Sure, many newspapers and a few broadcast stations played around at the edges of innovation. But over the years most of those innovators have left the newspaper and broadcast industries, and are now at work at start-ups or other online firms. That’s why I’ve pretty much given up trying to persuade current newspaper managers how better to publish online. So many of the ones I’ve met are more concerned with forcing their old pricing models and publishing practices onto the online market than serving the market as it now exists.

So, instead, I will direct my comments today at those who are leaving the newspaper industry, in the hope that they won’t make all the same mistakes their former colleagues did.

Don’t mistake the current practices of your publishing medium for the best practices of journalism. Don’t limit what you can do to what you have done. Ultimately, those are the reasons why I urged journalists and educators two weeks ago to shift their focus from AP Style to search engine optimization. It’s not that AP Style’s a bad thing for aspiring journalists to learn. Far from it, AP Style continues to offer some excellent advice on writing, as well as a connection with the rich heritage of print journalism. But learning SEO is essential to building an audience in today’s competitive online publishing market, more necessary for students than learning AP Style.

But on-page SEO is just a small part of what online publishers must do to fully optimize their websites to attract, retain and expand an audience. Site-wide online optimization prepares your website to offer the information potential audience members seek, within the context of a community in which they’ll feel welcomed, empowered and rewarded for participating… even if only as a reader.

Unfortunately, too many online publishers, new and old, view their websites only within the context of what their chosen content management system [CMS] can provide. That’s as bad a mistake as a 1990s newspaper publisher looking at his or her website as an online edition of the newspaper.

If you’re going to take full advantage of your opportunity as an online publisher, you must always look beyond the capabilities of your current CMS, focusing instead on what you see as the information and communication needs of your audience. In doing that, you must look first toward how your target audience is getting and using information online, and then envision a publishing environment that builds on their current behavior to maximize participation on your site.

What should a modern online news site include? Here are the four core components that I try to build into my websites, based on my experience with the audiences I’ve pursued online over the past 15 years, both on newspaper websites and in niche topic communities.

The Knowledge Base
News publications contain immense archives of information, but, thanks to the conventions of daily publishing in print, that information is scattered among thousands of incremental, daily articles. (I explored this problem four years ago in Search and you will find… an old news story?) That dispersion of information puts news sites at a huge disadvantage in attracting new readers, who so often instead end up at sites such as Wikipedia, which organize their information into single-topic pages, containing all relevant information about those topics.

There’s no good reason why news websites can’t have rich collections of articles about the topics of greatest interest to their communities. I believe that journalists ought to be the ideal candidates to write such pieces – they should know the community and the beat they cover within it. Unfortunately, most attempts to date by newspaper websites to create topic pages have relied on automated solutions.

An optimized news knowledge base must be written with human hands, by a knowledgeable writer (or newsroom) that can craft no more than 20 sharp graphs on a topic folks are searching for, with appropriate hyperlinks to information elsewhere on the site.

This knowledge base becomes the SEO bait that attracts new readers into the website, and delivers them the rich, rewarding information that helps keep them there.

Expert Voices
A Knowledge Base without updates is… an encyclopedia. That’s nice; it’s valuable, but it’s not a news site. Those need updates, written by knowledgeable reporters with the ability to distinguish the true from the false, the honest from the fraudulent, and the accurate from the incomplete. And to make those distinctions explicit for their readers.

It’s not enough to play stenographer any longer. Neither sources nor readers need journalists to do that. Communities instead need people who can cut through all that information accessible through Google, or posted to Facebook, and show them what’s true, what’s honest and what’s complete.

And, given the conventions of online publishing today, readers want to see the names and faces of the individuals who are making those cases. The Internet is a powerfully personal medium, defined by individual interaction. It is a mass medium of individuals in relation with one another, unlike print and broadcast media. In print, the byline was subservient to the masthead, and to the institutional voice. Online, readers expect to see the name and hear the voice of the author they read (even if those names are sometimes pseudonymous).

The blog provides the best format yet implemented for connecting expert voices with an audience. An optimized news website would provide a collection of expert voices, presented in blog format, with daily (or more frequent) updates to complement the basic information presented in the site’s Knowledge Base.

Readers’ Voices
As I just wrote, the Internet is an interactive medium, and a news website must function as an online community. Readers ought to have the opportunity to engage your publication’s expert voices, as well as to initiate coverage and conversation, through their own blogs and discussion forums.

Your community should be a meritocracy, though, which values the true, honest and complete among its participants as much as it does among the other sources that your expert voices cover. As a publisher, you are under no obligation to provide everyone an equal voice. In fact, you have an obligation to create a community in which participants can distinguish the valuable posts.

Legacy Media Archive
The final core component is the one that makes up the majority of most legacy news sites. Unfortunately, it’s the least engaging and least valuable in attraction the new readers that drive your publishing business’s customer growth. Still, I believe that placing a complete legacy media archive online is important, to allow readers searching for individual articles to find them, and for others to reference your legacy media work in their online conversations. Especially important landmark stories also should figure prominently in relevant Knowledge Base articles.

Such an optimized site offers sharp, focused topical articles to draw in new readers, knowledgeable voices to keep them coming back, community evolvement to empower them to make your site their online home and to promote it to others, as well as all the information that you’ve published elsewhere in the past, for readers’ reference. It makes full use of the capabilities of today’s Internet, in the way that readers are now using it.

Your decision about a publishing system – which one to select, to customize or to develop – should look forward to such an optimized site, instead of looking backward to providing a workflow that you might be comfortable with already, or an experience similar to popular sites you frequent. Looking backward too often locks you into suboptimal publishing techniques and formats that won’t allow you to distinguish your site from competitors’.

You might have noticed that I haven’t offered any suggestions how to blend these four core components. That’s up to you. An optimal website is better than the competition, not one that matches or duplicates it. All I hope to do here is to inspire you to think about how might better optimize your publication to reach the growing, thriving audience that your publishing business needs.

Before I get into that, I will share my experience and scenario which gives you some perspective on my situation. I’m a tech industry veteran (~25 years) though my hands-on coding experience is ancient (~20 years ago) but as a non-technical person goes, I’m reasonably technical though I’ve been on the business and editorial side of Web properties the last 15 years.

Part of my background includes being part of the early team of Microsoft Sidewalk starting in 1995 where I ran a team that supported the cities, as well as about half the cities reported through me, so I’ve been working with CMSs in the local arena for nearly 15 years. SunValleyOnline (SVO) has been around for about 5 years and was built on a proprietary platform that hasn’t changed in years. We are in the final stages of the transition from the old to the new site. SVO has been self-sustaining for a couple years with a small team of three people. We rely on a mix of community and staff contributions. I have personally blogged for several years and have used blogs built on Blogger and mostly WordPress.

To jump ahead, there’s lots of merit in WordPress and the ecosystem built around it, however I felt it came up short on the criteria I established to make the decision.

Listed below are the criteria I used with a brief explanation. While everyone will have somewhat different criteria, I listed the items in priority order from most to least important based upon my experience and priorities.

