What factors, specifically, contributed to the holdup in progression of the project? (e.g. lack of motivation, lack of pressure from the community, lack of powerful leadership)
What happened to the money? (i.e. Did they spend it all? If so, on what. If not, what’s left?)
How far did they get before they completely stopped? (e.g. is there anything open-sourceable that others can continue working on even if the original team is done?)
Do they plan to continue at some point? If so, what resources do they need in order to continue and how will they ensure it doesn’t fall off the radar again? If not, what about the money?!
What has their interaction with the Knight Foundation been like since they got the money? (e.g. Has there been any pressure from TKF to continue the project?)
What advice do they have for other Knight applicants to ensure a similar situation doesn’t happen to anyone else?
On a related note, what recommendations do they have for TKF to better monitor project progression after the money is granted?
I am enormously proud to be a part of the team that is reinventing the way news content is distributed.
Monday at TechCrunch Disrupt, Publish2 CEO Scott Karpannounced the company’s newest product, the Publish2 News Exchange. The entire Publish2 team sat huddled around laptops throughout our various locations in the U.S., cheering him on through our backchannel IM conversation. It was a momentous day for which we’ve all been working very hard.
We placed in the top five for the startup battlefield competition (Congrats to the winner, Soluto), and have gained tremendous momentum in the past five days. From here, we’ll continue to sign up beta users, roll out a full launch, and revolutionize publishing as we know it.
The goal of P2X is to disrupt the publishing business, notably the monopoly created by the Associated Press
We’ve created an open marketplace for news content distribution
Any content producers can contribute to the exchange — bloggers, independent/freelancers, and, of course, newspapers and other news organizations
Content creators set the terms and rates
We want to “Craigslist” the AP (i.e. take a multimillion dollar monopoly, downscale it and make it more efficient)
There’s a “story ideas” feature that lets multiple newsorgs request reportage on the same budget item
The platform integrates with print publishing systems through an automated FTP setup
Although it seems counterintuitive for us to focus on print, but it’s vital because it’s the only way to disrupt the AP. We’re creating a bridge for newspapers now as a starting point for a better tomorrow. (Scott says — and I most certainly agree — that news brands will survive after the death of print)
What others are saying
These are just a few of my favorite tidbits from bloggers and tweeters around the web in response to the launch of P2x. This morning Ryan Sholin posted a far more comprehensive list of reactions.
[...] they are courageously pivoting into a new business model but based soundly (as far as I can tell) on the learnings and proximity they have had with publishers and journalists in the last few years. It doesn’t hurt that their CEO is a domain expert and that they have a strong advisory board. I believe in lean startup thinking but I don’t believe that pivoting blindly will usually lead to success -Darryl Siry
One feature of News Exchange that fell under the radar at TechCrunch is a story ideas database – basically an RFP for story assignments. Editors can post a request for coverage; other members can respond with an existing article or a commitment to write something. -Rob ORegan
The beauty of News Exchange is it opens the door to bring non-traditional content into traditional products. As with any new venture, particularly one that turns tradition on its head, there will be bumps, even moats, in the road. But the prospects of lively yet professional content from new voices are too much to ignore….AP can no longer stand on its laurels and take baby steps in re-inventing itself. That clock stopped ticking earlier today. Logan Molen
Because the News Exchange is still in beta and has yet to be rolled out, there are some missing features. The big one publishers will be concerned about is being able to track how your story is used by your subscribers. … However, Sholin said a form of analytics will come … The goal, he said, is to provide news orgs with data on how their content is used, and as News Exchange gets rolled out, Publish2 is going to play with different variation of analytics and reporting though it may require a manual effort from news orgs using the content. -Vadim Lavrusik
And this tweet from Ryan Sholin sums up what we have to look forward to over the next months:
ryansholin: My job right now is talking to brilliant journalists on the phone all day and show them cool new tools. I love my job.
Drew Geraets of American Public Media led a session Saturday morning at BCNI Philly about customer relations management for journalists. In a nutshell, the tool — called The Insight Graph — is a way to tap the insights, knowledge and expertise of the news customers (i.e. sources, readers) to create deeper, more relevant news coverage.
Their network currently has 85,000 sources among the 12 partners.
The problem The Insight Graph is trying to solve is how to quickly discover and access insights from diverse sources– beyond the “standard rolodex.” The solution takes form of what they call the “audience insight repository” (i.e. a searchable database). The inquiry process for gathering information about sources looks like a form that feeds into a databse:
They want to give information access to the data so that it’s a two-way process– the information doesn’t get locked into a database and lost forever, but becomes usable and collaborative. The two-way aspect comes in the form of users being able to log into a separate interface where they can see a history of the forms they’ve filled out and follow the trial of where their data was used.
