“…a friend of mine who’s a grad student at Columbia University launched a kind of localized New York City version of Digg. Rather than using the editor curator approach — like Huffington Post — all the users of the site are New Yorkers that submit NYC-related stories and vote up and down on them to get them to the front page. The site also allows users to publish their own blog posts into the news stream, so it’s also becoming a place for community journalism:

http://nyc.is/

Anyway, I thought this was neat and interesting because this isn’t your typical VC-funded start-up, but rather a grad school student who’s working on all this stuff from scratch. And I think it’s a cool approach to more localized news. I thought you and your readers might find it interesting.

Thanks for the Tip!  Keep them coming.  The following interview took place in the form of an email Q&A between Susannah Vila and metaprinter founder Robert Ivan.  Enjoy!

RI- Are you studying journalism at Columbia?
SV- I study political science and public policy.

RI- What got you interested in journalism?
SV- I became interested in how people get the information that allows them to be active citizens.  I wanted to be a journalist because I wanted to inform and engage people.  I want to work towards engaging more people with their government and their communities.  I will probably be doing many different types of things with that goal in mind.

RI- Are students still clamoring to get jobs with traditional media outlets?…or is there something new to reach for?
SV- I think it depends on the student, and on the j school they came out of.  CUNY and Medill are doing great things to foster innovation and an entrepreneurial attitudes. But while there are indeed many exciting new prospects for journalism in play right now, they do not offer a steady paycheck, so the understandable attitude among a lot of people my age is that they should do whatever they can do to get a full time job.

RI- What do you think of Jose Antonio Vargas leaving the Washington Post?
SV- I do think that it, at least to some extent, reflects larger trends in journalism. HuffPo is constantly innovating and adding new features; it mixes the work of paid, professional bloggers and reporters with unpaid and, not necessarily formally trained, ones.  They’re growing while the Washington Post shrinks.  And it’s because of this the Vargas will be able to start his own thing from scratch, which is always exciting.

RI- Do you subscribe to a traditional news publication like a newspaper or magazine?  If so, which ones?
SV- Yes, I subscribe to The Economist and the New Yorker.  Everything else I read online.

RI- Where do you get your news from?
SV- I get all my breaking news from Twitter. I read longer things on nytimes.com, HuffPo, and many more. I also have the WSJ and NYT Iphone apps.

RI- You started NYC.is, Why?  What purpose do you find it serving? Or, what is the goal of the site.
SV- The only hubs for aggregating and curating local news in New York when I started making the site were one-sided, top down outlets.  This was before the Huffington Post launched its New York vertical.  NYC.is will, I hope, become the place to publish, share and rate community, civic and citizen journalism about neighborhoods in the five boroughs.  There is no barrier to entry which, in addition to the self-curating aspect, is what sets us apart.

RI- What was your inspiration for the site?  It has been described to me as a kind of localized Digg.
SV- Yes, Digg and Reddit are the inspirations. As is Chicago’s TheWIndyCitizen.com

RI- At the end of the day, even the most noble of causes needs to make money.  Is there a revenue model?  What is it?
SV- Bloggers and independent reporters should be the ones benefiting in ad revenue from a site like mine. I want to help people promote their sites, and also help NYC community organizations to harness the web for more impact. So while I will at some point put some ads up, it’s not my first priority.

I will be offering consultation to people who want to replicate NYC.is  in other towns and cities, and that will probably involve some payment depending on how much of my time I devote to it.

RI- Zappos was just sold to Amazon.com for $880million.  What is the end game or exit strategy for NYC.is?
SV- The only thing I care about is that a real community forms on the site.  I’m so busy trying to make this happen, that I haven’t really thought beyond that.

RI- Metafilter founder Matt Haughey attributes his site’s sustainability to its active community. Baristanet does the same.  What is your community participation on nyc.is?
SV- It’s a struggle, since we’re so new. The site is very much an experiment, and the outcomes rest on whether or not New Yorkers think this is a good enough idea to take part in it.  It’s a big city, and there are lots of people for me to reach out to, so I am optimistic.

RI- You launched NYC.is recently, (March 2009) I see you have 106 contributors to the site.  Are you happy with the growth?
SV- At first (in March) I launched the site only to friends.  I didn’t begin the real effort to reach out and spread the word until a few months later.  The challenge is less about growth than it is about getting people to remain engaged with the site, returning on a regular basis.

RI- Technorati is tracking 13,945 blogs with NYC content… how do you compete with that?
SV- It’s great to be reminded of how many blogs are in the area—it makes me much more optimistic for our future! I don’t see Technorati as a competitor at all.

RI- Who is your biggest competitor? Do you think you have one?
SV- It depends on how you look at it.  If I saw major news outlets like HuffPo and like NBC as competitors, I’d be shaking in my boots. I’d prefer the site to be viewed as more of a facilitator for other blogs and websites.  NYC.is can help promote the work of small sites, and it can also help big sites to connect with members of the community it is trying to serve (including newer and lesser known local bloggers).

RI- How are you getting the word out about nyc.is?
SV- Well if you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them!  Right now we’re just relying on emails to the right people, Twitter, and our (slowly growing!) Facebook group. People have been very receptive.
RI- I suggest you email everyone at this url an invite it’s the aforementioned list of Technorati tracked blogs with NYC content. Also I might enlist some friends to plaster all the highest trafficked subway stops with NYC.is stickers but that would be illegal, so don’t do that.  I would put up a forum for members as well.  It can’t hurt and it might foster a better sense of community on the site.

RI- Traditional media is going bankrupt in the internet paradigm, it’s my opinion that you must solve the revenue problem before you can solve the sustainable journalism problem… would you agree or disagree?
SV- Disagree, because I don’t it is possible to “solve” the former without also–simultaneously– exploring the latter. You have to try out many different models for producing  and distributing good journalism before you can find out what works. And as you do that, you’ll probably discover  new ideas about revenue models.

RI- What is the role of the 4th estate in light of communications advances in the internet paradigm?
SV- Generally speaking, changes in the medium don’t necessarily change the role of the press.  The Internet may help legacy media institutions better serve the public, but only if they harness it.  One way to do this would be to behave receptively to the suggestions of their audience as much as possible, and that’s something that I think is really important.

RI- How will nyc.is compete / partner/  or coexist with Everyblock?
SV- I see people going to the two sites for different reasons…the idea of NYC.is is that it is a front page for the best of each day’s local stories, so I can check back there a few times a day just to see what people are voting on.  I see Everyblock as more of a source for specific information. I would go there if I heard about a robbery on my street and I wanted the details.  I think people are interested in both the best of their whole community and the news from the ten blocks on either side of their home. As to how they could collaborate, I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

RI- Have you considered adding a “spot.us” feature to your site where readers can fund an endeavor?
SV- Yes, that has definitely been a part of my plan from the beginning.  The first phase of the site is to get an active community of voters and sharers, and then to engage a wide swath of New Yorkers who are not necessarily with publishing their own stories about their communities.  Depending on the quality of what we end up with in this initiative, I want to set up a model for crowdfunding.  Perhaps by this time David Cohn will have released the source code for spot.us and someone will have made a widget for publishers to easily implement crowdfunding.  If not, I would contribute towards a Drupal module for that purpose in a heartbeat.