1. No developer required: In my opinion, it is no longer necessary for 98 percent of sites to have a Web developer on staff. Fortunately, there are many off-the-shelf solutions that don’t require an in-house technologist. There may be occasional needs where a developer can be contracted to do specific work but at the early stages of a site’s development, I think a site should be focused on other items rather than doing custom development. As long as your CMS has the ability to extend it later, you can defer bringing on a technologist and save yourself money. Of course, there are hyperlocal sites founded by people with technology skills, and they can certainly take advantage of that, but it’s not a requirement to get off the ground.
2. Easy to monetize: This relates to the next point (“Open”). Most sites are limited to generating revenue using standard display ads. While that is the right place to start, this is a highly dynamic sector and thus it should be easy to extend your site with various other capabilities whether it is turning standard display ads into video ads or incorporating high-quality ad networks, it should be as easy as “copy and paste” to add these capabilities to your site.
3. Open: It should be very easy to add and delete modules to a page or an entire site, such as social media features, inbound RSS feeds (i.e., pulling in a news feed from another site), and widgets of all types from weather to flickr slideshows to polls to various monetizable elements from any number of third parties.
4. Community Generated Content: It should be very easy for members of your community to contribute articles, pictures, video, classifieds, reviews, etc. The CMS should give you the ability to determine whether a specific user is able to post directly to the site or whether the contribution should go into a publication queue for review/approval. It should also allow your community to send in articles via an e-mail interface. Among other things, this can allow them to e-mail pictures and video from their smartphones, which can be critical when there are breaking news events in your community. The CMS we picked has nailed this part. It gives someone who might be witnessing a breaking story the opportunity to submit stories to the site, including pictures (and mapping those pics). What’s more, once the article is posted, you can update it via e-mail replies from the e-mail confirmation the CMS sends when the article posts. This may be the coolest single feature the platform we chose provides.
5. Off the shelf cross-promotion: It must be easy to add features that help internal site promotion. Having features sprinkled through as site such as Most Viewed Pages, Recent Comments, Highly Rated articles and so on are very helpful at increasing the time people spend exploring your site.
6. Outbound RSS: Mentioned earlier was inbound RSS. Just as you can and should pull in RSS feeds from complementary sites, you should make various RSS feeds available so that others can pull in your content to their pages. A CMS should automatically create a range of RSS feeds (e.g., Top Headlines, department and author specific feeds, etc.).
7. Design templates and flexibility: CMSs usually come with pre-built templates, as well as the ability to customize the look and feel. If you don’t like the pre-built templates you can preview, ensure that the process to change the site design is straightforward. [Side note: I have, unfortunately, heard of designers charging sites $5,000 for a WordPress template when a few hundred dollars should get you a solid design.]
8. Pictures and video: Not only should it be easy to embed code that pulls in photos and video from sites such as flickr and YouTube, the platform should allow you and your community contributors to upload directly to your site. Having users be able to rate photos and videos is another way to increase engagement with your community, which is vital for your success.
9. Integration with Social Media: Your CMS should enable you to easily integrate with Facebook (and Facebook Connect) as well as Twitter. This includes enabling you to automatically post items to your accounts on the Social Networks including shortening URLs (e.g., using a tool such as bit.ly). Also throughout your site, it should be easy for users to send your articles, photos, etc. to the major social tools (Digg, StumbleUpon). Don’t forget e-mail – still the most popular way to share an article. “Send to a Friend” should be baked into the system.
10. Analytics: Not only should it be easy to add third-party tracking tools such as Google Analytics and Quantcast to a site, there should also be the ability to measure success and reward contributors based upon how well read one’s contributions are.
11. Events: A community-powered Events Calendar is a great way to connect with the community. Not only should a CMS have this capability, it should allow your community to easily submit events. The system should allow for plotting of the events on a map and have the basics of an Events Calendar such as support for recurring (i.e., multi-day) events.
12. Classifieds: While Craigslist has made it to many communities, it doesn’t work well today for hyperlocal. If you are only interested in garage sales in your immediate neighborhood, for instance, Craigslist can be unwieldy. Thus, there is an opportunity to fill a niche where the big boys aren’t servicing your community very well. Naturally, having features you expect in articles (maps, photos, etc.) is important for classifieds as well.
13. Maps: The importance of maps/location continues to increase with the popularity of smartphones. A smart CMS will be able to recognize a photo or Tweet having a GPS coordinate appended to it. This gives your community another way to navigate your content (i.e., location) and becomes more important as mobile consumption increases.
14. Mobile: Another item that I expect to rapidly grow in importance is mobile. A CMS that allows for your site to be easily consumed on various mobile platforms will be a big asset. At the moment, mobile requires a lot of custom development but this should change in the relatively near future.
15. Search Engine Dashboard: Not a common feature yet but one we expect to become more common. Sites such as the Huffington Post are very sophisticated in analyzing search trends to drive headline selection, tagging and how visibility of articles is raised or lowered based upon search term frequency.

At the risk of this sounding like a sales pitch for the platform we chose, I was very impressed with the flexibility and extensibility of the Neighborlogs platform we chose. It met nearly all the criteria listed above. Progressively, I’m learning the platform more and more and finding more slick things it can do. If I had to summarize why it’s a great fit, it is the fact it is purpose-built for the hyperlocal space whereas WordPress, Drupal, Django and other options I consider are great general-purpose systems but not geared towards hyperlocal specifically. Like WordPress and the others, you can’t beat the price (free). They currently only charge a revenue share on the self-serve ads that are purchased through that tool (no split on the ads you bring to the table).

To provide a bit of balance, let me share some areas of constructive criticism for Neighborlogs. The platform developers are running their own hyperlocal site and local network and are very busy. They aren’t always quick to respond, though it’s certainly better than WordPress where you just have a developer community and no dedicated team to support you unless you hire your own team. There are a few items that are not perfect in how they pull in RSS feeds and the accompanying social media features. Their ad system isn’t as robust as some of the ad servers out there, but the shortcomings weren’t deal breakers for us. Being a relatively new company and platform, there’s always the risk that they don’t survive, but, as good of a job as they have done, I think others will discover the benefits themselves.

Overall, I’d encourage people to clearly define their own criteria. My criteria aren’t applicable to everyone. Establishing your own will greatly increase the chances you’ll be happy long term. I encourage others to share their experiences, good or bad, with various CMSs they have used. I also welcome feedback on our new site. What works for you and what doesn’t?

Which brings us to this week’s reader question. Actually, it isn’t from a reader, but from a fellow participant in last week’s NewsTools 2008 conference. He asked the question during the session with Google News’ Daniel Meredith, and I thought it worth discussing on OJR, because I saw a lot of heads nodding in the room as he asked it.

Meredith had mentioned robots.txt as a solution to help publishers control what content on their websites that Google’s indexing spiders would see. A hand shot up.

“What is robots-dot-text?”

Meredith gave a quick and accurate answer, but I’m going to go a little more in depth, for the benefit of not-so-tech-savvy online journalists who want the hard work on their websites to get the best possible position in search engine results.

Note that I wrote “the best possible position,” and not “the top position.” There’s a difference, and I will get to that in a moment.

First, robots.txt is simply a plain-text file that a Web publisher should put in the root directory of their website. (E.g. http://www.www.ojr.org/robots.txt. It’s there; feel free to take a look.) The text files includes instructions that tell indexing spiders, or “robots,” what content and directories on that website they may, or may not, look at.

Here’s an example of a robots.txt file:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.doc$
Disallow: /*.gif$
Disallow: /*.jpg$
Disallow: /ads

This file tells the “Mediapartners-Google” spider that it can look at anything on the website. (That’s the spider that Google uses to assist in the serving of AdSense ads.) Then, it tells other spiders that they should not look at any Microsoft Word documents, GIF or JPGs images, or anything in the “ads” directory on the website. The asterisk, or *, is a “wild card” that means “any value.”

Let’s say a search engine spider finds an image file in a story that’s it is looking at one your website. The image file is located on your server at /news/local/images/mugshot.jpg, that is, it is a file called mugshot.jpg, located within the images directory within the local directory within the news directory on your Web server.

Your robots.txt file told the spider not to look at any files that match the pattern /*.jpg. This file is /news/local/images/mugshot.jpg, so it matches that pattern (the asterisk * taking the place of news/local/images/mugshot). So the spider will ignore this, and any other .jpg file it finds on your website.

So why is this important to an online journalist? Remember that Meredith said Google penalizes websites for duplicate content. If you want to protect your position in Google’s search engine results and in Google News, you want to search engine spiders to focus on content that is unique to your website, and ignore stuff that isn’t.

So, for example, you might want to configure your robots.txt so it ignores all AP and other wire stories on your website. The easiest way to do this is to configure your content management system to route all wire stories into a Web directory called “wire.” Then put the following lines into your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wire

Boom. Duplicate content problem for wire stories solved. Now this does mean that Web searchers will no longer be able to find wire stories on your website through search engines. But many local publishers would be that result as a feature, not a bug. I’ve heard many newspaper publishers argue that coming to their sites from search engine links to wire content do not convert for site advertisers and simply hog site bandwidth.

