I'm honored to say that I've been invited to be part of an annual Stanford John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships program this coming week.  The topic of the event is "#Hashtagged: How Social Media are Revolutionizing the News" and the other speakers are from NPR, Google and Yahoo; we're going to be talking about the impact of social media on news, a subhect dear to my heart.

The symposium is being help on Thursday, May 17th, on the Stanford Campus; deets here: http://comm.stanford.edu/mcclatchy/

Besides me, the other speakers are:
Krishna Bharat, distinguished scientist and founder of Google News, an automated news service aggregating more than 50,000 sources, with more than 72 editions in more than 30 languages. He is on the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships Board of Visitors.

Andy Carvin, senior strategist, NPR Social Media Desk. During the Arab Spring, Carvin developed a large following on Twitter who came to rely on his messages and retweets of news and information developing in the uprisings.

Sheigh Crabtree, lead editor and strategist for social, Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance. Crabtree has extensive expertise as an interactive strategist, editor and producer.  Before joining Yahoo! she was executive editor of UberMedia and has journalism experience with the Los Angeles Times and the Hollywood Reporter.

James Bettinger, director of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford, will moderate the symposium, which is  open to the public and The symposium, part of a series that began in 1964, is sponsored by the Department of Communication. It will be in the Vidalakis Room of the Schwab Residential Center.

The symposium is open to the public and will be followed by a reception. http://comm.stanford.edu/mcclatchy/

I'd like to think that I was invited to speak because of the great job the Oakland Local team has done in using social media both to source the news and community voices and because of our use of social media to cover local issues with national interest, including Occupy Oakland, the trial of Johannes Mehserle and the killing of Oscar Grant, and the recent shooting death of Alan Blueford, a young man shot and killed last week by an Oakland police officer.  The format of the symposium is informal, but I'll be preparing some comments/thoughts to post here to complement the talk.

Thank you so much, John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford, I am honored.

Okay, if you know me at all, you probably know I am a workaholic, Work to live, live to work, work work work...the whole deal. No sleeping till 10 am, etc. And today, I didn't do any work. Instead, I rested--along with many others in what I am more and more coming to feel is "my" Oakland community.  Here's how it went:
10 am: Digging in the garden with my most fabulous housemates, pouring out chicken manure and planting pole beans while discussing House of Local, Oakland Local and why the East Bay Express and Oaklandish somehow happened to name their new t-shirt line Lokal (like, should we complain or just say no biggie, huh? Maybe we'll just started the Oakland Express line--oh, I forgot, we called something Oakland Express a while ago  and the Express protested.)

Anyway, we got the garden all set up, at least for now.

Then 12:30 I was in North Oakland, at PLACE on 64th, for a wedding of two friends. Both the leaders of social justice organizations, they had a potluck wedding at a communal space and invited their community to attend.  What can I say about such an amazing gathering? It was so lovely to be with so many people working for change in Oakland, come together through shared purpose and transformed into friends and community. The energy and the love was magnetic, so special, and it was easy to spend several hours there, eating the good food, chatting with friends and dancing to the best 80's funk around.

By 4 PM, I was at my friend Susie's new house in North Oakland, sitting outside in her yard with a bowl of strawberries and a bevvy of her friends contemplating coconut water vs. procsecco ( I had both, eventually). One of Susie's friends is a handyman with 3 sons, one of whom plays/played bass, and we had a terrific talk. Another is helping to raise money to transform the 17th street train station, another is an editor...and so on.

Sitting there in the yard, talking and feeling the sun, Oakland felt like such a good place to be.

And then, by 6:30, I was home, and back outside my my own yard, now alot cleaner and more organized than it was this am, playing catch the ball with my dog.

Throw Catch  Throw Catch Throw Catch Throw Catch Throw Catch  The dog doesn't tire of this, probably because he thinks he's doing it to please me.

Thinking about checking out Heart and Soul, a Religious Science congregation many of the folks at the wedding go to, tomorrow am, but also resolved to catch up on all the work I didn't  do today (and go out with a friend tomorrow night).

Ah, Oakland. Today you really feel like my place.

It's 10:15 on May 1st.  At 8:30 am, I started getting materials ready for Oakland Local's team to cover the Occupy Oakland General strike. With three people in the field, and 3 volunteers in the office, OL managed to pump out more than 300 photos, 60 tweets from the scene, and 3-5 articles, depending on how you count the updates to the stories. We'll be filing more stories tomorrow, including some reflection/opinion pieces from the reporters, who are welcoming a chance to share some impressions now that May Day is (almost) over.