RI- No holds barred cage match: Jay Rosen vs Jeff Jarvis, who wins?
SV- Jeff Jarvis is much feistier.

RI- Is there anything you’d like to ask me?
SV- You are obviously someone who spends a lot of time online and pays close attention to the future of news, but do you regularly share and rate stories on a Digg, Reddit, or equivalent? Be honest.
RI- I rarely post to Digg or Reddit because things like Brittany Spears news will trump anything I put up.  I do however post or bookmark regularly to Delicious, Facebook, and Twitter where shared interests are often less nebulous. I also love interacting on ask.metafilter.

Lastly, I read digg and reddit but usually only via Trendalicious where Will Glozer has created a wonderfully simple website trend tracker.  I Highly recommend it to anyone who’ looking to see what’s hot NOW.
http://glozer.net/trendy/

RI- Do you own an eReader like a kindle or sony reader?  Why do newspapers keep pushing these things?
SV- No. If you grew up reading on a computer screen, why would you need a special, different device? The only people I know who have Kindles and use them to pay for news are my parents and their friends, so while I think that is a fine source of revenue in the short term, I’m not so sure about the long term.

Books, though, are another matter.  If I traveled a lot I would get a Kindle to read books on.

RI- Thank You for your time and keep us posted on your progress at NYC.is Readers can also keep up with Susannah via twitter at Twitter.com/SusannahVila
SV- Thanks!

RI- what is your affiliation with journalism online LLC?
MB- I am the strategy consultant at the moment, this is a start-up so we all have varied roles.

RI- I see in your Bio that you are an advisor to evri.com, a site that looks and feels to me like a news aggregator, does this complicate your involvement with Journalism Online LLC?
MB- No, it’s not an aggregator at all it is a natural language search site that builds related topics pages for new sites and others.  Our largest distribution deal is with WashingtonPost.com and if you look at the bottom of every new story page you’ll see our widget there.

*RI- I’ve never seen the widget because ever since the WashingtonPost put up their membership wall, I don’t visit the site.  But for the purposes of this interview I backed in through Google News and found the widget here:

RI- Do you have a domain name picked out or a name for your site?
MB- No, our brand is still something we are thinking through.  The corporate entity, Journalism Online LLC, is the only naming we have decided on.

RI- What publishers have agreed to sign on?
MB- We have no deals to announce since we launched 2 days ago, but we are speaking with many interested parties.

RI- Do you have a Facebook or Twitter account?  Do the other founders?
MB- Me personally, yes.  Gordon has both as well.  For the company, we are building our own Facebook and twitter pages and strategies right now.  …Social media development is an important part of succeeding online.

RI- What free news sites do you visit personally?
MB- Ha!  That’s a ridiculous question because you know I’m going to say MSNBC.com because I built it in 1996!  I don’t have any great insights into that except to say that it’s my homepage.

RI- Do you see a free site like MSNBC.com as a free competitor to what you are attempting to do with Journalism Online LLC?
MB- Not necessarily, They’re in the same bucket as people who produce newspapers and wire services who produce content and are looking for greater margins and new revenue streams.  They have great ambitions and would like to hire more people and do new things, though I haven’t spoken to them i’m sure they are intersted in creating new subscription products.  We’ll be talking to them in the future I’m sure.

RI- Do you expect traffic to go down if a publisher sign on to your service and puts up a pay wall?
MB- Of course we expect a loss of audience in the short term as habits evolve but we certainly don’t see a loss in revenue.  Over the long term, those audiences will return in large numbers.

RI- When faced with free options, why will they return?  It is because you feel paid content is a superior product?
MB- Quality content in all categories whether it is Sports Illustrated or Glamour Magazine or CNN or Washington Post has a long history of attracting lots of eyeballs and quality brands will ultimately be successful.  So, we’re convinced that permutations of what we are proposing will work.

RI- It seems to me you are using the term “quality brands” and “legacy brands” interchangeably? There are new media outlets available that are doing great things without a pay wall.
MB- You’re preaching to the choir there.  There was no MSNBC in 1995, there was no TalkingPointsMemo, There was no Huffington Post.

RI- So you’re saying that MSNBC is looking to put its content behind a paywall as well?
MB- I’ve had no conversations with them whatsoever but I know for a fact that quality online only brands are concerned with the long term viability of their advertising only revenue model.

RI- I’d like to see a press release between you guys and a new media outlet verifying that claim.
MB- Verify it right now.  Call up anybody running an online only website and ask them if they are intersted in developing subscription revenue models.

RI- I kind of did, in a recent interview I asked Liz George from Baristanet the following question: If newspaper websites put up a paywall would it hurt your business or help it? What is your opinion on paywalls? and this is her answer: The pay firewall was a bust for the New York Times. In general, I think paywalls are not smart. They go against the spirit of the Internet and they drive people from your site. As far as how it would affect us, I don’t think it would hurt us, and it might actually help.
MB- That’s a different question than I pose.  I don’t think the downturn in the newspaper industry affects negatively affects hyperlocal or national niche sites, it gives them a bigger business opportunity.  But that’s different than asking them, “is your long term belief with certainty that your only revenue stream is advertising”?  I think they would say “no, we’ve often thought about what kind of subscription products we can offer our audience”.

RI- Ok, what happens if I buy an article only to find it is now what I anticipated?  Do I get a refund?
MB- We haven’t work out our pricing strategies to that detail but that’s not an unanticipated problem.  It happens with magazine subscriptions all the time, we just have take that model and transform it to our situation.

RI- When you are envisioning your site, is there anything can share about the look or feel?
MB- We’re not even sure if we are going to have a content repository.  We are going to have a site that is a store front in the spirit of Amazon.com.  We are not trying to create a news portal.  It is not on our agenda.  We are not going to discourage sharing via social media. WSJ is a partial pay site that does a good job of it now.

RI- How do you plan to build critical masses of paying customers and of content? You will need to have a critical mass of customers before publishers will be willing to put some of their content that could generate ad revenue behind a pay wall instead. And they will need to have a critical mass of content before readers will sign up.  This seems to me like a critical switch you attempting.
MB- I agree that that’s a critical issue. We are going to do a lot of testing.  We can’t imagine a scenario where in the first month, 20 large publishing companies put 100% of their content behind a paywall.  We are going to do lots of testing and find out whether newspaper y’s sports content is good for a subscription model or magazine x’s utility content works well and gather data and move on that.  We’re trying to build a collaborative model that takes advantage of experiences that people will build over time and get it right.

RI- what’s been the biggest pushback from those in the know and the ordinary citizen who couldn’t care less?
MB- To your latter part first, the convenional street wisdom is that everything is free on the internet and that’s how it should always be is kind of a cliche.  The second one from the publishers is “what is the risk to our advertisers”?  Our expereince has been that ad inventory delivered to paid site commands higher cpms than a free site.