If you are using a spider to index your website for an internal search engine, though, you will need to allow that spider to see the wire content, if you want it included in your site search. If that’s the case, add these lines above the previous ones in your robots.txt:

User-agent: name-of-your-spider
Allow: /wire

Or, use

User-agent: name-of-your-spider
Allow: *

… if you wish it to see and index all of the content on your site.

Sometimes, you do not want to be in the top position in the search engine results, or even in those results at all. On OJR, we use robots.txt to keep robots from indexing images, as well as a few directories where we store duplicate content on the site.

Other publishers might effectively use robots.txt to exclude premium content directories, files stores on Web servers that aren’t meant for public use, or files that you do not wish to be viewed by Web visitors except those who find or follow the file from within another page on your website.

Unfortunately, many rogue spiders roam the Internet, ignoring robots.txt and scraping content from sites without pause. Robots.txt won’t stop those rogues, but most Web servers can be configure to ignore requests from selected IP addresses. Find the IPs of those spiders, and you can block them from your site. But that’s a topic for another day.

There’s no good reason to lament search engines finding and indexing content that you don’t want anyone other that your existing site visitors or other selected individuals to see. Nor do you have to suffer duplicate content penalties because you run a wire feed on your site. A thoughtful robots.txt strategy can help Web publishers optimize their search engine optimization efforts.

Want more information on creating or fine-tuning a robots.txt file? There’s a good FAQ [answers to frequently asked questions] on robots.txt at http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html.

Got a question for the online journalism experts at OJR? E-mail it to OJR’s editor, Robert Niles, via ojr(at)www.ojr.org

The job becomes even tougher for journalists, who want to draw traffic and elicit discussion while maintaining journalism fundamentals. It’s easier to open the doors for an anonymous shouting match than it is to craft a well-sourced and enlightening conversation.

Although we at journalism schools teach our students to write in an engaging and conversational manner, journalism is not casual conversation. The work we do to report and source our information tends to lend our words a formality beyond that offered by someone pulling their words from “thin air.” Ideally, we minimize that sense of formality in an effort to earn credibility for our work without intimidating the reader.

In addition, a reporter’s job, ideally, is to answer questions. If you’ve worked in a newsroom, think back to your first editor, or your basic reporting professor. When he or she told you to check out a lead, what would have been the reaction if you’d responded, “Uh, I don’t know”?

1) “Oh, gee, that’s okay.”
2) “Well, find the heck out!”

Journalists are trained from their first day on the job to find answers. That makes it hard for reporters to turn to their readers publicly and declare, “I don’t know. Help me out here.”

All these factors stand in the way of journalists running vibrant online discussion communities, even as our reporting skills and community know-how make us ideal candidates for those gigs.

We’ve offered dozens of articles on OJR over the years with advice on managing online discussion communities. And, as editor, I’ve tried to ensure that we’ve practiced much of what we’ve preached. Which is why I’m here to explain today a change we are making in the way that we are handling comments on the website.

Since I rewrote OJR’s content management system in the fall of 2004, OJR has required that readers register with the website in order to post a comment on the site. Our registration process is two-step, and requires registrants to retrieve a password from their e-mail accounts in order to log into the site.

In my experience, this system offers the best protection against spam bots and flame war trolls. The registration requirement keeps automated agents from exploiting input forms and the e-mail requirement deters anonymous hacks who want to cause trouble without consequence.

It’s not a perfect system; some spammers employ sweatshop labor to manually labor and submit comments to highly-linked websites. And even those who proudly attach their name to their comments can be jerks sometime. (Do I get some Fifth Amendment opportunities here?)

But, on the whole, I’ve found that this system, employed on other websites, helps keep the signal-to-noise ratio quite high, with a minimum of effort from site editors and moderators.

Yet a high signal-to-noise ratio doesn’t help readers that much when that signal remains weak. And in the relatively small world of the news publishing industry, sometimes people do not want their names attached to comments about their company’s vision and practices (or lack thereof.)

So, today we’re implementing a change at OJR: Readers may now submit comments to the site without registering.

That doesn’t mean we’re opening the gates to anything. Comments submitted by unregistered readers will be held for review before being posted to the site. And those comments will be identified by the poster’s IP address, rather than a log-in or reader’s name. (Unregistered readers will be able to include their name within their posts to OJR if they choose, of course.)

I hope that this alternative provides a way to readers to get introduced to commenting on OJR without having to go through the extra steps of creating an account and retrieving an account password. And that it provides a way for newsroom employees to add to the conversation in situations where they fear reprisals if their names were attached to their comments.

Of course, as journalists those of us reading the site will have to decide how much credibility to give to posts that come from unregistered readers versus those submitted by readers who have registered and supplied OJR with a working e-mail address. (You will know the difference because posts from unregistered readers will include an unlinked IP address, rather than a linked author’s name. Hey, at least we’re not slapping on the label “anonymous coward“.)

Ideally, from my perspective as editor, folks will try commenting using the anonymous system, decide that they like it, then register and becoming frequently contributing registrants on the site.

Spend more than a few days on the Internet, and you’ll see the whole range of conditions that sites impose on posting: from wide-open input forms without captchas to locked-down systems that require credit-card-verified user accounts.

Ultimately, we want more conversation, and less lecturing, on the site, and I hope that this change will move us toward that goal. And, as with everything on OJR, we reserve the right to change our minds — to make commenting either more or less restrictive than we will have it now.

Wanna share your experiences/frustration/success in running an online discussion. Hit the button and talk to us. Even if you haven’t registered yet.

The Enthusiast Group’s sites, yourclimbing.com, yourMTB.com, yourcycling.com, yourrunning.com, and yourhorsesports.com, fuse grassroots media with social networking. Each site is led by an “enthusiast-in-chief”, a pro or semipro athlete who acts as the community leader and chief blogger. Members post the majority of content on the sites – tales of their latest ascent plus picture proof, homemade videos, gear reviews, trail reviews, and events coverage. And more than a few of them have met up in person to climb, bike, run, and ride together.

The success of the sites has led Outing to refocus his company’s efforts on offering the platform to other publishers who understand the value of “conversational media” and “conversational marketing”. OJR spoke with Outing on the phone last week, and an edited transcript follows.

OJR: What have you been working on?

Steve Outing: Well, I’ve been doing various consulting projects and research. I spent four years at the Poynter Institute, working on the EyeTrack project. And about a year and a half ago, I started the Enthusiast Group, based here in Boulder, Colorado.

OJR: What’s the idea behind the Enthusiast Group’s websites?

Outing: To create a way for folks passionate about sports to share their experiences and find new friends who share the same passion. We gave people a platform where they can talk about climbing, post photographs, and videos.  Recently we added other features like trail mapping.  Anyone who had gone out on a climb could contribute a map and write a review of it. It becomes a community resource.  

The sites started out very much as “citizen journalism” – though I prefer to use the term “grassroots media” – and quickly grew into social networking for climbers to find other folks they can go climbing with.

OJR: Which of the websites have caught on the most and why?   

Outing: Definitely yourclimbing.com. The climbing site’s Enthusiast-in-Chief is Katie Brown. She’s in her mid-20s now, but when she was a teenager, she was a world champion climber. That made a big difference. We gave her a camera and she shoots some of her climbs. She also gets into the discussion forums and comments on our users’ photos. People really like the idea of being able to interact with this person who was perceived as untouchable. Here was an online venue where they could.  

I really think it’s important to have a personality at the center. He or she needs to be perceived as running the charge, and it certainly helps if that person has celebrity power.  

OJR: How did you manage to snag Katie for the site?

Outing: She happened to be living in Boulder and writing a column for the local paper. I was calling around and got referred to her.

OJR: How much time per week do the Enthusiasts-in-Chief spend working on their sites?

Outing: Probably five to ten hours.  

OJR: How does the site content break down in terms of content generated by you and generated by the community?

Outing: Early on we’d be doing quite a bit of content. As it grows, you get more and more from the community. Right now on yourclimbing.com, it’s probably two percent Katie and 98 percent community. Some of the newer sites might be 50/50.  

OJR: In a sustainable ad-supported online publishing model, where you automate ads and have reader-generated content, how much of that content would ultimately need to come from the audience vs. from you? 

