News Leadership 3.0

10-step mobile strategy for community publishers

2012-05-22T23:52:22+00:00

By Amy Gahran

Last weekend KDMC@USC held an invitation-only workshop on mobile strategy for community and ethnic media at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. The attendees included many top editorial, business, and digital managers for large and small publishers in the NYC metro area.

At this workshop I suggested 10 steps these publishers could take to start developing a viable, revenue-producing mobile strategy right now, even with modest resources. Here’s the plan…

1. Start using your phone for everything. Many people in the news business aren’t yet fully accomplished at using their own phones as everyday tools to access media, services, and interaction. Without this personal experience, it’s hard to recognize mobile opportunities and develop well-targeted mobile offerings.

So stretch beyond your comfort zone. For a few days or a week, try relying solely on your phone for media, news, information, entertainment, social media, services (like banking, shopping or getting directions) and interaction (texting, instant messaging, photo messages, e-mail, etc.). See how much you can do—and learn what you don’t already know.

2. Make your website mobile-friendly. For most cell phone users, a full website loaded in a small phone browser is a big hassle. If you’re standing on the street or sitting on a crowded bus, too much pinching, zooming, and scrolling are serious obstacles.

So create a fast-loading, simplified version of your site that automatically displays for cell phone visitors. Read Luke Wroblewski’s book Mobile First for advice on what works well with mobile web and app design and usability.

Your mobile-friendly site should be the core of your mobile strategy, since inbound links to any page of your site should load on any device, and most of what you do via mobile channels will ultimately drive traffic to your website.

Integrate mobile-friendly advertising into your mobile web layout. Ads displayed on your mobile site should link to mobile-optimized sites or landing pages. Educate your advertisers, offer analytics, and help the advertiser create ads and link destinations that will work well for your mobile audience.

Make sure your have a mobile-friendly website even if you offer one or more apps for smartphone platforms. The web is not a walled garden—it doesn’t require mobile users to download, install, and remember to launch anything. It’s inherently cross-platform. And many news venue-specific apps don’t automatically launch when a the user clicks a link to one of your stories received via, say, text or e-mail. You want your inbound links to always, always work.

Most likely for now you’ll have to implement “auto detection” code on your web servers to serve mobile users your mobile-friendly page layout. But if you’re starting from scratch with a new site, or when you do a complete overhaul of your current site, incorporating responsive web design principles is a more elegant and robust solution that could simplify your future needs and increase your mobile options.

Some third-party services like MoFuse will repackage your content in a mobile-optimized template for a monthly fee, and run their own network ads in a revenue-sharing arrangement. That’s also a viable initial strategy, but probably not your most lucrative long-range plan.

3. Start experimenting with Tumblr. This free social blogging platform is highly popular—but more importantly it’s directly accessible via the web and extremely mobile-friendly. Tumblr can be your mobile sandbox and much more.

If at this point it’s beyond your means to implement a mobile theme with auto-detection for your main website, then you can use Tumblr to build a mobile-friendly web presence which complements your main site. For instance, you can post to your Tumblr blog “teasers” which promote and link to your most important or compelling content—then promote links to those Tumblr teasers via social media. The vast majority of people who use social media access it regularly on a mobile device, so you probably already have a large mobile audience in social media.

Tumblr is also a great venue to highlight individual photos, videos, or other multimedia that you’ve published. And it’s a great place to engage people with tidbits from your “cutting room floor,” or to share content created by your community.

And even if you already have mobile-friendly website, you can set up special Tumblr blogs for special projects or campaigns, including crowdsourcing.

4. Consider mobile users in your editorial style. Mobile users often are accessing content a few moments at a time, so they need context. Work to emphasize context and action in your content. One contextual editorial strategy is to begin each story with 2-3 short bullet-point highlights at top of each story, instead of a traditional “deck” and before a traditional story-style lede.

Include action-oriented links wherever possible, which allow mobile users to do useful things like register for an event. Also, where appropriate include full street addresses, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers in your content—these become actionable (clickable) links on mobile devices.

And if possible, adapt your content management system to allow you to geocode your content by specifying latitude/longitude coordinates. The major search engines weight this in providing search results to mobile users, so geocoding will increase your mobile search visibility.

5. Use social media for community engagement. Again, this is where you probably already have a considerable mobile audience. Make sure when you post links to Twitter, Facebook, etc., the destination of those links are mobile-friendly whenever possible. Not sure? Look up the link first on your phone to check.

Use social media on your phone when out and about as a radar screen for a large part of your community, and to share engaging observations and photos from around town. If you use popular mobile-only services like Instagram, or geo-social services like Foursquare, make sure you connect them to your other social media accounts so you can selectively cross-post easily as warranted.

Video links are hugely popular on social media. So if you post video, set up a branded YouTube channel and post your video there—then link to your YouTube videos from social media. YouTube is probably the most mobile-friendly video sharing service online, and it’s owned by Google. Posting your video on YouTube makes it both very findable and very mobile friendly.

6. Conduct periodic mobile market research. Mobile changes fast, and each community has unique preferences. Knowing what’s currently popular in your community regarding mobile devices, cost considerations, and other preferences will steer your decisions for further mobile offerings.

I’ve created a simple mobile market research survey. This can be conducted in person (you’ll want to see how people use their phones) every 6-12 months. Even a couple dozen responses from typical community members can provide actionable guidance.

Also, the mobile user experience is only as good as the quality of local wireless service. If a locally popular carrier’s service suddenly degrades (which can happen), your mobile offerings might perform poorly. So periodically check Rootmetrics.com’s maps for your community to understand current coverage conditions. Is there poor or spotty data coverage? Then take it easy on the video! Or if large numbers of your users sign up for 4G service and local coverage is good, consider richer mobile media offerings.

7. Offer text alerts and polls. SMS text messaging is a huge overlooked opportunity, but it’s valuable because it’s ubiquitous: it works on almost any mobile phone. Text alerts are obviously useful to share breaking news, event reminders, and even offer interactive services like polling.

Your text offerings can be either general or special-purpose. Just make sure users know exactly what to expect from each service. It’s best to only send 1-2 messages per week or less, and never spam people! Users must opt-in to each service individually, and they must be able to unsubscribe immediately simply by replying “stop.”

You must use a common shortcode to offer any text-message services. That’s not free, but using a shared shortcode from a vendor like TextMarks can cut your costs substantially compared to leasing a dedicated shortcode. That’s a good way to start.

Text alerts can include links, so make sure you’re using these links to drive traffic to specific mobile-friendly story pages (not to your home page) or to mobile-friendly advertiser landing pages.

