How Technology Agnosticism Fuels Innovation

Steve Yelvington has an amusing post today titled “Dan Drinks the Kool-Aid,” a reference to my decision to build our Printcasting tools on the Drupal framework. In the inside-baseball game that is the blogosphere, there’s a story behind this that I think other media innovators can learn from, and in my opinion it’s all about how important keeping an open mind is to building a culture of innovation.

Ever since the Californian started experimenting with social media after the launch of The Northwest Voice and Bakotopia, we’ve stayed in close contact with Yelvington and his team at Morris Communications. Very early on, people at both companies noticed that we had similar ideas and approaches to engaging audiences. The differences between the consumer experiences on the Voice, Bakotopia.com and Morris’ Blufftontoday.com are very slight.

But there are some very large differences in our back-end technical approaches. Very early on, Yelvington’s team started building its social media sites on the open-source Drupal platform. The Californian started its sites first with a vendor, and then partly out of the frustration of that experience, moved in the other direction and began building our own stuff.

There are some good reasons behind this. Compared to Morris, which has 13 daily newspapers, 33 radio stations and magazines in multiple states, the Californian is tiny. When my boss Mary Lou Fulton started the Voice, the Californian didn’t have a single software programmer or system administrator on staff. Our complete lack of dedicated technical support staff made modifying an open-source tool difficult. We couldn’t do anything on our own and had to rely on vendors and outside contractors to guide many of our decisions.

When I started in 2004, before the Californian had any niche products or technology to speak of, I wasn’t satisfied with using vendors and I started playing around with various open source tools. We launched Bakotopia on an open-source platform called Noah’s Classifieds. It was a great one-trick-pony platform for simple Craigslist-list style listings, but we wanted to do a lot more than that. In the end we saw that it had to be modified so much that we faced two choices: build a bunch of new functionality around a core to make it do something it wasn’t designed to do, or spend an extra month building a new core that was a better fit for our long-term needs.

Before investing in a fully custom solution, we looked at other open-source tools, including Drupal. I liked the way it was structured, but found that it had stability issues and just wasn’t all there yet (I used it on my blog for a good 4 months before it crashed and took all of my postings with it). The Californian couldn’t wait for the perfect open-source solution to emerge and I didn’t want to risk staking the future of this 140-year-old media company on a promising, but at the time still adolescent, technology.

So we started “rolling our own” and, to our amazement, ended up with the award-winning Bakomatic platform. That was the right thing to do at the time, and we will continue to use and enhance the system. It still has some unique functionality and experiences that don’t exist in Drupal — for example, the Inside Guide business directory and a Facebook-like Personal Inbox. And in some respects we can innovate faster with it because we don’t have any external dependencies on other projects.

However, we don’t have any strong religion about proprietary technology, or any technology for that matter. Whenever a new need comes up we think first about the end-user and specific business goals, and then see how different technology solutions meet those needs. We’re technology agnostics.

Printcasting is unique for us in that it needs to work really well in Bakersfield, then be quickly adopted by partners in five other cities, and finally made available to anyone under an open-source license (read more about the three phases of the project).

Building the features on our own proprietary platform was one solution that would have required releasing some or all of our code to the open source community. We briefly considered doing that, but then realized that technology was only half of the picture. We also needed an open-source community. We decided that the project would have a bigger overall impact if it was connected to an existing open-source movement versus trying to start our own competing movement.

Four years after our initial evalutation, Drupal is well out of its adolescence and is an ideal launching pad for almost any social media tool. By making modules for the consumer-facing pieces and tying them into PDF generation on the back end (which by the way would not be done by Drupal, but the end-user will never know or care), we know that thousands of existing Drupal sites, and many more thousands to come, will experiment with what we build. Not only that, they will take what we do and make it better. That’s perfectly aligned with the goals of the Knight News Challenge.

Will the Californian use Drupal for more projects? Maybe, or maybe not, depending on the project. We’re also now using Ning sites as a low-cost way to serve smaller niche audiences. If they show promise, we invest more resources and move them into our larger network. If not, it’s really easy to shut down a Ning site. Ning didn’t even exist when we started down the path of social media. In another four years who knows what else will be out there?

Drupal is looking really good now based on our current needs, and it may continue to look good in another four years. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that innovation relies on flexibility and open-mindedness. The minute you put a stake in the ground, you’re cutting off your options and your rate of innovation slows down.

One thing that has bothered me since I re-entered the newspaper industry after nearly 7 years away is how it’s always looking for one silver bullet. Perhaps that’s because the industry relied on one solution (the daily printed newspaper) for its entire existence up until now. But times have changed, and one solution to every problem is no longer feasible.