Outing: I’d say 90/10, or maybe 95/5.  

OJR: Wow. That’s quite a high level of audience participation. How do you get there? 

Outing: For us, certainly the Enthusiast-in-Chief had a lot to do with getting these things going. We’ll seed with questions; then when people post things, we’ll dive in and make comments. I’m a mountain biker myself, so I participated heavily in the biking site.  Early on, it was going out to your friends, telling them about it, trying to get them to participate. We’ve come a long way.

One thing we tried that worked fairly well was partnering with the Access Fund, a nonprofit group working to keep climbing areas open. They put a note in their newsletters: “Every time you post something on yourclimbing.com, the site will donate $5 to the Access Fund, up to a total of $1,000.” We got great feedback on being good guys and for supporting an organization we all care about. 

It’s really important to tap other organizations with large lists of members, to hook in and leverage the giant sites like Facebook and Flickr. We built a Facebook application called “Run Time!” where you and your friends can log and compare your runs. The application primarily exposed Facebook users to our site. You can record ten runs without logging in. Then have to create an account with our running site. It drives traffic back to the site.  

When someone posts a photo to our site, there’s a checkbox for posting the photo to our Flickr site.

We also use incentives and compensation. We haven’t paid people for submitting content, but we do lots of contests, hooking up with sponsors and giving away prizes for “Post of the Week,” “Member of the Month,” and ad hoc contests. We’ve also toyed around with awarding “points.” On our climbing site, our top contributor has accumulated several thousand points. Getting lots of points signifies that you are a bit of an expert. While we don’t award anything for the points, people still care about them and get competitive about it. Lots of websites have figured out that awarding “levels” (Gold member, Silver, Bronze, or some such scheme) is effective.

The thing you want to avoid is the appearance of accepting user content and making money from it without giving back. What your site’s users are contributing to the community and your site is valuable, so make sure you figure out ways to acknowledge that.

OJR: OK, with so much audience participation, how do you ensure quality control? Have you ever had to deal with incidents of vandalism?

Outing: I’ll tell ya, I expected to have to be policing all the time. It’s been surprising – very few people have tried to mess things up. 

OJR: How many times have you had to delete something?

Outing: Just a handful. It’s pretty remarkable. Our audience is so narrow and focused.  If they’re hanging out on our site, it’s because they care about climbing. 

That said, we certainly have controls in place. Our biggest problem is comment spam, and that’s taken care of with a spam filter. We made a conscious decision from the beginning not to tolerate any abuse on our site. Every once in a while, something will slip through, and we have a community manager who keeps track of it. People can also alert us if something is wrong. I can think of one instance where the community actually commended us for kicking someone out. 

Another thing I worried about was someone posting copyrighted material. We’ve had a couple of instances. Sometimes we can tell if something looks too professional. We also rely on our readers to let us know.

On photos, we debated if we should freely allow people to post directly to the site or if we should moderate. Last year, we got about 3,500 climbing photos. That makes about nine to ten a day. Again, it has not become a problem. You can always pull the switch down the road. 

OJR: So in addition to running the sites, you recently began marketing and selling your platform. In the long term, which part of the business is more viable?

Outing: We’re moving away from the self-publishing model as the sites weren’t generating enough advertising to sustain the company long-term. We simply didn’t have the right partners. If we were able to leverage the readership base of media companies or REI or Black Diamond, I think that they could really take off in a big way.   

So we shifted our strategy and developed a strong publishing platform: sites that are built around participation: audio and video sharing that can be provided to other publishers.  

As for the long term, it’s really too early to tell. Everyone understands that social media is a mega-trend that they need to get into, but they haven’t quite figured out how to incorporate it into their strategy. I’m fairly optimistic.

OJR: Are there other companies offering similar services as the Enthusiast Group? What distinguishes the Enthusiast Group?

Outing: In the social networking space, it’s pretty competitive. There are a lot of companies that offer social networks in a box. Ning is probably the most well known – they even offer a free version of their software with ads. Then there are a whole bunch of companies like us that offer a more serious platform. 

What makes us different is that, with my media background, we try to offer full range of services: both the technology (the platform), as well as consulting services and community management (getting people to participate). 

Marketers are starting to realize is that using these sorts of platforms or approaches is about getting into a conversation with your readers, as well as providing a venue for your customers to talk to each other. In a lot of ways, it allows the customer to market for you. 

OJR: In your opinion, who out there is doing that the best right now?

Outing: In the media world, USA Today has done quite a bit to open up to readers to get in the conversation. I feel like the magazine business is further behind. Any niche publishers should have a strong online community where the readers are talking to each other. It’s a great way to get a conversation going online and understand what your readers want. 

In terms of other media, I think it could be really interesting for radio to get involved in social networking. Sports talk radio – there’s a great opportunity to add an online community where they could capture the voices of those people who are too shy to call in.  

OJR: Do you foresee big major media deciding to get into niche topic media?

Outing: Certainly with the specialty magazines, it feels like a no-brainer that they would get strong online communities. There’s a huge opportunity to provide niche networking tools for their networks – the type of stuff we’re doing. 

OJR: Do you have any other advice for publishers getting into the enthusiast space?  

Outing: A smart thing to do is to recognize that if you’re covering a geographic area or dealing with a niche topic, there is already a bunch of bloggers producing stuff, so you can bring them in. For example, on our running site, a user can add the URL or RSS link of his blog on running. So we have feeds from enthusiasts-in-chief, users, and external bloggers who want the extra traffic.  

You don’t want to be too much of an island. You want to reach out to other things. We’ve been trying to encourage people to stop being passive listeners and readers. I look at my teenager and all the media she interacts with is participative. Her generation is not one to be passively reading magazines. It’s all about trading content. 

Then, after stints at a couple of newspapers, Cauthorn essentially disappeared from the industry scene. He went off to some start-up called “CityTools,” which produced… well, many us weren’t quite sure.

Now, Cauthorn’s back. CityTools is ready to launch, and Cauthorn’s ready to show off his new baby.

In short, CityTools is a social media framework for publishing news articles, lists and classified advertisements. Cauthorn demo’d for me a platform that serves both newspapers as well as independent and individual publishers.

Newspapers could use CityTools as an ad hoc wire service, to create with other papers online portals on topics of mutual interest. Interest groups could use the platform to manage collaborative publications. Readers can build lists of their favorite… whatever, and share those lists with others to create aggregated “favorites” lists from designated communities.

And, of yeah, the platform supports stories, ads and lists in multiple languages. Speak English, Spanish… and Swedish? CityTools will let you read, create, order and distribute content in all three, at once. Registered users can declare which of 13 supported languages they read, and select which one they want to use as their primary language while navigating the site. They can also select their community, which will deliver them content and ads tagged to that community, while allowing them to use breadcrumb trails to navigate to content from all other CityTools communities.

It’s loaded with cool widgets like this, so my inner geek demanded that I get the scoop. I talked with Cauthorn on the phone earlier this month, and an edited transcript follows.

OJR: You were raising hell in the newspaper.com world there a few years ago and then just kind of disappeared into CityTools. Bring us up to speed on what you’ve been up to.

Cauthorn: I went into the lab. After I left The [San Francisco] Chronicle, I went backpacking along the Pacific Crest Trail and did a lot of thinking about the state of journalism and online newspapers and stuff and, as you probably know, I was one of the very earliest people doing what we now call social news. Back then we didn’t really have a name for it, you know, we’re just doing the community front page which allowed people to decide what was on their front page and share links and vote on things and – but all the stuff that has now become commonplace with Digg and whatnot.

I was thinking a lot about the need for a new kind of journalism online as well as the kinds of things that may help, you know, existing print newspapers to survive. And when I say print newspapers it’s because even though they have online operations, they’re still thinking so much like print operations, you know, and so after, you know, sort of both literally and figuratively going to the mountain, I came back and decided to try to re-imagine this stuff from the ground up.

So that’s what I’m focusing on right now.

On the newspaper side, what we’ve created is what we think is an extraordinarily interesting and brand new thing. We’re giving newspapers the ability to very easily set up ad-hoc wire services if you will, to share content with other newspapers of a like mind as well as to share classified ads.

