Live broadcast of my API session

OK, this time it’s for real.

On Tuesday, March 11 from 10:15 – 11:45 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, I will attempt to broadcast my entire session about Digital Transformation on Mogulus. Go to http://www.mogulus.com/dancam at that time and it should come up. We’ll have my MacBook Pro with its camera placed at a safe distance from my bobbing head, while my Powerpoint is projected from another computer. And all this using standard hotel wifi connections.

While you’re waiting for the live feed to start, you can watch the Dog Eats Iguana footage that I posted on YouTube last year — 400 views already, woot!

The first part of the session will focus on what the Californian has done, which many of you are already familiar with. But the second part should be fun and different.

After years of hearing smaller papers say, “We like what you’ve done, but we’re too small for that,” or “We can’t afford that,” or “We don’t have enough staff,” and a number of other excuses, I’m finally able to say with gusto: NO MORE EXCUSES! Anyone can start experimenting with social media today using freely available technologies.

I’ll demonstrate several free tools that newspapers — and really any company — can use to start experimenting with social media right now. Then, using a combination of Ning, Magnify.net and Mogulus, we will create a branded social network with user profiles, photo, video and blogs. We’ll try to set up a site that one of the lucky newspapers can take back with them and start experimenting with the minute they get back, or even that night from a hotel room.

I have to say that lately I’m obsessed with Ning, a social-network-creation company that’s overseen by Marc Andreesen of Netscape fame. They also have a very interesting business model that lets you start on a Ning domain for free, then move it to your domain name for only $4.95 a month. As your site’s traffic grows you can buy extra $9.95/month “units” of storage and bandwidth. That, combined with a very flexible drag-and-drop interface for adding, removing and positioning features, makes it the perfect solution for smaller organizations that want to start building new brands.

Technorati Tags: dan pacheco

Where are Classifieds heading?

Where will newspaper Classifieds be in another few years, and where do they need to be?

Steve Outing has a new initiative around this called Reinventing Classifieds, which is collecting information using an online survey. If there are other research projects out there like this, such as the incredibly insightful Classified Intelligence, I would be interested to know about it and will gladly write about it on my blog if I find it of interest. The more information in this space, the merrier!

I took the survey and look forward to seeing the aggregate answers, which you can only get if you take it. Outing promises me that all answers will be kept confidential and only reported with names removed. But if you’re one of the many people in this industry who can’t provide financial information about your company, know that you’re also free to keep those fields blank. That’s what I did.

Here’s what I posted in the survey comment fields, none of which should be new if you know where I stand.

Newspapers’ classified businesses are obviously challenged, but only because the marketplace is now much bigger than general-interest news products that revolve around print. People have many, many more choices than newspapers these days. The marketplace is much bigger than it was a decade ago, a fact which Classified aggregator Oodle is happy to tout.

Will consumers continue to pay for Classified advertisements? Sure, but maybe not in the way they do today. I see the model moving from one based on paying to publish to paying for targeted promotion. Publishing information online has been free for several years now, but if you look at the billions Google is raking in with keyword sales you can see that there’s a LOT of money to be made promoting free and cheap content. On the same note, paying for upsells that make your ad stand out in a sea of information is also valuable (and is also Google’s core business).

Ultimately people don’t really care about the medium in which their ad appears, but they do care about how effective the ad is at attracting exactly the right person at the right time. Targeting saves them time, and for commercial merchandise may also result in a higher personal profit margin. If you can do a better job matching local buyers and sellers than any of your competitors, you will create value that will translate into dollars.

I also think it’s useful to put Classifieds in the larger context of user-generated content, which in my opinion is really what Classifieds are.

In our market we see user-generated content making up most of the growth of our Web sites, but it’s still hard to monetize that traffic. By positioning Classifieds as a way of telling stories about your stuff (the “Antiques Roadshow” approach) and promoting them with user content — and vice versa — I hope that we’ll see the same kind of growth with ads that we’ve seen with blogs and user profiles. We’ve spent a lot of time lately building a solution that gives people the tools and space to tell really compelling stories, which I wrote about in an earlier blog entry.

I also suspect that we need to stop positioning ad placement in terms of “online-only” and “print + web.” Unfortunately the current choices from Classified vendors makes that difficult. What’s really needed is an integrated solution that lets users place an ad, choose upsells and then choose where they want the ad to appear.

Looking into my crystal ball (and this is pure conjecture on my part and my own personal opinion), I expect that consumers will soon see a print product as just one of many promotional upsells. Some people will pay to have their ads promoted in various print products that match their target interests and demographics, while others may pay for carriage in completely different products — such as Craigslist (why not?)

That’s a really different way to think about Classifieds, but the reality is that newspapers don’t get to decide how consumers view Classifieds anymore. There’s a whole other world of choices out there. We can be one of those choices, and we must be in order to remain relevant in the Classifieds space.

Technorati Tags: classifieds, newspaper classifieds

Revolution in The Bakersfield Californian’s Newsroom

One of the great things about being an early innovator is the sense that you are planting seeds that will one day sprout in other people, and take directions you never expected.

I’m having one of those moments this week as I marvel at what The Bakersfield Californian’s newsroom is doing in the blogs on Bakersfield.com and their recent reorganization to support it. They call this new approach Bakosphere: Where Bakersfield and the Web collide. It’s the most beautiful, natural evolution of online news I have seen in a long time, and a good example of how “news as a conversation” is becoming the norm in newsrooms around the world.

First, a little background.