8. Experiment with apps. After you have a mobile-friendly web presence, you’re considering mobile users in your editorial style and social media activities, and you’re offering some text messaging options, that’s the time to consider investing resources in apps intended to run on specific mobile platforms like Android or the iPhone.

The easiest way to get started with apps is to use a service that simply repackages your existing content within an app, “shovelware” style. Uppsite is one service that will create apps for you on all major platforms, and run network ads. That might be a good first step to experiment, get some data about your mobile users, and earn a little revenue.

However, in the big picture, content shovelware does not make a compelling app. Only 25% of apps get opened more than nine times. So if you intend to invest resources in developing an app, it’s better to look for opportunities to offer services, not just content, through apps.

Your mobile apps can be project-specific, such as presenting a data visualization, supporting a crowdsourcing effort, or providing special updates or context on a crucial community issue.

Usually when people say “mobile apps” they mean “native” apps which are software deployed for a specific mobile platform. But with the advent of better mobile browsers and more advanced web technology, it’s now possible to deliver a great deal of app-like functionality via the web. The advantage of “web apps” is that the user doesn’t need to download or run any software. One example of a mobile-friendly web app is ProPublica’s Dialysis Facility Tracker.

Developing platform-specific native apps cost more, so only build an app when it’s truly warranted: to use special device capabilities (like the camera or accelerometer) or if you have a very good revenue case. In particular, many publishers are lured by iPad apps because they look pretty and appear to return to publishers the control over users they thought they once had. But iPad apps have proven to be a dubious investment for news or content publishers.

9. Sell mobile landing pages or microsites, not just banner ads. Position access to your mobile audience as a premium service that can deliver more value to advertisers more value.

Use mobile landing page tools such as Landr.co or MoBistro to create compelling, actionable mobile microsites for your advertisers—for longer-term, bigger contracts than simply displaying a tiny banner that would likely perform poorly. You can get great analytics from these microsites, and adjust them on the fly to improve performance.

The key is that your ad sales staff must really know how to sell this service, build a basic microsite, and keep it updated with current advertiser info.

Once you have some advertiser microsites, you can promote links them not just via ad banners, but via your other mobile or social media offerings

10. Mobile doesn’t stand alone. Always promote and explain your mobile offerings in your print/broadcast venues, house ads and at events.

Prepare printed, online, and sometimes video tutorials explaining each offering: what is is, what value it offers to whom, how to use it. Create versions for community members and advertisers or partners.

And in general, train your community in how their phones can be useful tools. Recommend to your useful reporting tools for local issues like SeeClickFix, citizen journalism apps like MePorter, transit info services like NextBus and more.

The more you can encourage your community to get more info and value from their phones, the more they will value your mobile offerings.

More resources from the KDMC/CUNY community mobile media workshop.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The Knight Digital Media Center at USC is a partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. The Center is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

At Content Creators, journalists practice their craft and get paid

2012-05-15T12:35:47+00:00

By Julia Scott
Tim Collie stumbled upon a universal truth while building his news startup, Content Creators. “Most people don’t like their website.” The design is bad, or they don’t know how to upload videos. The content stagnates, and the site becomes a calling card appended with excuses.

Imagine then, that you get a cold call from Collie, 51.

“We’re story tellers,” his pitch goes. “We’ve looked at your website. We believe we can help provide you with content and videos.”

Talk about full service. Content Creators offers ghostwriting, editing, website design, photography, video, social media, and any other kind of content creation you can think of. Folks who design websites don’t typically follow up by providing content and keeping the thing bug-free.

Content Creators does. In fact, it is rare that they are hired to create a website and not contribute the content.

It’s one reason why the start up, barely three years old, makes enough to pay out of state college tuition for Collie’s two sons.

“We are willing to work with people who have basic skills,” he said. Not that he and his two partners, photographer and videographer Andrew Innerarity and business manager Jodie Knofsky, have left their day jobs. Collie edits the political news website Newsmax.com.

Content Creators is based in South Florida and covers three counties, Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade. Instead of having a main office, Collie and his partners work from home and on the road. “We’re kind of virtual,” he said. “We can move anywhere.”

Eighty percent of the work is done by Collie and his two partners. The rest is contractors. Expenses are minimal. Gas money eats up a chunk of change. Indemnity insurance is another big ticket at a few hundred bucks a month.

Revenue streams are packed into each contract, which may cover a particular project or include monthly services. Individual videos run roughly $1,000 a minute. Monthly contracts range from $6,000-$10,000. Website creation costs between $5,000 and $10,000.

Bootstrapping means the marketing budget is non-existent. Marketing is not a skill inherent to Collie or his partners, and hiring a marketing professional is not financially appealing. So Collie does it himself.

“Our marketing is very primitive,” he said. “I literally printed out a list of non profits in South Florida and started cold calling. There wasn’t a methodical market research.”

When he gets busy marketing falls by the wayside, which leads to dead periods during which he restarts his cold calling. Many gigs are word of mouth referrals or through informal talks Collie gives on social media and storytelling. If Collie had to point to one failure, it would be running a business. He got into an entrepreneurial mindset at KDMC’s News Entrepreneur Boot Camp in May 2009, but struggles with cash flow. Tracking down bills is not a strong point. (Disclosure: I attended Boot Camp with Collie.)

“I think journalists should stick to being journalists, but find a business mind who likes journalism who can do the business,” he said.

Another tip Collie and his crew picked up early on is being involved in selecting subjects to be on camera. The person a client wants on screen may not be a great speaker, or particularly polished.

A perk to hiring Content Creators is that the firm works in two languages other than English, including Haitian Creole, and Spanish. Portuguese is next on the list.

Clients also get top access. It’s not uncommon for Collie’s cell phone to buzz with a plea to provide video coverage in a few hours.

Just as important, perhaps, as full service is the company’s focus on non-profits. Content Creators retains a journalistic sense of purpose to their work, an approach that dovetails with the non-commercial mission statements of its clients.

Content Creators covers many of the same subjects Collie dealt with as a foreign war correspondent for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the The Tampa Tribune: Islam and women, drug use, sex trafficking, human genetics, senior issues, HIV.

The videos are powerful stuff. One meshes five women’s voices to tell how each triumphed over dismal circumstances. Another juxtaposes one man’s vision of a drug high with the life-threatening reality.

It’s a kind of journalism that nods to the reality of our industry, where entrepreneurial news veterans can practice their craft and still get paid.

Julia Scott is the founder of the money-saving blog BargainBabe.com.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Mobile for building the ethnic/community news business

2012-05-10T22:44:41+00:00

By Amy Gahran

Next week the Knight Digital Media Center at USC is partnering with the City University of New York to offer a two-day workshop on mobile strategies and opportunities for ethnic and community media organizations in the New York City area.

