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May 29, 2008
Musings on Kelsey’s Drilling Down on Local: Marketplaces, Seattle
Newspapers Increasing Focus on Verticals, Local Search
The following is a guest posting from Peter Krasilovsky, program director for The Kelsey Group.
At the Kelsey Group, we have just concluded our latest conference dedicated to the future of local advertising: Drilling Down on Local: Marketplaces. Held in Seattle April 29 through May 2, the three day extravaganza attracted 476 executives, including a larger number of newspaper executives than usual – maybe 20. It is always interesting to us that these high level conferences never get very many newspapers to attend.
Podcasting on the Rise
Edison/Arbitron Research Shows Increasing Use
Podcasting, like most things Webby, is continuing to grow in the United States.
A new report from Edison Media Research and Arbitron states that although awareness of podcasts (among all U.S. people age 12 and older) is stable at 37 percent, the number of Americans using podcasts is increasing.
May 28, 2008
Behind the Winning Entries: Savannahnow.com
Weekly, now through the end of summer, I’ll be posting one of the winning Digital Edge Award entries from the 2008 awards. All the entries are available in the report “Behind the Winning Entries,” but posting them here over time may make them more digestible and spark ideas in your newsroom as different issues come up in your communities. Here’s our latest installment:
Most Innovative Visitor Participation (print circ. <75,000):
'Creating a Two-Way Conversation with Our Community'
Savannahnow.com/Savannah Morning News
 Contact for This Entry:Susan Catron
Executive Editor
Savannah Morning News
Visitors to www.savannahnow.com can… post blogs, upload photos, interact on our message boards, rate a story, create a profile page, have their own avatar identifying them and their contributions, create an online group, vote in polls, comment on stories, bookmark pages, make a buddylist, place an ad, keep a blogroll, post an event, rate other users and hear their own voice from Vox Audio. In others words, we mean it when we tell our site visitors, “It’s not about us…it’s about you!”
Our Web site is creating a two-way conversation where before it was a one way-conversation. We are again becoming the voice of the people. Vox Populi is where people call in and leave messages about topics of interest. We used to print them in the newspaper and online but we wanted the public to be able to hear the voice of the person. We use Evoca technology and you can see how well it works.
Social networking is a large part of savannahnow.com. One of our main “food group” sections of our site is all about community interaction. It is the Share section. From Share, visitors can access all of the social networking and interactive areas or our site.
Blogging is one of the fastest growing parts of savannahnow.com. (Here is a blog about an out-of control bus driver, for example.)
PIXels is our photo sharing section of savannahnow.com. PIXels is broken down into two sections: Your Pix and Our Pix. We create community photo galleries around topics of interest. Site visitors can use the site to upload their own photos to share with friends, family and the community. They can also see photos taken at local events not often covered by the newspaper where the focus in on the experience and those attending an event, rather than reporting on the event itself.
Site guests can create Online Groups around areas of interest such as favorite TV shows, food, kayaking and many others. (Here is one on parenting.)
Each visitor can create an account, customize their member page, add friends, list likes, create groups and from their profile page. And, you can see their recent blog posts, stories, photos uploaded etc. Upon creating their account the visitor then has a dashboard at the top right of every page that offers quick links to accomplish key tasks.
All reporters have a profile page that is linked to from their bylines. Here is the personal profile page for Scott Larson, government reporter for the Savannah Morning News. This allows readers to get to know the staff and communicate directly with them.
Site visitors are encouraged to comment and rate stories. The option to comment and rate a story is available at the bottom of every story published on the site.
Savannahnow.com offers more opportunity for the community to have a conversation with itself. It holds the newspaper accountable by offering our readers an immediate way to provide feedback on our stories. It provides members of the community a voice to share their thoughts or ideas.
May 23, 2008
Behind the Winning Entries: Palm Beach Post's Classifieds E-mail Renewals
Weekly, now through the end of summer, I’ll be posting one of the winning Digital Edge Award entries from the 2008 awards. All the entries are available in the report “Behind the Winning Entries,” but posting them here over time may make them more digestible and spark ideas in your newsroom as different issues come up in your communities. Here’s our latest installment:
Best Digital Classified Innovation (circulation 75,000 – 250,000): PalmBeachPost.com
 Entry submitted by:Dan Shorter
General Manager
PalmBeachPost.com
What’s the easiest and cheapest way to add about $250,000 in annual classified revenue?