Innovation requires the opposite of silver-bullet thinking. It’s an ever-evolving process that requires constant experimentation, evaluation and change.

Or put another way, feel free to drink someone else’s Kool-Aid, but make sure you buy the variety pack. Today’s Black Cherry may be tomorrow’s Blue-Dini or Purplesaurus Rex.

printcasting, knight news challenge, rel="tag">news innovation

Help Build Printcasting in Drupal!

Ever since we won a Knight News Challenge grant for Printcasting, we’ve had our heads down looking into different programming languages, frameworks and architectures that could help us achieve two goals.

• Goal 1: Build something quickly by March that we can improve over time, without the need to reinvent the wheel for common features like registration, feed aggregation and user-contributed content.

• Goal 2: Since this project will ultimately be open-sourced, we want to start engaging an open source community early on so that a number of talented, motivated people are already working on the next version by the time our Knight Foundation grant ends (two years from now). We don’t just want to build software. We want to kick-start a movement that outlives us all.

Well, I’m happy to report we’ve finally settled on the obvious choice: Drupal. So to that end, we’re now officially looking for Drupal contractors who can help us inject Web 2.0 juju into the print world. It’s an exciting opportunity to democratize and, to quote MediaNews Group’s Peter Vandevanter, “individuate” the print experience.

Please feel free to spread the following posting far and wide. And let me know if you know of anyone who would be good! Inquiries can also be sent to jobs@printcasting.com.

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Drupal developers needed to democratize magazine publishing

The Bakersfield Californian is looking for experienced Drupal developers for an exciting new social media project. Using funds from a Knight News Challenge project, we’re going to make it possible for anyone to be a local media mogul. Sound interesting? Read on for details!

WHO ARE WE?
The Californian is an independent, family-owned newspaper in central California that has a reputation for innovation. We’re leaders in our industry in applying “Web 2.0″ concepts locally, and among the first newspapers in the United States to adopt social networking and citizen journalism as part of our core offerings.

We focus not just on our newspaper, but on growing local audiences through 11 niche brands. All of them have participatory Web sites, and 6 also have print magazines or newspapers that feature users’ content. We are the leaders in our industry when it come to fresh ideas that others are eager to adopt, and we have been covered widely, including in a front page story on The Wall Street Journal.

WHAT’S THE PROJECT?
As one of 16 winners of the 2008 Knight News Challenge, we have the support of Knight Foundation (http://www.knightfoundation.org) to develop a revolutionary set of tools that will allow anyone to create a local newspaper, magazine or newsletter. Everyday people will be able to publish printable magazines (in PDF form) that self-update with fresh content they’ve created themselves, as well as content from participating local blogs and news providers. Money, technical skills and design skills are not required — only passion about a niche interest. The end result will be hundreds of magazines which are also full of local ads that local businesses submit using self-serve tools.

WHAT’S THE KNIGHT NEWS CHALLENGE?
The Knight News Challenge is a five-year program, now in its second year, that will award at least $20 million for digital innovations for transform community news in specific geographic communities. Since its creation in 1950, the Knight Foundation has invested nearly $315 million to advance journalism quality and freedom of expression. Learn more at http://newschallenge.org

WHY DRUPAL?
Under the terms of our Knight Foundation grant, we’re developing these tools under an open-source license in order to start a new movement around personal print publishing.

What better place to look than the Drupal community? We want top developers to provide their knowledge and expertise to this project. We know that the Drupal community can develop a reliable, feature-rich application that can then be used by thousands of other Drupal sites.

Our project requires multiple skill sets. Please review our needs below, and let us know if you can contribute.

• Drupal – Ability to create modules correctly within the Drupal framework

• PDF Generation – PDF generation with advance layouts and functionality. Do you have ideas on how to generate PDFs within PHP? We want to talk to you!
• RSS/Atom – Key content is derived from RSS and Atom feeds. Knowledge of these standards and how they can be used is invaluable.
• MySQL – You should know how to effectively design a scalable database which will work well with Drupal.
• UI (Javascript/Ajax/DHTML) – We’ll need a rich interface to control content. Anyone who likes a challenge needs to work with us.

INTERESTED?
Send inquiries to jobs@printcasting.com and include a resume of jobs and/or Drupal projects you have worked on. Links are always appreciated.

Jared Polis and Politics 2.0

One of the coolest piece of junkmail I’ve ever received.
Originally uploaded by pachecod

I think I may have just encountered the 2008 version of a politician shaking hands at a campaign event, but it happened online instead of at a high school cafeteria. It says a lot about the changing nature of political campaigns in the Web 2.0 world, and how, just like all media, political advertising is becoming less of a one-way broadcast and more of a conversation. And it’s also an example of how print and online media can work together in advertising.