OJR: I think one of the distinguishing characteristics between let’s say, first generation online publishing versus traditional offline publishing has been that the focus of offline publishing, local newspapers, has been geographic. A lot of early online publications have been organized around topic and they’ve been geographically agnostic, if you will. They don’t care about where you are in the world, just what you want to talk about. And what you’ve just described here seems like it is taking the geographic-based local newspaper and moving it into the more topically based world where you’re creating topic – you’re creating topical networks for local communities so you’re no longer just about the Fort Lauderdale community, you’re about boating.

Cauthorn: Well, geography is still important. What we’re trying to do though is we’re trying to say, “Look. Let’s imagine content as a palette of colors.” Right now we’ve had a very limited palette. You’ve got what the wire services give you and you’ve got what your local folks generate and of course with layoffs and stuff like that, that palette of colors that your local folks is generating is getting less. And what happens is you say, “Okay fine. Why don’t we expand that palette by borrowing colors from other people?”

Let’s use agricultural reporting as an example. The fact of the matter is that agricultural reporting across the country, the numbers have been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. Right? Because the newspaper has to make a choice between covering agriculture, even if you’re an agricultural market, and covering the statehouse, they’ve got to cover the statehouse. It’s just their natural bias. Whether or not that’s relevant to the reader or not, who knows? But it’s a natural bias.

So what happens of all of a sudden you say, “Okay, but you know what? So we’re not doing a great job of covering all agriculture in our area, but you know what? If we combined four cities, let’s say all the small newspapers in the Imperial Valley, and say okay, we’re gonna share our agricultural coverage and ou can put it online or you can put it in print. It doesn’t matter. It’s up to them. All of a sudden, you’ve got a rich, brand new product that really resonates for the local audience. And guess what? Google can’t match. There’s no way a mass aggregator can match that.

OJR: Let’s talk about some of other folks that are out there, in this spectrum of social media, from earlier sites like Backfence to Topicx to whomever the Knight Foundation’s gonna be funding this year and next. What have you got going that you think distinguishes CityTools?

Cauthorn: Up until now what’s happened is that sites have enforced their view of what local is. So, you say, okay, this site is about Pima County Arizona. That’s our local view and that’s it. And it may be part of a network where you have Pima County here and you’ve got Maricopa County there, but if you’re on a Maricopa County site you don’t see the Pima County stuff. If you’re on a Pima County site, you don’t see the Maricopa County stuff.

What we’re doing to begin with is we’re saying, “Look, what we need to do is put the definition of what local is from the perspective of this site in the hands of the user.” We talk about personalization but what I want to start talking about is context of your life. The user has a context of their life and their context is that I might identify myself as being a local to the Bay Area, but my next-door neighbor might think of San Francisco only as where their local context is. How do you build a site that responds to both of those people’s concerns in a fluid manner? That’s what we’ve built.

So what happens is that, for example in Brooklyn — I think we’ve got twelve or fifteen neighborhoods in Brooklyn, specific neighborhoods. So let’s say you’re looking at Bensonhurst’s stuff. You’re reading a restaurant review in Bensonhurst and you click on Bensonhurst, say, “Show me all the restaurants you got in Bensonhurst,” because what we allow you to do is combine. I don’t know the context. I’m gonna allow you to set the context. Right?

So you say, “The context I’m interested in is Bensonhurst and I want to see all the restaurant reviews in Bensonhurst.” Well, everybody’s posted a restaurant review in Bensonhurst, there they are. If there’s not enough content, and if you think, “Oh well, wait a minute, I’d like to see all the restaurant reviews in Brooklyn,” all you got to do is click Brooklyn [on the page's bread crumb trail] and suddenly, bang, you get everything in Brooklyn.

OJR: One of the distinguishing characteristics about my hometown, the L.A. area, not that it isn’t beginning to happen in other metro areas as well, is as you go by neighborhood to neighborhood, you’re not just changing geography, you’re also changing, literally, the language spoken by the people in that neighborhood. Tell me a little bit about how CityTools is accommodating language differences.

Cauthorn: We currently support 13 languages. And we believe, we’re not sure about this, but we believe we’re the first multilingual news site in the world. Up until now, if you speak Spanish and you’re in Los Angeles, you have the choice of an English language newspaper or a Spanish language newspaper, either in print or online. But I go down to the mission in San Francisco and you hear people freely mingling Spanish and English together. That’s the context of their life. Right?

So what we do is we allow you to say, “Okay, I only want to see Spanish language content in East L.A.” So you’ve got it. If you’re comfortable in Spanish and English, you can have Spanish and English and it’s freely mixed in there.

Now think about this in terms of business model, what happens when you have bilingual classifieds? Imagine what would happen if the Hispanic community in Los Angeles had the ability to say, “Okay, I want to see classifieds in Spanish or English.”

That’s what I’m talking about when is say context. I want to know where you live, I want to know what languages you speak, tell me what you’re interested in. I will change the nature of the site to match those things. This is a big deal, we think.

Now, that’s – so that’s all really powerful, but then we get into some other stuff that also we believe is quite new. And you’re getting back to what distinguishes us from the other sites that have come before. We have this entire group publishing model that anybody can create what we call teams.

Let’s say you have a class full of journalism students and you create a team for that class and they write their stories and they assign them to their team. Now you have flexibility. You can I want it to appear with other team stories, but I don’t want to allow the team members to edit it. Or, you can say I want it to appear with other team stories and I’m gonna allow other team members to edit it. Because we have a draft and edit mode, what happens is that the students can write their stories in edit mode and then they can submit them to the teacher and when the teacher says that they’re good enough, then the teacher can say, “Okay, publish that one, publish that one, publish that one.” It’s just click, click, click, click, click and they get published.

Now here’s what’s slick about that. So all of a sudden what you have is you have got a workflow that resembles an existing news room. Right? But what’s slick about that is two things. One, every university in America is part of our geographic database. So let’s say this is at University of California-Berkeley. Let’s say they assign these stories to the geography of University of California-Berkeley.

All of a sudden then, you’re looking at collaborative group output of content which is tied to a place. And what’s really slick about it is that they can also put those headlines on their own sites because we give you code you can just cut and paste this code on and anytime that your story’s on CityTools, it gets updated on your own site.

Why does that matter? Here’s why. What we’re trying to do is we want to help nonprofits and community organizations, parent teacher organizations and stuff like that. None of them have the ability to conveniently and quickly update content on their own websites on a regular basis. Right? So what we’re saying is all you have to do is put this code in and once you start using CityTools, automatically those headlines will go over on your site, styled the way you want them, looking the way you want them.

But here’s where it gets really cool. So you and I have this organization working on leukemia. And let’s say we have a constituency of 3,000 people out there who have an interest in leukemia. All of a sudden, we can open up a public team that is tied to the organization and we can invite all of our thousands of people to join. So if you’re an activist – imagine if an activist organization, such as anti-war organization, said, “Everybody join this big team,” then you’ve got 1,000 people looking for stories about anti-war stuff every single day. And, by the way, it also shows up on your own website. Suddenly, that gets interesting.

So we are hoping that what’s gonna happen is we’re gonna start to engage people in the context of their lives – again, getting back to this word, context. Tell me what organizations you belong to and I will help you make life in that organization better.

OJR: Getting more into this idea of the crowd, tell me more about the kind of collaborative list building technology that you’ve built in here.

Cauthorn: When I was on the mountain I was walking down a trail and listing things in my head and I said, you know, if I got two other people doing this, I could build a consensus and that was when I went, “Oh sh-t.” What we do is that we allow people to create rank lists and these rank lists can be about anything. By itself, this is not unknown, it just hasn’t been done in this context.

What we can do is allow you to say, “Okay, here are – here are my five favorite Italian restaurants in all of Los Angeles.” And, by the way, you can adapt that by neighborhood if you want to, and you can do it in Spanish.

But then what happens is somebody else comes along, because none of us can resist a good list. And they go, “Oh no, Robert’s list was good, but he missed this, this and this and I disagree with the order.” So what they can do is what we call linking lists. When you read the list, if you’re a member, you just click, “I want to link to this list,” and create your own list.