Answer: Create an automated e-mail system which notifies customers when their ads are about to expire, offers a discount to keep their business and allows them to go online to renew themselves or click a button to be direct-connected to the phone center to renew – and maybe place another ad.
PBNotify is a program which scans our customer classified ad database each day, searching for listings about to expire and then e-mails the customers with the text of their ad as well as ways to renew the ad.
We developed an automated system because our call center reps couldn’t make all the renewal calls.We were leaving money on the table because we didn’t have time.
So we used computers and e-mail. Our goals were to create an easy-to-use program that would allow us the most flexibility and make it possible to reach out to each type of customer with a different message.
For example, we send different and appropriate messages to real estate, autos, merchandise and recruitment customers with category-specific instructions on how to renew their ads.
Our main challenges were to contact as many of our customers as possible, keep the system simple so it could be easily expanded to include our sister publications, make sure we did not contact those customers that did not want to be contacted and try to track the results of this new campaign as much as possible.
Our team spent many hours working on the requirements documents needed to build the program to ensure all our criteria were met and that the program would serve our needs for several years.
With the requirements complete, our in-house programmer took the spec and had the program available for testing in December 2006.
 Since PBNotify’s launch in early January 2007 we have sent out over 30,000 renewal notification emails to customers and received a response rate of at least 5 percent. (We say “at least 5” percent because we are unable to track customers that dial into our Call Center to renew their ads when receiving the renewal notification. This is our response rate without including these customers.)
Our online classified ad placement system alone has seen over 600 new renewal ads since the launch of PBNotify. These 600 ads account for $60,000 that may not have been realized without PBNotify.
Since our online system accounts for about 25 percent of our ads, we estimate the call center will receive triple the number of renewals this year – or more than 1,800 ads for $180,000+.
We included several items in the notification e-mails to make it easy and intuitive for the customer to renew their ads:
• An image of their ad and all the specific ad information to help the customer remember which ad they need to renew (since some customers have multiple ads).
• An eStara link which when clicked will connect the customer directly to the correct call center sales team to renew their ad.
• A link which directs the customer to our online ad placement site where they can renew their ad 24 hours a day.
We believe because of its financial impact as well as making it easier for our customers to renew ads that PBNotify is worthy of a Media Innovation Award.
The project was led by Tim Wambach with programming by Dale Swaim and with overall plan management by Gina Wilcox and Dan Shorter.
May 21, 2008
Macy's Goes Local, Commits to Newspapers
Macy’s is going local with their Web sites, and continuing their commitment to print newspaper advertising.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Peter Sachse, Macy's chief marketing officer and chairman of Macy's online division, said Macy’s will be using local media – including newspapers! – to target consumers who may have been sad to lose their locally-branded department stores when Macy’s renamed them over the past several years. In addition, each store will be able to tailor part of their offerings to local tastes. New online features for macys.com will launch by this Fall.
The moves are part of an initiative called “My Macy’s.” Here’s are just a few excerpts from the WSJ interview:
WSJ: How has the importance of newspaper advertising changed as readers migrate to the Internet?
Sachse: Newspapers, as you know, have declined. That's all there is to it. They have fewer eyeballs. As a marketer, you have to go where the eyeballs are. Having said that, we believe strongly in newspapers, always have, and in the foreseeable future, always will. Something could change, but I don't see it. ... When you think about how we are going to deliver "My Macy's" and those localized ideas, it is going to come from newsprint predominantly.
WSJ: What other strategies are you thinking about in order to get the "My Macy's" message to consumers?
Sachse: Frankly, we need to get the "My Macy's" organization set up, and let them begin to localize those [merchandise] assortments. Once they have done that then the marketing will follow. ...We can do that through the Internet, by locally targeting ads to a ZIP code. And I can do it in terms of newsprint as well.
May 20, 2008
Nielsen @Plan: Newspaper Sites Attract Affluent, Politically Interested Visitors
Data from Nielsen's @Plan service highlighted that newspaper Web site visitors are more politically engaged than their Internet counterparts. The data also indicates that people who read newspaper Web sites are more affluent and multi-media savvy than the online audience as whole.
May 19, 2008
Making History in the Desert
Las Vegas Sun Goes Back in Time
 This is how you do it.
Any newspaper looking at developing a history of their local market (one of the suggestions of Newspapers Next) should go to www.lasvegassun.com/history.
