Recently news arrived that the Asheville Citizen-Times is joining four other newspapers in the U.S. as part of Knight Foundation-funded project to see what happens when daily papers go “hyperlocal” and work with local bloggers.

Here’s the link to the basic announcement about the project, conducted by J-Lab:
http://www.j-lab.org/about/press_releases/networked_journalism_project/

Below is a writeup from J-Lab with more details on the project’s structure and staffing, plus the dollar amounts going to each individual paper.

Networked Journalism Project

J-Lab has a $225,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to do a one-year pilot project that would experiment with how five daily newspapers around the country could effectively partner with at least five independent, hyperlocal news initiatives in their communities.

The newspapers would need to commit to assigning or hiring a person to be a part-time project manager/wrangler and analyst for the project. It would be important that this person have an entrepreneurial mindset. We’d envision the duties of this person would involve:     
§      Recruiting the partners.
§      Being the liaison.
§      Figuring out how to amplify good content coming from the community sites -– sharing it, even monetizing it, figuring out how to integrate regional narratives or trends as fodder for professional journalism stories.
§      Paying attention to what works, what doesn’t; what small-J stories reported by the community sites are opportunities for big-J journalism. 
§      Attending one start-up meeting to flesh out joint issues among the newspapers and compare ideas for executing the project.
§      Attending one final meeting to report out lessons learned. All travel costs are covered by J-Lab.
§      Send J-Lab short (1-2 page) quarterly reports on what they are learning.

Support for this position: $20,000 per newspaper.  (Total $100,000)

Support for each of the 25 participating hyperlocal sites is $5,000 each (Total $125,000)

J-Lab will combine all reports and lessons learned into an overall report on how such a networked experiment worked.

The project wrangler should have the reporting skills to notice possible measures of “success,” which could include such things as:
§      What are the attributes to look for in recruiting partners?
§      What kinds of partners do, or don’t, want to partner with the newspaper?
§      What kinds of partner content was valuable enough that the newspaper gave it an added voice or used it as a basis for enterprise reporting?
§      Were there opportunities to share content among the hyperlocals?
§      What other community sites asked to join the network?
§      How do you maintain a sense of “ownership” among the community partners while also gelling as a “network?”    And more….
       

Meanwhile, in Seattle, the Seattle Times in engaged in another similar project, also funded by Knight Foundation, but separate from the J-Lab project. Seattle Times is partnering with four local news publishers.

Here’s a basic writeup on the SI project:
http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/08/The_Seattle_Times_partners_with_neighborhood_news_blogs_55086702.html#comments

Here’s a critical look, at the Seattle Times project, by outside.in blog.
http://blog.outside.in/2009/08/26/seattle-times-partners-with-local-news-sites-is-it-enough/

Outside.in asks three questions:
1) Why isolate the project to just four content publishers? Why not 20 or 100?
2) Why no automation and built-in ability to scale the project up to more providers and more content?
3) What happens after one year, when the funding runs out?

It looks like Asheville is on the cusp of at least one new collaborative effort to network local news outlets. But we’re also engaged in two self-organizing systems that are generating such networks: Facebook and Twitter.

What other efforts should we be engaged in? Given that Asheville is such a grassroots, activist town, it seems natural to expect some cutting-edge efforts.

There is no network. It is all an illusion.

You know, Asheville already has something like this in the BlogAsheville project, it’s just not curated with news as the central idea, and it’s not a formal network. But putting together a meta-blog of the most interesting local bloggers through Xpress wouldn’t be too hard.

In fact, Xpress has kind of done that in a way. Two of the more prominent local bloggers, Jason Sandford (AshVegas) and Anne Fitten-Glenn (Edgy Mama) are now deeply involved with the paper. Maybe creating a site that pulls the RSS feeds from local bloggers (or at least “curated” posts from those blogs) could work?

I’m testing out something not entirely dissimilar down here in Spartanburg with the SparkleCityBlogs.com project, but it’s not quite as developed as it could be. That project costs nothing other than hosting, it’s entirely automated and it includes content from every local blog with an RSS feed. It’s a local blog aggregator, basically, but the idea could be adapted into something more comprehensive and complex.

Via Twitter, from @swadeshine suggests mashable.com’s article from today about Fwix:

Fwix Attempts to Fill the Local News Void
September 1st, 2009 | by Christina Warren
One of the most distressing aspects of the freefalling newspaper industry is the effect that has on local news reporting. Although the fall of local papers is certainly an opportunity for bloggers and community-driven news sites, for news consumers, finding local news can become increasingly difficult.

Yesterday, Fwix launched, and it’s designed to be a local consumer newswire. Visit the Fwix page for your city and you have access to the latest local news stories from local sources and validated user-contributed content. You can then easily share those stories with your friends on Twitter or Facebook ...

Rest of the article is at http://mashable.com/2009/09/01/fwix/

This smells like failing newspapers/media companies trying to figure out how to profit from that which has made them fail. No sir, I don’t like it.

