We don’t launch right off into a five-minute tutorial on how do you use the site and all the things you have to set up. We wanted to make the user experience very good for someone wants simply to point and click and read.

OJR: You mentioned earlier that 15 percent of the audience is actually voting so those are the active members…

Tang: Yeah, voting and commenting…

OJR: How does this affect what news is presented? You are displaying news based on the interests of a small group of people. Do you have some counter-balancing algorithms to still be able to provide a diversified news budget?

Tang: Yes we do. Anytime you have a system in which editorial functions are driven by user behavior, you have to do things to safeguard against a small group of people making changes that affect the rest of the user base.

So while comments and votes do affect the placement of stories on Newsvine that’s not nearly the whole mix of things that go into our ranking algorithm. Some of the other things include page views which all readers of our site affect that and we measure something we call long views, which is the amount of time somebody spends on a page.

So we add weight to an article ranking if somebody spent a few minutes on it rather than just clicking there and clicking away.

In addition to that one, of the strongest contributors to an articles rank is its freshness. So if something comes in right off the wire or is submitted by a user right away, it has a pretty high ranking right off the bat. Imagine that the content, as it comes into the system, cascades down the page, and if it receives a lot of activity in terms of views, and votes, and comments, it can stick or even move back up. So if we didn’t do that, Newsvine would be a static, old style site.

OJR: You mentioned getting contents from the AP and individual contributors. AP is mostly text. I assume that a lot of the material submitted from users is also text based. When do you think you will diversify more into multimedia content?

Tang: Right, it’s funny that you ask that because just this morning I executed an agreement that will bring video to Newsvine. We will always be primarily a text-heavy site. We already have audio, that accompanies some of the articles from the AP but soon we will also have video from one primary partner who I can’t name yet.

OJR: Do you provide any editorial oversight when something is submitted?

Tang: It’s hands off from our standpoint as a company. There is no editorial process that happens prior to an article being published by a Newsvine user.

However we depend on our community for that function. We have both an editorially and an user-driven policing system. There are a couple of ways this happens. As far as inappropriate content not just the correction of facts, we depend on a sophisticated reporting system.

This works amazingly well. It’s much more efficient than if we had somebody manning a desk 24/7 looking at user contributions and deciding yes or no.

The other system that we have in place is an area called the Greenhouse. This is a place that serves two functions. When you sign up for Newsvine you can’t immediately post onto Newsvine, onto our tag pages, or the content can’t get up on the front page. Articles or seeded links will show up the Greenhouse. In addition to keeping spammers out, it serves as a place to showcase new users. So if somebody just signed up it might be hard for them to get their material up in front of a lot of people but they are showcased in this new user area and if their content receives a certain number of votes and comments then we quickly promote them out of the Greenhouse and get them into Newsvine.

With this system, you deter spammers almost completely, because spammers are all about high yield, low effort propagation of their material.

OJR: What refinements can we expect in news personalization in general?

Tang: Well I think that a site can always be improved up on. It can always become more intuitive and the more that sites can do to accommodate users preferences without them explicitly having to set things up the better. For example there is no reason why you shouldn’t come to Newsvine, and we detect where you are based by looking at your IP address. Then we can give you headlines from your local papers in your area. I mean that’s something that we should be doing and we will be doing in the next month or two.

And also based on a user’s behavior we should be presenting you with information or news similar to the stuff that you’ve liked other places. We have a rudimentary function that shows recommended articles page based on the types of articles you voted on. Now here are articles that you did not vote on but voted on by other users, who we think, are similar to you. And in that sense we are showing you things that you might have missed but would have liked. That’s another example of being able to pick up passively on the behavior of a reader.

OJR: Social networking…

Tang: Yeah, but for these social networking sites or customized news sites, the first thing you have to do when you sign up is you have to customize all these things to your tastes. Now the more we can do that for you, I think the better.

Of course, if you know of a thriving, unheralded hyperlocal grassroots site that also deserves some attention on OJR, feel welcome to drop me a note.]

A year ago I toured 10 geographical community websites that were pioneering in grassroots journalism. I wanted to find out whether they were really fulfilling the exuberant PR of the phenomenon’s hucksters. I discovered that, with a couple of honorable exceptions, most of the sites were the Internet equivalent of Potemkin Village, many URLs away from being vibrant town squares.

A little more than 12 months later – a lifetime in Web publishing 2.0 – it was time for another look. Was grassroots journalism finally living up to its golden-keyboarded billing?

Here’s what I found on my return trip:

iBrattleboro

iBrattleboro.com, was launched in March 2003 in Brattleboro, Vt., a 253-year-old town of 12,000 with a Norman Rockwell-Garry Trudeau double image. iBrattleboro uses the automated scroll format that’s ubiquitous at skimpily budgeted grassroots sites. But iBrattleboro has added some pizzazz with graphics (via Flickr) and video (via YouTube). Co-founders Chris Grotke and Lise LePage say stories from community contributors have doubled to about 12 a day. Also doubling have been users – from about 50 at any given time to about a hundred, though most of them are not registered.

Comments on articles – a key indicator of a 2.0 site’s liveliness – are also up. An article on “these really strange looking things growing up” in the poster’s compost pile, complete with photos, drew 11 reactions concerning whether pumpkins and gourds can “cross-breed.”