This project on the history of Las Vegas goes far beyond repackaging archives. It includes panoramas, videos of implosions, interactive casino development maps, podcasts, and features on local "personalities". In addition, the home page captures a ton of non-casino events, including the diversion of the Colorado River and the Nevada Proving Grounds bomb tests.
The only weakness seems to be that there’s a lack of super-relevant advertising. The first few sections of the project I visited had ads for Vonage, iRobot and an online education company. Nothing from the Nevada tourism association, an airline or hotel.
From an editorial standpoint, however, the team in the desert did some amazing work.
The following is a guest posting from Dave Toplikar*, new media managing editor at the Las Vegas Sun, with details about putting together this project.
We started the history project, “The History of Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada,” back in the fall and hoped to launch it in January when we launched the new Sun Web site. Then the more we got into the history project, the more we found and we decided to delay it’s launch until we had lots more cool elements. We picked May 15 to do it because that’s Vegas’ birthday.
Here are some more details, in no particular order:
We brought in seven UNLV journalism interns in November to help us work on the history project and other evergreen projects prior to our Jan. 10 site launch. Five of them were the students we met at the Online News Association conference in October 2007 in Toronto, who were part of the the Knight News Foundation’s grant for creating new innovative ideas for storytelling on the Web.
I assigned special projects editor Andy Samuelson to organize the interns and map out the project. They spent many days working in the Sun’s morgue, looking for old stories and photos. Andy spent numerous days working with the interns, lining up interviews with local historians, and working with UNLV special collections people and with KLAS-TV.
Those interns and two others we brought in helped us scan more than 1,000 photos and locate lots of old video footage. They also typed-in some 150 vintage stories from the Sun’s morgue that weren’t part of the electronic database. They also helped us write cut lines for the photos.
We brought in two Sun veteran writers, Mary Manning and Ed Koch, to help us write some of th 30-plus project specific stories and do research to help us find more photos and information.
The interactive functionality of the casino map and the clickable historic timeline was created by Zach Wise, our senior multimedia producer/editor who came to us from Ohio University, where he lead the Soul of Athens project.The artwork for the casino maps was created by our own staff, including one of our interns, Bethany Acree, and Billy Steffens, a multimedia technician we brought in from [the Lawrence Journal-World], and Todd Saligo, our new media art director, who we brought in from [the Naples Daily News].
The 11-part documentary, “Boomtown: The Story Behind Sin City,” was developed by Sun videographer Matt Toplikar, who is has a film degree from the University of Kansas. The documentary is broken up into decades, from the time the city got its start as a railroad stop, to the year 2000, when it became “the entertainment capital of the world.” Matt researched and wrote the narrative for the documentary and did all the production and sound work. Brian Greenspun, the Sun’s president and editor, narrated the documentary. Many members of the Sun’s new media staff helped in the preparation of the documentary.
Mob interactive: This include a lengthy story written by senior Sun writers Ed Koch and Mary Manning about the connections Las Vegas’ early casinos had with mobsters from Chicago, New York and other cities. After that story was written, Todd Saligo, our senior designer, worked with Andy Samuelson to create an interactive graphic that shows how the mobsters were connected to each other and to certain cities.
The project also includes several stand-alone videos by Zach Wise and Trent Ogle, former Arkansas-Democrat Gazette videographer who also worked as a TV news videographer in Little Rock, Ark., for 10 years.
The final design was created by Todd Saligo, senior designer, and Tyson Evans, the Sun’s new media design editor, and Samuelson and others.
The Sun’s newroom helped us with the editing and final reviews of the project.
* Disclosure: I worked with Dave at the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World in 2003 - 2004.
Newspapers Have Strong Showing, Drudge Tops Nielsen List Again
Although DrudgeReport.com has the highest number of sessions per person by far; Yahoo! News ranks highest in unique audience, followed closely by CNN Digital Network and MSNBC Digital Network.
Note that nine of the top 30 belong to newspaper companies!
May 15, 2008
Newspaper People Receive News Challenge Grants
 John S. and James L. Knight Foundation yesterday announced the winners of the News Challenge grants for 2008.
The News Challenge is a program that grants seed money to individuals and groups to use digital media to promote journalism in a geographic area. Oh, and the projects need to be completed with open-source programs. The Knight Foundation set aside $25 million, or about $5 million for five years, to fund these grants.
This year, two U.S. newspaper-focused people won grants. They are Dan Pacheco of The Bakersfield Californian (and one of the minds behind Bakersfield’s InsideGuide and Bakotopia), and Ryan Sholin of GateHouse Media, where he is director of community site publishing.