My story begins at my mailbox, which just like every day was overflowing with junk mail I didn’t ask for. As usual I sifted out the bills and prepared to drop the rest in the recycling bin. But this time, something caught my eye.

Jared Polis, the Boulder entrepreneur famous for Blue Mountain Arts (sold to Excite for $780 million) who’s now running for congress, sent me a laptop!

Well, not exactly. But the card looked like a laptop, and the techie in me just had to open it. The inside of the card spoke straight to my geek heart, sporting a miniature MacBook Pro keyboard with Jared Polis on the screen above. I thought this was one of the more creative mailings I’d seen, so I pulled out my iPhone, snapped a picture and e-mailed it to my Flickr account (something I do at least once a day). You can see it here, or in this post.

A few days later I got an e-mail from Flickr saying someone had commented on my photo. I was tickled to see that Jared Polis himself had found the photo and posted a comment thanking me.

Before I continue, I just want to be clear that I have absolutely no relationship with the Jared Polis campaign, and when it comes to congressional elections I haven’t made any decisions about who I’m going to vote for (which ironically is exactly what I told a Jared Polis caller the other day). And when I do, I’m certainly not going to blog about it.

But as an online media person, I do want to comment on how much more interesting and, yes, even FUN this was for me as a voter. It’s the kind of experience politicians and marketers of all types should strive for. Compare it to endless robo-calls at dinner, sticky notes on doors and windshields, duffel-bag-carrying doorbell ringers, and of course the mass of mostly uninteresting political mailings. This was the complete opposite of all that.

Whoever came up with the idea of a card-as-laptop mailing is a genius (given Polis’ greeting card background, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was him). And Polis is very smart to not only search social media sites for content that people are posting about him, but also publicly interact with the content owners. After all, it got me to blog about him, didn’t it?

In the context of a presidential election year where the Republican and Democratic candidates both have their own social networking sites — McCainSpace and MyBarackObama.com — I think we’re seeing a very new kind of politics that’s driven not just by the messages politicians send out, but also the degree to which they connect with potential supporters and help them connect with each other.

My story doesn’t end there, by the way. My kids, 2 and 5, have since found the mailing and they refuse to let us recycle it. They consider it one of their toys: a play computer. Yesterday a neighbor kid came over and she started playing with it too, and when it was time to go home she refused to let go. To keep the peace, I had to promise her that she could play with it the next time she came over.

So lest you think print is dead as an advertising medium, or that print is something only old people care about, take a look at my kids. I wonder how many other kids are fishing this mailing out of the recycle bin and taking it to mom and dad, who then open it and read the message.

jaredpolis, social networking, politics

News Challenge Marketing Gig

The Knight Foundation is looking for a Web 2.0-savvy marketing freelancer from July to September to help spread the word about the 2008/2009 Knight News Challenge contest. You can read the contract description here. Sound like you? Send an e-mail to knc-marketing@abcdelta.com.

If you’re the type of person who lives on Twitter, Facebook, Seesmic and whatever is right around the corner, and you have a good network of connected peeps, this is a great way to get paid to do what you’re probably already doing. And as a News Challenge winner, I can also tell you that it’s a great way to meet some wicked smart, fun people. That includes this year’s contest coordinator Susan Mernit, one of the smartest tech innovators around.

News Challenge, marketing jobs

Craig Newmark’s interview with The Washington Post

Printcasting in the Blogosphere

The word about Printcasting is starting to spread on the blogosphere. Here are a few recent posts mentioning the project — for which we are very grateful.

• Fernando Pizarro of the Honolulu Advertiser puts Printcasting in the context of a larger trend of reverse publishing. Many newspapers, like the Advertiser but also The Bakersfield Californian, now publish content online first and then feed it into print publications.

  I think the big difference with Printcasting is a) that we give total publishing power over to regular people, b) we allow it to happen automatically, c) we don’t require printing and distribution in order for people to read, as they can also subscribe to receive PDFs in e-mail, and d) there’s a significant self-sere advertising component that is not dependent on a sales person for every ad.

• Kristen Taylor from The Knight Foundation is publicizing our screencast of early User Interface concepts.
• The AFP’s MediaWatch site is including a link to my MediaShift Idea Lab post.
• Fellow News Challenge winner David Cohn posted this impromptu video of a demo I gave him at the MIT Future of Civic Media conference. (I reluctantly link to it, but not because of Dave, who rocks. I really hate videos of myself. So focus on the ideas and not on the bumbling, talking head

  Speaking of Dave, check out his own News Challenge project Spot.us, which will take the idea of community-funded reporting to new levels. If there’s a story you want to fund, you’ll be able to drop some coins in a tip jar — kind of like Barack Obama’s approach to election fund raising. Very cool! Hopefully one day every Spot.us reporter can have an instant Printcast, too.