IBrattleboro has followed the long-simmering controversy about the local community TV station with the tenacity of a bulldog. Grotke and LePage said in an e-mail: “The denouement [findings of 'gross misconduct' against two former station board members] came at the group’s annual meeting for which more than 100 people showed up. One man stood and said that he especially wanted to thank iBrattleboro, because without the coverage on the site, he wouldn’t have been angry enough to want to get involved.”

The site’s ad revenue is “increasing slowly,” Grotke and LePage say. “It is not to the point where we could live off of it, but it covers the basic costs of operation most of the time.” iBrattleboro has no sales reps.

As to where the site fits in the journalistic pecking order, Grotke and LePage write: “For a while, we felt almost embarrassed to be calling ourselves citizen journalists – we felt illegitimate. Having met and talked to a number of professional media types in the last few months, we understand now that we are illegitimate, at least in their eyes. It seems that mainstream journalists resent our use of the privileged term ‘journalist.’ But that turns out to be a strength because iBrattleboro was founded, at least in part, because we felt that the mainstream media was not telling the whole story on important issues. If, by calling ourselves journalists, we can bug mainstream journalists into some much-needed self-examination of their own profession, that can only be a good thing.”

Bluffton Today

BlufftonToday.com was launched by Augusta, Ga.-based Morris Communications [http://morriscomm.com] on April Fool’s Day 2005 in a sly gesture toward its Web team’s intention of subverting online journalistic conventions. One of those conventions was that a newspaper’s website should be a promotion vehicle to guide users to the print version of the paper.

But 18 months later BlufftonToday.com is an aggressive and constant promoter of the free-circulation tabloid daily Bluffton Today, which was launched shortly after the website. BlufftonToday.com confines all it’s hard news to the Technavia-powered electronic version of the tabloid. Technavia brags that its NewsMemory application isn’t as slow as .pdf, but navigating stories and flipping between pages in Technavia is like reading a print newspaper with oven mittens. Online users can’t comment on the print stories then and there. Whatever they want to say, it has to be on their blog – every registered user gets one – or in a response on someone else’s blog. As a result, comments on an important story can end up being fragmented in several places.

Steve Yelvington, the Morris strategist who helped create BlufftonToday.com, says the site has 70,000 monthly unique users who call up 800,000 page views. Registered users of the site have grown to 6,000 – in a community with 16,000 households and many seasonal visitors. Morris will not disclose how much ad revenue the site produces or whether it’s profitable. Yelvington says the economics of the online and print BlufftonTodays are joined at the hip.

Though the electronic paper gets more hits than the site’s web content, Yelvington said user blogs can become a powerful prod for civic action. In one case, a barrage of angry comments helped to force the state to modify traffic management during major improvements on a key highway.

Greensboro101

Greensboro101, in Greensboro, N.C., is essentially a portal for about 110 area blogs – 20 more than were featured a year ago. To figure out what’s happening locally, a user has to hop, skip and jump to content that’s fragmented among the blogs and a user-driven news feed – a structural predicament which may account for the site’s low traffic ranking – No. 501,682 on Alexa on a recent weekday.

Greensboro (pop. 225,000) is a tech-savvy community, but that’s proving no benefit to Greensboro101. The site has recruited a lively, knowledgeable volunteer editorial board, but its members aren’t giving the site a distinct personality. Greensboro’s look and feel are the end product of the sorting and compiling operations of computer software.

Backfence

One of the fastest-growing grassroots sites is Backfence.com. After launching in the Washington, D.C., suburbs of McLean and Reston, Va., and Bethesda, Md., Backfence has expanded to the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, with sites in Palo Alto, San Mateo and Sunnyvale. In late September, it planted its flag in metro Chicago, starting in Evanston. Weeks later Backfence added nearby Skokie, and is preparing to launch in Arlington Heights, west of Evanston, on Nov. 29. Backfence has also spread farther in the Northern Virginia suburbs – to Arlington County and the newer suburbs of Chantilly, Sterling and Ashburn.

Backfence was founded by two early Internet players, Susan DeFife, who was strong on the business side, and Mark Potts, who was strong on the content side. (Potts recently left the Backfence management team to return to consulting and start a blog called RecoveringJournalist.) Last October, Backfence won a big vote of confidence in its expansion strategy when it received $3 million funding from venture capitalists SAS Investors and Omidyar Network.

Shrewdly, Backfence bought out Dan Gillmor’s failing Bayosphere site last spring, and used Gillmor’s high profile as the guru of grassroots journalism to give credibility to its entry both in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. Backfence’s first Bay Area community was Palo Alto, where it competes with 10-year-old PaloAltoOnline, which features stories from the Palo Alto Weekly. Just before Backfence came to town, PaloAltoOnline opened up a prominent block of its homepage for an interactive feature dubbed TownSquare. The website has lost some traffic since Backfence’s launch in late April, but still attracts as much reach as all 12 Backfence sites combined.

Backfence’s brand of grassroots journalism generally reads like a well-written but bloodless press release. The who-what-where-and-when are there, but who cares? As Liz George, the managing editor and co-owner of Barista.net wrote in PressThink in December 2005: “The style at Backfence…makes no reference to actual places where people live, but only to an imagined place in times past where villagers shared information over the back fence.” When the sites does try to put its finger on a throbbing pulse, it often doesn’t know how to take the reading. On Oct. 3 the brand new Evanston site ran an item, written by Content Manager and Editor Robert Reed, on the “growing number of houses with ‘For Sale’ signs,” but the item had no facts, and ended on this desperate boosterish note, “These things can change quickly and before you know it the housing market will be hot again.” A link to Trulia, the new, deeply and widely zoned and easy-to-use site founded by realty professionals, would have provided Backfence users with loads of information about Evanston home listings and sale prices and their recent histories.