Pacheco’s project will focus on niche publications. Here’s the project description from the News Challenge site:
Printcasting will allow individuals to easily create ad-supported, customized publications with a mix of local news and information. The software will help aggregate feeds from news organizations, bloggers or newsletters, for example, so that would-be publishers can pick and choose among them to create a niche publication. The Printcasting model then will guide users through placing articles, photos and ads onto a template that either could be delivered by e-mail or printed at home and distributed. For example, a publication for reef-diving photographers could include ads for nearby dive shops or underwater cameras. The idea is to pair localized ads and content to create targeted publications.
Sholin’s project will connect reporters who are working on similar projects across regions through social networking.
Reporters working on similar topics will be able to communicate and share ideas using a social networking tool and a web site created through this project. The site will indicate how many journalists across the country are working on the same issue, such as declining tax bases or water problems. Reporters then could exchange resources and approaches, or use one another’s communities as examples in their own stories. Journalists in small newsrooms often feel isolated. Given the opportunity to communicate with others, a reporter can add context to articles and, perhaps most importantly, know when a seemingly small local story is part of a larger regional, or national, trend.
Other projects in the News Challenge focus on mobile news, community-produced video content, radio and new editorial management systems.
Also, Web-celeb Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Martin Moore received a grant to create a system that will help the public find fair and accurate news.
The News Challenge site has descriptions for all the projects, as well as biographies of all the grantees. For the 2007 grants, MediaShift blogger Mark Glaser hosted a group blog for grantees called Idea Lab. I believe that blog will continue.
May 14, 2008
Behind the Winning Entries: DallasNews.com Real Estate Video Tours
Weekly, now through the end of summer, I’ll be posting one of the winning Digital Edge Award entries from the 2008 awards. All the entries are available in the report “ Behind the Winning Entries,” but posting them here over time may make them more digestible and spark ideas in your newsroom as different issues come up in your communities. Here’s our latest installment:
Best Digital Classified Innovation (circulation > 250,000): Dallas Morning News Real Estate Video Tours
 Entry submitted by:Karen Davis
Interactive Creative Director
DallasNews.com, The Dallas Morning News
(214) 977-8222
Strategy: The sales team recognized the potential of true real estate video tours and the need for quick action. They took sales pieces out to advertisers and talked them through the proposed video experience. The response wasn’t the typical “how much will it cost me”. Instead, we experienced “how soon can I get this”? The team sold 80 videos in less than 30 days.
Innovation: Launching a program in the real estate market in November is risky as builders are often looking to liquidate. But, there was no price objection when we went to market because no one else was offering true streaming video home tours. Panning still images were being presented as video at that time and advertisers quickly saw the advantages of this offering. We got a good price by being first to market and by offering video production, hosting and allowing the advertiser to link to the video from their own site.
Adaptability: This type of program in easily adaptable in other markets and other verticals. We are in the process of offering a similar technology for store tours in our shopping area.
Impact: The results surpassed our initial expectation. We received $80,000 in incremental revenue in just two months. Advertisers loved it and commented it was a great driver to get people out to the properties. The videos alone generated 8,219 page views.
May 13, 2008
Economics of Social Media: New Revenue, New Business
The following is a guest posting from Randy Bennett, vice president, New Business & Audience Development at NAA.
On April 29, I attended paidcontent.org’s Economics of Social Media conference in Los Angeles. The event covered topics ranging from online video to traditional media role in social media to advertiser perspectives. Full coverage of the event is available at paidconent.org.
Here are a few highlights:
“Social Media is the New Local.”: So says Marketwach.com founder and venture capitalist Larry Kramer. We all know that the Internet has redefined consumers’ perspectives on “community.” New social media tools, according to conference speakers, have accelerated that shift. While a few speakers acknowledged that local (i.e. geographic) community is still important – and profitable – social media tools have elevated the importance of extended communities (friends, business, shared interests), or, as almost every speaker defined it, users’ “social graph.”
The “Activity Web:” Fabled venture capitalist Geoff Yang described the emergence of the Web as a platform for “social activity” like visiting a mall. Web publishers, he advised, should focus on how to leverage social media tools to facilitate social activity such as shopping, gaming, site seeing, etc.