One of our instructors, Arturo Duran of Digital First Media, will be explaining how mobile can enhance the business model and community engagement efforts of these news outlets. Here’s a preview of his advice…

Arturo Duran is the Chief Innovation Officer for Digital First Media—a spinoff from Journal Register Co. which last year took over operations management for all MediaNews Group and JRC newspapers. He also was a 2010-11 fellow in the Knight-McCormick Leadership Institute at KDMC. In the upcoming workshop, he’ll discuss the business considerations and opportunities for community and ethnic news outlets that embrace mobile.

Duran has considerable experience on this front. He was part of the team that created AOL Latino in U.S., and also served as CEO of Intermedia Digital (the largest Spanish-language newspaper company in the U.S.). He’s also led digital and mobile initiatives for small and large news outlets, and has even experimented with early augmented reality efforts.

Most ethnic and community news outlets are fairly small and local, but some (such as Little India magazine and China Daily) are quite large—spanning several states, or the nation, or the globe. Outlets from all points alone this spectrum will be represented among the workshop’s participants. What should they keep in mind about mobile?

“We need to stop thinking of what we—people in the media business—want, and listen to what our users are doing,” said Duran. He noted that in the U.S., African Americans, Hispanics, and other ethnic groups tend to be especially advanced in their use of mobile devices.

For instance, recent Nielsen Co. research found that U.S. Hispanics are 28% more likely to own a smartphone than non-Hispanic whites, and they also consume more mobile data than all ethnic groups. U.S. Hispanics also are three times more likely than non-Hispanic whites to have internet access via a mobile device, but not have internet at home. And their average mobile bill is 8% higher than the overall U.S. average.

Similarly, as of last summer Nielsen found that 33% of all African Americans own a smartphone, significantly higher than the national average. Also, 44% of all new mobile phone purchased by African Americans were smartphones—and among younger people in this group, that was over 50%.

And least year research from Rebtel (an internet telephony provider) showed that tablet computers are especially popular in several immigrant communities in the U.S.

“Ethic communities are more advanced not just in terms of how they use text messaging and smartphone apps, but also the mobile web,” said Duran. “For many ethnic groups, their mobile devices are the primary way they access the web. Since they’re using that platform, we should be giving them news and information that suits the platform they use. That makes what we offer more valuable, because it’s easier for them to find and use.”

What emerging business opportunities can mobile yield for ethnic and community news sites?

“Mobile delivers better data about your users, which helps you become even more relevant to them,” said Duran. “First of all, analytics for your mobile traffic can deliver more accurate info on where your users are. You also learn more about who they are. Unlike computers, a mobile device tends to be used by only one person. The more relevant you can be, the more engaging you can be—and so can your advertisers. Advertisers pay more to reach more engaged audiences.”

Mobile-optimized advertising is the natural place to start when looking to earn revenue from mobile offerings, said Duran. This includes ads that run on a mobile-optimized website or app, which can be served directly by the news venue or from a digital ad network. In fact, some ad networks offer tools to make it easy for news venues to create ad-supported apps.

“Using an ad network will help you get some initial information about your mobile audience,” Duran said. “They’ll give your statistics on your clickthroughs, engagement, etc. So you know what your mobile audience is doing. They can’t give you as much data as you’ll probably get from measuring your regular website traffic, but that’s still a lot of very useful information.”

And then: “Once you gain more experience with mobile and get more data about your mobile users, you can actually start segmenting your mobile audience and creating more tailored offerings that can be sold directly,” said Duran. “So if you’re already serving a niche market like a specific ethnic community, you might have even more of an edge in the mobile market.”

Duran recommends offering options in all mobile channels—from text alerts and mobile-optimized e-mail to the mobile web and apps. But strategy and moderation are crucial.

“You don’t want to overuse these tools. Especially with texts and e-mail,” he said. “You want to drive people from text or e-mail alerts to your mobile site. So don’t sent them lots of alerts; send them a few and show them where to click to learn more on their phone.”

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Funding mobile for social impact, including community media

2012-05-02T17:04:27+00:00

By Amy Gahran

Is engaging underserved communities part of your mission? Increasingly you’ll need to reach them via mobile media. A new white paper from the ZeroDivide Foundation explains how can you do this well—and how can funders support mobile community media efforts…

Last week the ZeroDivide Foundation published a white paper I co-authored: Funding Mobile Strategies for Social Impact. The aim of this paper was to educate foundations and other funders about the ways that mobile technology can help people in underserved communities. It also advised funders on ways to help grantees seize mobile opportunities that can help fulfill their community mission.

Most of these grantees are nonprofit and community organizations which focus on traditional service delivery (health, education, employment, etc.). But some of them are—and more could be—community media. Also, funders might be in a position to support special projects run by, or in collaboration with, community media.

Here are a few highlights to consider:

1. Mobile is hugely popular with key demographics within traditionally underserved communities.

Cell phones are already a primary tool for how many people get online and access all sorts of news, information, services, and entertainment. This is especially likely in communities and demographics that are “underserved”—poor or otherwise marginalized by language, geography, educational, or cultural barriers.

About a year ago research by the Pew Internet and American Life project found that 25% of smartphone owners mostly go online using their cell phone, even though many have other access options (such as a computer) available to them. These “cell mostly” internet users are disproportionately young (42% are age 18-29), black or Latino (38%) and low income (40% come from households with an annual income of $30,000 or less). Also, 33% went no further than high school in education.

When Pew revisited U.S. digital divide issues this February, they found that smartphone ownership had increased markedly across all key demographics for “cell mostly” internet access—although Latinos and African Americans already showed disproporrtionately high rates of smartphone ownership for a few years previously.

Most of these demographics also doubled—or more—their ownership of tablets (from the new Kindle Fire to the iPad) in the most recent holiday buying season.

2. Text messaging is especially ubiquitous and popular—and underutilized.

In the U.S., 72% of adult cell phone users send and receive text messages, and the rate is higher for teenagers. Most people use text messaging for strictly interpersonal communication. However, texting also can be used to transmit news, alerts, or reminders—or to provide interactivity or customized services.

Text messaging is the most ubiquitous of mobile channels—it works on almost every cell phone. Around the globe (and especially in the developing world) this has made texting a vital tool for delivering services and information.

But in the U.S., the way wireless carriers here bill for text messaging (charging both the sender and recipients for each message) plus the U.S. requirement to use a common shortcode for virtually any text messaging other than interpersonal communication makes it relatively costly and complex to add a texting component to programs.

Community members also often hesitate to sign up for services delivered via texting—they have real concerns about spam and privacy. And such programs typically require substantial outreach and education to encourage adoption.