YourHub

YourHub.com, co-owned by E.W. Scripps and MediaNews, started out with 38 hyperlocal sites clustered in metro Denver in the spring of 2005. Now it has 110 sites in Colorado, California, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas (all connected with Scripps print papers), and powers 44 sites that the Los Angeles Daily News (owned by Dean Singelton’s Media News chain) publishes under the valleynews.com brand in the San Fernando Valley.

Too much of the content on YourHub remains handouts promoting some product, service or fight against a disease. Some of the PR is hard sell, like the articles “Public Relations? What is it and do I need it?” and “Home-Flip.com for free real estate ad.” Some of the sell is of a softer, nonprofit variety, like the article “The 11th annual Denver/Lakewood/Golden Tour of Solar and Green Built Homes in Boulder.”

After the Platte Canyon High School hostage taking west of Denver on Sept. 27 in which the adult assailant killed a 16-year-old female student, YourHubConifer, which serves the area, ran some of the condolences that poured in from the region and beyond. But the site made no attempt to answer what must have been on many people’s minds, including the parents of students at Platte Canyon: How good is the school’s “safe students” plan? On Oct. 3, three days after a query by this writer, the YourHub staff reporter finally posted the “Platte Canyon School District Safety Policy.” The policy says “a final report …shall be made available to the public.” You would think the report would be posted on the school district’s website. But it’s not there. If this had been pointed out by YourHub, the gap might have prompted a community conversation about school safety, not only in the area served by Platte Canyon High, but throughout metro Denver.

The Northwest Voice

NorthwestVoice.com has been one of the mostly frequently, and favorably, cited examples of how grassroots journalism can transform the Web on the community level. But reality doesn’t match the PR. Most of NorthwestVoice’s hard news is written by paid reporters for the companion print product, while most of the soft stuff (some of it very soft) comes from volunteers.

Even after nearly two and a half years of operation, and a steady stream of positive media mentions, NorthwestVoice.com still struggles to attract traffic and generate productive conversations among users. It ranks 1,107,759 in reach on Alexa, which means it barely registers a traffic pulse. In one of the site’s featured “Discussions,” someone asked, on July 13: “Who’s responsible for providing public facilities, i.e. a post office, library, etc. for the Northwest?” Three months later, the question remains unanswered. Ten of the 17 discussion articles, dating back to November 2005, had no comments.

WestportNow

When Joanne Woodward couldn’t join her husband Paul Newman at the Westport Country Playhouse’s Sept. 25 salute to composer Stephen Sondheim because of a fall she took while walking her two Miniature Schnauzers, the news broke on WestportNow.com. Besides its wide variety of up-to-date news, including high school sports – all of its contributed by residents – the site is loaded with volunteer photos that capture Westport’s people and places.

WestportNow founder Gordon Joseloff, after running the site for its three and a half years, has brought in a salaried editor, Jennifer Connic, who is well connected with the town as the former Westport reporter for the Norwalk Hour. Unlike most grassroots sites, WestportNow does not run contributions untouched by editors’ hands. Joseloff, a former CBS News correspondent who now is first selectman (mayor) of Westport, insisted on professionally crafted stories when he was in the editor’s chair. That meant he and his volunteer part-time editors did a lot of training, and mentoring (and rewriting) of volunteer contributors.

One of WestportNow’s most popular features continues to be “Teardowns,” which features photo stories, with an interactive map, on million-dollar-plus homes that are to be demolished to make way for bigger and more expensive ones. The New York Times recently ran an article on how the grassroots site Barista.net in suburban New Jersey was fighting redevelopment with a feature inspired by WestportNow’s Teardown.

Joseloff said his site’s traffic continues to grow about 30 percent annually, with unique visitors now hitting 5,000 to 7,000 daily.

Summing up WestportNow as a business, he says: “WestportNow is running close to break even. When I left the editorship (for which I received no remuneration) and we hired an editor, our expenses went up. Advertising revenue is up but not enough to cover all the increased expenses. I still believe there’s a viable business here (and in expanding elsewhere) and hope to be able to continue WestportNow until such time that it becomes self-sufficient.”

GoSkokie

GoSkokie.com was launched as a student project at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in spring 2004 in the hope that it could be handed off to the residents of the city of Skokie (pop. 23,700) north of Chicago. GoSkokie received a flurry of plaudits from the hucksters of grassroots journalism, and even received a 2004 “notable entry” in the Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism from the Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism. But it gasped its last breaths in the fall of 2005.

MyMissourian

Like BlufftonToday, MyMissourian.com has become a joint Web-print operation, with, so far, the print product generating most of the ad revenue and paying the bills.

Two-year-old MyMissourian, which is produced by the Columbia Missourian print newspaper, was developed by Clyde Bentley, associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, for which the commercially owned Columbia Missourian serves as a teaching and research lab. Bentley, while he’s in London on leave, has turned the MyMissourian site over to graduate student Jeremy Littau, who worked as a sports copy editor and page designer at the Los Angeles Daily News before pursuing his master’s degree at Mizzou.