The new challenges The Insight Graph is addressing:
Share insights
Better tools for sharing
Sources can update profile – Through an interface called “myPin” sources can see which sources they’ve responded to, which of their submissions have been used on the web, and have the ability to follow individuals’ responses
Sources determine access
Instantly publish insights
Create credibility systems – how do we know who is going to be reliable? The editors deciding?
Create a better UX
Integrate with existing sites
This is what the AIR (audience insight repository) looks like so far (prototype):
The dashboard lends itself to collaboration. Different newsrooms can access the info, leave comments on different inqueries, submit pitches, etc.
You can also drill down into the source database with multiple layers of filters, save those filters to “bins” and export them:
I believe that yes, it is, and yes, it will — but there are still some rough edges that need to be worked out.
Based on my current impressions of The Climate Desk, collaboration primarily takes place at two points in the editorial process:
Brainstorming
Distribution
That makes sense. Those are the easiest two points at which collaboration is possible. But those aren’t the most important points. What about all the in-between? Sharing sources, sharing data, reporting together, editing together.
If the collaborative model is going to scale for newsorgs, we need better tools for storing and sharing data.
If I work at newspaper x and I want to work with newspapers y and z about climate change, how would I go about sharing the data I’ve already collected?
If I wanted to find all the data about climate change based on coverage my newsorg has already done, the process would look like this:
Do a Google site search of “climate change” at [mynewsorgsdomain].com
Find the dates those articles about climate change were published
Go back through some date-structured folder system on my newsorg’s server to find contact sheets, notes, drafts of said article
Email those files to the other newsorgs collaborating to report on climate change
Everyone shares their contacts, someone puts together a Google Spreadsheet to combine the data we found and make something functional out of it — an overall picture of sorts
This process isn’t ideal for finding and sharing data because it doesn’t structure that data in a way that would be more usable the next time the newsorg wants to collaborate around climate change. If we collaborate again in six months, I’d have to go back to that spreadsheet, copy the data that is useful for me, then start a new spreadsheet titled “Climate Change Resources Oct. 2010.” It’d be redundant and inefficient.
[...] what I mean by this is how news organizations manage all of the data they’re privy to that is either stored in structured format or could be stored in a structured format if they had the tools to do so.
If we can figure out how to store data in a way that’s transferrable across multiple platforms and in on-going coverage, collaboration not only becomes easier, but becomes the next logical step in knowledge management.
A few thoughts:
The structure can’t be owned by anyone. It has to be native to the web
There needs to be universal markup for certain kinds of data — markup that’s native to the web like HTML, but not owned by any one brand. I want to be able to tag something as <location =”12.9982348 14.23423423″>home</location> and have that data be transferrable to any maping platform, whether it be Google Maps or Mapquest. The same goes for time. I want to be able to tag something as <time =”15:32 PST”>time of the event</time> and then be able to filter all data on the web related to that exact minute.
If we have a standardized structure for all types of metadata, then we can begin to organize and reuse that information on a large-scale and in new ways.
A CMS that builds layers of data on top of each other
Crowd Fusion has always stuck with me as a good baseline for a knowledge management system. Crowd Fusion is the CMS built originally for tech product review sites on top of wiki, blogging, RSS and social networking tools. The creators understood that databases are good for information and blogs are good for news, but there’s no way of connecting all those pieces. My thoughts when I first discovered the CMS in Sept. 2009:
This CMS created by Brian Alvey reminds me a lot of the CoPress connection engine. The concept is dynamic, combining databases, blogs, RSS, social networks and wikis to give the user an all-in-one experience. I wish a newspaper had developed this software and I wish it was open source. I could see a new direction for newspaper websites. [Update: Apparently now there's an open source beta. Yay]
Built into the CMS are features for both data management and collaboration:
Workflow
Group feed reader
Assignments
Database
Wiki
Team-based permissions
Applications that work on top of the data
Topic-based user experience
More about it here (worth the watch, I promise):
I’d be interested to see a newsorg adopt the software and start to build more interactive applications on top of data generated from back-story research and interviews– plus combining it with user-generated content and collaborative reporting from multiple newsorgs.
Anyway, that’s all I have for now. Let’s continue this conversation at BCNI Philly, to which I am hopping on a plane at 10 p.m. PST and arrive in good ol’ Philadelphia at 6 a.m. for the 9 a.m. conference. Who needs that sleep thing, anyway?