Still, texting is such a potentially powerful communication channel that it’s important to push past these obstacles, especially to reach underserved communities or demographics.

The ZeroDivide paper explains how programs such as Mobile Voices in South Los Angeles, and the transit info service NextBus (available in several cities), use text messaging and other mobile media channels to deliver services and information—and also to empower underserved communities by giving them more of a voice online.

Funders can help nonprofits and community media overcome obstacles to using texting in their offerings by helping to cover the cost to develop, deploy, promote and support texting services. They also can lease shortcodes which then could be shared among their grantees or partners at low/no cost, and educate grantees about texting opportunities.

3. Build powerful partnerships.

Mobile almost never stands alone. It tends to work best as part of the overall experience of a service—and for underserved communities and demographics, relevant media and information are vital services.

Similarly, mobile offerings often represent a prime opportunity to bring together partners—funders, nonprofits, institutions (schools, etc.), media outlets, government, community leaders, and more. This can deepen ties and foster further collaboration of all kinds to aid and empower communities.

For instance, the national Text4Baby campaign (aimed at supporting maternal and infant health) worked with the wireless carrier association CTIA to convince all North American carriers to deliver all of the program’s text messages (over 20 million so far) completely free of charge to both the sender and recipient.

Of course, Text4Baby is a well funded national campaign with sponsors like Johnson & Johnson and the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, so they were able to wrangle a special deal.

However, at a recent conference on nonprofit technology, CTIA vice president David Diggs told me that the Text4Baby arrangement is a pilot test of a lower-cost texting service (rather like an 800 number for texting) that carriers plan to make available to nonprofits.

Consequently, now might be an opportune time for funders, community media, nonprofits, and their partners and constituencies might lobby the CTIA to roll out this service sooner rather than later. Also, carriers could experiment more now with similar pilot tests involving a variety of types of media, service providers, programs, and constituencies.

...This paper covers much, much more. As a cofounder of the nonprofit community site OaklandLocal.com, I tried hard to make it relevant to community media as well as funders and service organizations. You can download the paper, and you might want to pass it along to your current and prospective funders and partners.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The Knight Digital Media Center at USC is a partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. The Center is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Why the mobile web is slow, and your mobile site must be FAST!

2012-04-25T01:57:24+00:00

By Amy Gahran

Take out your cell phone, look at it and count to nine. That’s just slightly less time than it takes the average web page to load on a mobile web browser over a U.S. wireless carrier’s data network. It feels painfully slow. And unfortunately, the widespread rollout of carriers’ faster “4G” networks probably won’t help that situation much.

Which means that if your news or community site isn’t optimized to load very quickly on cell phone web browsers, and be easy and fast for mobile users to navigate, you’re facing a major and growing disadvantage to building your digital audience and business…

For lots of reasons, a mobile-optimized website should form the core of any news or community site’s mobile presence. Even NPR recommends that in order to grow their mobile audience, news sites should focus resources on the mobile web, rather than on building platform-specific mobile apps.

Last week Olga Kharif of Bloomberg reported that “twice as many mobile-phone users abandon a website for reasons such as sluggishness than their desktop counterparts.”

The Bloomberg article was focused mostly on e-commerce sites, which lose sales when mobile users get frustrated and leave. However, the same principle can apply to any type of website.

According to Kharif, the typical webpage currently takes 9.2 seconds to load on a mobile browser over a U.S. carrier’s data network. (Wifi load times are usually faster, but carrier networks are far more ubiquitous than wifi connections.) Also, “Almost half of mobile users are unlikely to return to a website at all if they had trouble accessing it from their phone.”

Kharif reported on new efforts by Google, Microsoft, Akamai Technologies, and other major internet companies to improve mobile web browsers, offer new mobile performance optimization tools for website owners, and to change how some basic internet technologies function.

Google’s goal is to make the overall mobile web experience twice as fast as it is today.

...OK, take out your cell phone again, look at it, and count to four-and-a-half. That’s better—but compared to the desktop experience it still feels a bit long to wait for a webpage to load.

Why is the mobile web so slow? Sometimes it’s a combination of where the mobile user is and how strong or congested the carriers’ network is in that location. But the servers where websites resides, browser technology, and other internet software also play a role in slowing down the mobile web experience, despite faster carrier networks. All of this is beyond the control of web publishers.

But Kharif notes: “Often it’s because the webpage wasn’t designed to load quickly on a wireless device.”

That’s where news and community site owners can take action to turn mobile media to their advantage.

Where’s your mobile site?

Many news and community sites lack a simple mobile-optimized layout. Instead, they display a miniature version of the full website in the mobile browser—which then requires more time and effort to pinch, zoom, and scroll merely to see what’s on the page.

For instance, the Bay Citizen (a nonprofit, well-staffed local news site in the San Francisco Bay Area that has attracted millions of dollars in funding) apparently lacks a mobile-optimized version. Try loading BayCitizen.org in your phone’s web browser and see what happens. (Note: On Apr. 25 The Bay Citizen tweeted: “We’re working on a mobile site as we speak!” Stay tuned.)

For contrast, try loading MinnPost.com (a smaller nonprofit news site) in your phone’s browser. That’s how a mobile-optimized site can look and perform. See the difference?

I’ve heard some smaller digital news publishers say they don’t offer a mobile-optimized layout for revenue reasons: the ads they run on their full site won’t display well or at all in a single-column layout on a small touchscreen.

Meanwhile, I’ve noticed that the mobile versions of mainstream daily news sites often offer few ads, and these are generally supplied through mobile ad networks—which typically provide relatively lower quality, less relevant ads and less revenue per ad. This, combined with a “shovelware” approach to the mobile web (which replicates the worst digital missteps of the news business from the 1990s), signals to users and advertisers alike that the mobile site is a less-valued, lower-priority product.

That’s just plain bad for business.

However, since mobile devices are fast becoming the most common way for people to access the internet in the U.S., failing to figure out how to place and sell relevant mobile-optimized ads because you believe this might undercut the ads on your desktop site seems shortsighted, to say the least.

So far, many news publishers have developed mobile apps which deliver ads as well as content. Since apps store many design elements on the phone, they have to download relatively less data each time they’re used compared to a mobile webpage. So news venue apps often perform faster and display ads and content more uniformly and reliably than the mobile web.

...Which is really nice—except that apps don’t always support inbound links that people encounter on search engines, around the web, in social media, or in e-mails or text messages. Plus you need to build and maintain separate versions of your app for each mobile platform (Apple’s iOS, Android, etc.). And finally users must download, install, and remember to launch your app. (According to research by Localytics, over 75% of mobile apps don’t get used more than 10 times.)