Last October, MyMissourian took over the total-market-coverage Saturday print edition of the Missourian, the daily produced by students at the MU School of Journalism. As Littau noted in an e-mail, the takeover was “a reversal of the print-to-online model that newspapers have been following.” The strategy is for the TMC to subsidize MyMissourian till the website can build its own advertising base. In a quid pro quo, the TMC is stuffed with recycled MyMissourian content.

After getting off to a shaky start, MyMissourian has tripled its registered users to 1,200. Contributor-generated news is strong in some areas – like local history and arts/culture – but not so alert to news about business and civic life. Sometimes stories ramble across non-local subjects, like a Sept. 20 article on “designer dog breeds.” Without any comment tools, the site is more 1.0 than 2.0. It doesn’t have any home-grown blogs, but links to some external ones.

While Bentley and Littau are bullish about what they see as MyMissourian’s progress, the site has a weak reach – No. 5,161,651 in traffic, according to Alexa.

Muncie Free Press

A little more than a year after he launched MuncieFreePress in Muncie, Ind., KPaul Mallasch says: “We’re still afloat! We’re still growing.” Mallasch still runs the site out of his apartment, and still does a lot of the reporting and other editorial and business chores, while also juggling freelance balls to pay the bills. But he’s finally getting help from the community.

“I have one citizen recording and providing audio for her town’s council meeting,” he wrote in an e-mail. “I have a retired professor writing the occasional column. Tips and press releases of all types are coming in more frequently now. I have another lady writing and reporting on the local CAFO issue [concentrated animal feeding operations that critics say can produce heavily polluted runoff].” Still, he has to lard his pages sometimes with syndicated bulking agent, including a Michael Reagan column.

Mallasch’s main online competition is the Muncie Star Press, where he used to work. “We’re at about 1/8th of the traffic that the Star Press had when I left a year ago,” Mallasch e-mailed. “They’re still stomping us in the search engines too, because they’ve had their domain since ’96 and Gannett heavily crosslinks their sites.”

Between January and September, MuncieFreePress more than tripled its monthly visitors (from 2,543 to 8,035) and almost doubled its page views (from 38,867 to 74,651).

All this with one person in charge of everything from bandwidth to blogging.

Conclusions

The best sites – WestportNow and iBrattleboro – have got better over the past year and are closing in on profitability, but only because the key players don’t take salaries. It’s not clear how scalable either operation is. Neither has the capital yet to expand or even hire advertising staff.

YourHub is grassroots journalism only under a Play-Doh definition. It provides five percent news and 95 percent bulking agent consisting of press releases and other handouts. Yet YourHub is expanding nationwide with lightning speed. It’s able to do that because it is backed by the considerable wherewithal of Scripps. Backfence’s grassroots journalism is several hundred percent better than YourHub’s, which puts it somewhere between so-so and mediocre. Backfence, with its investor funding, has been able to expand in three major markets in a little more than a year, and, like YourHub, hire ad staffs to generate revenue.

If this trend continues, and we get more virtual Potemkin Villages, what will happen to grassroots journalism? Will it start looking more like AstroTurf journalism?

Tom Grubisich, a screenwriter based in Santa Monica, Calif., was managing editor of news for DigitalCity/AOL until AOL’s merger with Time Warner in 2001, and, earlier, was a reporter and editor for the Washington Post, then co-founder of the free-circulation Connection Newspapers in Northern Virginia. He is reachable at TomEditor@msn.com.

Utilizing the Web for small business solutions is an obvious resource, but a basic, unguided search can yield an overwhelming and extraneous amount of information. A recently launched website called Work.com aims to focus those results by publishing and updating how-to guides that illustrate tangible and practical solutions. An offshoot of the successful search engine business.com, Work.com is both an internally-rich content site and a search directory, continually updated and ranked accordingly. The current offering—around 1100 guides–covers topics on everything ranging from developing a business plan and establishing a business account to obtaining a business license and tax id number.

We asked Work.com content editor and syndicated business columnist Daniel Kehrer to take OJR on a basic tour through the site, and explain some of ways that it can help independent web journalists who need a crash course in business management.

Online Journalism Review: Who’s writing the Work.com guides?

Daniel Kehrer: When it first [began], we launched a huge effort to create a thousand of these things, so we hired 70 or 80 freelance writers all over the country to work simultaneously at a rapid pace. Now we’ve toned it down, so we still have a small core of freelance writers working on a paid basis. We also have people showing up on the site because they want to share their expertise by writing guides. Then we also have experts in various fields writing specific guides.

OJR: For the users who are writing guides, how do you ensure that information is factually accurate?

Kehrer: People come in and write the guides and we do an initial rating, and then [the work.com community] will also rate people, so the guides that are bad will fall out the ones that are good will rise to the top. But initially everything gets read by the [editorial department].

OJR: Before it goes live?

Kehrer: It actually goes live but we look at it really fast and so if something is just not up to par, we may e-mail someone and say, hey we looked at your guide and we think you can get a much better rating if you do this, that and the other–so we may in fact offer advice. Right now it’s easier now because of the volume, but it might just have to be the user ratings eventually. That’s the way the system works- the highest rated guides would show up first and the lowest ratings might not show up at all. So it creates a self-policing mechanism.

OJR: How can Work.com help independent Web journalists in ways that conducting a basic search can’t?

