So here I bring you, The Today File. We soft launched the blog two weeks ago and are now regularly linking to it from the homepage. The slideshow below is the presentation I gave to editors and reporters.

What it is

1. A home for breaking news. Prior to the launch of The Today File, we had a crime blog, weather blog, politics blog and a ton of other niche-topic blogs. If any other random in-between news broke (traffic, education, general metro), there wasn’t a home for it except as a “full story” i.e. something that originates in our print CMS (CCI) and goes through the standard workflow of being published to the web. It could sometimes take 10 or 15 minutes to get an item up on our site, and it could only be done from within the building.

Not only is this a many-step process, but it’s a print-centric one that doesn’t allow us to easily do things like hyperlinking, dropping in maps, sharing on social media, etc. WordPress, of course, changes all of that.

2. A place for us to be more transparent. It’s not as radical as The Guardian opening up its news budget to the world every morning, but it’s a start. Every morning, a metro editor posts a Morning Memo which outlines the day’s weather and morning traffic, stories we’re pursuing and a few items worth reading before you walk out the door.

3. A place for us to be more personal. If you read one of the aforementioned Morning Memos, you’ll see that they’re casual and fun. Everything else we post on The Times’ site is very straight-forward, who, what, where, when, why.  This is a place for us to relax a bit and have some fun if it’s appropriate.

4. A way to use modern technology. Our print and web CMSes are old (surprise, surprise). Old technology means old workflows, old workflows mean old mindsets and old mindsets lead to the inability innovate which means we lose relevancy which means we lose readers and attention, so on and so forth. In my mind, changing the technology is the first step at showing people what’s truly possible so they can dream big and adapt.

A quote that I recently read in Stijn Debrouwere’s blog has been ringing in my head for days: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” You connect the dots.

5. A place to freely experiment. Without going through a formal request process and waiting for IT resources to push out something new, we can implement it on a small scale on the blog and quickly rollback if we don’t like the results. For example, we’re trying Facebook comments for a short time to see how our comments are impacted by removing anonymity (I’ll report back later on the findings of this experiment, promise). Because of the vast amount of documentation and array of plugins available for WordPress, we don’t necessarily need developers to roll out new features.

6. A means of disaster publishing. In the event of a huge snowstorm or a fire in our building, all of our web servers would be at jeopardy for our main site. With an off-the-reservation WordPress blog, we now have a place to keep publishing, using software that our editors and reporters are already know and are used to using.

 A few details

• Running: WordPress v. 3.2.1
• Hosting: EC2 instance (soon to be load balanced across a few instances)
• Caching: Amazon Cloudfront  + memcached
• Metrics tracking: Omniture and Chartbeat
• Commenting: Facebook comments (temporary experiment)
• Internal documentation: Internal wiki
• Training: One-one-one with editors, mostly done my me
• Users: All reporters are authors with the ability to edit others’ posts, editors are editors, special user type for producers (between admin and editor)
• Workflow: EditFlow to notify specific editors when posts are ready to be edited
• Photos: Our photo desk drops in photos via FTP (using Add From Server), reporters/editors also manually upload photos
• Shortcodes: For easily inserting Brightcove videos, Document Cloud embeds, links to Seattle Times photo galleries
• Polls: Polldaddy
• Mapping: Using Google Maps Shortcode plugin for crime bloggers to easily drop-in locations

A huge interdepartmental success

What I really love about working at The Seattle Times is how well all the departments work together. This project has been an example of developers, designers,  metro editors, reporters and web producers putting their brains together to create a new product. So here are a few shoutouts:

• Joel Hartshorn, our software development manager, has been a lifesaver for the blog — couldn’t have done it without him. He configured our server, set up all the bells and whistles to make the blog sing under load, helped me during moments of panic, and has generally been excited and open to trying something new.  Thanks to his whole team, too.
• Eric Ulken for being the project manager and setting all the pieces in motion. Also for trusting me enough to take on a big chunk of the project.
• Nick Provenza, a metro editor who has been at The Times for 27 years. He is the gatekeeper of the blog who gets to the newsroom at 5:30 a.m. to write the Morning Memo. He’s our newsroom evangelist who encourages other editors to post. His content is the heart of this thing.
• John de Leon and other metro reporters for filling the blog with Blotter crime content.
• Matt Ironside, our technical producer, who spearheaded the integration with our web CMS so we can easily pull blog headlines onto the homepage.
• Suki Dardarian, Mark Higgins, Kathy Best, David Boardman + all senior editors for their support and helping craft the mission.
• + everyone else who will be dragged into this project in the future

Next steps

The blog is a continually-evolving beast. We’re still trying to figure out which workflows (that word again!) are most efficient, which tools work best, how to integrate with the rest of our site, etc. But the bigger-picture step looking forward will be to institutionalize the blog so that instead of being an off-the-radar side project, we have the right kind of support and resources (yes, that word again, too) to keep it going strong.