So until typical U.S. mobile web pageload times improve substantially, the best strategy to grow your digital audience and build your business is to offer a mobile-optimized version of your website. Today.

How to make your site mobile-friendly and fast

This can be accomplished by offering a separate mobile layout (“theme”) that gets served when a mobile visitor is detected by your server—you can use cookies to give individuals the option to display the full site on return visits if they prefer.

Or, if you’re building a new site or doing a total site redesign, you might adopt more advanced web design strategies—notably responsive web design, which reflows and changes dynamically to best suit the type of device a user happens to have, from a large computer monitor to a tiny mobile web browser.

Smaller and newer sites often have an advantage on this front—their websites typically rely on newer content management system technology that makes it easier to deploy mobile themes and responsive design.

Regardless of how you deploy your mobile web presence, if your site is ad supported it’s crucial to learn about, and to educate your advertisers about, mobile advertising. The Mobile Marketing Association has compiled detailed, useful mobile advertising guidelines.

Eventually mobile web speeds will catch up with the desktop web experience—but when? Lelah Manz, chief strategist for e-commerce at Akamai, told Bloomberg this could happen by 2014.

That might be true for the average e-commerce site focused on direct sales, since they have the strongest motivation to optimize. But for content-focused sites, including news and community sites, I’ll bet mobile users will still be waiting, and waiting, and waiting, for a while past that.

Which means that publishers who start taking their mobile web performance seriously right now have a window of opportunity to gain a competitive advantage not only with the fastest-growing part of the digital audience, but also with advertisers.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The Knight Digital Media Center at USC is a partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. The Center is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Local news enthusiasts: Pew research hints at opportunities for ethnic, community media

2012-04-17T23:33:39+00:00

By Amy Gahran

The vast majority of U.S. adults are really into local news, Pew research shows. How might ethnic and community media outlets capitalize on this as more media goes digital and mobile?...

Over a year ago, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 72% of U.S. adults say they follow local news closely most of the time, whether or not some important local news is happening. Today, a new Pew report takes a closer look at this group of “local news enthusiasts.”

According to Pew, local news enthusiasts are more likely to be female, age 65 or older, and retired. “Politically, they tend to be conservative in their outlook (although they do not differ from others in party identification) and they also attend religious services more frequently than others. They do not differ from other adults in terms of household income, but are less likely to be college graduates.”

In terms of ethnicity, the vast majority (69%) of local news enthusiasts are white, Pew found. Black and Hispanic adults each comprise 13% of local news enthusiasts—roughly equivalent to the representation of these ethnic groups among the U.S. population at large.

Interestingly, adults with the lowest annual household income ($30,000 or less) were by far most likely to be keen on local news: 32% describe themselves as local news enthusiasts, compared to 22% in the highest income bracket (over $75,000). People with $$50,000-$74,999 annual household income had the lowest representation among local news enthusiasts (12%).

This finding indicates that ethnic and community news and media might be especially likely to gain traction in poorer communities and low-income demographics within communities—a point that might interest local advertisers and sponsors wishing to reach those communities.

Local news enthusiasts don’t all have gray hair. Fully one fourth are age 18-24. However, according to Pew this is the only age group where “other adults” outnumber local news enthusiasts—by almost two to one. This hints that right now is probably a crucial time to engage younger people in local news and information.

Digital media, including mobile and social media, might be particularly valuable in engaging younger people in local news and information. Pew noted: “91% of younger local news followers are internet users, compared with 71% of local news followers age 40 and older, and 82% of adults who do not follow local news closely.”

For contrast, another recent Pew study found that 20% of U.S. adults—mostly those over age 50—still don’t use the internet at all.

Also according to Pew, 73% of younger local news enthusiasts use some kind of social networking service (such as Facebook), compared with 35% of older local news followers and 53% of adults who do not follow local news closely. Twitter is not quite as popular—only 16% of younger local news followers use Twitter, but that’s far more than older local news enthusiasts or other adults. This indicates that using social media to complement your local news and information offerings on the web and in other media might be an especially effective tool for engaging younger community members.

Mobile devices represent a huge opportunity for ethnic and community media. Overall, 84% of local news enthusiasts have a cell phone, and 7% have a tablet computer—slightly less than penetration among all other adults. Also, Pew found the highest penetration of both types of mobile devices is among the youngest local news enthusiasts (under age 40).

This Pew report did not explore how many local news enthusiasts currently use smartphones. However, this year marks the tipping point when smartphones take over as the majority of U.S. handsets in use. Also, most simpler, cheaper “feature phones” are capable of browsing the web and accessing e-mail—and virtually all cell phones can send and receive text messages.

This means that a robust, inclusive mobile strategy (ideally one that includes text messaging alerts or interactivity) can help any local or niche news outlet connect with its community via the devices that most people already carry with them everywhere they go. Also, since social media is one of the most popular things that younger people do on their cell phones, social media can help jumpstart your mobile strategy.

Online media is definitely not the leading source of local news for local news enthusiasts—which may put online-only ethnic or community news and info outlets at a bit of a comparative disadvantage. According to Pew, enthusiasts’ most popular sources of local news are broadcast TV (80%), word of mouth (57%), radio (52%) and print (48%). In contrast, 41% of local news enthusiasts use search engines to find local news, 23% turn to the websites of local newspapers (TV stations sites, 20%), and 12% get their local news from social networking sites.

This points out an opportunity to leverage partnerships for cross-media promotion. For instance, online-only ethnic or community news outlets might provide some articles or other content to run in local newspapers, in exchange for the print outlet providing information about how to find the ethnic/community news site or do other cross-promotion. Similarly, providing simple, short, broadcast-quality audio or video news segments or community updates to local radio or TV stations could help broaden your audience. Many local stations are eager to run such content.

Finally, ethnic and community news sites with a strong mission to improve local communities may be encouraged by this Pew finding: “Slightly more local news enthusiasts than others think they can have a big impact on making their community a better place to live (33% vs. 27%).”

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Lessons in entrepreneurship: Identify an information gap and fill it

2012-04-10T12:16:49+00:00

By Julia Scott
Homicide Watch connects families and friends of homicide victims with the courts in Washington, DC, where most killings go uncovered by local mainstream media. Founder Laura Amico recaps key lessons she has learned as a first-time news entrepreneur

Within four months of launching, Laura Amico’s site, HomicideWatch.org, exploded in popularity. The jump in traffic was as unexpected as a revenue stream that turned her lark into a full time job.

Amico, 30, had given up her job as a crime reporter for the Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, Calif. when her husband, Chris, landed a gig in Washington D.C. Bored with freelancing in the nation’s capital, Amico fell into her old beat. Perusing obits for homicide victims, picking through court documents, scrolling memorial pages on Facebook.

She discovered a gap.