Now [the lists] are part of a family and what happens behind the scenes is that we do some heavy lifting on text analysis and we look at the item titles and then we say, okay, we then can allow you to create a consensus view of what the best Italian restaurants are by merging them together.

For example, let’s say there’s a restaurant that you call Paizano and I call it Il Paizano. Our system will recognize that you’re talking about the same place and so Paizano appears on both lists. As you know, consensus building algorithms are not unknown. This is pretty well established, but nobody’s applied them to lists before we believe.

So all of a sudden what happens [on CityTools] is that then you the reader can say, “Hey, here’s Robert’s list and here’s Bob’s list. I want to see the consensus. Show me the ranked view of what both lists think is the most important.” And that’s cool if it’s two people. It gets really, really interesting if you have 25 people doing it or 100 people doing it and then it get really, really, really interesting if you can bring it up by geography.

Now imagine if the PTAs in San Francisco all put in their lists of their greatest needs at their school and they link them together. With one click then a reader can say, “Show me what the most serious needs are in the schools.” No one’s every been able to do this before. And we’re allowing people to determine the context in which it’s done, certainly they can say, “Okay show me what are the worst needs in San Francisco.” Oh guess what, you can expand the view to show me the rank list of the needs of schools in the entire Bay Area.

This gets powerful. I mean that is magic, man. I mean think about what this can mean for a society.

You start to pull these things together and what you’re looking at is a sandbox for community interaction that hasn’t existed before. Up until now, here’s what we had: You had UGC [user generated content] sites where people can create stuff, or you had shared news sites where they could share news. Okay. That’s fine. We do both. We say, “Look. You go in both modes, because sometimes you want to write stuff. Sometimes you want to read stuff.” Okay. There are a couple of sites out there where you can make lists, but you just write lists down. You can’t tie them together. You can’t link them together. You can’t do this other stuff that we’re doing.

When I was doing my big backpacking trip and thinking about this stuff, I decided, on a very cold night in the Sierras, to peel back newspapers to their essential core. You know? And part of that essential core has been creating marketplaces.

But the other part of it is this entire connective tissue argument is the way in which our reporting and the reading of those reports connects individuals to one another.

That’s what we’re trying to do: to get back to that essential core of allowing people to create these connections between the writer and their audience, between groups of people who are trying to get something done in a community.

That’s what I set out to find with my J309 class at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism this spring. The class is Annenberg’s “Introduction to Online Publishing,” a required capstone course in our undergraduate core curriculum and students’ first (and only) required course in online journalism.

This is the first year for the course and I wanted the students to leave the semester with an individual final project that showcased what they’d learned in both this course and the core curriculum. Along the way, I provided a brief history of Internet media and an overview of ethical and economic issues surrounding online publishing. The heart of the class was their individual blogs (linked in the blogroll), where I assigned weekly writing and reporting exercises.

Ultimately, I hoped that at least a few of the students would develop a love for online publishing, while the others would at least recognize how they
could create interactive and multimedia news projects with little technical effort.

To that end, I challenged students to find free online tools that would support such work. Below, I list the tools my students used this semester, followed by links to their final projects. (I did teach students basic HTML hardcoding skills, as well.)

Of course, online journalists can create far more engaging work with custom-programmed Flash movies, purpose-built content management systems and smart modification of a variety of open source development tools. But that is work for the advanced online journalism student. For these undergraduates, I did not want potentially intimidating development tools to squash what I hoped would be an emerging passion for working online.

And to further encourage that, I turned students loose to choose whatever topic they wished in reporting their final projects. Predictably, I got several food- and sports-related websites. But I don’t mind. Passion developed in personal web publishing projects can help inspire students to enliven more serious reporting projects in the future.

Tools

None of the following tools required programming skill to implement; all provided point-and-click user interfaces. And the price was right for a student budget, as all the following tools are free.

Blogger.com
Google’s blogging tool remains one of the Web’s more popular. Students used Blogger for their weekly class blogging assignments, and several used the tool to publish their final projects as well.

Google Maps
Google Maps weren’t on our radar until late in the semester, when Google introduced a customizing tool that allows users to create multipoint maps with user-supplied links and photos for each map point. Previously, one needed to use often-clunky third-part tools, or Google’s API to create such maps. With the new tool, however, tech novices can publish sophisticated custom maps with minimal effort. (Now, if only they could be embedded in a remote webpage….)

Google Pages
Google Pages allows users to publish flat webpages, using a selection of templates. Users can control the HTML within the template design, but do not have the flexibility that they would with hardcoding the page from scratch. As with many Google projects, Google Pages are in beta, and students encountered frequent connectivity problems when updating pages. Still, this proved to be a convenient alternative for students who were looking for Dreamweaver-like production environment, but who didn’t want to make the trek to a campus computer lab or buy their own software.

Jimdo.com
Lying somewhere between Google Pages and WordPress, Jimdo is another free, hosted webpage tool that allows users to create websites that break from the traditional blog format.

mixmonsta.com
Mixmonsta enables users to create embedded audio and video mash-ups through a relatively simple Web-based interface.

ProBoards
This is a handy, free, hosted online discussion board tool, which allowed one student to create a question-and-answer board for her project site, without having to install or manage a PHP or Perl application.

Slide.com
Slide’s been the go-to source for crafting Flash frat-party photo slideshows for MySpace pages. But there’s no reason why a journalism student couldn’t use the Slide tool for a news project. No, you don’t get the craftmanship of a custom Flash movie, but you can put these shows together in less than five minutes, and with zippo tech expertise needed.

Webshots.com
Webshots has long offered free photo hosting, but now also offers a Flash slideshow feature, like Slide.com. Some students preferred Webshot’s Flash app, saying that it looked more professional than Slide.com’s.

WordPress.com
WordPress seems like the king of blogging software at this point. But my students opted for the hosted WordPress.com platform, rather than take on the more technically challenging task of managing their own WordPress installation.

YouTube
There’s no easier way to put video on a blog than YouTube. All my students have used YouTube in the past, as viewers, and were pleasantly surprised to find how simply they could employ YouTube as publishers.

The Sites

ATLA Music
Helza Irizarry
Irizarry, and Atlanta resident, employed a variety of audio and video tools, along with WordPress, to create an online guide to the collision of Southern- and West Coast-flavored hip hop.

The BBQ Fanatic’s Guide to Texas-Style Ribs in L.A.
Megan Seely
Food blogs proved popular among my students, who embraced the chance to take care of meals and homework at the same time. Seely tried several cuisines before settling on her online homage to L.A.’s best B-rated BBQ dives.

Best Jazz in L.A.
Elsa Bertet
Bertet used still and video photography in her attempt to capture the viewing experience at a selection of clubs popular with USC students.

The Conquest of South Central
Carley Dryden
Dryden set out to investigate Conquest Housing, the largest private landlord for USC students living off-campus. She recorded many students’ horror stories with Conquest, the talked with university and real estate experts to provide perspective.

Down with Downtown
Kyle Cabodi
More USC students are living in downtown L.A., a mile or so up the road from USC’s campus. That, along with new commercial and entertainment development, are helping support revive residential development in the city’s historic core. Cabodi shot several photo galleries of downtown development and conducted interviews with developers and residents for his project.

L.A. Dinner and a Movie
Lindsey Kaiser
This project blended a smart mash-up of Blogger with custom Google Maps to provide a venue-based guide to good restaurants located near popular Los Angeles movie theaters.

The O.C. Source
Cindy Santos
Santos, an Orange County resident, said she wanted to create for Orange County what LAObserved publisher Kevin Roderick has done for Los Angeles.

Ride Hard
Sandra Altamirano
Altamirano documented her and her friends’ obsession with motorcycling on this blog, which used first-person accounts, interviews and, rather graphic, photo galleries.

Rotting Off the Vine
Geoff Rynex
Chicago Cubs fan Rynex used Jimdo and Blogger to reflect on his favorite baseball team, from 2,000 miles away, while providing links to other virtual gathering places for away-from-the-friendly-confines Cubs fans.

