I really enjoyed the Leonard Witt interview, but I’m always hungry for quantified examples of success in implementing the whole “readers help produce the news” concept.

Here’s one where the newsroom still plays the arbiter role, but standing on the shoulders of, well, everyone: “Minnesota Public Radio, Public Insight Journalism”:http://www.current.org/news/news0608skoler.shtml.

bq. Seventeen thousand people, at last count, have volunteered to share what they know about their communities, their work and their lives to help us find and tell important stories. Many have given us leads we might never have found. Our network of public sources continues to grow (by roughly 1,000 a month) and so does its contribution to our coverage.

bq. In the past few weeks, reporters here and at our American Public Media programs in Los Angeles have used these sources for stories on crime in Minneapolis, obstacles faced by women entrepreneurs, advances in green architecture, rising middle-class insecurity, and religion at the office. We also met with 70 people, many of them undocumented workers, for our continuing coverage of immigration issues.

“And Dan Gillmor has more on-the-ground ideas”:http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/06/18/distributed-journalism-conversation-at-pressthink-bloggercon/.

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“A Reuters article”:http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71131-0.html?tw=rss.technology says that an electronic version of print media could be here by 2007:

bq. Some of the world’s top newspapers publishers are planning to introduce a form of electronic newspaper that will allow users to download entire editions from the web on to reflective digital screens said to be easier on the eyes than light-emitting laptop or cellphone displays.

One big question is: won’t this technology also allow people to download blog content or anything else they want from the web for easy transportation. Where’s the competitive advantage here for newspapers in particular?

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“SUpost.com”:http://supost.com/, a site made to look and feel just like Craigslist, has launched at Stanford. The point is to play off of Craigslist’s popularity, but to aim specifically at the campus population. In the few weeks that the site has been up, it’s been gaining a solid amount of traction.

“A Stanford Daily article”:http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=20699&repository=0001_article, published on May 30, says: “according to [founder Greg Wientjes], the site currently boasts more than 846 postings, with 434 items for sale and 269 postings with information about events at Stanford.”

Today, June 11, the site has over 1200 postings, with 842 items for sale and 192 postings with information about events at Stanford. And most of the time between the article and today has been dead week and finals week — which has probably skewed the site’s growth in favor of items for sale but against events.

Two improvements beyond Craiglist: the site requires users to include a campus email address and also allows users to link to each other’s Facebook profiles.

If Greg avoids a cease-and-desist order from Craig, I think he’s got a success on his hands: look out for Gregslist. I am sure that nobody’s classified department has seen that kinda growth in recent history. It’s time to give up on classified ad revenue as you’ve known it. Charging readers for classies causes financial pain, pain that can now be alleviated through a free campus service that connects buyers, sellers, “general romance” seekers, etc… way more efficiently than any print product can. _Exhibit A: Craiglist has already done the same thing to professional newspapers._

Maybe I’m overly concerned — so where’s the evidence to the contrary? The two most immediate options I see:
* Copy Gregs/Craigslist on your paper’s web site, or really gain your campus’s attention and affection through even better online community/online marketplace solutions (this site offers plenty of ideas on that).
* Combine your print and online options, making your print classified option at-cost for any user. That might create some extra value that only your paper could offer. And at least you could maybe make some ad dollars off the web part of it (although Craigslist makes its money through charging employers for their job postings — and that’s another uh-oh for college papers if sites like Greg’s are successful).

I’ve seen a few of these kinda “online marketplace/community” sites popping up at other colleges around the country. I don’t know if any of the others have been hits. Nevertheless, clearly many people see a big, unmet demand and someone — and I personally hope someone with student media’s interests at heart — is going to do it right and redefine campus.

“As Greg says on the site”:http://supost.com/about.php, “I’ve frequently found myself wishing that someone would build a website that would tell me what’s happening on the Stanford campus or help me to buy discounted computer equipment. Nobody did. So, I decided to build it.”

The other week I ran into Greg, who I kinda knew from my freshman dorm. At that point, he was still looking to get an article in The Stanford Daily. My recollection of our conversation…

Greg: “Do you know if there’re any reporters in The Daily office who I could get to write an article about my new site?”

Me: “Uh, it’s Friday afternoon. Nobody’s gonna be around. Try next week.”

Greg: “Okay, because I think it’d make a really interesting article.”

Me: “Yeah, except you’re basically aiming to replace some of the core functions of what The Daily does.”

Greg: “Well, I see my site and The Daily as being complimentary.”

Me: “I don’t see how.”

_End of conversation_

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So you’re thinking about introducing streaming video to your paper’s web site… get ready to pay, or face service problems.

In recent months, debate has erupted over “net neutrality”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality, a lack of which would allow telephone and cable companies to discriminate against customers who can’t afford premium services like next-generation video, or who otherwise aren’t aligned with Telecom’s interests.

As CNET “more objectively puts it”:http://news.com.com/Politicos+propose+new+action+on+Net+neutrality/2100-1028_3-6074108.html: net neutrality “centers on the idea that broadband providers must not be permitted to favor some Web sites or Internet services over others. Network operators argue that they should be entitled to charge bandwidth hogs extra for faster transmission and prioritized placement in order to help finance vast build-outs of broadband infrastructure.”

