This is probably a discussion I’m missing at the Reinventing conference this weekend, unfortunately, but…

Papers interested in getting their entire campus community involved in content production, READ THIS:

Dan Gillmor, tech journalist and author of the watershed citizen journalism book “We The Media”, has semi-ended his initial effort to apply his theory, in the form of Bayosphere: “of, by and for the [San Francisco] Bay Area”.

For a variety of reasons that he discusses in detail, the site didn’t really take off like he and his partners had hoped (I cut n’ pasted everything below from his post about the semi-closure here).

* Citizen journalism is, in a significant way, about owning your own words. That implies responsibilities as well as freedom. We asked people to read and agree to a “pledge” that briefly explained what we believed it meant to be a citizen journalist — including principles such as thoroughness, fairness, accuracy and transparency. Although some cynics hooted that this was at best naive, we’re convinced it was at least useful.

* Limiting participation is not necessarily a bad idea. By asking for a valid e-mail address simply in order to post comments, you reduce the pool of commenters considerably, but you increase the quality of the postings. And by asking for real names and contact information, as we did with the citizen journalists, you reduce the pool by several orders of magnitude. Again, however, there appears to be a correlation between willingness to stand behind one’s own words and the overall quality of what’s said.

* Citizen journalists need and deserve active collaboration and assistance. They want some direction and a framework, including a clear understanding of what the site’s purpose is and what tasks are required. (I didn’t do nearly a good enough job in this area.)

* A framework doesn’t mean a rigid structure, where the citizen journalist is only doing rote work such as filling in boxes.

* The tools available today are interesting and surprisingly robust. But they remain largely aimed at people with serious technical skills — which means too ornate and frequently incomprehensible to almost everyone else. Our tech expert, Jay Campbell, did a heroic job of trying to wrestle the software into submission to our goals. We still felt frustrated by the missing links.

* Tools matter, but they’re no substitute for community building. (This is a special skill that I’m only beginning to understand even now.)

* Though not so much a lesson — we were very clear on this going in — it bears repeating that a business model can’t say, “You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.” There must be clear incentives for participation, and genuine incentives require resources.

* On several occasions, PR people offered to brief me on upcoming products or events that they hoped I’d cover in my capacity as a tech journalist, but were happy to give the slot to our citizen journalists. This testifies to a growing recognition among more clued-in PR folks that citizen journalism is here to stay.

* Although the participants — citizen journalists and commenters — are essential, it’s even more important to remember that publishing is about the audience in the end. Most people who come to the site are not participants. They’re looking for the proverbial “clean, well-lighted place” where they can learn or be entertained, or both.

* If you don’t already have a thick skin, grow one.

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We in student media have yet to meet our potential for producing quality content and running great organizations — regardless of the latest trend in new media. But by effectively meeting our existing needs, we can create a structure that could be a pillar of the media world in the future.

Through building a standard platform that provides web-based, newsroom-worfklow intranets to each of our organizations, then connecting each of these intranets to each other to form a grassroots student media network, we can:

* overcome the disorganization that’s all too common in each of our newsrooms by allowing staffers to centralize their story budgets, deadlines and other production information in one online location.

* improve institutational memory for each newsroom as students and advisors can then reference specific information produced by former staffers on each intranet.

And, at the same time…

* connect each intranet so that staffers covering the same stories or facing the same organizational issues at different schools can easily find each other and share ideas, sources, photos and other images and everything else needed to produce content or run each organization.

Developing better intranets and exchanging how-to manuals are two existing needs. Sharing content information between organizations during the production process is not as in-demand right now, partially because it is so dang hard to do (see my personal anecdote below), but creating one network that does it all will encourage constant collaboration. Example: a reporter assigned to a story gets an email via the newsroom intranet with a link to information to use for writing the story and when they go on to the site, there’s a list of reporters from other schools, sources and everything else needed to get started with collaboration.

Which leads me back to that grandiose “pillar of the media world” thing I said earlier:

Institutional memory doesn’t just mean new staffers in a newsroom being able to reference the sources used by previous staffers. It also means keeping graduated students connected to the newsroom — an alumni network — as they go into professional journalism, the blogosphere or less intensive citizen journalism.

