But I don’t like people who bitch and don’t execute. So I’m going to execute.

For those of you who don’t know, I left Publish2 in December. Since then, I’ve been interviewing at big media organizations across the United States. But every interview feels like a battle. I’m trying to convince people of my ideas and my enthusiasm, but am always countered with the question: “But, we’re a newspaper — how do you pull that off when our culture is so naturally resistant to innovation?” Well, at least they’re finally admitting it. That’s the first step to recovery.

When I graduated college in December 2009, I didn’t want to work at a newspaper because I didn’t want to be stifled. Lately, I’ve jumped off my high and mighty tower and decided that if newspapers are going to get anywhere, they need to hire more people like me who can help revolutionize from within (take Greg Linch, for example, hoppin’ on over to the Washington Post after leaving P2. Young brainz permeating big media). But now I’m in a new state of mind: If I want to be a part of the media revolution and help news along its winding journey, I can do that from outside of a traditional newsroom. In fact, I can start my own newsroom.

So here’s the buried lede. I am very seriously considering going back to my hometown of Porterville, California to create a news startup. I’ve bitched enough about, “Oh, I’d do it this way” or, “Oh, you should do it that way.” Time to put my money where my mouth is.

Porterville is perfect for this experiment.

I grew up there. Born and raised. I have 21 years worth of knowledge about the local government, education system, crime, religion, culture… everything. I’m not going to dump myself into a foreign city because the market seems right. I’m going to go to a market I know inside and out.

There is no real local media. The one news outlet in Porterville is the Porterville Recorder, which has decreased in size over the past few years, and has a shaky future since its parent company, Freedom Communications, seeks to sell some or all of its properties. Even if the Recorder does continue to exist, its reporting is shoddy. Take a look at some of today’s homepage headlines:

• Gang Summit addresses problem areas
• Lindsay teen dies in crash
• Oncoming storms will add to lake storage
• Police arrest teen in Tulare murder case
• Main Street fire intentionally set
• Brews flow for good cause
• Amber alert issued for abducted Porterville child

Notice something? These are all reaction pieces. Perhaps because of lacking resources, the Recorder primarily responds to police reports and press releases.

Because of the dynamics of the small community, reporters are walking on eggshells (or so it would seem) when it comes to investigative reporting. Today The Recorder ran the first investigative piece I’ve seen in a while about the overstretched resources of the local emergency room. A few problems with this “investigative” series:

• Today’s headline for the series is: “Meeting the community’s needs.” Boy, does that sound like good PR.
• The reporting has no real value. The first four grafs boringly outline the history of the emergency room, and there’s no nut graf to be found anywhere, seriously. I don’t even know what the point of the piece is.
• Finally, the eighth graf hints at getting to the real problem that should be addressed through this reporting: “But when patients are on gurneys, waiting to be admitted, the wait for a treatment area lengthens — because patients are being observed.” But that issue is quickly overlooked as the story jumps back into facts about the ER. What the?
• The first piece of the series references concerns brought up by local residents on the Facebook page — none of which are further investigated in the piece. Instead, the article looks at the challenges faced by the staff of the ER, which leads to those problems. It’s almost as though the paper is defending the emergency room. Almost as though there are allegiances to be upheld. What about the stories of the people who are turned away from the ER? Where are their voices?  It is NOT COOL to only quote spokespeople from the organization being criticized.

I sat down for lunch Thursday with Bill MacFayden, the founder of Santa Barbara’s Noozhawk — a local news site competing against traditional media. He gave me tons of sound advice about starting up a project like this. Notably:

Start with a niche. He noticed coverage of local education in Santa Barbara was lacking, so he dominated that niche when he started three years ago and that was how he initially built up his reader base. His approach reminds me of Jay Rosen’s 100 percent solution: Cover 100 percent of something, anything, but cover it fully. That’s still his most popular coverage topic on the site. I’m going to have to do quite a bit of research before I get started, but I already know taboo topics like gangs and teenage pregnancy are huge, huge issues in the valley, yet get no play in the local media (unless prompted by a press release).

Do your research. This isn’t something I can just jump into. I need to learn about the broadband saturation (since this is online-only), talk to advertisers to find out what kinds of needs I can fill for them, and talk to local community members to find out what coverage is lacking, where they go to find top news, etc.

This is the perfect time for me to try something crazy like starting my own newsorg. I’m 21 years old. I don’t have a mortgage or a family. Rent in Porterville is dirt cheap. I can build my own site (WordPress to start with, probably, until I can hire real devs someday). The opportunity is huge within the market I want to target. I can do it better than my competition. And I’m ready to rock it.