How did we manage to create content that was picked up and carried across the country with a team that's part-time, could definitely be better paid, and was 50% volunteer?

Or--to put it another way--how come we keep doing this work when the calls for support for funding our Occupy Oakland coverage-which probably more than 6,000 people read today, if previous stats mean anything--didn't even net us contributions to cover the way too small sum we spent on our hard-working reporters?

Part of what keeps me working at making Oakland Local work is the pride I have in the talented team.  We have a number of people--our managing editor and several reporters among them--who've worked with Oakland Local for more than 2 years (we're 2.6 years old).
These people tell me they stay with OL because they believe in what we're doing and think it can work--and they thing our reporting and trainings are making a difference in Oakland.

To me, that sense of dedication was evident in the reporters we had out there today. Our team started at 10 am, covered more than 3 actions and marches all over the city, came into our workspace and filed and dumped photos so volunteers could process their work, then went back out and kept working late into the night. Unlike the folks at the mainstream media outlet when went off shift and were done for the night,our team chose to keep going right till the last policeman moved people out of Frank Ogawa Plaza.

As the editor/publisher of this enterprise, this is a great moment to reflect not only on the good work we did, but on how Oakland Local motivates people.  With the late-night,woozy haze of a glass of wine and post half-watching a movie, some reflections:

People on the team choose to work here.  OL doesn't pay well enough that people who are unhappy, feel misunderstood or unappreciated have incentives to stay. In a way, it's a zero sum game--if it works for you, you enjoy it. If it doesn't, you split.

People on the team know their work has impact and makes a difference. In such a flat organization, people are appreciated for what they can do--and they can make substantial contributions fairly quickly.  One of our newer reporters, who has a flair for social media, has incredibly enhanced our work by live-tweeting from the field, for example.

We try to have a play to your strengths environment. You do video, you like to live tweet? You're all about data visualization?  Because OL is about shared and mutual incentives, we try to support and use the skills and passions people have, as well as help them learn new things.

We haz food.  Yep, food. I'm positive that our reporting team did such a good job, in part, today because when they came back for lunch, as we'd arranged, they found trays of Vietnamese sandwiches (including a vegan one for the vegan), fruit, salad, home made smoked trout salad, crackers, cold cuts, a fruit smoothie, soft drinks, beer, chips and energy bars.  This food a) gave them some more energy  b) showed them people cared and valued what they were doing.

We're all invested in what we do.  Yes, we're all proud of Oakland Local. We're proud of what we do even as we wish it paid more, swear it needs to pay us more, and wonder when it will. The money's not so great, but the human capital and the pride are valuable--as is the resume credential for many of our writers.

I've just set up a workspace and table in our living room for myself, facing the front window. Through the thin blinds, I can see people walking up and down my street.

When we moved in here, I set up the back office as my work space, with the idea A had an office and a job to go to.  Later, after he started working from home, he asked if I would agree to reconfigure my space to allow him to share it and I reluctantly agreed. 

We changed to larger desk, added more bookshelves and moved cabinets around; after we'd finished, we had a space that fit us both but felt too small for us to use at the same time. (A's a big guy, 6"4, 230 lbs, who likes to spread out).

Fast forward 18 months and A's computer and stuff is spread over the dining room table, taking over a shared space, and I'm in the back. office. Dining room table is always messy, making it seem not public, not shared. 

Then, when the idea of the biofeedback machine as an life management tool for A came back to life--along with the purchase of a series of programs and some training sessions to use it-he needed space to spread out the monitors, computers and music speakers he wanted for his biofeedback program.

Ergo, time for a new workspace. For me.

My new spot is my old white wooden gate-leg table from Ohio, which I have worked on for more than 25 years, with the same white painted wooden chair I bought off a farmer moving to the city.

I've written poems on this desk, consulting documents, site plans, pitches, essays...pretty much everything.  And now it's nose up in a corner of our living room, facing the front windows, wireless humming just as nicely as can be.

Right now my new desk has a funky old linen tablecloth cover, tea cloth sized, and soon it will have a functioning desk light and a desk cover. I've been working here for an hour or two and in feels, in a way, like a coming home. A place of my own.

Sometimes I am amazing how powerful a tool anger is for getting me to address things. This week, I got a packet from my insurance company that told me that, in 3 months, my policy would increase by 27.8%. That means my health insurance would pretty much start to cost like a home rental. NOT GOOD.
SO I immediately got online and researched options with my current provider, then called their health line and talked to someone. That person recommended a high deductible policy with MUCH lower payments: I have about a month to decide.
I then went online, check out the local HMO and applied for coverage there--that's almost half the price of these other quotes and won't have the honking huge deductible.