Kehrer: It will provide a much more focused approach if it has anything to do with operating a business as a journalist and an entrepreneur. The site has information on all the things that go into establishing the business side of setting up a website: managing the money, establishing a credit card, paying people, opening a business account. They can find precise recommended solutions in a much more focused way.

OJR: The site features broad topics- everything from hiring employees, government resources, website design- how do you plan to stay current on such a broad range of topics? Isn’t there a danger of oversimplifying or missing relevant information?

Kehrer: It’s just the opposite–we’re so focused that we may have 15 different guides on one narrow topic. The system allows everyone to comment- and we encourage this- if there’s something missing or out of date, users can post a comment and the guide writer will hopefully update the guide. If a particular guide doesn’t have [the latest information], that guide will disappear and something else will take its place. So there’s a built-in mechanism for keeping things, fresh, up to date and ever-expanding.

OJR: How do you think journalists can maintain ethical integrity if they’re managing both editorial content and advertising on their websites?

Kehrer: You could ask the publisher of The New York Times the same thing- it’s the same issue for everybody who’s involved in [journalism]. You always have to have to ultimately decide that ethics comes first. If your information doesn’t have credibility, and you don’t have credibility, then you’ve got nothing.

OJR: You’re the author of “100 Best Resources for Small Business.” Are any of those resources applicable to journalists who want to become online publishers?

Kehrer: Sure, and a lot of those resources are now on business.com. A lot of it deals with general business start up information. Certainly if you’re a journalist/entrepreneur who wants to start your own website, you need to do some of the same things as anyone who’s starting a business. You need to write a business plan; you might want to take some training classes on business management; you might want to know where to seek free counseling.

You can incorporate quickly with an online service. You can go to various places to get your website set up as one big package, and you can find places that will help you with a marketing plan of some kind. Also, if you’re a sole-practitioner, even if you don’t employ anybody, you still have to get a tax ID number.

OJR: Various business laws and tax laws are complex and vary state by state. How familiar does a journalist/entrepreneur need to become with these issues before launching or trying to earn a profit online?

Kehrer: You can get bogged down in this stuff and that’s kind of the danger. You don’t need to know the intricacies of all the tax laws. You need to know that you have to file a tax return as a business and if you don’t do that you’re in big trouble. If you hire someone else to do some writing for you and pay an independent contractor you’ve got to report the income on a 1099 to the IRS.

There are guides on Work.com that have answers to all of those things in the taxes section. There is a long list on licensing on finding an accountant, on getting tax software, and finding local, state and regional tax requirements.

OJR: If you were to publish a guide for journalists who want to launch profitable websites what you would include?

Kehrer: Packaging does count. Hiring a Web designer is going to cost a lot of money, but there are various hosting packages that include [customizable] software.

OJR: Say you aren’t a techie–do you recommend being able to access all aspects of the site and update it yourself?

Kehrer: Yeah, I do actually because I believe in simplicity and control … and the technology has advanced so nicely that there are so many tools available online with a minimal amount of technical knowledge required. Keep it simple and…that will let you focus on the writing.

Since when is the Los Angeles Times the only place anyone can do great journalism in L.A.?

Obviously, The Times has done its share. Over the past decade, the paper has distinguished itself with multiple Pulitzer Prizes, as well as engaging daily stories that expose injustices from crooked judges to L.A.’s pathetic Skid Row. Yet failure balances The Times’ recent triumph. Tribune-mandated cutbacks have reduced the newsroom from about 1,200 to a little more than 900. That’s led to the closure of most of The Times’ suburban bureaus and a massive reduction in neighborhood coverage.

Word from the newsroom reports that Tribune wants the newsroom even smaller, to about 800 or so. That’s sparked concern from local business leaders, who fear, along with most Times reporters, that a smaller Times newsroom won’t be able to properly cover Southern California. Times Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson and Editor Dean Baquet have protested, too. Now, Johnson’s off the job.

One might think that business and government leaders would enjoy having fewer eyes looking into their affairs. Writing in Saturday’s Los Angeles Times, media critic Tim Rutten pointed out that an aggressive local press has helped communities grow, by exposing the inefficiencies of graft and corruption. Rutten correctly credited newspaper managers for helping enrich America, and themselves, over the past half century.

“The astonishing financial success of postwar American journalism rested on a recognition that an educated and increasingly urbanized readership demanded more sophisticated information on a broader range of topics than ever before and on newspaper managers’ willingness to invest in covering them.”

But established newspapers are not, and need not be, the only actors in the news industry. Rutten acknowledged that “the era into which we now are moving will involve new ways of distributing journalism — new combinations of print and online venues and, surely, avenues we cannot foresee.”

If the Tribune Company wishes to cut the Los Angeles Times’ newsroom into irrelevance, that ought to be the Tribune’s right as the LAT’s owner. Johnson and Baquet deserve credit for fighting for their newsroom. But there’s no need for those who have expressed interest in buying The Times to keep their money in their pockets, should Tribune continue to refuse to sell.

Want to protect and improve the quality of local journalism in Southern California? Great. Then go hire some of those folks that Tribune’s about to lay off and start up your own newsroom. Worried about the high cost of starting up a new print newspaper, in an era when print’s losing readers to the Web? Why bother? Simply start a Web newsroom instead. Worried about the loss of influence publishing online instead of in print? Um, didn’t we just say that print was losing readers to the Web?