A few principles I will stand by during my creation of this project, if I do in fact follow through with it:

1. I will never over-work myself or my employees. I know that the hiring of employees is still a long ways off, but I need to get this down from the get-go. I know that burnout leads to pissed off people who secretly despise every conference call and meeting. I plan to pour my heart into this and expect anyone who works with me to pour their hearts into it, but I will never, ever force people to work holidays or 28 days straight.  Everyone will get two days a week off, even if it means rotating off-days so that there are always people on call. People can take vacations when needed. No one will be burned out. I will treat them with love and feed them vegan food and give them lots of hugs.
2. I want to mentor students. When I was in high school, I had a burning ambition to be part of the Porterville Recorder as an intern, even if it meant copy editing without pay. They refused me. I want to pull students in, even if they suck, and help them get better. I am thinking a joint effort with my high school’s Grizzly Gazette will be a good revenue opportunity for both parties.
3. I am all about collaboration. I understand competition is healthy and important, but if the Recorder ever wants to do a joint project, or we want to rope in the Visalia Times-Delta, Tulare Advanced-Register, Bakersfield Californian, and Fresno Bee — I’m 100 percent in favor of sharing information and sources to create high-quality, useful content and applications.
4. I will never walk on eggshells. If there is a story to be told, I will get to the heart of it.
5. I will represent the voices of all people to the best of my ability.
6. I will document the shit out of this. Every decision. Every project. Every new step will have a blog post or a video or a Google doc. I want this to be a huge learning opportunity for everyone who follows me. I want you all to feel like you’re starting this up with me. I am not doing it solo. I want your support and your love and your virtual arms holding me in the middle of the night when I don’t know what I’m doing or where the money will come from to pay my writers.

So, here goes nothin’. Who’s ready to invest in me?

Monday at TechCrunch Disrupt, Publish2 CEO Scott Karp announced 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.

Here’s a video of Scott’s presentation:

Everything you need to know about the News Exchange

• We’re calling it P2X for short.
• 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.

Intrigued yet? If so, sign up for beta or email contact@publish2.com if you have questions.

More videos from TechCrunch Disrupt:

The site will focus on community news in Honolulu and charge a $20/month subscription fee to access content. There will be a few-dollar fee to even access the site because the founder, Pierre Omidyar, believes in a capitalist economy that won’t be sustainable if you give anything away for free from the start.

All Howard’s opinions were his only. He does not represent Peer News or the Civil Beat, although he was a consultant for them.

“Why is a Facebook beer worth more than your news story?” Howard asked in a recent blog post. People pay for fake gifts on Facebook, but won’t pay a dollar for a news story. This is a problem. We first have to answer it before moving on to charge for content.

The basic premises for adopting Civil Beat’s model:

1. It has to be an online newsorg that has no production costs
2. The news has to be a niche product, an “elite” niche
3. As a result, there’s a need for hyper-efficiency
4. There has to be a focus on technology (only 5 reporters, but two programmers).

What is the atomic unit of journalism?

An atomic unit was a “news article” in the past. But an atomic unit of journalism is going to change radically in the new era of journalism. News can’t be “articles” but a service. The Civil Beat is drastically changing the way they view the final product.

The atomic unit of journalism is tied to co-creation.  We see evidence of their mindset in the fact that the job title for their staff members is “reporter hosts”  (because reporters are servants in the process of gathering the news).

An important part of the news site is the living story. Although Google launched “living stories,” Howard noted that they were really like topic pages. Peer News wants to approach stories realistically. For example, if there’s a new zoning law, it’s based on something initiated 10 years prior. A traditional news aritcle throws in background information in a few grafs, but the living story doesn’t assume the reader will do his/her own background research. The living story is fully contextual.

Why he thinks it will work:

• Small staff is hyper-efficient on open source tools, so the production costs are drastically cut
• They’ll be reaching a unique, elite niche for which professionals like real estate agents will want to and be capable of paying

Some people in the audience were skeptical about the paywall. A few questions that were asked:

• How can a democratizing force also be sustainable financially? If you charge, is it still democratizing? Howard made the comparison to broccoli (deep, investigative, valuable stories) and curley fries (fluff, generic, cheap, reporting). We can’t babysit society and ensure that they’ll read what’s good for them, but we hope that they have strong enough judgment to know that it’s good for them.

Plugging into the already-existing blog network

Although the Civil Beat doesn’t intent to include advertising, Howard’s suggestion to them would be to connect with local blogs and build an ad network. The Civil Beat will cover elite topics, but not nightlife and food and entertainment, etc. If local blogs can fill that space and they can share advertising, everyone would profit.

The site will launch officially with full content May 4.

Spurred by his recent interest in computational thinking, the idea of his session is to balance larger view concepts and how they can be applied to the news process.

Before diving into the topic at hand, Greg asked the 50-person audience to arrange our seats into a circle. We each went around the room and introduced ourselves.

Warning: these notes are all over the place because this session was all over the place. There was no structure. It was brilliant.

Types of thinking we brainstormed

• Analytical
• Linear/non-linear
• Critical
• Curiosity
• Inductive – start with small point and expand
• Deductive – start with larger point and look for the smaller picture
• Computational
• Visual thinking
• Brainstorming/visioning
• Episodic
• Stream of consciousness
• Narrative
• Philosophical
• Conventional
• Relational

After brainstorming a list, we identified the top “best practice” thinking as analytical, critical, computational, visual and relational thinking to come up with definitions. The following are the definitions we created and our subsequent analysis of those forms of thinking. (I did not attach names to each person’s comment simply because I could not keep up with everyone shouting over each other )

Analytical thinking: Gathering data, scientific thinking, testing a hypothesis, evidence, context.