“There needed to be a hub where families and neighbors and friends could connect with the courts,” Amico said in a telephone interview. Mainstream media, by her estimate, covered one out of every ten cases.

She launched quickly, one of her best moves, and made the bold decision to cover every homicide in D.C.

The decision paid off. Early on, an elderly white woman and a twenty-something black man were killed the same weekend. Mainstream media covered the first killing, Amico covered both. Traffic for the man’s death had four times as much engagement, a metric Amico uses that includes page views and comments.

“If Homicide Watch hadn’t covered [the man’s death], that community would have had nowhere to go,” she said.

Her first readers were families of victims and suspects, and grew to include neighbors, detectives, attorneys, hospital workers, and teachers.

Page views jumped from 500 the first full month online, to 82,000 four months later. Now, HomicideWatch.org receives an enviable 300,000 page views each month. Unique visits number 25,000 a month. Readers spend an average of five and a half minutes on the site, flocking to the homepage, victim’s page, suspect’s page, and the photo gallery. Amico updates the site’s blog three to five times a day.

The HomicideWatch.org database catalogs every homicide. Chris Amico, a web developer, used Django software framework to build it in his off time. (He develops applications for NPR).

With a few clicks of the database, I discovered that of 118 open cases, 62 of the victims were in their 20s. All but 19 were men.

Amico enters each case manually. Data is organized by the suspect or victim’s name, age, race, gender, or the victim’s date of death. A new mapping feature displays all this info geographically.

During her preparation work as a fellow in the 2011 KDMC News Entrepreneur Boot Camp, a big idea hit. Instead of living off grants, Amico could make money licensing the database software to other newsrooms.

Her first client percolated from a talk she gave at an Online News Association conference in 2011. Amico is courting a second. She plans to charge monthly licensing fees in the low four figures, depending on a number of variables, including market size and the amount of support needed.

As a first time entrepreneur, Amico has many lessons to share:

* Be open to new business models. You may misjudge your site’s value.

* Just get started. After a year of freelancing, Amico launched with a basic WordPress site. “We were able to test out right away if there was an audience, what they were looking for, and what we could provide,” Amico said. “That impacted how we built the platform that we’re using today.”

* Social media is an important news gathering tool. Amico’s readership may not have widespread Internet service at home, but smart phones are pervasive. “Nearly everyone I’m dealing with has a Facebook page.”

* Focusing full-time is key. “I had to trust the project,” she confessed. “I had to trust that the idea would work and take the lead and go for it.”

Julia Scott is the founder of BargainBabe.com and an alumna of KDMC’s 2009 News Entrepreneur Boot Camp. Her most recent job title is new mom.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Faces of Black Men: Blending Pinterest, Tumblr for public engagement on race

2012-04-04T17:16:16+00:00

By Amy Gahran

Last month, Dori Maynard had just begun experimenting with Pinterest as a way to use images to counter stereotypes. When the shooting death of Trayvon Martin started making national headlines, she decided to combat negative media images of black men by offering a collection of photos of ordinary and extraordinary black men in her life. That caught the attention of Deanna Zandt, who launched a related Tumblr blog where others can contribute images on this theme. A similar project by Colorlines also is helping to bring attention to personal stories of racial profiling.

Here’s how these visually powerful social media tools can work together to help elevate the public conversation on contentious topics…

As president of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, Dori Maynard thinks deeply about race, bias, and the media all the time. Here’s how she described her Pinterest board, The Face of Black Men: Neither Super Predator Nor Superhero:

“Somewhere between the inaccurate and distorted media images of the black male super predator and the black male superhero, live the majority of black men. They are fathers, brothers, doctors, bloggers, editors and accountants. Here are only a few in my life. While they are exceptional to me, they are hardly the exception.”

So far, Maynard has posted over 30 photos to this board, each a face with a name and description.

Why Pinterest? “I think it’s a great tool for visual storytelling, and it feels very natural for me to use. All my social media mentors say you should use whatever tool feels right to you,” said Maynard.

“I didn’t know that Pinterest is where you’re supposed to post pictures of pretty things you want,” she quipped.

One of Maynard’s friends whose picture she included on her Pinterest board is George Kelly, online coordinator for the Contra Costa Times. He found his inclusion to be a bit disorienting, but positive.

“I had an out-of-black-body experience,” Kelly said. “I’m not used to looking at collections of people of color, let alone picking myself out of the backdrop. ‘There I am, but what am I doing here?’ Here are men who, merely by living their lives, serve as signposts and guides; here are unique and ordinary people with diverse origins and interests who just happen to have these certain traits in common with me: blackness and maleness.

Kelly said Maynard’s point is well-taken. “I think the project is a strong example of a Web platform’s potential to address issues and redress grievances. One person gets to arrange and display rich, surprising offline connections in an online medium.”

Collaboration and crowdsourcing: Expanding to Tumblr

Maynard wanted other people to be able to join her awareness effort. But she soon learned that one key tradeoff is that so far Pinterest makes it relatively complicated to have more than one person contribute images to a particular board.

But when Deanna Zandt, author of Share This: How you will change the world with social networking, learned of Maynard’s Pinterest board, she immediately saw the potential to open this project up for collaboration by complementing it with a blog on Tumblr.

So Zandt quickly launched The Faces of Black Men on Tumblr. This blog includes a key feature that Pinterest lacks: visitors can submit photos and tell the stories of black men in their lives.

This kind of crowdsourcing is enabled by Tumblr messages, a feature that can be applied to any Tumblr blog. Contributed posts are held for moderation by the blog owner, so they don’t immediately post live on your Tumblr site. This helps deter would-be vandals and trolls, as well as irrelevant contributions.

With Maynard’s blessing, Zandt copied over to the Tumblr blog all of the photos and descriptions from Maynard’s Pinterest board. “That took a little longer than I expected, a couple of hours,” said Zandt. “But if you want to encourage good contributions, it’s really important to show lots of examples of the kinds of contributions you hope people will make.”

Since then other people have contributed their personal photos and stories to the Tumblr blog, such as this family photo from Geoffrey Philp.

Zandt moderates and publishes contributions to the Tumblr blog, and Maynard plans to soon add these crowdsourced photos to her Pinterest board.

Zandt decided to launch the Faces of Black Men Tumblr blog partly due to her success with a similar project she started in February: Planned Parenthood Saved Me—a place for women to share personal stories about the positive difference that services from Planned Parenthood have made in their lives. She launched it just as public outrage was building over the Komen Foundation’s withdrawal of funding for Planned Parenthood. It very quickly attracted over 300 contributions.

