"My hope is that giving up blogging and the rest of it will be the equivalent of making a cross-eyed kid wear an eye patch on his good eye for a while: The weaker eye will grow stronger. My company needs to get better at what every other company already knows -- how to promote and market products without depending on one single channel. We've completely saturated a small slice of the target market, and now we have to go after a much larger group of potential customers."
--Joel on Software, explaining why he is hanging the blogging hat on teh hook for a while.
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Here's the other preso I presented at The Media Consortium on Building Community:

I've spent the past day and a half in NYC at The Media Consortium Annual Membership meeting, talking with some of the really interesting organizations that belong. One of the panels I presented on was focused on planning for revenue (a current favorite topic); here's the preso I talked with:

Oakland Local is now 4 months old, going into its 5th month, and the routine of getting up and doing daily updates every morning is starting to feel, uh, normal. In the past month, we've focused on posting more local blog posts and what we call simple stories, and our traffic is growing as a result.

oakland local traffic.jpgAccording to Google Analytics, in the past 30 days, OL has had 36,974 visits, and 63,770 page views, with more than 50% of the visitors returning--about 25,000 uniques. Our traffic comes through search engine referral, through Facebook and Twitter, and via direct traffic to OL (ie typing the URL in.)
.
We have 2,310 Facebook fans, many of whom are very active on the page, and an engaged community on Twitter as well.

Next steps: We are slowly--way too slowly--making the move to take advertising and sponsorships. With a small team, clearing the time to make this happen is hard, but its the next item on my plate. 

We are also refreshing and tweaking the site, adding small new features and changes based on user input. And we are adding writers and stepping up training for community and non-profit partners so they can tell their stories.

It's really hard work, which is why being obsessed is great. But it's also service work, because we exist to reflect and help focus a series of overlapping concerns and communities, a new way of combining civic engagement and news.

Being a perfectionist, I look at the site and see how much more we need to learn and do. But being a pragmatist, I know that having the traction we do after 4 months is both a huge testimony to the team--and just great! (Big grin).

I am working on a whole slew of research and planning products around modelling media market analyses for California, identifying viable revenue streams in a revenue portfolio for non-profit and local news sites, and hoping my dogged work will pay off with some executable plans.
In some ways, I feel like I came late to a party that started in Summer 2008 with CUNY's New Models for Revenue, carried forward with David Westphal's excellent work, and kept going, even as I looked away (at real live living  sites like baristanet, blogher, afrobella and budget fashionista to see how they made their bucks

Not only am I about to crunch alot of numbers, I have tons of reading to wade through--and then tons of writing--and thinking--to do.

But I could really use some help. What are the papers, case studies, revenue models etc--that fellow newsies and biz folks have found useful? If you send me links and data, I will aggregate it here, post and share.

This is a workshop I did this week for The Center for Investigative Reporting and their Board members. I work at CIR as their web strategist, and have trained lots of people in using twitter for more focused purposes that just chat.  I'm pleased with this preso because I think it concisely addresses A LOT of the questions people have. So, here's the document. Enjoy!

oakland_local_logo400x200.png

The impetus for starting Oakland Local was the murder of Oscar Grant. I'd always thought many people in Oakland lacked a media outlet--blog or news site--that reflected who they were and what they cared about--but I'd always felt like starting one myself was more than I wanted to take on.  Did I have the focus to get it going? The commitment to social justice it would require to continue?

But then, as the information about Oscar Grant's death unfolded, and people reacted to the killing of a hand-cuffed young man on a train platform, and to the failure of BART to be immediately accountable, and to conditions that made some people not want to acknowledge Grant's death as the outrageous event it truly was, it became clear, in those days following the killing, that a lot of voices were being left out of the media conversation.

Problem was, to my eyes, that the coverage was unbalanced--there were accounts of merchants' whose shop windows were broken as a demonstration turned violent, but no accounts of people of color whose voices went unheard by mainstream media, or whose grief was treated as colorful and exotic. And then there was the question of police accountability--and responsibility--in this death.

As the New Years' week went on, and events unfolded, the coverage improved a bit--but not really enough.

Why weren't there more local people of color voices being heard? Why did so much of the media degrade into us and them? And why weren't more perspectives on Oscar's death, the BART police, and what passed for justice able to be accessed?

"There has to be a way to have a more diverse range of voices be heard in Oakland, " I told my friends and my partner. "This is just not balanced, not rounded in any way."

Those feelings gelled into the idea of a new site for Oakland after I met Kwan Booth, now our senior producer (and an OL principal), who simultaneously corrected some of my misconceptions ("People are talking," he said, "But not on blogs and social media sites where you can see it,") and agreed with some of my arguments ("Yes, the blogosphere and the media are pretty siloed here.")