Adoption

People in the newsroom seem to love it. Compared to our outdated version of Moveable Type and our current homegrown web CMS, WordPress is glorious. Even the least-tech-savvy of editors took to the interface with a few minutes’ training.

We recently used it for our week of live “viadoom” coverage (closure of the viaduct, which stretches along a major highway) and we’ll be using it for the Nov. 8 election.

The biggest complaint from within in the newsroom so far: “Why aren’t all our blogs on WordPress?” Not a bad idea. Stay tuned for awesomeness.

Trust me, I’m all for hyperlinking. It’s the fabric of the web, what makes the web functional, and I think more newspapers should be doing it — and more often. But what we have here is a technology problem and an ideology problem. I’m sure if the AP could write through stories using HTML (and, of course, have that HTML stripped once it hits the print CMS), they would do it. Or at least I hope they would.  But their solution of including bit.ly links — in parentheticals — isn’t the way to credit newspapers or drive traffic.

There are so many problems at play here.

1. News producers are going to have to manually link the bit.ly URLs. So, when the AP says its going to link to “straight pickups” (as in, stories which derive entirely from a member’s reporting), they really mean they’re just going to insert a bit.ly link in to the story. So, for example, the link won’t look like this. It will look like this (http://bit.ly/oOAVhT).

With the lack of producers in most newsrooms and the wealth of wire content that gets shoved onto news websites, I doubt producers will prioritize manual linking on top of their other duties. And even if they do, this is probably two-five minutes of extra work per story published. Which comes out to probably an hour of work per day, depending on how many AP stories get pushed to the web at a particular website.

2. As a result of that, the bit.ly links instead clutter a story, rather than driving traffic. Readers aren’t going to take the time to manually type in or copy/paste a bit.ly link, whether they see it in print or online. It’s less work to Google a search term if you’re interested in reading more about a print story. If the URLs were inline linked, the UX is such that clicking through would actually happen. So, now, we’ll have all these stories with unlinked bit.lys, which is a confusing and unintuitive usage for readers.

3. Adding bit.lys still doesn’t fix the fundamental problem at play here. We are all reposting the same stories over and over. Today, Amy Winehouse died. I saw this on Twitter, then reported on BBC.  I sat at my desk waiting for the AP slug to come across the budget list. As soon as it did, I published the AP obituary. So did about a dozen other newspapers, and probably more afterwards. We do this with national stories every day.

Imagine if we all just linked to the original reports from news outlets who have the stories first. And imagine if part of the AP’s role — if they truly want to be “more like an aggregator and less like a rewrite desk” — was to find those scoops and push those links out to member sites, so we could all link back to the original reports and send traffic where traffic is due, then add our own original reporting when and where necessary. This would increase the value of everyone’s content and save time.

AP is headed in the right direction (kind 0f), but the technology needs to catch up so linking can be done right. Until then, inline, unlinked bit.ly links are probably not going to be hugely useful.

For those of you who don’t know, I left Publish2 at the end of December. Since then, I’ve been blogging, doing freelance design and lounging on the beach — all while searching for the right job. I have finally found it.

The Seattle Times is the second-largest newspaper on the West Coast and has a newsroom of about 200. The team I’ll be working with, led by Eric Ulken, is awesome and loaded with good ideas — and exciting changes on the way.

Day-to-day, I’ll be doing your typical producer work (mostly on the homepage) and behind the scenes I’ll be working on editorial projects. Because this is a residency, I expect it to be a great learning experience for me from an editorial perspective, where my actual newsroom experience is sparse. Because I’m a teacher as well as a learner, I plan to give back to the newsroom with my unique knowledge of design, multimedia and all the other random skills and tidbits of knowledge I’ve picked up along the way. I start the first week of June.