I'd like to be angry enough to apply this to my auto insurance premium (could be lower), cleaning the house more often, and reducing other insurance costs. Man, it feels good to get in front of a problem for a change.

I just got back from the Knight Foundation Media Learning Seminar 2012 and wanted to share some of the materials I provided for the attendees.Here's a list of useful llinks and white papers focused on civic engagement and future of news projects:

The Knight Foundation Community Information Tool Kit, http://www.infotoolkit.org

Released in April 2011, this tool kit helps leaders  harness the power of information to advance their goals for a better community. It offers a simple, easy-to-use set of tools to help take stock of your community's news and information resources, and take action to improve them.

(See a related video discussion with Mayur Patel: http://vimeo.com/19721589 )

Getting Local: How Nonprofit News Ventures Seek Sustainability

http://www.knightfoundation.org/publications/getting-local-how-nonprofit-news-ventures-seek-sus

How are successful non-profit newsrooms engaging audiences and diversifying revenue? The Knight Foundation's Mayur Patel, with Michele McLellan, studied eight well-funded organizations and reports on the results in this fascinating survey.

From Idea to Implementation, Taking your project to the next level, http://slidesha.re/vbDUjQ

This presentation by KCIC Circuit Riders Susan Mernit, Michele McLellan and Lisa Williams offers essential tips and resources for kicking off a successful project that are useful to everyone who has to execute on an idea.

Thinking about site sustainabiity, talk by Ben Wirz, The Knight Foundation

http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/site/resource/3373/?/seminars/video3-3/knight_community_information_challenge_bootcamp_2011/

What are important indicators for sustainability to think about in the early days of your project? What lessons can Silicon Valley Startups teach us about building for success? Wirz' talk is loaded with useful ideas.

Web Development 101: Getting Your Site Right From the Beginning, Lisa Williams

Preso: http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/seminars/agenda/boot_camp_for_knight_community_information_challenge_projects1/

Video: http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/seminars/video4-2/boot_camp_for_knight_community_information_challenge_projects1/

What do you need to know about web developers BEFORE you start a new project? What do you need to know about what you want? Circuit Rider Lisa William takes you through key questions to ask.

Social Media for News Sites, Susan Mernit, Kwan Booth & Amy Gahran

 http://bit.ly/vtISpi

This on-line module focusing on social media, civic engagement and tools for news provides an easy-to-read window in some of the fine points of using social media tools and is part of the Knight Citizen News Network from J-Lab at American University.

I just got back from the Knight Foundation Media Learning Seminar 2012 and wanted to share some of the materials I provided for the attendees.Here's a very useful list of cloud-based tools:

The Top Ten List: Tips and tools for managing a civic engagement project

There are so many different tools and resources available to help plan projects, manage virtual teams, and tap into open source civic engagement projects that figuring out what's useful for you and your projects can be an overwhelming job.

To streamline the process, the Knight Community Information Challenge Circuit Rider team spoke with a number of grantees about online and virtual tools and resources that were useful to them as they thought about projects, planned projects and got started actually building projects that focused on civic engagement as a key component.

What follows is a list of some of the most useful tools out there--a Top Ten Tools list to check out and share. Each of these tools is easy to use, free or low-cost, and considered best in class by Knight KCIC grantees, Circuit Riders and staff.

·      Basecamp, Easy to use project management software, http:// basecamphq.com

·      Doodle, Help your group find a meeting time online, https://www.doodle.com/

·      Dropbox, Send big files easily, http://www.dropbox.com/

·      Freeconference.com, Phone conferencing tools, http:// freeconference.com

·      Github, Software code sharing repository, https://github.com/

·      Google Apps for nonprofits, free tools for site operators and project teams, http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/nonprofit/index.html

o   Google Apps Mail, Set up mail for your domain, http://www.google.com/apps

o   Google docs, Share documents and collaborate online, http://google.com/documents

o   Google Calendar, Create team and project calendars, https://www.google.com/calendar

o   Google Groups, Create a group for shared communication, http://groups.google.com/

·      Google Analytics, The go-to resource for measuring traffic and engagement on your web site, http://google.com/analytics

·      Google alerts: Monitor your reputation and what's being posted, http://google.com/alerts

·      Toggl, Time tracking for projects, http://www.toggl.com

·      Toodledo, time and task management tool, http://toodledo.com

 

I just got back from the Knight Foundation Media Learning Seminar 2012 and wanted to share some of the materials I provided for the attendees. This list, Top Twelve List: Words for the wise you'll want to know, is part of  series of posts I did for attendees that I'll also share here:

Top Twelve List: Words for the wise you'll want to know

What are the emerging ideas, buzz words, and concepts you'll want to make sure you're familiar with in 2012? Here's a list focused on civic engagement, digital solutions and digital inclusion that will make you feel super-clued in to some of the topics we're discussing at the 2012 MLS.

