The main question about participatory media has evolved from “should we do it?” to “how do we do it better?” The sessions at the Oct. 28 “Citizens Media Summit” used the second question as a starting point, and some of the most forward-thinking believers in open media, inside and outside of newspapers, spoke about their passion for inviting new voices to become active storytellers online.

Much of the conversation focused on themes and questions that appear frequently on the NMF e-forum: preferences about the amount of editing for citizen posts, tools and technology, success metrics, how to make money and what to call this stuff, anyway. Below you’ll find summaries of discussions about revenue opportunities, important metrics to measure, tools and technology, and useful resources for creating a successful citizens media strategy.

The summit, held at the University of Maryland at College Park, was sponsored by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism, located in College Park, and the NAA New Media Federation. I participated as a session planner along with Jan Schaffer, J-Lab executive director, and Mary Lou Fulton, The Bakersfield Californian’s vice president, audience development. More than 80 people, including a significant number of New Media Federation members, attended the sold-out event.

Making It Pay

Yes, there is a business model for citizen media. And it’ll sound very familiar. Lots and lots of advertising (fingers crossed) in a self-service mode or sold by reps, plus classifieds and yellow pages. Voice of San Diego, which refers to itself as an online newspaper, uses a membership-style model.

Backfence.com : Classified ads are free for Backfence members, but businesses pay a monthly fee. The community sites in the Washington, D.C., area also offer yellow pages listings and low-cost, build-it-yourself display ads. Backfence received a $3 million investment earlier this month from a variety of companies and individuals.  

NewWest.net : Google AdSense, ads sold by part-time reps in three markets; getting really to add a full-time sales rep.

Voice of San Diego: The non-profit started with a $350,000 investment from a local venture capitalist; relies on a PBS-like model of membership dues and sponsorships from foundations and others. Generates approximately $4,000 per week from the membership model, according to Barbara Bry, the site’s former editor in chief and CEO. The site, founded by Neil Morgan, who spent many decades with Copley Newspapers, and venture capitalist Buzz Woolley, publishes articles from full-time editorial staff writers and “contributing voices” – prominent and respected community members. The site operates on a $600,000 per year run rate; Bry thinks $800,000 to $1 million would be ideal.

Important Metrics to Measure

It’s too early to publish benchmarks about citizen media sites (you need this many contributions per day, etc.) But everyone needs at least a few metrics to monitor internally.

Watch for the total number of contributors and “the breadth and variety of those contributors,” said Mary Lou Fulton of The Bakersfield Californian. You want to see different voices and new topics emerging on the site. If not, re-energize the marketing engine, which mainly involves person-to-person interaction between staff members and community organizations.

Sites that operate forum-based discussion areas should analyze the frequency of visits per contributor and time spent, said Chris Muldrow, content director, Internet operations at Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. (CNHI) in Birmingham, Ala. Muldrow, who enjoyed great success with forums while he was with fredericksburg.com, wants CNHI site operators to see multiple visits from the same people every day.

Picking a Platform

Morris DigitalWorks is known for its advertising technology. But the company didn’t use its own tools for Bluffton Today’s content because, well, it didn’t have any for community-journalism projects. MDW’s Steve Yelvington said Drupal was the right choice because of the underlying code offered a high level of quality, it was supported by a large open-development community, it offered a distinct separation of presentation and business logic, and it supported individual blogs but in a manner that worked with a large community. Drupal supports BlufftonToday’s blogging, event calendar, message boards, comments and profiles. Eventually MDW’s Spotted photo application replaced Gallery2. BlufftonToday uses MDW’s classified advertising technology. The site offers PC users an RSS reader provided by Charlwood Emarketing.

In a handout, Yelvington listed 10 companies (including Drupal) that MDW researched for BlufftonToday:

Drupal
Geeklog
Mambo
MediaWiki
PHPX
Plone
Scoop
Typo3
WordPress
Xoops

Other technology options used by/mentioned by speakers:

Backfence.com: Built its own platform after looking at Six Apart and Drupal.

Bakotopia: Developed the “Bakomatic” platform. The Bakersfield Californian’s Northwestvoice.com and Masbakersfield.com will run on the platform as well. The Northwest Voice previously used iUpload as its vendor.

Blountcountyvoice.com: The site, which serves Blount County, Tenn., and is owned by Horvitz Newspapers, uses iUpload’s platform. The site typically receives 38 community contributions per week from 571 registered users (as of Oct. 12), said Catherine Shen, vice president/strategic development at Horvitz Newspapers.

CNHI: Relies on open-source specialist Zope Corp.

NewWest.net: Expression Engine from pMachine

Voice of San Diego: Kintera

YourHub: Web-based application that uses the DotNetNuke Open Source Project as its core content management system. The online/print community project from The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News has received so much interest that the Denver Newspaper Agency, which oversees business operations for the papers, is licensing the platform to other publishers. After the conference, Fran Wills, vice president interactive of the DNA, said the YourHub system offers content publishing, reverse publishing, integrated classifieds and a turn-key kit complete with a business plan, sales/marketing plan and editorial guidelines. More than 12 newspapers have signed on, including the Knoxville (Tenn.) News Sentinel and The Commercial Appeal in Memphis.

Adrian Holovaty, editor, editorial innovations at washingtonpost.com, developed an open-source framework called Django while he was working for the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal World. He supports internal development and gave some good reasons, primarily that off-the-shelf tools will require customization anyway, and that local publishers should have a solid technical person on staff to support a variety of online initiatives. Holovaty also mentioned Ruby on Rails as another framework for site publishers to investigate.

Holovaty shared some of his favorite mash-ups, or sites that use application program interface (API) to create new services from existing tools. Tops on his list:

• Housingmaps.com, which pulls in real estate feeds from craigslist and displays them with the Google maps interface
  
• Chicagocrime.com, Holovaty’s Batten Award-winning site that maps crime locations with data from the Chicago Police Department
  
• BBC Backstage, the spot where the BBC invites programmers to build innovative new “stuff” with existing content. 

What’s in a Name? A Lot!

Oh, the buzzwords. There’s “user-generated content,” “participatory journalism,” “citizen’s media,” “we media” and lots more. Ultimately what you call this collaborative approach to covering communities doesn’t matter as long as the results achieve your current and future goals.

Jonathan Weber, editor and founder of NewWest.net, explained why his site, which primarily features reports from 20 regular, contracted contributors, uses the name “Unfiltered” for its reader-submitted postings. People who aren’t journalists were intimidated by the word “journalist.” And those who consider themselves professional journalists or aspiring journalists didn’t want to be lumped in with the others. “Unfiltered” works because it signifies an open, direct interaction with readers and removes any trace of the “J” word.

One More Resource

Anyone on your team who is involved with the citizen media effort should visit the J-Lab’s J-Learning.org site. The online tutorial, launched in August, provides instruction and advice in four main categories – Plan It, Build It, Present It and Promote It. There are basic HTML lessons, details about tags, and instructions for working with images and audio, as well as blog management pointers.

The closing thought of this piece comes from Catherine Shen of Horvitz Newspapers. “As an editor, you spend most of your life saying ‘no’ to people,” she said. “A community content site is a way to say, ‘yes.’”

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