RI- Have you spoken to a large advertiser like proctor and gamble?  What’s been their reaction to your idea?
MB- Yes.

RI- Yes… anyone in particular?  anything you can share?
MB- No I won’t tell you what advertisers or publishers we’ve spoken to.

RI- Alright, thanks for your time and good luck.
MB- Thank you, we hope to hear from you again soon.

To learn more about Journalism Online LLC visit their site.

RELATED:

Brill, Crovitz, Hindery Launch E-Commerce Venture For News Business -from paidcontent.org

Brill: Bring Back an Old Business Model for New Media -from advertising age

Media Executives Plan Online Service to Charge for Content -from NYTimes.com

RI- What is TweenTribune and how did your idea for it come about?
AJ- Lets go all the way back to 1996 when I wrote an article for Brass Tacks Design entitled Online newspapers: Where’s the revenue? In that article I emphasize the importance for websites to build on a “community of interest” rather than a geographic community such as newspapers have traditionally served.   The points being, advertisers would be eager to advertise beside niche content rather than generic news on a website AND the internet is better suited at targeting “communities of interest” than printed newspapers.  Newspapers should have 1000 niche sites, not 1 mammoth site attempting to do everything.

I am the father of two tweens and being familiar with the Newspapers In Education (NIE) program it was clear to me that something better needed to be created for all parties involved.  The current NIE setup is a disaster.  The print product they are pushing not only costs publishers millions of dollars, it is attempting to get kids interested in a product that is going away and filled with adult content.  Their online solutions are equally bad.  Those sites are not designed with the kid’s best interests in mind.  The sites are poorly designed and have wacky logos and colors…  I actually did design testing with my kids and their friends, and my friends kids… you know what they like?  A well laid out, clean site just like the rest of us!

TweenTribune is a news site for kids, filled with interesting and engaging stories that I select from AP news feeds.  The TweenTribune site delivers niche content to one targeted audience, Tweens.

RI- Does it fulfill the requierements of NIE?
AJ- Yes it does.  TweenTribune is safe.  The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 is a federal law stating that it is illegal to collect information including last name and email, about a child under the age of 13.  So we set up a system where kids register using other information.  The site is secure so there is no linking in or out, lest someone contact a minor.  The site is also hosted by us to minimize any situations there.

RI- How do teachers use it?
AJ- The stories at TweenTribune can be relevant to almost any school subject – from social studies, to language arts, to science, to art. Once a teacher registers their class and starts using TweenTribune, the site will automatically generate custom pages showing things like: The stories their class has commented upon and individual comments by each student, on his or her own page. Additionally, all comments by students, are in one report that teachers can sort by students’ names, comments, or dates. Teachers can moderate, edit, or delete their students’ comments before they’re published.

RI- How does the site generate revenue?
AJ- Here is the beauty of this site and lesson for newspaper publishers.  There is no need for behavioral targeting, primarily because the site targets demographically AND GEOGRAPHICALLY, because all users provide their location when they register.  The tween demographic has never before been available to newspaper publishers, so it’s new revenue.  When I wireframed the site, the first thing I drew was the 300 x 250 IMU – (Medium Rectangle) for advertising, everything else flowed around it.

The lesson is that I can charge a higher cpm for the ad space because it is the only one, highly targeted, and prominently displayed.  If newspapers had niche sites like this, they could do the same thing, and command higher cpms.  Why doesn’t the Virginia Pilot have the world’s premier Chesapeake Bay website?  Who else would know that niche better than them?  If they built that niche site and monetized it smartly I have no doubt it would be making money on day 1.

RI- What do newspapers get when they sign on up for TweenTribune?
AJ- They get a turnkey news platform targeted to a niche demographic they are not currently serving.  They can brand the site with their logo, they can use their content, they control the ad space, they get the idea that this concept can be used throughout their entire media offerings, not just for a tweens (~ages 8-14) site… they get a lot.

RI- Who is using it now?
AJ- We just went live with the TweenTribune platform about 4 weeks ago and The Virginia Pilot is the first newspaper using the site.

RI- What is the site built on?
AJ- Drupal. It is the best CMS for this sort of thing.  Drupal is open source and Free.  There is a large number of free modules available for modifying the site and there is a large pool of developers who can enhance, modify or repair the site at a moment’s notice.

RI- Thank you for your time.  Any takeaways/ final words?
AJ- Visit TweenTribune for more info but remember the greatest takeaway is building news sites with “communities of interest”.

RELATED:

Teens Love Aggregation and ‘Free’, Newspaper Study Finds -wired.com
Online newspapers: Where’s the revenue? -BrassTacksDesign

Advertising and AP add-ons throughout the site pages as well as link mazes make the existing Press of Atlantic City site user-unfriendly.  I sat down with TownNews regional manager Loren Widrick at the TownNews booth to learn more about how they were going to help the PressofAtlanticCity.com improve their site.

RI- What is the TownNews CMS built on?  What does it use?
LW- BLOX is our new CMS.  It uses Universal Template Language (UTL) an Application-independent output template language engine.  The UTL utilizes PHP, CSS and XHTML but the newspaper’s content editor does not have to know any of that, our Asset Editor is really intuitive.  The new Press of Atlantic City site is being built on BLOX and will launch April 13th.

RI- What’s so great about BLOX?
LW- BLOX is a great CMS because it is platform and device agnostic, it can render sites on a mac, pc, iPhone, or Blackberry with equal ease.  On the front end, a social networking tool is built right into the site as well as a photo gallery feature.  BLOX allows tagging all Assets which provide for sharing additional content in a story for example related images and vide.

As for the back end, the CMS is dynamic in that the templates can easily redesigned using  a WYSIWYG drag and drop interface.  The templates can be saved and previewed without making any permanent changes to the existing site, so it give the publisher greater confidence in trying new things with their layout, content, and advertising placement.

RI- Tell me about the Asset Editor
LW- It is powerful and simple.  Articles, videos, photos, graphics, archives, audio, PDFs, polls, HTML, Flash, others – These are what we call Assets, they are not tied to articles and can be stand-alone. This allows you to create relationships between Assets, creating galleries and other special presentations of material.

You will no longer need to use tools like Photoshop to crop down photos to fit the page. Cropping and resizing can be done through the Image Asset Editor without the need for a third-party editor. Resizing and reviewing video is also done right through BLOX.  You won’t lose time learning an image editing software, and you won’t have to spend money on such software. You can also create multiple thumbnails/previews of the photos from the interface.

RI-  Who hosts the site?
LW- TownNews hosts all the sites we do.  It’s easier and safer for everyone involved.

RI- Who is using BLOX now?
LW- The Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa and Portage Daily Register in Portage, Wisconsin are both on BLOX.

RI- How many sites use TownNews CMS?
LW- About 1600 in the US and Canada so we have TONS of experience.  We do lots of weeklies and niche sites as well as daily newspaper sites.  The Press of Atlantic City will be one of the bigger news sites we’ve built.