Apps: Short for web application, an app (formerly known as a widget) is a piece of software that runs over the internet so that it can execute queries and display results in a web browser, or via a mobile platform

Civic media: What is the relationship between emerging forms of media and civic engagement? Civic media is media that goes beyond news and story-telling to help citizens and communities become more informed, engaged and involved in the issues of the day.

Crowd-funding: Why not ask the public to help fund a project? Sites like Indie GoGo, Kickstarter and Knight-funded Spot.us enable the public to give directly to projects they want to support.

Crowd-sourcing: Increasing, conferences are crowd-sourcing speakers by Marchhaving prospective attendees vote on speakers and programs and reporters are using social media to find original sources for their stories. Both of these are examples of crowd-sourcing.

Data catalog: A data catalog is a centralized, online listing of available information, often presented in both APIs and flat files, that developers can work with to build apps.

Data commons: A data commons takes the data in the data catalog and organizes it to ensure there can be standardized access, delivery and  accuracy of the information provided.

Data visualization: It's possible now to tell stories with numbers as well as pictures; data visualization is the art (and the science) of presenting large sets of complex information in visual form.

Digital inclusion: Digital Divide denotes the gap between information technology haves and have-nots; digital inclusion is the intention to make sure civic leaders, educators and industry work together bring everyone into the digital commons so they can participate and have a voice.

GIS services: As mobile phones become ubiquitious, location-based services, aka geospatial information technologies, become an important part of the data we need. Adding GIS data to projects is increasingly relevant and allows users to locate places, views maps, and add data to specific locations.

Engagement: On the internet, page views(the number of times pages on a website are loaded) surely matter, but user engagement--the amount of time a visitor spends on a web site and the number of pages they read per session  are increasingly important as ways to measure a reader's level of attention and even participation.

Gov 2.0/Open Government: How can technology solve civic problems, make information more accessible, and support government accountability? Gov 2.0 and Open Government are both catch phrases for projects--both local and national--that are built on these ideas

Hack day: Hack days are brief--often one to two day--public events where developers, product managers, designers and others gather to focus on identifying and discussing specific problems and then building software that offers solutions.

 

Just gave a workshop in Oakland on creating a web presence, focused on business folks. There were about 35 people there, very attentive. My fav moment: the woman who asked why social media would help her business, and when I explained why it might said, “Wow, I never realized that before.”
Here’s the preso I made for it:

I was thrilled to hear about the CIR/Bay Citizen merge plans, but Ken Doctor's post about it leaves out so many things I had to write my own post. You see, if you just read Ken's post, you might think tat things today were just like in 1999, or maybe 2003, and that the only new news models to get excited about were the big ones, with budgets over $2MM (The Bay Citizen had a projected 2012 budget of $6.2MM before the merger; CIR's was about $3.2MM).  In reality, local news entities can't and shouldn't aspire to budgets of this size unless they are a) in wealthy communities b) have friends with deep pockets  c) are doing a scale of work that requires 17 + reporters, a rarity for most news operations today).

What's more viable--and not mentioned by Doctor's post--are the smaller local news outlets bringing valuable news and discussion to their communities and making a go of it.  Not only is there the no-so-small Voice of San Diego, there is the Voice of Orange County, Noozhawk in Santa Barbara, Oakland Local, Berkeleyside, Sacramento Press, SF Appeal, SF Public Press, Natomas Buzz, Lake County News, YubaNet,  and all the local sites supported by local J-Schools, Mission Local and The Alhambra Source. And that's far from a complete list.

Most of those sites are 1-8 person operations and they're making it work--and the scale of the budgets are much more in line with sustainability.

One of the things I'd like to see come out of the CIR/Bay Citizen merger is a way for the new entity to work MUCH more effectively with smaller local news partners than Bay Citizen did in the past. These sites are the drumbeats of their communities, Ken, and they are another important piece of the media landscape of the future.

Update: Maybe some of us are "surviving", as much as thriving. But let's not be overlooked.