Monetizing Social Media: Several speakers focused on the need for marketers to get into the conversation in a non-intrusive way. In other words, be relevant without being obnoxious. Kinsey Wilson, executive editor of USA Today, said “advertisers want to be associated with new and innovative, but at the same time, they want the safe and proven.” Another theme was that “monetization follows audience.” Speakers suggested that you don’t need “mega-hits,” as long as you’re attracting a loyal audience that advertisers care about.
Yahoo! EVP Jeff Weiner said the challenge is “to identify consumer ‘intention’ ina social media environment. How can we identify and serve advertisers based on that intention?” (e.g. marketing to two people communicating about sushi restaurants in L.A.).
And MTV’s EVP of digital advertising Nada Stirratt offered four challenges for making more money:
1) Get into the results’ business
2) Gain scale with a broader portfolio
3) Provide better ad sales service (operations, processes, bodies)
4) Learn how to thread advertising into the middle of the conversation
“Curators of Content”: The notion of Web publishers, including newspapers, as curators of content, has gained much traction. The strategy is to aid users’ discovery process by providing the tools, organization and editing that will lead them to relevant, and quality, content. USA Today’s Wilson described his company’s three-pronged “curating” strategy, which includes 1) producing original content, 2) facilitating content creation through social media tools, and 3) aggregating/tagging content to provide relevant results.
Similarly, Sports Illustrated’s digital chief Jeff Price said his company’s strategy includes: unbundling its content from the Web site, building programs to sell content wherever it resides and using SI content and tools to empower conversations happening on the social networks.
Steve Wadsworth, president of the Walt Disney Internet Group, shared their strategy of “creating quality content and building a consumer base around that content that is sustainable for the long term.” Disney is not creating a platform (which aggregates thousands of small communities). Disney is providing context: leveraging brands into large communities with a common purpose.
For more information on these sessions and more, go to www.econsm.com.
May 09, 2008
Zooming In on Online Video: A Development & Growth Guide
Last year, research from the Newspaper Association of America revealed that the majority of newspaper Web sites features video. Results from this 2008 NAA survey, which looks more closely at the area, show newspapers' video operations are quite extensive. This is a pleasant and encouraging surprise from an industry going through a difficult period of change.
To help newspapers further develop their video initiatives, NAA has developed a guide to online video.
May 07, 2008
Newsroom Barometer: Partly Sunny Skies Ahead for Industry
World Editors Forum, Reuters release report
There are some really interesting results in the World Editors Forum/Reuters Newsroom Barometer report, released late yesterday. Zogby International conducted the survey. Here are a few of the results, with comments:
56 percent believe most news will be free in the future, up from 48 percent in 2006. This is good for democracy, giving more people access to more information, and maybe good for advertising, since more people may see advertising if the content around it is free. However, print circulation revenue does contribute a bit to most news companies’ bottom lines, so we’ll have to see how the numbers play out.
63 percent believe within 10 years, the most common form of news consumption will be electronic (online, mobile or e-book-style readers). This one is also mixed: Good for the environment (less paper), but we all know quite well that online CPMs and print advertising rates are very different. Even The New York Times Assistant Managing Editor said this week in an online chat that NYTimes.com revenues would not support the entire newsroom.
86 percent said an integrated print/online newsroom will be the norm in the near future. It’s good that news organizations are realizing this – integration, cross-platform collaboration and more will make the end product better, both in revenue and audience. However, as the report notes, many newspapers have bridges to cross before they get to that point.
According to the John Zogby’s analysis of the report, “For these editors the future is self-evident and our survey shows that they see the writing on the newsroom wall. The evolution of the 4th Estate is no longer questions of if, when or how. Editors now know the solution: Innovate. Integrate. Or perish.”
May 06, 2008
Behind the Winning Entries: Vita.mn
Weekly, now through the end of summer, I’ll be posting one of the winning Digital Edge Award entries from the 2008 awards. All the entries are available in the report “Behind the Winning Entries,” but posting them here over time may make them more digestible and spark ideas in your newsroom as different issues come up in your communities.
Best Local Guide or Entertainment Site (circulation group 250,000 or more): Vita.mn
Entry submitted by:
Matt Thompson
Minneapolis Star Tribune
(612) 673-4000
Vita.mn, the Star Tribune’s database- and user-powered arts and entertainment site, is now about a year old. In that time, we’ve implemented a new design, new functionality, blogs, articles, and an innovative user-reward scheme called “karma.”Users have responded by writing more than 10,000 top-ten lists for more than 800 topics, tagging more than 27,000 items, submitting more than 1,100 venue reviews and delivering more than 1.9 million pageviews.