RI- any parting words?
LW- The BLOX CMS has increased our customers’ sites revenue by creating well laid out, search engine friendly, easy to navigate sites that link to many internal assets, increasing pageviews and user engagement.

RI- Thanks for your time
LW- Thank you

Visit the TownNews site for more information about their BLOX CMS.

RI- You are responsible for projects like Walking With Angels, what exactly do you do on a daily basis at STLtoday.com and what is your latest big project?
WS- Just to be clear, the Haiti project you refer to is from a previous job as Interactive Projects Editor at The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Florida. At my current job as Interactive Director at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I help try to bring the newsroom into the 21st century and beyond. My recent big projects have been working on search engine optimization training/development changes within the newsroom, marketing and IT departments, as well as some new social media initiatives.

RI- What types of social media initiatives?
WS- We’re working with reporters to use social media tools to report faster and converse with their audience. We had great success during the 2008 election using tools like Twitter and Qik to report live from events and are building on that getting more people on board: http://www.stltoday.com/twitter

RI- Are you responsible for this seizure inducing layout or did someone’s grandson get to do the web design during March Madness?

WS- Holy Toledo! That’s quite remarkable and news to me. I believe it’s an total-page-buyout ad campaign though, not normal design (as you can see all the ads on the page are paid for by Mizzou). It’s a premium ad placement package that’s very expensive.

RI- Where were you Editor in Chief? What was that like and why did you transition away from it to become an Interactive Director?
WS- It was at the Independent Collegian in Toledo, Ohio. It was a great experience at my college newspaper learning all the roles in a newsroom and buisness organization and how to manage them. We were going through some rough times after going completely independent, breaking away from university control and funding. I left the job because I graduated.

RI- The Journerdism site is cleanly laid out. What is it built on? Why don’t we see newspaper websites this cleanly laid out?
WS- Journerdism is built on Word Press and probably needs a redesign soon. While I think that’s a pretty broad statement about all newspaper websites (they are improving… albeit slowly…), I think there’s a perfect storm of problems for newspapers’ design woes. To name a few:

• A daily tsunami of content in multiple forms every day, constantly, 365 days a year.
• Corporate design-by-committee templates that don’t allow any flexibility, customization or logic
• Antiquated content management systems that don’t embrace modern languages and technology
• An underdeveloped and antiquated advertising model that relies on annoyance and bigger, louder display graphic ads rather than quality or targeted relevant ads
• An unrealistic demand to squeeze every possible opportunity to monetize online revenues to account for the same revenue that print revenues did (decades ago in a time of total market control)
• Leadership that has enjoyed monopolistic control of their medium and who are averse to change or trying any new ideas (newspapers just copy other newspapers)
• Chronic organizational culture that fears or is antagonistic towards technology
• Leadership that doesn’t acknowledge, understand or respect user experience and the impact usability in design plays on their bottom line

RI- I didn’t see any of the Flip Video cameras on your picks page, as a matter of fact, I didn’t see any video cameras cheaper than $300. Do you really think that’s still necessary?
WS- If that’s what you can afford then rock it. Be careful on your audio with Flip’s though, there’s no control or external mic and users have no patience for horrible audio (they’ll generally tolerate bad video if the content is there). They also lack of removable memory, durability, zooming and overall video and audio quality. But it’s the message that matters, not the gear. We use point and shoot cameras for quick video and photos and they get the job done. We also use professional gear for larger projects and it gets the job done. We use mobile phones for live streaming video and it gets the job done. Use the tools that you can afford at your organization to deliver content.

RI- “What news outlets do you regularly visit to stay on top of news?” is a question I regularly ask non media/journalism professionals and most of the responses are something like, “I don’t. I have a cell phone and a computer and a TV so I figure that news will find me if it’s important”. What do you think of this newer mindset (news should find me) that the ubiquity of communications devices is creating?
WS- I’m one of them for the most part, except I’d add that I have RSS feeds, aggregation tools, smart filters and semantic recommendations feeding me my news. I think it’s fantastic to have so much choice and competition for audience’s attention. I wish more journalists acknowledged/understood this (specifically that there’s more competition that the local TV station… or if their lucky, and still work in a market with more than one newspaper, the other newspaper) so we could abandon 70 percent of the b.s. filler and wire in newspapers that is not unique and start focusing only on unique, original and relevant news reporting that no one else is doing anywhere. Competitive news markets produce great journalism.

RI- Do you own an eReader? Why or why not?
WS- No, but I’ve used a friend’s first generation Kindle though and enjoyed it. I’ve been considering the new Kindle, but have been hoping for some sort of open source effort to materialize.

RI- You are on a lot of social sites; where do you spend most of your time and why? Have you quit any?
WS- I use Delicious, Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook the most. Delicious is my library and archive. Twitter/FriendFeed is just like reading a bunch of tiny blogs and targeted news aggregation for my interests/people like me. Facebook is to keep up with friends and family. I try a lot of different sites to keep up on what’s developing on the web and see if there are opportunities for news organizations to partner or use them. I’ve tried many sites and didn’t love them so I don’t use them much anymore. Does that mean I have to delete my account also to quit it? Sometimes these companies evolve and improve so I like to have accounts with many to check in and see how things are changing.

RI- I have to admit, my favorite “interactive design” news site features are the NYTimes audio slideshows and the entire experience of Boston.com’s the Big Picture blog. Besides your own work, what do you like happening on news sites?
WS- The new news API’s being developed from the NYTimes, NPR and The Guardian are brilliant.

RI- Given the dramatic cutbacks/ layoffs/ furloughs/ hiring freezes in traditional media, what do you tell people / students when they ask you about getting into journalism?
WS- I tell them to not expect to work for the traditional media. This is the greatest time in the history for journalism (and the worst time for traditional media monopolies) — the ‘penny press’ just became pretty much free and accessible to everyone. There’s lots of opportunity out there.

RI- What should I be asking you right now?
WS- What’s the secret to life?

RI- Last thoughts? Thanks.
WS- These pretzels are making me thirsty

RI- Will Sullivan is available for consulting, freelance, teaching and speaking engagements at: will [at] journerdism.com

Don has been a leading researcher, author, educator and speaker addressing the sustainability of media supply chains for the last decade, and for over 25 years has been a respected media technology and marketing strategy consultant to major advertisers, agencies and publishers.

RI- Why are newspapers and other traditional publishers pushing the issue of eReaders as a communications medium when something like less than one third of one percent of the reading population of the United States owns these products? Is it a paper sustainability issue? Is it a cost issue? What’s the justification?

DC- Other than pushing the “cool” factor, one of the main selling points being made by marketers of eReaders is that they are greener than print. It is little surprise that the common view held by consumers who don’t know the backstory is that going digital means going green and saving trees. Many are in for a rude awakening. When subjected to “cradle-to-cradle ” Lifecycle Analysis eReading is not nearly as green as many naively assume it is.

There is no question that print media could do a better job of managing the sustainability of its supply chains and waste streams, but it’s a misguided notion to assume that digital media is categorically greener. Computers, eReaders and cell phones don’t grow on trees and their spiraling requirement for energy is unsustainable.