Fwix, huh? Why does everything involved with this sort of thing sound like baby talk?

Ken Hanke - 01 September 2009 03:30 PM

Fwix, huh? Why does everything involved with this sort of thing sound like baby talk?

Because idiots rule the world.

I’ll have to look at Fwix, but it really doesn’t sound like much other than a variation on Google News. Unless there’s a local news and content curator and someone capable of doing actual investigative journalism, it’s completely at the mercy of what’s supplied to the network. That’ll mostly be press releases and blog posts, particularly as news budgets fail. I’m skeptical about the long-term viability of such a project and it’s real use to the community it serves.

I was right: It’s basically Google News with some Digg-like elements. That’s fine if you just want to aggregate news, but it does nothing to generate news and content.

Jeff Fobes - 01 September 2009 12:38 PM

Recently news arrived that the Asheville Citizen-Times is joining four other newspapers in the U.S. as part of Knight Foundation-funded project to see what happens when daily papers go “hyperlocal” and work with local bloggers.

Here’s the link to the basic announcement about the project, conducted by J-Lab:
http://www.j-lab.org/about/press_releases/networked_journalism_project/

Below is a writeup from J-Lab with more details on the project’s structure and staffing, plus the dollar amounts going to each individual paper.

Networked Journalism Project

J-Lab has a $225,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to do a one-year pilot project that would experiment with how five daily newspapers around the country could effectively partner with at least five independent, hyperlocal news initiatives in their communities.

The newspapers would need to commit to assigning or hiring a person to be a part-time project manager/wrangler and analyst for the project. It would be important that this person have an entrepreneurial mindset. We’d envision the duties of this person would involve:     
§      Recruiting the partners.
§      Being the liaison.
§      Figuring out how to amplify good content coming from the community sites -– sharing it, even monetizing it, figuring out how to integrate regional narratives or trends as fodder for professional journalism stories.
§      Paying attention to what works, what doesn’t; what small-J stories reported by the community sites are opportunities for big-J journalism. 
§      Attending one start-up meeting to flesh out joint issues among the newspapers and compare ideas for executing the project.
§      Attending one final meeting to report out lessons learned. All travel costs are covered by J-Lab.
§      Send J-Lab short (1-2 page) quarterly reports on what they are learning.

Support for this position: $20,000 per newspaper.  (Total $100,000)

Support for each of the 25 participating hyperlocal sites is $5,000 each (Total $125,000)

J-Lab will combine all reports and lessons learned into an overall report on how such a networked experiment worked.

The project wrangler should have the reporting skills to notice possible measures of “success,” which could include such things as:
§      What are the attributes to look for in recruiting partners?
§      What kinds of partners do, or don’t, want to partner with the newspaper?
§      What kinds of partner content was valuable enough that the newspaper gave it an added voice or used it as a basis for enterprise reporting?
§      Were there opportunities to share content among the hyperlocals?
§      What other community sites asked to join the network?
§      How do you maintain a sense of “ownership” among the community partners while also gelling as a “network?”    And more….
       

How is any of this cutting edge or original? It sounds like a lot of blogs and aggregate sites that have been out there for years now. Doesn’t sound much different than this site, really. It’s like hearing the big guys step into a functioning network of independent ‘bloggers’ and say, okay, let us organize you. WTF?

also, how do they suppose they can ‘monetizing content’?

They could start by paying me to do something, even if it is to go away.

shadmarsh - 01 September 2009 07:14 PM

They could start by paying me to do something, even if it is to go away.

Give up now, I’ve been trying that for years and it doesn’t work.

We gotta cover the page in local, regional, and national ads.

The (PFKaP) - 01 September 2009 07:13 PM

How is any of this cutting edge or original? It sounds like a lot of blogs and aggregate sites that have been out there for years now. Doesn’t sound much different than this site, really. It’s like hearing the big guys step into a functioning network of independent ‘bloggers’ and say, okay, let us organize you. WTF?

also, how do they suppose they can ‘monetizing content’?

Content itself is basically impossible to monetize. But there are ways to monetize aspects of the sites. Not that I think newspapers in general are likely to figure it out any time soon. They’d have to look at existing money-making blogs and sites to figure it out, and that would require realizing that “newspapers” as a form and newspaper publishing as a business model won’t work on the internet. To make money like a website, you have to work like a website.

Is it really that different, though? You make money by selling ad space, right?

The main problem here is that they are telling newspapers “Here’s $20000 to hire someone to do this for you” and giving the bloggers $5000.

In short, they won’t pay decent wages to the very people they want to enlist to save their sorry asses.

So, in the near future, instead of even a passing semblance of “journalism” in the form of sycophantic local newspapers (most of which function solely as tax shelters for the behemoth media corporations which have run them into the ground) we will be inundated with the circle-jerk nature of the “blogosphere” in which any idiot’s rambling is automatically validated by being picked up and quoted by at least two other incoherent ninnies, who add nothing to the conversation except the phrase “X over at Y.com has some great things to say about Z.”

#### the whole thing.