Most of those contributions came in during the first three days after the Tumblr launched—and that’s fine. “Tumblr is very much an in-the-moment medium,” said Zandt. “A project like this doesn’t have to require a lot of effort over time to keep up. It can have its moment in the sun, and then remain online as a record.”

Faces of Black Men isn’t the only crowdsourced Tumblr in reaction to the killing of Trayvon Martin.

In March, Dominique Apollon, research director for the Applied Research Center (which publishes Colorlines, a daily news site focusing on race) noticed the momentum that Zandt’s Planned Parenthood Saved Me project had quickly built. So he decided to create a similar crowdsourced effort: I Could Be Trayvon—which so far has attracted nearly 30 personal stories.

This Tumblr blog is where people can share their “Trayvon Stories”—personal experience from people of color about times when they were “racially profiled by police or vigilantes, and could have ended up dead after doing nothing more than the everyday activity typical of human beings living in a supposedly free society.”

Colorlines promoted this crowdsourcing project on its main site, and republished Apollon’s personal account of encountering serious danger due to being racially profiled by police—after Apollon first posted the story to the Tumblr blog.

Colorlines publisher Rinku Sen explained that after Apollon presented his Tumblr idea to the Colorlines team, they moved very quickly to put it into action. “We had it up and had the first stories posted to it inside of 36 hours,” she said. “One great thing about Tumblr is that it’s very fast and easy to launch a project like this, and spread the word. Especially with an emerging controversy, speed like that is really important.”

Sen observed that a tool like Tumblr might be less intimidating to people, and thus encourage more contributions than, say, a call for submissions on a regular website. “We wanted to give people who had this experience a place to name it and to tell their story, in a way that doesn’t require them to have a blog or be great writers. This is a platform for everyday people,” she said.

Expanding to other communities, other stories

Since Dori Maynard launched her Pinterest board, she has developed a larger vision.

“I would love to see other people—who represent other ethnicities and communities that experience stereotyping or profiling—to create similar boards and blogs,” she said. “I’d love to see one by and about Asian men, or Hispanic or Native American people.”

“The reason my blog is specifically about black men, and not just more generally about people of color, is that the media narrative around each ethnicity is different. We each have different kinds of stories we can tell to undermine particular stereotypes,” she said.

“Yes, anyone could create this—but I think it’s more effective when it comes organically from within the community.”

Tips

Advice for individuals, organizations or media outlets who want to try a Pinterest/Tumblr crowdsourced project about a specific topic or theme:

1. Post example content first. If you’re soliciting personal stories or any kind of crowdsourced content, the first few posts to your Tumblr should exemplify the kinds of content you hope people will contribute. For instance, if you’re really hoping to get photos with captions, post photos with captions.

2.Write a submission guidelines post. A good example is the submission guidelines from Faces of Black Men. Embed in this post the submission form that you can generation using Tumblr’s message feature. Then add a link to this post in the “description” field for your blog, so it shows up as a consistent navigation link on every page and post in the blog.

Also, Sen recommends: “Keep your instructional language very accessible, easy to understand. Don’t use a lot of computer or social media jargon.”

If you want to have the option to republish selected contributed items to a Pinterest board, or in another media outlet or other channel, your submission guidelines should clearly state that you might do this, so people won’t be surprised if their story gets posted elsewhere.

3. Publicize through social media, and your other media venues. You can promote your project and solicit submissions through your networks on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. Ask your colleagues, friends, and supporters to also promote the project through their networks. You can share links to individual posts as well as publicize the entire project.

But if you also have a website, newspaper, radio show, or other media presence, publicize your project there too via articles, stories, and public service house ads.

If your project includes both a Pinterest board and a Tumblr blog, make sure you publicize both efforts. They offer a different experience, and so can attract difference audiences and engage people in different ways.

4. Be flexible: Roll with what the community wants. With her Planned Parenthood Saved Me Tumblr blog, Zandt originally hoped that women would mostly contribute photos of themselves holding up handwritten signs telling their stories—visual storytelling approach that has become popular with various causes from health insurance to the Occupy movement and more.

However, people mostly contributed text-only posts to the blog. And that was fine, too—because the stories were personal and powerful, and resonated with a wider community. “The community had spoken, that was how they wanted to tell their stories, so we just went with that,” said Zandt.

5. Use web browser bookmarklets for posting. When creating your board and blog, Zandt says it helps to install the PinIt button for Pinterest, and the Share on Tumblr bookmarklet, in your web browser’s toolbar.

Upload each image to Tumblr first. Then view each post individually on Tumblr and click the PinIt button to cross-post that image to your corresponding Pinterest board. It may help to compose the description for each photo in a text file, so you can just copy and paste it into both Tumblr and Pinterest.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The Knight Digital Media Center at USC is a partnership with the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. The Center is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Training: A change agent for news organizations

2012-03-27T10:30:10+00:00

The sad demise of the American Press Institute is a reminder of the newspaper industry’s lack of commitment to training and professional development - and why that’s one of its biggest mistakes as digital transforms the news landscape. But even without training budgets, newsrooms can implement training programs - here are some tips for doing that.

API let go its staff Friday as part of a merger with the Newspaper Association of America, and that set off a round of Twitter laments about the need for training in news organizations today. No kidding.

Journalism and press training organizations have struggled in recent years, much like the newspaper organizations they serve. Some have found themselves short on digital expertise and wedded to an expensive training model that brings trainees to the training organization for multiple days. In turn, their client news organizations have cut training budgets and increased workloads - so a) who can get away for training even if she can pay it? and b) will she even have a job when she comes back from training?

Then again, it’s not as if the news industry suddenly turned its back on training. The news industry has never valued professional development of its staff - at least not enough to invest much money in it.

One study by Inland Press, nearly a decade ago showed that the newspaper industry invested a paltry 0.4 percent of total payroll in training and staff development. At the time, the national average for training was more than five times that amount. Both averages may have diminished in recent years but I don’t imagine the ratio has changed. In fact, many companies invest more heavily in training in a downturn to prepare their employees for their next adaptation.

Instead, of offering consistent staff development, the news industry has relied primarily on occasional, opportunistic training from organizations that are often subsidized by foundations. (Knight Digital Media Center, by the way, is primarily funded by the Knight Foundation. I work with both organization but these views are my own.)

The problem is not just a lack of money. It is a lack of consistent, strategic thinking about the role training can play in taking an organization, as well as its employees, where it needs to go.