Making a computer typically requires the mining and refining of dozens of minerals and metals including gold, silver and palladium as well as extensive use of plastics and hydrocarbon solvents. To function, digital devices require a constant flow of electrons that predominately come from the combustion of coal, and at the end of their all-too-short useful lives electronics have become the single largest stream of toxic waste created by man. Until recently there was little if any voluntary disclosure of the lifecycle “backstory” of digital media.

Sadly, print has come to be seen as a wasteful, inefficient and environmentally destructive medium, despite the fact that much of print media is based on comparatively benign and renewable materials. In addition, print has incredible potential to be a far more sustainable medium than it is today… and a truly digital medium as well. Despite its importance to business, government and society, print has been cast in the role of a dark old devil in decline. Digital media has been cast as the bright young savior on the rise.

Ironically the future of digital media and eBook readers is likely to be based on flexible polymer electronics manufactured using printing presses rather than silicon semiconductor fabrication technologies. In fact, the next generation of eReaders will most likely be digital AND be printed. For example, major components of the soon to be released PlasticLogic eReader are printed flexible polymer electronics.

RI- What is the demand for eReaders now though?

DC: Well it’s a category that has been “emerging” for over 15 years. What one can say is that eReaders are once again capturing media attention and there appears to be significant latent demand for gadgets that can replace printed media, but mainstream adoption still remains years away. E-reader device sales and eReader content revenues are still rounding error in relation to print media revenues. In a survey of attendees at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair 40% predicted digital book content sales would overtake traditional printed book sales by 2018, but over 30% said digital content would never surpass traditional books sales, and 66% said they expect traditional books to dominate the market for the next decade.

We’ll likely see many fits, starts and failures with different products, media formats and business models over the next five years to ten years until someone hits on the sweet spot and develops a business model that supports the profitable creation of content as well as a system of commercially practical devices and a sustainable supporting infrastructure. One of the major problems is that people tend to be fixated on the announcements of cool new devices rather than on the development of business models and sustainable supply chain business ecologies.

For an example of what I mean, consider why Edison was successful. Edison didn’t invent the first electric light bulb, but he did develop the first commercially practical incandescent lighting system. It encompassed every aspect of the lighting lifecycle including not just the bulb but also a business model for a successful electric energy generation and distribution system.

I think a comparable challenge exists for eReaders. People focus on the eReader devices, but it’s not the invention of the coolest e-reader that matters most, it’s the availability of a sustainable business ecology that matters most. I don’t think traditional publishers or device manufacturers have yet identified that sweet-spot combination of content, medium and business model that’s required for e-readers to become mainstream.

Unfortunately many of the business models that drive media companies still have both the content and production/distribution aspects of the business intertwined. They are struggling to find ways to uncouple them and remain profitable. We saw companies like Kodak face the same challenge in trying to decouple the business of capturing and preserving memories from the business of selling analog film photography and photofinishing systems. They are still struggling with a profitable transition to the use of digital imaging technologies. Newspapers are likely to face similar problems trying to decouple newsgathering, journalism, creative and advertising from production and delivery in print to delivery via networked digital eReaders and handsets.

RI- What other examples of fundamental business model failure can you give me?

DC- Sure. One example is the failure to recognize the value of “waste” and the true cost of externalities like greenhouse gas emissions or water use. Print media value chains have become extremely complex and tend to cross-subsidize and institutionalize wasteful and inefficient flows of energy and materials. A case in point of institutionalized waste is the fact that more than 60% of magazines distributed to newsstands never get sold or read. Another example is the failure to consider the full lifecycle costs or carbon footprint of media. Newspaper publishers deliver newspapers but they don’t typically recover them and recycle them or use them as an energy source locally. Few if any know what the carbon footprint of their products are. Why is that?

Until recently, companies like Nine Dragons were shipping our waste paper half way around the world to make cardboard out of it, and then shipping it back to us as packaging which we were sending to landfills. Going forward, the carbon cost of print and digital media will no longer be swept under the rug. It will soon have to appear on the balance sheets of advertisers, publishers and retailers. It will also appear in the price tags of goods and services. The climate crisis is another market failure that is now coming to light.

Business models that fail to recognize full lifecycle cost and value will be unlikely to succeed going forward. As we exit the global recession we will simultaneously be transitioning to a low carbon global economy that will change the meaning and value of waste and inefficiency. As we do so, print will survive if it reconfigures its supply chains to use energy and materials more eco-efficiently and publishers will survive if they can decouple the message from the medium while meeting the requirement for “triple bottom” line results that are economically viable, environmentally restorative and socially constructive. The growing demand for sustainable business practices, lifecycle analysis and environmental product disclosure will impact eReader manufacturers and digital media companies as well.

I expect there will be new opportunities for sustainable digital printing and print on demand to compete with toxic eReaders and coal-powered digital media. I also think there will be exciting new opportunities for printed electronics to blur the categories of print and digital media. Ultimately both print and digital media will have to become more sustainable if either of them is to survive, and judgment of which is environmentally preferable or cost effective will increasingly be based on comparative lifecycle analysis, carbon footprints and environmental product declarations based on standards such as ISO 14040, PAS 2050 and ISO 14025. Sustainability science and the triple bottom line are becoming an increasingly important aspects of business and public policy decision-making. There is every reason to believe they will also become increasingly important in media business and policy decisions.

RI- What have you seen in other countries that sticks out in your mind?

DC- When you leave the Stockholm’s airport to get on the high-speed train to downtown Stockholm there are book vending machines! While some may choose to download content to a phone or eReader, for many a book, a magazine or a newspaper will continue to be preferred. One of the major challenges print needs to address is waste, and another is the customization of format and content. There is no technical barrier to replacing newsstands and vending machines with hard copy media output devices or “fabricators” that could produce customized or personalized books, magazines or other media objects on demand. That would be one of the ways print media could compete with the immediacy and customization potential of digital media while also eliminating newsstand distribution waste.

RI- Sounds to me like the future is looking digital.

DC- As I said earlier, the distinction between print and digital media will ultimately vanish. The media of the future will be digitally printed and printed digital devices.

RI- Will people still care where they get their news from?

DC- I don’t think people care so much about where their news comes from, but journalism… yes I believe they still care. Anyone can make news and anyone can report it, but journalism is different and that difference matters. For example, Twitter is fast becoming one the most important source of breaking news, but it isn’t journalism. I think a robust Fourth Estate capable of independent investigative journalism is essential. The first tenet of sustainability is having a political system that secures effective participation of its citizens in decision making. That is the role served by journalists and the media channels that deliver and store their content.

The capacity of our society to effectively participate in decision making is contingent upon our having sources of news, journalism and dialogue that represent a diversity of informed opinions as well as a diversity of textual, graphical and other content types. Likewise, the sustainability of our society is dependent upon the supply chains and media that carry that content being diverse and sustainable as well. While much of current media debate is about the future of journalism as the sea change shift to digital media is occurring, we need to recognize that our current digital media supply chains and media types are unsustainable before we kick print media to the curb and entrust our future to an ephemeral and uncertain digital media monoculture.