Ventura County Burger Shacks
Leland Ornelaz
Ornelaz ate is way across L.A. County’s northwest neighbor, eschewing chains for historic hamburger stands, which he photographed and reviewed for this blog.

Wine 101
Calli Fisher
Fisher turned 21 during the semester and celebrated by creating a site where students like her could learn to become knowledgeable wine drinkers.

Students and instructors from other universities are welcomed to describe their online journalism projects on OJR. E-mail editor Robert Niles — rniles [at] usc.edu — for more information.

Just five years ago only a handful of California community college student publications were online. Today 80 percent of the schools with publications have started online versions with many of the remaining 20 percent in the process of getting online. Many of those with the third-party vendor College Publisher, which provides a free content management system designed for college publications and represents more than 500 schools across the country.

California’s huge community college system boasts 109 campuses located from near the Oregon border to within site of the Mexican border. In any given year, about 65-70 of those schools publish a student newspaper or have a regular journalism program. Fifty-six of them now sport online publications –two-thirds of them through College Publisher.

Of course, getting online is only the start for student publications. To prepare students for tomorrow’s workforce, journalism program must revamp the thinking of students who are used to publishing a print edition only every other week, or less often. With online publications, students have the ability to treat breaking news with the urgency it requires. And students can learn new multi-media ways to tell stories. Not all are going to run across the problems the Collegiate Times at Virginia Tech had in the opening hours of the shooting tragedy it faced a few weeks ago — the site got so many hits it crashed — but every college publication can have the ability to compete with the mainstream press with the insightful coverage Times students provided once it got back online.

It will take a mindset change, though, from thinking about print deadlines and learning to post first, print later.

There are several stages college publication staffs have to go through to get online publications to the stage where students are getting effective training for the future.

Stage One

Get online. Start a site and get used to updating it on a regular basis. Content management sites, even if their output resembles blog output, are the easiest and most efficient ways to do this. Bryan Murley of Innovation in College Media has prepared a great discussion of how to get online tools for colleges. Among the most affordable for low-budget college programs is College Publisher’s CMS.

Stage Two

Shovel content from the print edition to the online edition. Most California community colleges are stuck at this stage. They create print edition and then move the content wholesale (often minus photos) over to the print edition. Any online exclusive content that might appear on the site is content that was created for the print edition but did not fit into the space.

Murley suggests that there needs to be an intermediate stage here where student journalists — shoot, all journalism publications! — need to start adding live links to their stories or posting links to original source documents. Not a bad idea.

He argues throughout his ICM site that publications have to be willing to let their readers stray away from the publication home sites from time to time to let readers have access to the most important information. Trust them and give them a good product and they’ll come back.

These links might include something as simple as a link in a movie review to the official movie web site.

Stage Three

The online becomes important. At this stage students are comfortable enough to consider design of the web site important.

(Actually, some schools have a parallel Stage One where they bring in an HTML techie who wants to wow the world with a complex design — remember the old IBM commercials where the techie asks whether the client wants a spinning logo or a flaming logo? Journalism/content takes a back seat. Programs that have faced this parallel step like their product initially, but find it too difficult to maintain once the techie moves on.)

Design is important, but content rules. At Stage Three students start to experiment with some true web-exclusive content. They may start with breaking stories or see the value of different story forms, such as video, podcast or slideshows (with sound).

At some point, possibly here in the evolution of Stage Three, Murley argues, publications need to start thinking about community and involving their readers in the process. The publication of tomorrow will not be one where the journalist decides what stories to tell, the readers will. Witness the success of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. Student publications will become irrelevant if they don’t invite their readers to become a part of the process.

Stage Four

The online is fully integrated into the process. Stories routinely are told in forms designed for online, including blogging, podcasting, videos and more. Updates, exclusives, etc., are common.

Stage Five

Who knows? At this stage the online prevails. Some suggest that it will replace the print edition. Clearly the online publication dominates the thought process in storytelling. Print becomes a convenient way to reach other audiences instead of being the main audience. Your readers are engaged with the online publication and provide content and comments. They hold you accountable with access to instant participation.

While most California community colleges are still stuck in Stage Two — not a surprising result given the number of schools that have gone online in just the last year or two — some are stepping into Stage Three. According to that recent survey of programs, only 14 percent said they tend to post stories first and consider print later. But three-fourths reported that they regularly have online exclusives on their sites. Three-fourths of them contain interactive polls — a built-in feature on the College Publisher sites. And while only a quarter of the publications reported including podcasts, videos or blogs, 51 percent of them said they regularly contain slideshows.

A simple tool they are using to create those slide shows is SoundSlides, a shareware program that easily combines graphics and audio into attractive slideshows.

While advertising is important to the financial health of any student publication, few California community colleges have tapped into the online advertising market. Those who sign through College Publisher forfeit national advertising to the company; that’s the price of the otherwise free tool. And few, 21 percent, have developed strategies for attracting local online ad sales. But it is early in the process; two years ago that number would have been closer to zero.

For more…

Related blog sites that talk about online student publications:

• Innovation in College Media
• Journalism Association of Community Colleges blog

Journalists should be excited by the Internet. On the Web, words, pictures, video and audio can be woven together in ways that tell stories more effectively than is possible with any of these mediums alone. But in order to weave exceptional, rich, carefully planned online stories, you have to become proficient at a lot of techniques, skills and technologies, many of which you probably thought you were avoiding when you chose journalism as a career.

To help you learn some of these skills and start experimenting with online journalism, we’ve assembled a list of sites and programs that will help you quickly and easily begin using multimedia and the internet to advance your reporting and your storytelling. All of these applications are low-cost. Most are free, though some ask you to pay to access advanced functionality. All are free of spyware and adware, as far as we know (though it is always good to do an Internet search on anything you download and install to be sure). And each should make the work of creating great journalism online at least a little easier.

Our list of easy online publishing tools is a wiki, so please feel free to add links to tools that you’ve used, which fit our criteria, and that are likely to be of great use to other online journalists as well.

About nine months ago, I decided to free myself from the shackles of submission editors and paper-based journalism and join the legions of writers who publish online.

I dabbled in journalism in college at my school newspaper while earning a computer science degree, but left it behind for a career in computers. After six years of managing and implementing systems integrations, serving off and on as a systems administrator and cringing as I saw America get less and less well-informed, though, I decided to return to journalism and see if I couldn’t be of some help.

I am convinced that systems to better manage reporting and reporters are essential to the future of news, as important as reporters putting boot to pavement and talking to people, face to face. I have had trouble convincing editors of this, however, and so I decided to become a blogger.

As a blogger, my mom can read my work whenever she wants. I can publish articles on conspiracy theories and journalism technology, even when I can’t find anyone who thinks people will be interested. And as I blog, I’ll also be gaining the kind of down-and-dirty knowledge of Web publishing software I need to make some of my ideas a reality. It’s going to be great.

Finding a blog tool

I looked into hosting packages as well as sites like blogger.com and typepad.com and tried to answer some basic questions. Will I need to be able to serve more than one site, for instance – one for weightier work and one for food writing and pictures of pigeons and the microscopic dogs people carry in their purses here in New York? Do I need to be able to customize CSS or to allow guests to write on my site? I even studied the hardware requirements and features of various blogging programs and considered building a server myself.

After careful consideration, I decided on a professional account at typepad.com for its good balance between ease of use, features I thought I needed – multiple blogs with pictures of rats on subway tracks are in, and so are guest bloggers – and the ability to customize. The available templates are pretty obviously pre-built, but you at least can choose from many layouts and tweak the CSS. Best of all, I don’t have to worry about operating system updates or patching databases or Web servers.

My first blog site is named sideways_reporting, implying that journalists need to collaborate more with each other – between publications, across great distances, etc. And if you haven’t heard of it, it’s because I haven’t posted a word to it in the nine months I have been paying for the account. I am still keeping Mom and the rest of the world waiting.

After weeks spent finding the perfect mix of features and flexibility for all the things I hoped to do, when push came to shove and I actually looked at what it would actually take to get my blog up and running, the solution I chose ended up being too complicated for what I had the time and desire to do.