Many local journalists already have made the switch to online publishing. Just scan the dozens listed on Kevin Roderick’s LAObserved.com, under the headings “Media In or About Los Angeles” and “Selected Blogs and Websites.” Contrary to the attitude of some within the Times building, many blogs and independent websites feature smart, original reporting. And many more would if they could cash a check from the likes of Eli Broad to support their efforts.

Take the $1 billion that analysts have estimated The Times could fetch, divvy it among the paper’s 900-some newsroom employees, and you’ve got a cool million-plus. Per employee. How many sharp, local investigative websites could be funded with that kind of cash? Heck, maybe a little competition might better get Tribune’s attention.

Don’t want to run a charity? Fine. Why not hire a few soon-to-be-out-of-work ad reps to go out and find advertisers for these existing and prospective local indie news websites? I’ve lost count of the number of journalists who want to start their own original reporting news websites but have not out of fear that they won’t be able to sell enough ads to support themselves. They shouldn’t have to. Let the ad folks sell the ads, and the reporters do the reporting. A smart, well-funded local ad network for indie websites, run by experienced local sales reps, could help sustain the quality of local reporting more effectively than any amount of op-ed handwringing will. And make a bundle of cash for its investors, too.

The point is, Los Angeles has a strong, entrepreneurial business community that shouldn’t have to beg to Chicago for tough, local news coverage. If the Tribune Company doesn’t want to fund that the way folks around here think it should, then fine. Now’s the time for Tribune’s critics to put up, or shut up.

The Web is waiting.

From the ONA conference…

MSNBC.com, Roanoke.com, The Center for Public Integrity and NOLA.com won the top categories in the annual Online Journalism Awards, presented Saturday night by the Online News Association and the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Longtime OJR contributor Staci Kramer writes up the ONA conference sessions at PaidContent.org.

As founding editor and publisher of Wired magazine and the Industry Standard Magazine, John Battelle has certainly witnessed and experienced enough ebbs and flows in both the new and traditional media business to advise journalists on how to avoid common mistakes when establishing themselves online.

As a veteran technology journalist, Battelle is also highly skilled at engaging and maintaining an online audience on a level esteemed by many of his colleagues. His latest incarnations, Federated Media and Searchblog both appear to be strong examples of how to do it right.

Speaking by telephone from Federated Media headquarters in Sausalito, Calif., Battelle discussed the importance of establishing good conversation, and how his latest publishing venture has evoked a new way to help independent Web journalists get the bills paid.

OJR: What do you find that most journalists are lacking when they attempt to launch websites?

Battelle: The advice I give any journalist friend or colleague is to make the transition from that which I call packaged goods media–a finished television, news or radio report–to the conversational approach to [online] journalism. For most of us journalists who have spent a majority of their careers in the packaged goods area, it’s terrifying to hang it all out there and to admit that you might be wrong and to make mistakes and be corrected. It’s scary to say, I don’t have an editor and I don’t have a title but here’s my opinion and I can’t hide behind a newspaper or magazine masthead.

[Online journalism] is much more like performance art. I would compare the skill set [with that of] a radio talk show host. They talk to each other, they interview people and they take calls, and 50 percent of the callers are regular commentators. We as audience participants love to listen to the conversation. Blogs in particular have that same kind of conversation. On Searchblog, there are three to four times more comments than there are posts from me, and I would say that of the 10,000 comments on the site, probably 50 to 100 people are responsible for 8,000 of them.

OJR: Then how much freedom do you grant to them? Do you restrict usage or do users have to earn the right to comment?

Battelle: No, anyone can comment, but I will delete comments that are off-topic or that are obviously for self-gain. You have to be a moderator of the conversation. Journalists are very good at this, particularly the ones who are good at interviews because they know how to keep things on topic.

OJR: Searchblog is a member of your current publishing venture, Federated Media. Describe the general philosophy behind FM.

Battelle: The general idea is that not all journalists or authors who can draw a community want to be the CEO of a publishing company. They care about getting paid but aren’t very interested in selling ads. They care about making the site look good, but they don’t want to take care of the back end. They don’t want to necessarily hire and manage an accountant and controller, but they certainly care that their check comes on time.

After working on Searchblog for a while, it struck me that the site had gotten to the size of a respectable trade magazine, and I could tell the audience was pretty influential. So as a publisher I was thinking if I had 50,000 influential people reading a publication, it could be a real publication, but I didn’t want to do that again.

Meanwhile, Boing Boing came to me and said our hosting bill is way too high we can’t keep doing this little hobby of ours, so maybe we can figure out a way to turn it into a business. I started working with them on doing that and it struck me that between my site, which was a mini Industry Standard, and Boing Boing, which was more like Wired, there might be something there.

So I started looking for other sites and thought what if we federated all of our inventory? It struck me that the only way to really maintain a high quality of sites was to maintain a reasonably small number of them. These are not $1 or $2 RPM (revenue per thousand page views) sites, these are at least $15 to $20 RPM sites, and they needed to present themselves to advertisers as worthy of that premium. So, we’re now at about 85 or 90 sites and we have federations in various categories, including media and entertainment, tech, parenting and automobile markets.

OJR: So FM sites have already met a certain criteria.

Battelle: Right. They have a validated audience. We’ve done demographic surveys, we’ve joined comScore, we’ve done all the things we do if you’re a real media company. Yet Searchblog is never going to spend $35,000 to join comScore. But FM is going to spend that $35,000 and everyone in our network is now in comScore–that’s the power of federation. And many of the sites that are small cast large shadows. Even though Jeff Jarvis’ site (www.buzzmachine.com) isn’t that big, it’s influential. Marketers like that mix, you get reach and good demographics.