Collaboration between current and graduated students could also mean this: professional reporters (working on increasingly tight budgets due to market pressures) connecting with student reporters to share information on stories with both national and local angles. For example, a professional reporter covering the impact of Medicare and Medicaid privatization policies around the country would contact health reporters in selected newsrooms to go out and find sources — patients, doctors, private companies, hospital administrators — to share with each other and the professional reporter. Everyone pools their information, the pro writes their own story for their own publication and the students get the experience of working with the pro as they use the same information to write their own stories tailored to their campus audiences.

Each reporter’s reach is multiplied, stories in each of our publications have the potential to be much broader and deeper than they are now, without extra effort on the part of each individual reporter.

This sort of collaboration doesn’t happen between professional reporters because they’re working for competing companies. It also doesn’t happen — at least right now — in the blogosphere or in citizen journalism, that I’ve seen.

Student media organizations, however, (almost always) don’t compete.

The big concept here is that by creating a social network of student journalists now based around existing needs, we’re also laying the foundation for a social network of the main people who’ll be in professional newsrooms, the blogosphere or engaging in participatory journalism of some sort in the future.

Student media reporting network = grassroots reporting structure
= potential professionalism and coordination at a macro level not available in the blogosphere or pro media world.

Interesting ideas, you’re hopefully saying, but you’re probably also asking who’s doing what about making them reality.

Unimedia?

Meaning: “University media”, “United/unified media” as well as ” U and I media” if you’re okay with a common grammatical error.

Who?

A group of current and recently graduated students, advisors and others in student and professional media who’re trying to make these ideas a reality, who’re committed to creating a grassroots student media network controlled by the student media organizations who’ll use it. Yes, we’re incorporating as a nonprofit.

We want and need to work with everyone else who’s interested in the ideas and has the same goals and values.

Right now, we’re getting support from:
The Stanford Daily, The Daily Californian (Berkeley), the Current Project for Student Journalism (Current Magazine), the California College Media Association, the Associated Collegiate Press — and lots of exciting potential support from a number of professional media companies and foundations.

How?

Well, the cost of software development and hardware has plummeted in the last few years. Developing this these intranets and the network is very, very doable at a grassroots level. Young but talented programmers are working on the site now, which you can check out — although it’s under construction — at http://www.unimedia.org/.

If you’re a programmer or know programmers who’re interested in the ideas, we’d love to talk!

Or if you’re part of a student media organization or related body and want to give us feedback or even step in and take a leadership position developing the site and the ideas, please let us know. Grassroots efforts like this require everyone working together.

Or, if you think these ideas are flawed, then please criticize as much as is required for us all to come up with ideas that’ll work!

About the young whippersnapper writing this:

My name’s Eric Eldon, born in raised in Corvallis, Oregon. You can contact me at (650) 814-5854 or eric@unimedia.org

These ideas are based in part on my own experiences as a reporter, editor and business manager at The Stanford Daily, and on my conversations with many others who have been thinking of similar ideas. I don’t claim to have thought of everything I’ve written here, but I think they’re all worth pursuing based on my own experiences.

When I started out at my paper, covering labor strikes on campus, I realized after 10 or so articles that my writing was all sounding the same: same sources, same issues, etc…. I figured that an interesting article would be to compare and contrast labor problems at my school with those of another — how were university labor policies similar or not, what were the unions doing, what were the worker and student perspectives? I found another school that was having labor issues, I found the newsroom phone number on the web site and called over. Over the period of at least a week, I got transferred from the editor in chief to the managing editor to the desk editor to, finally, the person who had been the labor beat reporter — who by that point was covering something else and didn’t have time to work with me. I started thinking about better ways to connect with other reporters.

I became a desk editor in the news department later that year. We used emails, Word documents, phone calls and whiteboards to coordinate story production. Multiple versions of each week’s story budget would get emailed around, causing: writers to not get the the story information they needed, editors to assign two writers to the same story, photographers to not know where or what to shoot. We couldn’t find contact information for sources graduated staffers had used in the past. Whatever personnel issues caused some of these problems, the system was clearly partially responsible. I imagined an online story budget that could put us all on the same page….

As the business manager at the paper this past year (a full-time one-year job that goes to a recent graduate), I was on the CMA and CNBAM listservs. There’d be great discussions about advertising policies, staffing structures, rates and everything else that I had to wade through my old emails to reference later. People would occasionally post about sharing how-to manuals for running their organizations, a few might get sent out, but I could never go and find them when I needed them. No disrespect intended to either listserv or organization — we just want to work together to make collaboration even better.

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