• And finally, 2007 News Challenge winner Lisa Williams says she can’t wait for us to build Printcasting so she can have an instant magazine for her blog. Music to my ears!

  Speaking of Lisa, she and Susan Mernit are now in a partnership together for a new company called Peoples’ Software. There aren’t many details available yet about what they plan to build, but I’ve talked to both and I can see the light in their eyes. It will be fun to see what these two smart innovators cook up! Susan is also also running the Knight News Challenge for its 2007/2008 round.

printcasting, knight news challenge

Making Print Part of Web 2.0

For the next two years, I’ll be posting thoughts and updates about Printcasting on the PBS MediaShift Idea Lab blog. My first post is titled, “Making Print Part of Web 2.0.” It explains some of the thinking behind the idea — especially with regards to the digital-print hybrid activity we’ve seen in Bakersfield — and examines some of the roadblocks people have to new print models.

Many Eyes: a cool tool for journalists

I’ve spent the last two days at the MIT Future of Civic Media conference, which was like a live mashup of smart MIT Media Lab students and Knight News Challenge winners. My head is still spinning with all of the amazing projects I’ve learned about, but one that jumped out at me is Many Eyes, a project of IBM’s Visual Communication Lab.

Many Eyes is a visual graphing tool that will accept simple text and data tables (such as Excel files), and present that data in a visual, interactive way. It’s the kind of thing that makes data come alive, transforming it from something dull that people normally tune out, into a fun engaging, individualized experience. The example they showed was a “word tree” presentation of Alberto Gonzales’ 2007 Senate testimony. Go there and type in the word “I,” and then click “don’t,” and you will immediately see how data analysis can be fun — and even amusing.

Many Eyes graphs are embeddable too (see an example of a gas price graph below), and anyone can create and share them for free. So come on journalists: get busy! Start uploading your data and sharing it on news sites, blogs and anywhere else it makes sense.

In Defense of Rob Curley, LoudounExtra and Innovation

Will Sullivan has a great post on Journerdism about some of the undue criticism of Rob Curley and LoudounExtra.com upon Rob’s latest move from The Washington Post to the Las Vegas Sun. Some journalists see Rob’s move as a sign that LoudonExtra is a failure, and they cite some of Rob’s own admissions of what he could have done better as evidence.

loudoun extra, rob curley, the washington post

My Reality Check for Steve Ballmer

I’m cross-posting this from something I sent on the Online-News list today in reaction to a Washington Post interview with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, who basically said there would be nothing in print 10 years from now. The exact quote:

There will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

All I can say to that is, really? Print is dead? Just last week I received a postcard in my mailbox from Microsoft urging me to upgrade to Windows Vista.

Ballmer’s statement is overly simplistic and completely disregards other trends that are not directly connected to “the daily newspaper” or general-interest magazines. Here are just a few:

• Increased niche print products, especially hyperlocal ones. Larger newspaper circulation may be decreasing, but in some cities — like in Bakersfield where I work — there’s a net increase in total number of eyeballs reached with niche print products.

• The hybrid online-print synergies observed in such niche products.
• Home printing. I like to tell the story of a local pastor I know who receives e-mails all day, but prints them out and carries them in a folder. At the beginning and end of the day, when he has time, he answer them.
• Direct mail, circulars and flyers, and anything that can be stuck on your windshield or door (like that Microsoft postcard!)
• Anything that can be printed out as a Kinko’s and left in a coffee shop or bar. I urge everyone to go to your local copy shop on a Thursday or Friday night to observe all the bands painstakingly creating and copying “hand bills” for their gigs to leave around town. Not only does it show that print isn’t dead, but it’s being used by the young generation we’re all told is tuning out print. Something is getting lost in translation there.

Technology is fueling more personalization and direct-to-consumer delivery in all of the above print distribution channels, which is the subject of the Personalized News conference in Denver next month.

I’ve been trying to track down what the net difference in print is when you factor in these other sources, and also figure out how you would measure it. Just like the broken “pageviews” stat for Web sites, total copies doesn’t seem to make as much sense as total audience reach. If you have some relevant data, please send it my way!

My suspicion is that we’re all individually receiving more personalized messages in print from these personal sources, and less so from general-interest publications. It’s part of the larger trend that we see with information in all mediums.

And of course I’m working on something in this area called Printcasting via the Knight News Challenge that seeks to bridge the gap between online UGC and local “citizen” print publishing.

There’s a lot of life left in print. But just like everything else, what it looks like tomorrow will be very different from what we and Steve Ballmer see today. And technology is fueling that shift.

printcasting