OJR: What do you think the journalism sites on FM have accomplished to get to that point?

Battelle: For the most part the sites that have risen to influence, particularly in the technology sector, are sites that are written by people who are seasoned journalists. I think one of the reasons these sites are so influential is that they’re so read by journalists who have crossed the bridge from the conversational medium back into the packaged goods medium and write second-day, more definitive pieces. You see that a lot in The New York Times, and you know the political writers and tech writers are reading those blogs.

OJR: Especially considering the importance of user participation. The blogger may initiate the conversation, but the important piece of information is the conversation itself, not just the initial posting.

Battelle: Blogs have become archival footage in a way. I’m often referred back to posts I wrote six months ago or a year ago. One of the early examples of a major company breaking news through a blog is when Amazon let me break the news that they were getting into the search game. Later, Amazon announced that they were going to launch [a search site called] A9. Someone wrote me recently and said, remember that post? The A9 thing seems to be going away. I reread the post and 20 comments. When you see it as a whole, it’s really a powerful statement and [sometimes] the comments far outweigh the pure words of the post itself.

OJR: According to a recent post on the FM site, you’re not adding any new authors until you make sure everyone’s happy with what you’ve got.

Battelle: We’ve built momentum … so I had to make a business decision. Some of the FM sites have very ambitious plans. We have a different kind of conversation with them. But for the sites who are doing it on their own for the first time, we help them decide whether they should bring on an editor and how to use financing. There might be a time at which they want to hire their own sales force and fire FM. Frankly I expect that to happen and I expect to lose some sites at some point.

OJR: What if one of your bigger sites starts expanding on a huge scale right away? How do you decide whether FM should grow to accommodate it?

Battelle: That’s a very good question. With some of our sites that are bigger and have significant revenue opportunity like Digg or Boing Boing, we have to make sure that this still a true partnership, and we always have to be asking [whether it's still] making sense. This is not a new model in terms of business, but in terms of the media business, it’s kind of new ground.

OJR: You posted a response on your blog about the Washington Post’s recent attempt to offer to sell ads on blogs and split the revenue with bloggers. Do you think it’s a profitable idea?

Battelle: I believe there’s a place for it. There’s no doubt that traditional media can and will continue, but it has a hard hump to get over. Traditional media is in the business of sort of corralling talent. [As a newspaper reporter], you don’t talk to readers. Your job is to talk to your sources. Institutionally, these organizations have grown up managing reporters, not talent. When I was editing at Wired, my job was to produce writers and manage 50-150 talented, half-crazy freelance writers, and I think it really got me ready to do what I’m doing now. People with influential blogs are talent and they don’t want to be told what to write about.

OJR: So, is the Post trying to copy the Federated Media model?

Battelle: It’s similar, but I don’t think it’s copying any more than I copied the ad rep/book publishing/music label/talent agency model. There’s a lot of great content out there and we all want to figure out a way to get involved in it.

OJR: In your book, “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture” (Portfolio, a Penguin imprint), one of the principal theories that you describe is the “database of intentions.” What will the implications of search mechanisms be for online journalists over the next few years?

Battelle: The key thing here is that anything that has existed online will exist online forever and the privacy issues, the citizen versus state issues and the corporation versus reporter issues are profound because now so much exists. I don’t think that culturally we’ve really gotten very far in the discussion of what it all means.

Think about it: Every place you go, everything you do, everything you click on- it’s all meta data. And what really got me excited is that my great-grandchildren can access my searches. That’s an artifact that I want to give them. I’d like to have access to and editing rights to that information, but right now that’s an artifact that I don’t own.

The Knight Foundation is putting up $25 million over the next five years to encourage journalists and Web developers to find new ways to use the Internet to help improve the quality of life in geographic communities. The Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge will award up to $5 million this year “to fund new ideas, prototypes, products and leadership initiatives that use innovative news methods to help citizens better connect within their communities.”

Anyone can apply: individual journalists, news companies, hackers with a dream. The deadline for submitting a letter of inquiry is December 1.

Gary Kebbel is the Journalism Initiatives Program Officer for the Knight Foundation. He spoke on the phone with OJR about the Challenge.

OJR: What kind of thinking, or action, are you hoping to encourage with this initiative?

Kebbel: I think a lot of what we think of as not getting traction is research and development in the news industry. We want to help spur that. But we’re also looking at non-news industry companies that are doing research and development and creating new products. But they’re not necessarily being created by people who have news values and principles and ethics. We want to make sure that we can help those in the news industry with the values of seeking the fair, accurate, contextual search for truth and to help them develop new products that help them stay strong.

Sort of a genesis for this was looking around and realizing that there was a time period when the publisher of a paper – and we’re saying, particularly the publisher of a Knight newspaper – was the glue of the community. In the way that, they not only were good citizens, they participated in community life. But by presenting the news, they helped identify problems, and they helped bring people together for common solutions. Now, as people transfer their news seeking or information seeking to cyberspace, who is doing in cyberspace what a Knight publisher used to do in real space? Who is performing that function of bringing the community together, and helping them solve problems? And improve their lives? So, with those sort of questions in mind, and in the idea that we felt that the news industry needed some help, we created this news challenge.