One of our biggest experiments and biggest successes with vita. mn over the past year has been “karma”, the system we created for determining the site’s most valuable users. Users receive karma points for creating and contributing content, and receive exponentially more karma when their contributions inspire other users to participate. Every month, we award prizes to the users who’ve earned the most karma during the month. This has proven to be a popular, enjoyable, effective and transparent way of giving back to the users who contribute the most. The community of users that has coalesced around the site treats karma like a spectator sport, coming back each month to view the fun. (Read a conversation about October’s karma contest here.)
Lists showed early promise as being one of the flagship features of vita.mn. That promise was fulfilled this year with a special franchise issue of the associated weekly print product – “The List of Lists.” The issue was a reverse-publishing triumph, featuring a 19-page spread created by aggregating more than 3,000 lists written by site users.This user-centric take on the typical arts-and-entertainment weekly’s “Best of ” issue brought in plenty of positive buzz from blogs, local businesses and advertisers, and especially from users.
We’re now pioneering an approach to blogging that complements vita.mn’s interactive, democratic style. Our “Alexis on the Sexes” blog aggregates the site contributions of our sex and dating columnist – top-ten lists, venue reviews, event comments, forum posts and more. This means every post, as well as being interesting content in itself is an invitation to users to engage with these features of the site. Disagree with Alexis’ review? Post your own.
The past year has seen the addition of user-submitted photos for venues and events, which appear on the home page and most section fronts, as well as on the appropriate listings pages.
We’ve added interactive maps to venue and event pages. We recently partnered with a company,
InRadio, to deliver a Flash widget, updated weekly, featuring music from artists performing in the Twin Cities during the upcoming week(you’ll find this widget on the home page).
In October, we launched a redesign that drew nothing but positive reaction from users and bloggers. As part of this redesign, we made the site’s section fronts more dynamic, using the power of tagging to pull in relevant lists, guides and discussions from all over the site.
May 02, 2008
How to Get Your News on Google News Fast!
Short answer: API
A person from Google (who’s name I didn’t catch!) came to the NewsTools 2008 Conference this afternoon and gave a very helpful rundown of how to get your breaking news article onto Google News faster….
Newsroom and Community Connection Map
More from NewsTools 2008
Please check out these two awesome diagrams. They’re not directional, point-A-to-point-B maps. These are value network maps: The first diagram looks at the old news story (who’s involved, where the connections are between audience, source, producers, advertisers, etc.); the second one, below, looks at the emerging news ecology (editors as “sense makers” and a very different pathway between the audience, sources and others). These brilliant maps were drawn up by Sherrin Bennett with collaboration from the Journalism That Matters team.
For me, the maps were like a massive brain-dump (in the most positive sense of the term). A lot of us here at the NewsTools conference had pieces of these maps in our heads, in that we all had at least a theoretical understanding of these networked online and offline connections in the news world. The maps make these ideas concrete.
Separately, Robert Niles of the Online Journalism Review wrote about some of the problems with journalists, based on conversations he had yesterday at the conference. Among them: Impatience with unsolved problems (and a low tolerance for imperfection), and an unwillingness to serve drinks and dessert (the fun, lighthearted and interesting stuff) along with the vegetables (hard-hitting, investigative pieces) of journalism.
May 01, 2008
NewsTools 2008: Coverage
I’m in Sunnyvale, Calif., attending NewsTools 2008, part of the Journalism That Matters series. The conference brings together 150 technology people (social network builders, programmers, online community managers), journalists from legacy media companies, bloggers and broadcasters.
The goal of the conference is to look at participatory journalism and technology and discuss the opportunities and possibilities. In an e-mail to participants, Bill Densmore (of the Media Giraffe Project and one of the conference organizers) wrote, “We’re willing to share (perhaps irrational) exuberance about the future of journalism and participatory democracy – a sense of possibility, not dread.”
Tonight, Scott Karp (of Publish2) and Vineet Gupta (of Daylife) led a small-group discussion about aggregation as content, link blogging and how reliably sending people to interesting and useful places elsewhere on the Web can build loyalty. Google is one of the most popular sites in the world, Karp pointed out, and all Google does is send people off to other sites. Newspapers that present not only their own content, but also present relevant and interesting links to other content, can build audience loyalty the same way.
In the spirit of that conversation, I’ll send you off to blogs that are covering this conference more thoroughly than I can alone.
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