As publishers struggle to extricate themselves from the advertising business models that encumber them, we are likely to see them continue to trim editorial staffs and funding for investigative journalism. However we are likely to begin to see syndicates of content creators and journalists emerge who are independent of any particular distribution channel or media type. Spot.us is an example of how journalists may increasingly be directly supported by their audiences rather than by a publisher who is supported by advertising.

If the capital structure of traditional media cannot support the research and legal expenses that investigative journalism demands then those entrepreneurs will find other sources of funding for their efforts.

RI- So do you have to go to newspapers to get journalism?

DC- No, as I said, we’re already starting to see things like spot.us and syndicates, as well as entrepreneurial journalists operating outside of mainstream media advertising supported business models.

RI- Last question. What should I be asking you right now?

DC- The real question is “how can we encourage both advertisers and publishers to consider the sustainability of the media supply chains they depend on?” Whether they are print or digital, they consume energy, and neither are sustainable. Will they have to learn the way fish learn about the importance of water? Will they only be aware of it when it is gone?

Looking at Print media, we can basically agree that it is dependent on paper. The paper making industry in the United States is in tragic decline. We haven’t built a paper mill in the US for over 12 years and we’ve shut down hundreds of paper making machines. We’ve exported more waste paper than any other product. In fact waste paper is this country’s single largest export! The paper has gone primarily to China where it is recycled into cardboard and shipped back to us as containers and then ultimately devoted to landfill.

We’ve effectively put ourselves in a situation where in short order we may be as dependent on imported paper as we are dependent on imported oil. If we don’t address the strategic importance of an intact infrastructure for papermaking in the US we may not have print media in time because we won’t be able to afford the substrate to print it on. Hopefully the current administration’s focus on renewable energy holds promise for the reinvention of America’s papermaking industry.

Over the next 10 years we need to transition from making paper in outmoded papermills mills build by our grandparents to producing paper, fuels, energy and renewable chemical and pharmaceutical feedstocks in a new generation of integrated biorefineries.

Likewise we need to transition from printing methods that employ wasteful and inefficient mass production to those which employ leaner greener digital printing and printed electronics manufacturing that support mass customization and dematerialization.

Looking at digital media from the same perspective it is not economically or environmentally sustainable either. During 2006 energy consumption from data centers and servers consumed 61billion kilowatt hours of electricity. The consumption rate for data centers doubled from 2000-2006 and is set to double again in 2010. Additionally, e-waste now constitutes the most significant toxic waste stream in our landfills and it is the single largest toxic waste export. We are about to witness a veritable tsunami of toxic e-waste as people turn in their CRT TV’s and buy new HD digital sets to cope with the FCC’s analog to digital mandate.

RI- Ok, that wasn’t the last question. After you mentioned exporting toxic waste to other countries I’m wondering; what are the global implications of publishers switching to new media /new medium?

DC- Thinking that we can transition from books to ebooks, and satisfy the fundamental needs of all 6.7 billion people on the planet is a fallacy. We don’t have clean water in many countries, let alone 3G towers to feed our Kindle’s today’s newspaper news. 2 billion people don’t have clean water in the world. As publishers, advertisers, and consumers, we have to find ways to encourage development of both sustainable print and digital media supply chain management technologies. We need to reframe the issue. Today’s print vs. digital media debates are a zero sum game. Regardless of which media wins the war of words we all lose. The fact is we will need both print and digital media for many years to come and we need them to both become far more sustainable than they are today.

RI- Thank you for sharing your ideas with metaprinter regarding news media innovation, convergence and sustainability. When is your next upcoming conference and what can people learn there?

DC- SustainCommWorld’s next Green Media Conferences will be held on June 9, 2009 in Washington DC and on June 23 in Chicago. The Green Media Conference website has detailed program information on it and the Green Media Connect Social networking site is where attendees can network, blog and share information before during and after the events. In addition, I post news items and exchange tweets with the thousands of people who follow me on twitter each day. Thank you for taking time to speak with me about this important topic. I look forward to seeing you and your readers at the Green Media Conferences in June.

More about Don Carli’s work:

The Institute for Sustainable Communication was created to raise awareness of the issues and train the next generation of media and communication supply chain professionals. We do that through various non-profit education and outreach initiatives such as the Sustainable Advertising Partnership (www.SustainableAds.org) being developed in partnership with Ad-ID (www.Ad-ID.org) and our Students of Sustainability (www.SOSReach.org) programs. ISC also supports the SustainCommWorld LLC Green Media Conferences which were created to provide advertisers, media planners, media buyers, creative professionals, publishers and suppliers in the print and digital media supply chains with real world and virtual world forums where they can network, explore and forge sustainable print and digital media supply chains solutions. In addition, ISC is working with Fortune Custom Publishing to produce a special section to Fortune Magazine in the Fall of 2009 focusing on the ways in which sustainable print and digital media supply chains can be a powerful force in the effort to address our global economic recovery and the challenge of climate change.

Related Links:

http://www.greenmediaconference.com

http://www.greenmediaconnect.com/

http://www.twitter.com/dcarli

http://www.sustaincom.org

Word Cloud of this Interview click for big view

Nice find from Joey Baker‘s blog

Newspaper and social media convergence.  I have never seen any other newspaper put twitter addresses in their masthead, have you?  To learn more read the following Q&A with Bill Adee, Chicago Tribune editor/digital media.

RI – Introduce yourself (name, title, specialty)
BA – Bill Adee, editor/digital media

RI – Does the masthead in the printed newspaper have the twitter addresses or is it just visible via the link above? What am I looking at? Where does this appear?
BA – That is the masthead as it appeared in last Thursday’s newspaper, on the Editorial page.

RI – Does the Chicago Tribune feel that twitter is better at contacting those in the masthead than email? Why use twitter?
BA – We wanted to make a statement about our digital efforts, but at a practical level it also is a great way to communicate with our readers and learn more about what they are reading and thinking.

RI – When did your news organization officially begin using twitter? (when was the “Chicago Tribune on Twitter” logo created?)
BA – I have been using it for two years. I would say we stepped up our use of Twitter a year ago.

RI – Who is credited with bringing twitter to the Chicago Tribune? (putting it into widespread use)
BA – Here is a link to a piece I did about our social media efforts at the chicago tribune:

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100697

RI – What interesting things have you done with twitter so far?
BA – I think it has helped us connect with the Web community (bloggers, readers) here in Chicago. We have received plenty of breaking news tips through Twitter. We teach Twitter as an important way for a reporter to connect with sources and readers.

RI – Where do you see the tool really shining?
BA – I think Twitter Search is still hugely undervalued. It’s a great way to monitor what see what the next big news is going to be, whether it is a gaffe in a presidential debate, a controversial call in a game or a plane crash.

RI – How many Chicago Tribune readers use twitter? (as a percentage of total readers)
BA – How many Chicago Tribune newspaper readers? I would guess under 3 percent.