In “News, Improved,” Tim Porter and I wrote: “The news industry trains people as badly as a fast-food diet nourishes them. Training is episodic rather than continuous. Random, rather than strategic. Long on talk. Short on measurable impact. Not exactly the kind of well-balanced learning diet” required to build and maintain an adaptive organization. By strategic training, we mean programs that are developed based on specific organizational goals that are clearly and consistently articulated by the leadership and understood by the staff. The organization would then develop tactics designed to accomplish that and provide training to the staff on why those tactics were chosen and what skills and practices are needed to implement them. For example, a goal might be to increase user time on the website. An example of a tactic would be to develop more data interactives. The training would be designed to enable that. This approach to training not only raises skills, it improves the culture of the organization. It can help highly change-resistant news organizations, become more able and eager to adapt to changing consumer needs.

“News, Improved” was published in 2007. We had spent a couple of years working with more than a dozen newsrooms and we developed tools and best practices for creating a learning organization that seem highly relevant today for news organizations that know they need to help their staffs learn and become more adaptive and willing to embrace change.

Here, for example, are 10 tips for creating a goals-focused newsroom learning program:

1. Keep the newsroom’s goals out front.

Newsroom goals determine the foundation of the training program and factor heavily in decisions and priorities for training individuals.

2. Put someone in charge.

A training coordinator, even if not a full-time position, means that someone comes to work each day with staff training as a top priority.

3. Engage the staff.

Whether the goal is changing organizational culture or building staff skills, including staff members in the training committee - both to assess needs and develop the curriculum - is key.

4. Illustrate specific goals.

Whether it’s through a short, staff-produced video or a simple printed guide, find a way to make training goals visible and concrete.

5. Know the newsroom, know the market.

We performed detailed, pre-training assessments for newsrooms, which helped them link training needs to culture, market challenges, goals and leadership development needs. We looked at leadership capacity, staff capacity, market demographics and challenges, newsroom resources and readership goals.

6. Identify trainers and develop modules.

Explore all three major sources of newsroom teachers: current staff, new hires, and outside trainers. Regardless of who runs the training, that person must keep in mind the basic principle of adult learning: Adults learn by doing. Classes should include opportunities to actually do something. If a training exercise can produce a news story, so much the better.

7. Clarify expectations for attendance and participation.

All staff members must understand the goals and their personal roles in moving toward them. If some staffers - most often those opposed to change - opt out, it is unlikely the program can improve newsroom culture or news content. For this reason, managers must be accountable for staff attendance.

8. Create a long-range training calendar.

The calendar must reflect the newsroom’s capacity to develop a quality training program and engage staff in it. Training opportunities should be frequent enough to support the message that learning is continuous. Allowing staff members and their supervisors to plan ahead is critical. People can plan to attend the sessions most relevant and interesting to them, rather than simply decide thumbs up or down on a random session at the last minute.

9. Consider quality of training.

The impact of training may be assessed by four measures: reaction, learning, application and impact on the news product. Time-starved newsrooms can learn what they need to know by focusing on the first measure, reaction, and the last, impact on news content.

10. Measure impact of training.

Too often, news organizations fail to measure whether training has improved content. In addition to measuring cultural change in partner newsrooms, we evaluated whether changes in news content reflected training goals. We generally used a simple count of stories, photos or other elements in a 28-day sample of the newspaper to assess change.

In addition to the book, much of this work is detailed in excerpts from “News, Improved,” archived at www.newsimproved.org. While many of the newsrooms we worked with in 2004-2005 focused their training efforts on print, the concepts we developed with their help can transfer to efforts to build adaptive digital newsrooms today. NPR has used similar concepts in pushing its transformation from a radio organization to a multi-platform organization - interestingly, a report on these efforts is entitled “News, Improved.”

Training organizations can and will help with that work. But most of the effort has to come primarily from within the news organizations and their leaders who see that having skilled, adaptive, creative, change-embracing employees is their best strategy for getting their organizations into the future.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Lessons in entrepreneurship: It’s the connection, stupid

2012-03-22T12:00:22+00:00

By Julia Scott
As bargainbabe.com has developed, I have fundamentally changed the way I see myself in business. Once an online content creator and filter, I now view myself as a vital connector of brands and people.

Three years ago I quit my reporting gig to blog, and now my value as a writer pales in comparison to my value as a connector.

The realization hit me while planning the third annual Frugal Festival, a one-day gathering of savvy spenders in Los Angeles. The idea for the event was spawned at KDMC’s News Entrepreneur Boot Camp when Robert Niles asked me to dream up a “big hairy” idea that would take my nascent company to the next level.

At the most recent Festival, A-list brands like Albertsons, Yelp, AOL’s Shortcuts, Chicago Cutlery, and Pryex participated. So did some 350 Angelenos looking to save money on the most fundamental expense of all, food. The annual event is popular with media and is one of the most profitable elements of my money-saving brand, BargainBabe.com.

Perhaps more importantly, working with top brands has fundamentally changed the way I see myself in business. Once an online content creator and filter, I now view myself as a vital connector of brands and people.

What changed?

The success of the event was one piece. (Attendees began lining up before volunteers arrived.) Another was that so many brands were willing - no, eager - to work with me. A little ol’ blogger.

Clearly, my view of my brand was outdated. BargainBabe.com has zero paid subscribers and a fraction of the readers of the mid-size newspaper where I last collected a paycheck. But it has something else.

A connection. And Frugal Festival, the offline extension of the brand, was valuable to attendees and sponsors. Guests liked that I offered them ways to save money. Free food and goodie bags didn’t hurt, either. Brands liked access to savvy customers who were likely to share deals that they found.

Both sides wanted access. I found a way to provide it.

Along the way I realized my brand’s value is not reflected in old media’s measure of success, readership.

So how did I go from deadline devotee to marketplace matchmaker?

I built loyalty among my readers by consistently delivering top notch content five days a week. I solicited feedback and posted their tips, always making room for a reader’s idea. I personalized saving money with my own experiences and those of readers.

When brands reached out to me, I tried to find a way to work with them that met BargainBabe.com’s ethical guidelines. (All paid content is marked.) I proposed new ideas. If it didn’t work out, I kept the lines of communication open. Instead of a blunt “I would never cover this completely un-newsworthy scrap,” I opted for “This isn’t a good match for BargainBabe.com right now.”

I tapped my existing relationships with brands, often through PR contacts, to gauge interest in Frugal Festival. Instead of a hard pitch, I told them the truth. I was creating an event to help people save money on food and wanted to know what would make it worthwhile for them to participate.

Taking a step back, I conceptualized the event by asking myself two questions.

What would make people come?

What would make brands get involved?

Answer those questions for yourself and you are on your way to capitalizing on your value as a connector.

Julia Scott is a journalist by training, a cheapskate by nature, an entrepreneur by design, and an alumna of Knight Digital Media Center’s News Entrepreneur Boot Camp. Reach Julia, aka The Bargain Babe, at julia at bargainbabe dot com.

The News Leadership 3.0 blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.