We started to talk about the idea of building something for Oakland that would be more open than what we saw in January 2009--a news & community hub that would be a platform for multiple voices, a place where people with diverse experiences and views could all share and be heard.

And here it is, a year later, and we're into the third month of operating Oakland Local. 

Thanks to a grant from J-Lab's New Voices program and hard work by a lot of people, Oakland Local is up and running. Judging by our growth over the past two months, jumping from 10,000 to 19,000 unique visitors a month, there seems to be a genuine need for a site that is diverse, community-focused, and speaks to a wider audience. Our blend of reported news and community voices also seems to have hit a mark, with some member-written stories getting over 1,000 page views apiece.

Interestingly, while the spark for Oakland Local started with Oscar Grant's death, a lot of what we have done to carry it forward speaks to his life.

The OL coverage of this one-year anniversary of his death--with his killer not yet tried--honors the vibrancy and humanity of a life lost way too young. It reflects our commitment to highlight the opinions and views of people who too often feel pushed outside of the mainstream, made into the Other, and our promise to ourselves to speak truth to power.

Oakland is a city where moving forward to solve our problems means talking clearly with one another, then making things happen, We can say "We are all Oscar Grant," but what makes the statement meaningful is how we listen to one another, how we get out of our silos.

Quote of the Day

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" There is a consistent set of themes explored in Gaga's videos, with the three most notable strands being: the intersection of sex, mortality, and public image; the ambiguity and blurring of sexuality and gender roles; and pop music and its attendant fame as an infectious, devouring monster. These themes are bound and unified by a distinctive visual style: at once literate and hedonistic, and possessed with a beautiful alien eroticism."

--Oscar Moralde, "Pop Ate My Heart": Lady Gaga, Her Videos, and Her Fame Monster
(via melissagira)

Web Hosts: Who do you like?

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Our web host for Oakland Local is flaking on us bit time, so I asked for recommendations that people liked. Here's what I have so far:
  1. Dharmishta
     
    @susanmernit I <3 mediatemple--I've called them day and night and they're always helpful.
  2. Krys F bLaKtivist @susanmernit Hey NY transplant :)
  3. Barbi WebhostingArc webhostinghelp @susanmernit I host with loads of companies and can help u pick the right one for you. How many sites do u have to host?
  4. Gotekky Gotekky @susanmernit Hi Susan, sorry to hear that. Take advantage of our holiday vps specials to try us out, 30 moneyback http://gotekky.com/vps.htm
  5. Michelle Murrain pearlbear @susanmernit Slicehost is our favorite. Linode is good. As is Rackspace Cloud servers.
  6. ItsJustHosting ItsJustHosting @susanmernit Check out our line of fully managed VPS plans here: http://bit.ly/6jQW3F let us know if you have any questions!
  7. Jake Bayless honyocker @susanmernit EmpireReport.org uses slicehost. Been happy with it so far. Don't feel like we're getting hosed. :)
  8. Clarisa Roberts ClarisaClarity @susanmernit we just signed on with Media Temple.
  9. therealmrscienc therealmrscienc @susanmernit fatcow.com is pretty good. Several choices of page building tools. Servers R 100% alternative energy powered. High reliability
  10. linode linode @susanmernit let us know if we can answer any questions or be of service
  11. Ramin Firoozye raminf @susanmernit I've been pretty happy with Slicehost. A lot of people like Linode, though. Who are you using now?
And Facebook folks say:
Ted Curran
I've been using BlueHost and their customer service is pretty good. My second go-to is DreamHost.

Greg Yardley
We use a smaller firm named Contegix for some of our mission-critical stuff. They're quite pricey but support and up-time are top-notch.

Allyson K
Media Temple is pretty good. Pair.

Debbie Galant
Zubrcom

Susan Beebe
Laughing Squid is using Rackspace, which is a very good hosting provider

Anyone else? Suggestions welcomed!





Quote of the Day

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"Being broke and growing up in a not exactly small, but not exactly book friendly city, these reviews were often as close as I got to the books themselves and it was comforting to know that somewhere out there were folks that got off on that new novel smell just as much as I did.

Most of my working life pre-writing was split between libraries and bookstores and that's where I first discovered the holy trinity of Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly and Poets and Writers, along with a whole gang of other writing related rags.

After this revelation my productivity dwindled to just above nonexistent, as just about every moment was spent with my nose between the pages of one of these wordy journals. Luckily I was surrounded by other booksluts who shared my addiction. I mean, these were books we were talking about-serious business! Plus PW came out like every week and I didn't pick up my 1st copy until I was like 19, I had a lot to catch up on."

--Kwan Booth, Boothism, describing his inner life as a book review fanatic

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Susan Mernit
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