RI – How is twitter marginalizing your long form journalism? is it?
BA – I don’t think it is. It is a great way to find out about interesting long and short stories and to recommend them to others.

RI – Regarding convergence, what should i be asking you about right now?
BA – I would be asking you about your definition of convergence. I think it meant more to me 5 years ago.

RI – Touche Bill Adee. My usage of “convergence” here was meant to illicit a response in line with your thoughts on the continuing evolution of digital media communications and that of print media communications.  Or specifically how “The Colonel” and Twitter are related.

RI: what is “a single media newsroom”?
TDP: The ability to produce content for all mediums from one location. We can be described as a content management system for newspapers, Solely for Newspapers.

RI: why are newspapers coming to you?
TDP: they are seeking to consolidate into a single newsroom. Financial pressures have forced the issue.

RI: What is the main product?
TDP: GN3 is the main product.

RI: With all the consolidation, is the business is booming?
TDP: Yes, we are doing well. Big jump in foreign interest especially in Latin American companies.

RI: do you deal with large chains like gannett or advance
TDP: Not so much as our foreign sales, but it’s changing.

RI: How do you sell?
TDP: Through resellers mostly.

RI: Who are your biggest competitors?
TDP: We like to think we are in a league of our own, but Saxotech is a competitor.
RI: innovation at Tera ?
TDP: GNportal (good news)
RI: What’s that?
TDP: Laura our project manager will tell you about that.

Laura Koval: GNportal is a central content store for getting content from remote places so it’s publish ready. It’s a direct user interface and works on any platform, any browser (regular contributors, connect upload enhance the metadata and then publish. There is also an “upload and publish mode”.

You can also connect via email (parses out attachments and performs validation on the pictures for example) or the website. Content in the form of stories, videos, pictures, etc… reside on the portal and remains there till someone chooses to publish it.

The portal archives are full text searchable and also return other related info like “how many are videos and stories, location, who the author is, related articles, etc…

RI: View this image to get a visual representation of how the portal works.  Click to see a larger version:

RI: Where can people find out more?
Laura: Visit our website to learn more about GNportal and our other products and services.  Or contact us directly for a demo. Thanks!

About Tera digital publishing:

Tera is a leading provider of integrated multi-media editorial solutions for the newspaper publishing. Dominant in many of our worldwide markets, we are best known for the quality of our engineering, our products’ ease-of-use and very low cost of ownership.

Tera’s product line includes multi-media editorial, archiving, advertising and prepress solutions. All our products deliver the highest performance, maximum reliability and low operating costs. Our solutions are installed quickly and easily, with the smallest impact on the organization.

In the US, we publish over 100 titles and are the dominant vendor to Spanish-language newspapers. We are the dominant vendor in Brazil and Croatia.

The high quality of our engineering contributes to the low cost of ownership of a Tera system. Tera has never released an upgrade that invalidated any customer’s data nor required the risk and expense of a so-called major upgrade. And yet our software is an engineering leader. Our installation times are measured in weeks, not months or years. The addition of new titles is a routine matter.

Interview with Second Street Media Solutions Co-owners Matt Coen and Doug Villhard to learn more about their fastest growing product, Upickem, which is an online contesting platform.

RI - Simply publishing content on a website is not enough.  How does Upickem bring news sites into the internet paradigm?
MC - By virtue of the way contests work, ie. participation, we make newspaper news sites much more interactive with their target community.

RI - How do you drive user engagement? How do you build communities?
MC - The contests engage a passionate community. “cutest dog contest” for example generated 4.5 million pageviews, 6800 dog photo submissions, over 1million votes, and 15,000 registered users for The Minneapolis Star Tribune.  The users who register to participate in the contest provide the paper with their email info that can be used to drive participation in future contests.

RI - How have advertisers reacted to the contests?
MC - Now advertisers have a premium platform for lead generation. News sites absent this context have had little incentive to advertise on a news website.  The newspapers using Upickem have been selling out of ad space almost as soon as it becomes available.

RI - How have newspapers reacted to the contests?
MC - Robin Gray from the OC Register and Julie Foley from the Statesboro Herald are both here and both using Upickem.  Everyone is raving how well Upickem works, how high the ROI is, I encourage you to seek them out and ask them yourself.
RI - I’ll do that. (and I did, see below)
DV - We have a new feature coming out called E-Blast Engine.   The engine slices and dices the data newspapers have collected to establish email and text blasts for the purpose of promoting new features and really anything. Think of this as “spiral marketing”.

RI – Is it just a website application?
DV – No we have an iPhone application that will allow people to vote and participate when on the move.   We see mobile as a growing platform for engaging users, personally speaking I’m constantly on my iPhone and it just made sense.  Newspapers love it too because it solves a difficult problem they are having with how to monetize their mobile presence.

RI - If you were me, what should I be asking you right now?
DV - How can newspapers overcome their current challenges?  Newspapers have challenges and they are reacting by cutting costs and saving money. This is important, but we have an opportunity for them to make money. Upickem has real tangible value and introduces new revenue to publishers of any size.
MC - Borrell sees online promotion growing 3x in the next few years. This is the opportunity to get newspapers to fill the needs of local readers and advertisers.

RI - Thank you both, where can people learn more?
MC - Visit the Upickem page on our site where you can learn all about features, revenue generation, and pricing.  Thank you.

Borrell Associates Webinar on “promotional advertising”:

Related:

UPICKEM was featured for about half of the Tuesday 2:45 panel called Link, Search and Play.  Robin Gray from the OC Register and Julie Foley from the Statesboro Herald presented their successes with online contests over the past year. Follow the preceding links to see real contests those newspapers have run.  I liveblogged the event on twitter at twitter.com/metaprinter and used the hashtag #naamxc09 if want to dig through that feed.  May I suggest hashtags.org.

After the session, I spoke with Julie and she reiterated that the revenue her contests are generating is new money and not cannibalizing ROP advertising.  She cannot speak highly enough about the ROI from Upickem and also mentioned that the Statesboro Herald can never have too many contests.

Baristanet.com is a leading independent news site in NJ. Many news media experts consider Baristanet to be a whopping success in a sea of general interist news site and blog failures (traditional and nontraditional). Business is good at Baristanet and they are enjoying a growing community presence. At O’RIELLY Tools of Change 2009 Future of News panel discussion, Jeff Jarvis went so far as to suggest that New Jersey’s largest newspaper, The Star-Ledger, enter into some kind of partnership with Baristanet to share resources.

Following the TOC 2009 event I wanted to learn more about this hyperlocal hero.  What follows is an email Q&A between metaprinter.com founder Robert Ivan and Baristanet.com Co-Owner Liz George. Enjoy!

RI- Introduce yourself and tell us what you do on a daily basis at Baristanet.

LG- I’m Liz George and I’m the co-owner and editor of Baristanet. My partner and the site’s founder Deb Galant started Baristanet in May 2004. Her initial partnership did not work out; we started working together in August 2004 and soon after became partners.