• How we can improve analytical thinking? We have the day-to-day, but we don’t step back.
• We shouldn’t be scared of finding  ”right answer” to questions
• To be better analytical thinkers we need continued “liberation” of journalists from the old way of thinking and the physical model (deadline structure, form of the workday)
• The process informs the way we think
• We’re being trained in the “AP” style of thinking, don’t draw conclusions, don’t put your own analysis into it — people aren’t interested in reading that anymore
• The comment that the AP should die was followed up by a comment that maybe we need a better AP
• Identifying questions sufficient to a full story – the need for immediacy can’t distract us from covering a story fully (answering all the questions, identifying a hypotehsis, etc.)
• Hypothesis, method:

Critical thinking: Questioning face value

Computational: Using computing and applying it to other areas. The computer scientists in the room defined computational thinking as using user interfaces as a way of solving human problems in the world. Greg described it as abstraction vs. automation

• Dan Berko of the New York Times said the data is not the end all of itself to tell a story. Data is just one source of information that can lead you to different conclusions
• Will Mitchell of Washington City Paper said that looking for relationships (domain modeling, for example) in any set of data is where he starts with any problem when building a system
• Mitchell also said to look for outliers, look for points in a set of data when the assumptions break down. One example is a “best of” issue of a newspaper that’s produced once a year. How do you map a print-based product into something usable online?
• When a political reporter comes to him (Mitchell) with a set of data he wants to analyze, he first looks for relationships within the data, answers relatively simple questions that need to be answered. From that it evolves into a process of finding trends (what he calls “domain knowledge”).
• Greg says there’s a need to find the balance between human thinking and computational thinking
• Before we can think computationally, we have to relate to each other as human beings first
• There are parallels: modeling vs. storyboarding, algorithms vs. editorial structure
• Similarities between object-oriented programming vs object-oriented journalism
• The point: there needs to be a middleground
• Educators say that students aren’t coming out of education with a new way of thinking. Worried that we’re not in school telling students its OK to melt the two ways of thinking — you can find these students with these kinds of thinking, not the ones in journalism programs.
• Independent thinking is important to journalism because education is institutional

(We didn’t get to jump into the following modes of thinking because we got so caught up on computational thinking:)

Visual thinking: Mapping, images, patterns, visceral

Narrative: Description, telling a story, inverted pyramid

Relational thinking: Linking, connecting

It’s the perfect last-minute gift for anyone with a slight tinge of geek in their blood or the old-fashioned curmudgeons in need of enlightenment. If you’re not sold, here’s a quick little taste of what the book is about:

If that doesn’t hit the spot, Brady Teufel has a great list of journalistic, creative non-fictions that would also make for great Christmas presents.

Happy Holidays, everyone. See you in 2010.

Who: Professors, students, journalists, professionals
What: “Bring a professor” chat
When: Sun., Feb. 22
Where:  www.collegejourn.com
Why: To discuss ways to modernize college journalism education 

Us vs. them

I hate to make this us vs. them, but to be honest, this is an us vs. them situation. Some would argue that “we’re all in this together,” both the professors and the students. But it’s not that way. The students and the industry are in this together. But the professors aren’t impacted directly. If they fall behind, they don’t see the direct consequences of falling behind and thus have no incentive to change. 

It doesn’t have to be us vs. them though. Professors can eliminate the us vs. them by taking the risks students are expected to take.  The classroom should foster that innovation, not hinder it. We can take the risks together. 

“Communication in a communication department would be a start,” said the Mustang Daily managing editor Giana Magnoli when the topic came up in our newsroom. And that’s what #bringajprof chat is about. Bringing that communication between staff and students to a national worldwide level. 

I recently wrote a blog post that sums up the changes I’d like to see in journalism education:

1. Scrap print as a track: There is no such thing as a purely print publication. Thus a solely “print” concentration is pointless. Replace it with a “multimedia” track and keep very minimal print aspects involved.
2. Make video a must for all concentrations: Public relations and news editorial both need to know video editing. Broadcast students who already know how to shoot/edit video need to know how to get it on the Web. All three need to know how to live stream and incoroporate a live chat. 
3. Create a class about social media: Not about platoforms or social networks, though. A class about the community, the conversation, the two-way dynamic of the Web. 
4. Create media business course. Joey Baker said it best in his recent blog post: ”What we need more than anything else is a business model for our industry that is sustainable. Why need students not only to be aware of the problem, but contributing to the brain storming that will eventually lead to a solution.”

This week’s #collegejourn chat is yet another example of how great minds can come together with great ideas (if you’re unfamiliar with #collegejourn chat, read more info here). After an extra hour of chatting, a small group of dedicated #collegejourn chatters have devised a plan to get college educators on board with the 21st century:

What: “Bring a professor” Chat