OJR: One of the distinguishing characteristics of online publishing that we’ve seen at this point, is that there are a lot of vibrant communities out there. But they’re organized around topics, subjects, rather than geography. Talk a little bit about that, and what the implications for that might be for this endeavor.

Kebbel: Obviously the requirement that the communities effect people in physical space in real life, is an addition requirement. Because we don’t feel that online communities need our help. Virtual communities spring up every day. But using digital communities to enhance physical communities, we think does need our help. And the reason we’re focusing on physical communities is because we simply want to perform the functions that a good news organization should, we think. Which is, to help improve the lives of people where they live and work. And it boils down to physically getting people together and trying to improve their actual, real lives.

OJR: But might it not be possible that some people or organizations putting together these virtual communities might develop some type of technology that then could be applied to the physical geographic community that would then be worthy of consideration?

Kebbel: Oh, yes. If a digital community helps people get together in real life, that qualifies. We’re just saying, for example, a community of model railroaders around the world is not one that we’ve designed this news challenge for. But something that might bring together Detroit teachers, that would work.

OJR: Let’s talk a little bit more about specifically who you’re looking for to apply for this. Are you looking for individuals in their home office? Are you looking for a corporate IT department, or something in between?

Kebbel: Everything. We would love it if a brilliant high school kid submits an idea and we get the chance to recognize it for its potential. Typically, foundations give money to other non-profit organizations. And what we’re doing that’s different with this, is that we’re giving money – or saying that we are able to and planning to – give money to individuals, to other non-profits, or to commercial entities or to for-profit companies. It could be a company with two employees, who are trying to get off the ground. It could be an arm of a much more established company, if indeed what that arm is doing is creating a product that helps improve life in physical communities.

OJR: Looking through the website that you’ve set up for this – one of the first things that struck me is that the criteria here is vague. And, as you say, purposely so. But one of the interesting things I saw in there was, you did get a little bit more specific when you’re talking about what you’re not looking for.

Kebbel: You know, you’re the second person to say that.

Well, what we’re not looking for are things that are already there, obviously. A new way to use a blog is probably not going to make it. Or – it’s sort of difficult to say what we’re not looking for, because overall, the thing is so broad. One thing, though, is the training program thing is important. This foundation has supported journalism training very heavily, since its founding in 1950. And so, we really wanted to point out that what we’re looking for here is probably so new that it’s not possible to have a training program for it yet.

OJR: Another one of the issues that comes up to this sort of thing is – it’s great when you’ve got something like this happening. You get a little initial source of funding for it, but what about the long term sustainability? Tell me a little bit about the awards process. Will people be able to renew them, or is there an expectation that this will get you up to the level where something is sustainable?

Kebbel: Well, we’ve broken it into various categories. And let’s take the very first one, ideas. And these categories we thought sort of mimicked a product creation stage, or process. Let’s say that someone wins the idea award in year one. We would love it if they would come back in year two, and try to get a pilot project award for the same program. And then the thing about the pilot project or field test is that we do want there to be a sustainability plan, as part of that. We don’t have any set limit on either the number of grants, or the amount of grants that we’re going to make in each of these categories. We’re literally going to judge it against the number of the quality of proposals that we have in. And some of these proposals might be for $30,000, and some might be for $300,000. We’re not going to say that one is better than the other, until we look at the proposal and what we think it has the chance of accomplishing. But you’re right. Obviously, I think we will give preference to those that seem to have the best sustainability possibilities.

OJR: One of the things I saw that was alluded to on the site, that’s always interesting, and maybe you can expand on it a little bit, was the concept of, if something looks fundable, that not only could there be an award, but also you could help network to introduce people to venture capitalists.

Kebbel: You’re absolutely right. Because we’re a foundation, and are legally set up to give money to other nonprofits, there are different legal hoops that we would have to jump through to give money to a for-profit. Now, there are ways to do it legally. That’s one possibility: A flat out “we want to invest in your company.” Either as an angel investor, or a second-round investor. But we also thought there are other ways to serve this function of bringing new products to the market. When young companies go up in front of VCs—you know, VCs are always trying to hit a home run. And home run usually means the potential for 100 percent profit in three months. Well, we would be fine with 40 percent profit. I think there’s a lot of good companies that get dropped off of the VC table because they’re not going to guarantee 100 percent profit.

Our interest is in what they call the double bottom line investing. Which is something that will be profitable, and socially responsible, and serve a social need. So in doing that, we would be glad to take the companies that fell off the VC’s home run list. And match them up with our financial advisor, who is also a VC, or people that our financial advisors know. We’ve been talking to various other foundations that do the work of bringing entrepreneurs together. Because we think it would serve the networking not only of an individual to a group of Vcs, but entrepreneurs to one another.

OJR: Twelve of the 24 months after you announce the winners, the initial winners of these awards, how are you going to be judging the success or the failure of this program?

Kebbel: Because what we’re doing is so new in the first year, we’re actually going to be using it as our guinea pig, and our baseline. So, I’m glad you said 24 months. Because in the year after we’re doing this, we don’t know precisely yet how to judge this. Depending on how new or unique or creative the ideas are, there may not be traditional measures of measurement, at the moment. So, one thing that we’re gonna do is just do it for a year. Let’s see what we get. And then use that as a baseline for trying to start judging what’s out there after it’s been there.

For more information about the Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge, or to apply, visit www.newschallenge.org.