The CNET article goes on to discuss a counter-bill being introduced “[that] would make it illegal under antitrust law for network operators to impose such fees or to fail to provide their services on ‘reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms.’ It… would, for instance, bar broadband providers from blocking, impairing or degrading sites or services and from stopping users from attaching the devices of their choice to the network.”

Citizen media guru “Dan Gillmor”:http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/04/25/saving-the-net-from-the-real-predators/ and the “MediaCitizen blog”:http://mediacitizen.blogspot.com/2006/05/telcos-seek-to-deceive-bloggers-with.html explain in more detail why this is so bad for journalism.

Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet, “explains generally why giving the Telecoms what they want is bad for innovation”:http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/11/vint-cerf-speaks-out-on-net-neutrality.html.

*Meanwhile, Big Telecom aids the feds in attacking journalists.*

As you may have “read recently”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm in USA Today, AT & T and other major telephone companies have been accused of cooperating with the NSA to spy on their customers — including you?

“CBS reports today that”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/05/22/politics/main1638699.shtml: “[US Attorney General] Gonzales also said Sunday the Bush administration would not hesitate to track telephone calls made by reporters as part of a criminal leak investigation. He said officials would not do so routinely and randomly.” That is, not when they don’t want to.

An ABC reporters’ blog confirmed this “a week ago”:http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/05/fbi_acknowledge.html.

So college journalists probably won’t be getting spied on by the feds anytime soon — unless somebody gets a particularly juicy lead — but maybe once students graduate and go pro? The idea, in any event, is scary.

Wired Magazine has been covering the issue for some time now, and today published evidence originally produced by an internal AT & T whistle-blower:

“Whistle-Blower’s Evidence, Uncut”:http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70944-0.html

“Why We Published the AT&T Docs”:http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70947-0.html?tw=rss.index

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Last week I got a chance to meet two of the guys behind “Crispy News”:http://www.crispynews.com, a garage startup here in silicon valley.

Their technology lets anyone create their own “community news” site—according to Crispy’s definition, a site where “users submit stories for review, but instead of having an editor decide which stories go on the front page, the users do.”

They basically developed tools for anyone based on the concepts behind sites like Digg (www.digg.com) and Reddit (www.reddit.com)

I’m encouraging them to build a plugin for newspaper sites — imagine the New York Times’ “most emailed” top 10, but with little buttons where each user can directly give a positive vote to their favorite stories. I’ll post again when they have some sort of module ready, but ping me at eric (at) unimedia.org if you want to get in touch with these guys in the meantime. They want to gauge newspaper’s interest for the tool.

If readers could rank their favorite content from their campus paper, editors would have a better idea of what’s interesting to people and readers could feel a greater sense of control over/connection to the paper. Of course, readers’ positive feelings tend to drive more, sticker traffic to papers’ sites.

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What does this mean? Probably a large, aggressive media corporation trying to cash in on the college market, like Viacom (owner of MTV, VHI, Comedy Central, etc…), “or so says Business Week”:http://businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2006/tc20060327_215976.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_today%27s+top+stories.

The main example of this type of move being Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp’s purchase of MySpace and the subsequent reorienting of Murdoch’s empire around the site.

In any case, there’ll likely be more media content accessible to students via Facebook in the near future, meaning more direct competition for student media.

Oh yeah, and funny how the sale coincides with Facebook’s growth “seemingly levelling off”:http://gigaom.com/2006/03/28/should-facebook-have-taken-that-750-million-offer/.

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I stayed with a friend while in New York last week. He used a mashup of Google Maps and the New York subway system to figure out how to get us around. A little more searching revealed there are a few NY mashups out there — check out this “roundup of ‘em”:http://www.gridskipper.com/travel/new-york/new-york-city-mashup-roundup-126515.php.

On that note, there are at least two sites I know of applying the mapping concept more broadly:

http://flagr.com/

http://platial.com/

This stuff could be really cool if applied to town-n-gown life. And would be a fascinating addition to student newspaper web sites.

Imagine being able to see a map of where news events, restaurants and everything else is located in and around campus!

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Online innovations are slowly but surely bubbling up in student media, from what I learned at the ACP’s LA convention this past weekend.

* Student newspaper blogs can really work. The “VanCougar”:http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/ss/vancougar/ at Washington State University-Vancouver, has an active one going “here”:http://vancougar.blogspot.com/ using Blogspot. It started as the newsroom’s response to criticism of its coverage and has since become a central campus forum.

* Online campus community needs are still not fully met. For example, students at the New School in New York are looking to develop a virtual community to overcome the separation created by the crowded urban environment.

* The number of online-related sessions seems to be going up, judging by the number of them in LA and forthcoming ones in New York.

New Unimedia web site about to launch:
Phil Kast, a Unimedia web developer, and I demo’ed a web site that we’ll be launching on Wednesday where anyone can upload, download and comment on any kind of document — staff manuals, style guides, ad rates, bylaws, etc…. more on that, soon.

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