A newspaper is the perfect place for me right now after working with a few startups (P2, CoPress, Spot.us). I’ve experienced the entrepreneurial end of the journalistic spectrum and I’m now ready to fully embed myself in the more traditional side: newspapers. The Seattle Times is the perfect fit for me — a forward-thinking and bright organization with the right team, the right newsroom size, the right location, the right vision. I couldn’t be at a better place.

Along with the announcement of this job, I’ve launched an official “journalist page” on Facebook for myself (mostly as an experiment) which you can choose to “like” if you want to follow what I’m up to and what I’m reading. Please note that this page is unaffiliated with The Times. It is my independent page and will be my new professional home on Facebook.

For those of you in Seattle, I’ll be at the Hacks/Hackers brainstorm event tomorrow night while I’m in town looking for a place (actually in the air en route to SeaTac as I write this). Hope to see some of you there. I’m absolutely thrilled about moving to the beautiful Pacific Northwest.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me get here (you know who you are).

Next on the to-do list: Buy rainboots, a Patagonia jacket and new windshield wipers.

Last week I learned that David Cohn knows how to tell a joke, bust a move and host an awesome conference.

In all seriousness, the Hardly Strictly Young conference was a whirlwind of new people, old friends, big questions, bright ideas and lots of food. About 30 of us got together at the Reynold’s Journalism Institute in now tornado-stricken Missouri for a small conference gathering designed to compile alternate implementations for the Knight Commission’s report on informing communities.

We sat around for a full day in small, rotating brainstorming groups to tear the Knight Commission’s report to pieces and find ways to implement the very vague concepts recommended. Notably, the four topics we discussed:

1. Journalism or media education at various levels
2. How we can increase the sources of news providers
3. Expand local media initiatives to reflect the “full reality” of the communities they represent
4. Ensure that every local community has at least one high-quality online hub

These aren’t small topics to tackle for only an hour and a half at a time. Half of each discussion was simply trying to figure out what the language of each recommendation really meant.

One criticism I have of the ideas we came up with implementation is that most of them  were abstract, and I think that’s partially due to to time limitations that kept us from drilling down to the heart of each recommendation. Part of the thought processes for such abstract concepts is starting at a high level, breaking the concept into subparts, then tackling each subpart. We were forced to skip from step one to step three, though, and our conclusions were far from exceptional. A few notable implementations that stick out in my mind.

Demos not memos — in the K-12 classroom

On the topic of media education, it’s more important to focus at the lower levels than on higher education. Because teachers learn better from role models than from instruction, create a network of teachers who are making exemplary use of media literacy in their classrooms, then distribute that information to teachers across the nation to guide them toward what works, rather than trying to recreate the wheel. Incentivize teachers with grants and awards.

Report for America

On the same topic, the best and most implementable idea was the “Report for America” concept, comparable to Teach for America or Code for America. Although this idea was presented in the scope of increasing media literacy, I think it would work better for the last recommendation we looked at: ensuring every community has one high-quality, online hub.

Take a look at the description for Teach for America’s approach: “Teach For America corps members commit to teach for two years in low-income communities, then go on as alumni to lead efforts to change the face of public education.”

If you replace “teach” with “report” and “education” with “journalism,” you have a way to ensure communities have online hubs (Report for America members commit to report for two years in low-income communities, then go on as alumni to lead efforts to change the face of journalism).

Combine that with the technological aspect of Code for America: “Code for America enlists the talent of the web industry into public service to use their skills to solve core problems facing our communities” and you could have a sustainable partnership for creating informational hubs in every community.

Wikify it

Although it seems like a no-brainer answer, one way to ensure there’s an online hub for all communities is by expanding Wiki tools. Of all the solutions presented at HSY, this was the most practical and takes the fewest amount of new resources. The group that presented it, Jenny 8. Lee and Chris Amico, referenced the greatly successful Davis Wiki out of Davis, California (see the video below).

LocalWiki – collaborative, community-owned local media! from Philip Neustrom on Vimeo.

Why I absolutely love the LocalWiki project as a means of creating an online hub for communities is that it’s truly community owned, and can become an important informational tool for any community. It doesn’t require the participation of journalists or newsrooms or extra tools — it’s just people informing people.