When I joined The Bakersfield Californian nearly four years ago, the newspaper’s Web site, Bakersfield.com, was largely an afterthought in the print-centric newsroom. Stories would sit around on reporters’ computers until it was time to “file” for the next morning’s paper, and at 11 p.m. every night an automated process would copy those stories onto the Web site. Meanwhile, those same stories were being covered more and more online by competitors, and they weren’t waiting for the next morning.

The New Products group I work in started to challenge the status quo by doing things that some considered suicide for a newspaper — such as creating separately branded Web sites with free Classifieds, launching tools that let anyone in the community write a news story or blog, and allowing young people to upload music and post content without anyone reviewing it first.

After those efforts proved to be more than a passing fad, we introduced the same capabilities on Bakersfield.com, and user-contributed content quickly became the fastest growing portion of the 140-year-old Californian’s growth. A few reporters began to set up their own staff blogs and our “Blog Czar” Steve Swenson, later joined by community coordinator Jason Sperber, set standards for communication and conversation that act as glue for the community.

Three weeks ago, the newsroom — all on its own and after no prodding or consultation with my team — took that up a notch with Bakosphere. While it’s bolstered by new technology, it’s really driven by a whole new way of approaching the news.

Today I spoke with executive editor Mike Jenner, whose newsroom is the real force behind this. He says it all started with reorganizing the newsroom to reduce layers. Fewer editors now touch stories between creation and posting, with many stories going straight to the web in blog posts. Later in the day, another editor will read the story before it goes into print. By reducing the number of eyeballs at the front-end of a story, they’ve sped up the process of getting news online considerably, while still providing space for that second or third edit before a story goes into the immutable print medium.

Another major change is that there is no longer a “web team” through which all online content must pass. Now everyone is the web team! All story originators are trained and expected to post stories online and attach assets like photos, links, graphics and videos. They all know how to edit video, although video editing still goes through a desk that focused just on that. And they can all send out breaking news alerts, which reach readers in e-mail and cell phones.

“We managed to do this by taking nearly all print responsibilities off the shoulders of originating editors and putting more print production tasks on the back end,” Mike told me.

You have to admit that’s pretty radical for a newspaper, and I just have to wonder how long the term “paper” will be associated with our industry’s name. It’s now just one delivery mechanism of many, and also the last in the chain.

Another surprise for me is that the bulk of online news reporting is happening in blogs. Every reporter posts to a news blog, as well as a few “team” blogs — such as Money Talks. Some of these blogs are seeing 6-7 postings a day by the authors, with even more comments by users.

I have noticed that in more than one of these blogs, the community is posting questions and comments, which the reporter reads and responds to. On the Pinheads blog, which is providing live coverage of a high school wrestling championship, you can see how the uncle of a wrestler was conversing with the reporters asking for details about his nephew. An excerpt from that conversation:

The reader:

my nephew is wrestling 130 wt class name is frank martinez . is there a way to watch on the internet,or do you know if he has wrestled already?

The reporter:

I caught part of Frank’s first-round match at 130. He was ahead 8-0 going into the third period, so that looks like good news for you. I don’t think there’s a way to watch on the internet until tomorrow’s semifinals.

OK, I know that we journalists like to hum and haw about our deep investigations and amazing storytelling. That’s definitely important, but this exchange really shows how we can use the online medium to connect with our community. That uncle is never going to forget that he learned about his nephew’s standings directly from the reporter in real time.

Some notes from Mike about what’s working:

• Web traffic, which was climbing all along, is now climbing at a noticeably higher rate with little to no promotion.
  

  If you look at a bar chart of our hourly traffic M-F, it now looks more like a butte or mesa than like a sharp-peaked mountain,” Mike says.

  Traffic used to run way up at 7 and 8 a.m. and peak at 9, then fall off quickly. Now traffic is running up and flattening out around 9 a.m., and not dropping precipitously until after 5. To me this says we’re developing in users the habit of returning to the site for more news and updates during the day.

• They’re seeing a broader range of readers commenting on blogs — a welcome change from the one or two dozen commenters Mike calls “frequent fliers.” The new names and faces mean new points of view that were drowned out before.
• The newsroom is getting more story ideas and leads through blog comments. And he also says they’ve discovered mistakes and been able to fix them more quickly, which also results in not memorializing comments in print.
• Reporters are growing more accustomed to direct interaction with citizens, readers and sources and are much less dismissive of the value of the interactivity.

There are some negatives, too. Mike specifically asked me to mention these because he recognizes that this is a work in progress and that it will take time to get just right. I would add that the process of innovation is inherently messy. I’m reminded of Gannett’s Jennifer Carroll’s frequent advice :”Conversation is messy. Welcome the noise!”

Negatives include:

• Some areas and staffers are a little overwhelmed by the extra work and a few things have fallen through the cracks on the front end. (But hey — this is only a three-week-old revolution, right?)

• Reporters and originating editors are reveling in volume and speed, and that can easily come at the cost of story-telling that provides depth and insight for non-commodity news.

All of this is a reminder to me of how no good idea stops at step 1. It’s gratifying to see how a company’s entire culture could be changed simply by opening it up to outside involvement
. By giving our audience the tools and structure necessary to share their voice, we unknowingly opened the door to a revolution within our own organization.

It’s a story of “If they can do it, so can I.” In the end, user-contributed content isn’t something to fear. It’s a community partnership that is changing the nature of media.

user contributed content, the bakersfield californian, networked journalism, netj, participatory media

Dancam: Live from Colorado Press Association

I’ll be broadcasting my presentation live from the Colorado Press Association today using Mogulus. You can catch it here from 2-4 p.m. MST today, or at http://www.mogulus.com/dancam