Tech should serve content, not the other way around

In focusing on features and technical specs, I ignored what I think is the single most important factor in choosing software (or choosing a car, creating a budget, planning reporting for an article, designing software, etc.): before you do anything else, you need to step back, take stock at a basic level of how much time, money and skill you have to dedicate to online publishing, then decide how you want to use your resources.

Many people who publish online want to learn more about the technologies involved in blogging and publishing on the Web, especially given journalism’s employment insecurity, the value of computer skills in the job market and the sex-appeal of the hacker archetype (like the guy in the laptop commercial who walks into a cafe where a panic-stricken businessman is staring at a smoking laptop, closes the computer, places a new one down in its place, and walks out without saying a word – that is hard core).

Learning about technology is a great goal, and journalists must become more technologically literate, even beyond the career advantage it offers. The better journalists understand technology, the more chance there is that they can use it to inform better reporting and presentation of the news.

But time is valuable, and technology can soak up any and all time you have to give, if you let it. If you are reading this, chances are you are a journalist and not an IT worker. Before you even begin to look for Web publishing software, be brutally honest about what you want to accomplish online. If it involves writing and reporting, don’t let the siren song of technical knowledge or advanced features trick you into making decisions that will keep you from reporting news.

Regardless of your technical skill, it is easy to under-estimate the amount of your time managing your publishing software will take, and increased technical skill complicates things. You can do more, but you become tempted to take on work that you can manage if all goes well, but that can become overwhelming if things go wrong.

Should you decide, for instance, that you really want to learn about the technology involved in Internet publishing (or save on hosting), you might look at hosting your blog or website on your own server.

Hosting your own

Hosting your own website can be a great way to save money on hosting fees. You have the opportunity to learn about installing, configuring, securing, and using a range of technologies, from relational databases to Web servers to scripting languages. You get full control over configuration, implementation details and an imposing array of acronyms. If you are a mad genius trying to push the bounds of Internet news, you’ll never be limited by someone else’s rules.

You’d learn a lot this way, but you will be doing all of the operating system and application updates, all of the installing and configuring and all of the maintenance on your site yourself, just you and either the Unix shell prompt or the blank stare of a Windows desktop.

And you really must keep your software up-to-date. A minor security hole in one program could allow a hacker to exploit other bugs that deliver control of your whole server, and once a hacker gets that kind of access to your system, about the only way to guarantee that it is clean is to erase the hard drive and install everything from scratch. No program is too little to ignore.

Securing and configuring everything also can become a challenge as you update software. The new version of one program you need might not work with an older version of another essential program. You can try to reconfigure the connection between the two (which can range from easy to infuriating) but if you can’t get them to work together, you might be forced to decide between using older, less secure versions of programs or making up a new way of implementing whole sections of your site.

This strategy requires a considerable amount of work when all goes well (and even then it will create frustration), and things will not always go well.

Eventually you will suffer a hack attempt or a hardware failure and you will learn a great many things the hard way, in a very short amount of time. There’s no glamor here. Your site could be down for days, or could be lost entirely if you don’t have a good backup strategy (which you should – at least back up to a USB hard drive once a week). Your marriage, relationships, friendships, etc. will suffer. You will disappear from the Web and be unable to tell anyone why, even as the struggle to figure out which piece of hardware or software is causing the problem, what Web server patch you forgot to apply, slowly turns you into a desperate poster to tech forums and open source FAQs.

Hosting your own server can be done by a journalist, and you definitely would learn from the experience, but as you can see, it demands much non-journalism work and requires figuring out how to deal with a broad range of problems, most unforeseen.

Get someone else to host

Don’t worry if that sounds like a little too much for you. There is a reason many of the IT professionals you see walking around are pale and haunted looking, sometimes with a nervous twitch. I am a little haunted myself (I rarely admit to knowing anything about computers in polite conversation, and when someone figures it out, I cringe, waiting to hear something like “While I’ve got you, I’ve got this problem with my AOL email…”)

Maintaining creative control over your website without taking on all the responsibility for keeping a server up and secure is still possible, through different hosting plans. Hosts offer services ranging from housing a server that you have configured and continue to manage, to allowing you to use a server whose software is installed and maintained by the host.

When you sign on with a host, you usually pick between packages that let you decide how much the host manages and how much data you are allowed to serve out. As the host manages more of the software installed on your server, your cost increases and you sacrifice some control. Your money should include technical support, though, and while it feels good to know you installed and configured every piece of software you use, it can also be nice to have someone you can call at any time if you notice problems or have a question, and letting someone else worry about software updates and security gives you time to do other things.

Forget the hosting, and just blog

You also can throw in the technical towel, as I have for now, and get an account at a blog hosting site like blogger.com or typepad.com . They worry about keeping the server running, allowing you to focus on becoming comfortable with Internet publishing at a high level, first, and reporting news.

You won’t have exceptional flexibility or control, but you can still change your site’s basic layout and choose between different color schemes, and you can use blog sites to make some pretty substantial Web news destinations. Don’t let the generally accepted definition of a blog fool you. This is powerful, flexible publishing software and it can host a variety of content, not just short, sometimes poorly written and underreported opinion pieces.

In the end, regardless of the strategy you choose for publishing on the Web, keep the following in mind:

• Your best-case estimate of how much time you’ll have to spend dealing with technology is probably too optimistic (unless you have an account at a blog site);
• The worst case can take up a whole lot of time and might involve your site being offline for some time;
• And it is better to over-estimate the cost of maintaining a certain strategy than to be overly optimistic.

Also remember that while this is an important decision, it isn’t exactly life or death. If you err on the simple side and end up feeling limited by the constraints of your myspace page or friendster blog, you can always switch to another hosting strategy, and take your content too (though pulling off the migration can be a challenge). And if you find the opposite is true and your solution is too technical, don’t be too proud to ratchet down your expectations and find a simpler way to get your stuff online.

In the process of writing this article, I once again logged in to my typepad account to see if it could be simple enough to let me get started blogging while I planned my next move. I considered other options, even myspace and friendster pages if that was what I needed to start writing. I finally decided I could get a very basic typepad configuration implemented in a couple of weeks that will require minimal maintenance and let me write while I plan my next move.

I want to start reporting repositories where journalists can access not only the 20% of reporting that makes it into a finished article, but also all the other stuff, information that might lead them in a different direction or help them to angle the story differently so that it can be more accessible to an audience they want to reach.

For now, however, I am going to use my blog to post longer reported pieces, put the reporting I can easily put in a digital format online, write shorter analytical pieces that expand on and emphasize select points from each article and then see how readers react.

It won’t necessarily be the future of journalism, but you’ve got to start somewhere and it is a first step.

And that first step is key. The features you select in online publishing software are important, and it is a great idea to pick a hosting strategy or software that will help you to learn more about Internet publishing technology and take advantage of technical skills. But remember not to lose sight of why you are trying to get on the Internet in the first place – reporting and writing.

As a Web journalist, you need to figure out how much you want to allow technology to keep you from gathering and sharing information and always keep this tradeoff in mind as you choose how to put your journalism on the Web.

For more in-depth information on choosing a Web host, check out the following sites:

• How to Choose a Web Host (thesitewizard.com ) – Written by Christopher Heng, this is a simple overview of things to consider when choosing a Web host by someone who understands the tradeoffs inherent in the choice.
• How to Choose a Web Hosting Service (ISP) for your Business Web Pages (wilsonweb.com) – This is an article from a Web marketing group that offers a little more detail on some of the points in the first web page, but that is still at a high enough level to be accessible.
• General Web Hosting Articles (thewhir.com) – Articles and a glossary from the Web Hosting Industry Review. I poked around this site, and if you are looking for in-depth information, this looks like a good choice. It is not only for people looking for a host, but also for hosts themselves, so some articles might be too technical for the casual Web journalist. But don’t let that scare you away. From what I read, these people know what they are doing and seem fair and accurate, as much as I would ask of any journalist.

This is definitely a short list, and I am sure I haven’t found all of the best resources on Web hosting. If you decide to go with hosting and come across other good sources of information, please let me know so we can check them out and pass them along.