Overall takeaway

1. Putting a bunch of smart people in a room is an awesome idea. Limiting their topics of discussion to recommendations from the Knight foundation — maybe not the best use of our time
2. Next time, I’d love to see some kind of hackathon and a way for us to continue talking about and building our ideas after the conference.
3. I’m not a fan of invite-only conferences overall. I understand space and resources are limited, so next time I’d suggest having an application process so that those outside of our immediate circle of twitterati are given the opportunity to participate if deemed worthy.
4. Agree with Chris Wink: “It’s tough to do so with such a busy crew, but I think we all would have been more productive had we all fully read the Knight Commission report (I did on the plane there) as I believe there was some duplication.”
5. The diversity at this conference was awesome. People from different backgrounds, ethnicities, professions, etc. were there. Next time I’d like to see people from outside of “journalism” (entrepreneurs, general community members for whom we’re making these decisions).

Thanks to David Cohn and RJI. It was an amazing weekend.

Needless to say, the vegan community is really pissed off about this, including a few of my die-hard vegan friends. I’ve been eating vegan since October, but I wouldn’t call myself die-hard. As a reader of VegNews, I certainly won’t be losing sleep over the issue. But as a community journalism aficionado, I think that the editors of VegNews should be the ones losing sleep for committing the No. 1 sin of niche publications and news organizations in the 21st century: Failing to understand the needs of its community and readers.

After being called out and receiving a huge outcry from its community, VegNews released a letter explaining the situation:

Yes, from time to time, after exhausting all options, we have resorted to using stockphotography that may or may not be vegan. In an ideal world we would use custom-shotphotography for every spread, but it is simply not financially feasible for VegNews at thistime. In those rare times that we use an image that isn’t vegan, our entire (vegan) staffweighs in on whether or not it’s appropriate. It is industry standard to use stockphotography in magazines—and, sadly, there are very few specifically vegan images offeredby stock companies. In addition, it’s exceedingly challenging to find non-stock imagery thatmeets the standard necessary for publication. We would love nothing more than to use onlyvegan photography shot by vegan photographers, and we hope to be there soon.

As someone who lives and breathes news/publishing, I can have sympathy for the financial woes that have forced VegNews to perhaps cut back on staff photographers. As someone who also lives and breathes design, I understand the need to have high-quality art alongside content within the magazine and in the blog.

But even more important than those financial and design restrictions is the commitment VegNews should have to its community. VegNews staffers should know more than anyone that vegans are serious about this shit. Vegans are militant and uncompromising in their beliefs. The vegan community has more passion about their cause than I’ve seen in many religious and activists groups. Veganism, in a way, is almost like a religion.

VegNews, as a publisher of vegan content and vessel for vegan community, should know that about its readers. And they should have comprised high-quality art as a sign of respect for that community they serve, just as any news organization should. Now that the secret is out, VegNews has undoubtedly lost tons of subscriptions and reader loyalty.

So now that they’ve fucked up and been called out on it by some of the most passion-filled evangelists out there, here’s what I’d do as an editor of VegNews:

• Be very transparent about the mistake they made in deceiving their community. Part of the upside of having an extremely passionate group of readers is that they are also compassionate and forgiving.
• Discontinue the publication of real meat stock photos and establish a policy moving forward that they will not knowingly publish real meat photos and pass it off as vegan meat.
• Create a community-based system for photo submissions of vegan food, clothing, accessories, etc. They can use a service like SubMishMash to manage submissions of recipes and user-taken photos. Again, vegans are extremely passionate about their food and sharing their vegan culture. They (myself included) would gladly submit their favorite recipes alongside photos of their food for the magazine. (Just look at the results for “vegan” on Flickr. Vegans are absolutely obsessed with their food and taking pictures of it).

I hope VegNews learns a valuable lesson in the power of a community and understands that, moving forward, their needs come first and foremost.

• Berkeleyside was founded in October 2009 by Lance Knobel, Frances Dinkelspiel, and Tracey Taylor who all have backgrounds as editors and writers.
• The site is run on WordPress
• Their main revenue stream is advertising (and they’re starting to build membership revenue)
• After 18 months of existence, the founders have only recently begun to pay themselves a “very modest monthly salary”
• Berkelyside.com currently has 117,660 unique visitors monthly
• The Berkeleyside iPhone app calls for user contributions by allowing community members to submit photos from the scene of news events
• Three trips Taylor offers to others wanting to start a local news site: do it your way, keep it lean and be transparent

Read the full post at 10,000 Words.

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?