On any given day, I’m either writing for Baristanet, editing the stories from other writers and contributors, assigning stories, updating the site with breaking news, answering requests from readers, community organizations, businesses, etc., and working on developing new aspects and features of the site, new projects and alliances. Some days, Deb and I will meet, but typically we do most of our work virtually and fill in with phone calls and emails. Deb handles more of the ad sales end of things.

RI- You didn’t start off as a general interest news blog or did you? How did this evolve?  Were you filling an unmet need?

LG- Baristanet was started as an experiment, with an aim to deliver local news to three contiguous towns in Essex County in a hyperlocal and humorous way. In this area, the local coverage was limited to newspapers for these towns that published on a once a week basis, and some additional coverage a couple days a week in the Star Ledger. Baristanet began covering both the big and small stories, and covering them 24/7. Once we gained an audience, our readers began bringing us the news – tipping us to happenings, everything from car crashes to falling trees to home teardowns to crimes. Instead of linking to newspapers for coverage of these stories, we began breaking these stories and our readers began to get their local news immediately, rather than waiting for the weekly newspaper. Since then, some of the local papers in our area are stepping up their web presence.

RI- When you run an announcement that a commenter named “mike” had a baby and over 40 people respond with congratulations it is clear to me that there is a large, growing community on your site. What drives that relationship? Or did I just answer my own question?

LG- I think what drives the relationship for our site is its intimate quality. People who visit the site on a daily basis and read the comments on posts get to know their neighbors, albeit by pseudonym in many cases. Some commenters even get together to meet and socialize on their own; many share personal stories and major events in their lives (link to a long-time commenter who got married and ran a marathon). Their stories and opinions are part of the site’s flavor; we’re not just a place to read the local news, we’re an interactive community and we’ve become a daily habit for the people who visit this site, much like a local coffee shop. Personality is a huge factor – without it, a local site is vanilla and bland, something I touched on here in this PressThink article.

RI- NYT has David Carr, BoingBoing has Xeni Jardin, MetaFilter has Ask.MetaFilter, for someone who’s never been to your site, where should they go? What is your most engaging feature?

LG- I’d probably tell them to click on comments on a post. Each post is different and sometimes commenters go off on wild tangents that have nothing to do with the original story. Having said that, there are some pretty funny commenters and the back and forth can be very interesting. Often, people add information in comments that we then explore and add to the story, if we can get confirmation. So the comments can add a lot to the site.

RI- No one ever wants to talk revenue numbers, so I will. You started in 2004, when did you become cashflow positive? Is it realistic for laid off journalists to start a news blog and make money?

LG- I think it took 18 months before we started to make money. It’s definitely a smart idea for out of work journalists to consider doing something like Baristanet. We’ve been approached by a few people already; in response to that we’ve started Baristanet Incubator, where we help hatch new local sites. Interested parties can contact us about this at partners@baristanet.com.

RI- Cruising around the site I see advertisements all over the place, in the stories, in the sidebar, sponsorships, Classifieds, Google Adsense, etc. Is display advertising your biggest source of revenue? What is growing in importance?

LG-Display advertising is our primary source of revenue. We get some money from Google ads, but it’s an afterthought. We also have people who want to buy our classifieds, which is amazing when you think that Craiglist is available. People have gotten a good response with these ads and the intimacy of the site plus the traffic combine to make it attractive for people to use our classifieds.

RI- How challenging is it to sell display ads and sponsorships to smaller local businesses? Is it challenging? Do you have someone in-house to help them create ads?

LG-We have a terrific salesperson who knows our product inside and out. It’s become a lot easier to sell ads to local businesses now that these businesses see the kind of excitement and interest advertising on our site can generate. At least a third of all our ads have come in over the transom, from advertisers who have found the site and our ad kit and want to buy an ad. We have a talented in-house designer who makes ads for business who can’t provide their own; she can also help them create a web presence with a splash page.

RI- I’ve read too that you as a company are now branching out to consulting serves… what’s that all about? Have traditional newspapers approached you for advice?

LG-We’ve been approached by a variety of people to consult, but most have been individuals who are interested in doing something similar in their area. Deb and I have both spoke at conferences where the audience was traditional newspaper editors and publishers who wanted to learn more about hyperlocal sites like ours. Additionally, we’ve partnered in the past with the Star Ledger to create a special, co-branded section with them.

RI- If newspaper websites put up a paywall would it hurt your business or help it? What is your opinion on paywalls?

LG-The pay firewall was a bust for the New York Times. In general, I think paywalls are not smart. They go against the spirit of the Internet and they drive people from your site. As far as how it would affect us, I don’t think it would hurt us, and it might actually help.

RI- Some statements have been made that blogs are not real journalism and that if newspapers die, so does journalism. If traditional newspapers went bankrupt would it hurt or help your business? How would you adapt?

LG- I certainly don’t want to see traditional newspapers go under, but I don’t think journalism dies if they do. I’m an NYU J-school grad, and I think newspapers that survive will find a new identity in response to the Internet. As far as blogs not being “real journalism,” I think a lot of blogs, including ours, commit random acts of journalism on a regular basis. There are many instances both locally and nationally where blogs are breaking stories before “traditional journalists.” Still, covering all the news a traditional newspaper might cover isn’t always the full-time job of the blogger. In the case of our site, in addition to reporting news, we are looking for ways to entertain, elicit comments, link to national or state stories but with our own local twist, create and build a community, incorporate social networking tools, reunite lost dogs with owners, deal with offensive commenters, solicit our readers for opinions with polls and other interactive features.

RI- Where do you see The Star-Ledger and The Asbury Park Press 3 years from now?

LG- I don’t have a crystal ball, but where I’d like to see them three years from now is having evolved to meet the needs of their readers. That might include building relationships with sites like ours that are mutually beneficial.

RI- Where do you see Baristanet 3 years from now?

LG- I see us partnering on other local sites as well as adding to our existing site in terms of content and expanded back end operations.

RI- If you were me, what should I be asking you about right now?

LG- Do you have fun doing this? The answer is yes. It’s a lot of work, but ultimately running a business in your own community that touches the lives of people and gets them talking, arguing, interacting or even just eating at a restaurant we reviewed, can be very rewarding. Now that we’re making money, that helps, too.

RI- END of Q&A.  I want to thank Liz and Baristanet for their time in sharing this information.  Everyone go check them out and read through some comment sections!

Key Takeaways:

· The Baristanet online community has transitioned offline. This is one of the things Matt Haughey mentioned happens on Metafilter. Having a community around your site like this builds the brand even stronger, something severely lacking on big impersonal newspaper sites.

.      Contact Baristanet to see how they can help you launch a local news site:  partners@baristanet.com

· People pay to advertise on the Baristanet Classifieds section even though Craigslist is a free option in the area. Again, the value of a community and strong brand here adds value where without it there would be none. If newspaper sites had such strong community ties, perhaps those people would also pay for their classified services as well, no?

.      The Baristanet website doe not use any fancy coding or voodoo trickery to accomplish its goals.  The biggest attraction is news and community interaction.  NYT article skimmer take note.

“I think a lot of blogs, including ours, commit random acts of journalism on a regular basis.” –my favorite quote