Remember the 90-9-1 rule of online community interaction? Well, on Reddit, I rarely say a word, and I’ve probably never started a thread, but I do so enjoy their magical little UI for upvoting posts and comments, especially on my phone, often in the middle of the night while trying to get a child back to sleep.

That places me somewhere between a lurker (90 percent) who never logs in, just reads and scans, and at best, might link to a thread from elsewhere, and an active participant (1 percent) who posts daily, optimizes their headlines to be more likely to garner enough upvotes to land on the homepage (please note the title of this blog post), and/or creates “novelty accounts” — usernames designed to be part of the joke themselves.

It’s a fascinating community, with Reddiquette that has evolved over the years, and a language of acronyms as described by David Weinberger in a blog post this weekend that acts as the beginning of a set of open questions along the lines of “Is Reddit Journalism?” But those quotation marks are my own. David’s questions are much better than that.

His questions revolve around the idea of “Reddit and community journalism” (the actual title of his post, clearly not optimized for upvotes at the time of this writing.) Several key Reddit acronyms are covered, including TIL (Today I Learned) and AMA (Ask Me Anything).

Sound familiar?

Open up a daily newspaper, and find what in no uncertain terms we’d call “community journalism” in the form of interviews with and profiles of local personalities, unsung heroes, hidden gems, people in your neighborhood, etc.

That’s an AMA.

Admittedly, the request queue for print coverage in this vein could be considered a little less democratic than on Reddit, where a search for “IAMA request” strongly resembles the early days of the Help A Reporter Out mailing list.

And of course, we’ve all read columnists elaborate on some interesting tidbit of information or history of their community, sharing a discovery with their readers, who often write back in the form of letters (and now, comments, naturally) and share their own point of view, rebuttals, or even memories of the factoid in question.

That’s a TIL.

Now, go upvote this on Reddit.

If it makes it to the homepage, I’ll write a sequel titled “10 ways Reddit is like a newspaper in the 1980s.”

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Now, go build something useful.

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We spent a full day in four rotating groups of around eight people, taking on one of the big Knight Commission questions at a time. Here are some mixed notes, with findings from various groups that still stick out in my mind, some key ideas tweeted, and associated other free associations.

The Four Questions

1. Town and Gown connections

Along with the standard j-school/local news organization mashups, we tried to dig a littler deeper into a goal of breaking down the barriers between a university and the community that surrounds it. One key bit of epigrammar: We need both Public Professorship and to learn from the Professorship of the Public.

At Matt Thompson’s lead, we even went so far as to imagine what a layer of 106 & Park-like hashtag trappings might look like when draped over a civic issue, as a tool to teach modern media literacy. Maybe even a local debate framed as an American Idol-style tournament of viewpoints, complete with SMS voting.

And then, there was Cody Brown’s media literacy in the classroom recommendation:

Instead of a hamster or a highway, middle school class rooms should adopt a Wikipedia Page to teach students about media literacy. #jcarn

April 19, 2011 12:42 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@CodyBrown

Cody Brown

2. Increase the number of news sources

This is one that was subject to a great deal of interpretation during the pre-conference Carnival of Journalism. At my table, we had the benefit of insight from #expertmode crowdsourcer Amanda Michel of Propublica, so we took the word “source” literally.

I walked away from the table with at least two excellent (you might even call them actionable) product development ideas:

• Add a tip form to your 404 and/or empty search results pages. “Didn’t find what you were after? Tell us what we should be reporting on.”
• Build yourself a source dashboard behind the scenes where you can connect a commenter or contributor to their Twitter and Facebook accounts (and blogs, etc.) even if they haven’t connected them to their public accounts, so that you get a holistic view of reliability, expertise, and behavior.

3. Expand local media initiatives to reflect the communities they represent

This was one I felt strongly about, as evidenced in part by my open Carnival letter to new Knight Foundation VP Michael Maness. I think our host might have remembered that, as I was denoted as one of two presenters on the topic for our table, along with Nieman Journalism Lab reporter Megan Garber.

I’ve posted the full notes from our group’s recommendations, but here are a few highlights of our three point plan to connect Knight journalism grant technology with community nonprofits and ethnic media organizations that are already providing community information needs, but could use a little push to expand their reach and build capacity:

• Outreach: A recurring theme in recommendations on this topic: Find the existing community information providers that are already thriving, but need support for capacity building in order to expand their reach.
• Pilot Grants: Having identified the key community information providers with a lot of upside, show up at their doorstep with small grants (preferably with quick turnaround times on approval, having already taken steps to establish criteria and identify potential grantees). The goal of these grants? Build their capacity, expand their reach.
• Apply a generous layer of News Challenge technology: Given the community, the focus of each organization, and the pilot project, connect these new community information grantees with News Challenge (and other Knight journalism program) grantees. Apply KNC technology (and programmer/journalist resources) to the new grantee problems and challenges.

4. A local information hub for every community

The group I was in had a great deal of trouble finding a niche to work with here. The technology to make this available already exists, and in many communities, local news sources get this job in some form, too.

One successful model we weren’t alone in identifying? Local wikis, like Davis Wiki, and my personal favorite, RocWiki in Rochester, NY. The Davis Wiki team, matter of fact, is a Knight News Challenge winner, currently building out tools for building local wikis.

And my other favorite implementation idea, intended to bring Web access, literacy, and skills to areas where broadband coverage is still sparse, the Web-a-bago.

Another cool journo idea at #jcarn: 'Web-abago' for underserved areas; take community hub to the community

April 19, 2011 12:04 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@moniguzman

Monica Guzman

Hardly Strictly More to Read

• Christopher Wink’s wrap up post
• Craig Silverman brings a little #jcarn to CJR
• Video interviews with some attendees (I somehow escaped @ceshove‘s lens.)
• A community information toolkit

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“Many publishers will ask—and it is a fair and familiar question—why should users have the right to carbon copy my content and share it in other contexts? It is a question that belies a concern about something slightly different: compensation. If publishers were compensated $10 every time content was shared and $1 every time it was read on their site, they would do everything in their power to get their content shared. Copying is not the problem—compensation is. Today’s web environment makes it nothing less than a struggle to support content creators. We have unlimited tools for sharing and virtually none for payment.”

It seems safe to add News.Me, Summify, and Trove to the list of satellites — or rather, to the list of, say, content asteroid belts that circle readers and publishers.

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“Chris and Tim are at sea now, heading toward Benghazi, which means, in the indirect but solemn ways that the fallen travel from battlefields, that they are heading home.”

via THE GUN by C.J. Chivers.

###

As for me, I don’t have a lot of grief in me for this, just anger. Undirected, unfocused anger.

If you have any ideas about who I should be angry at about this, please let me know.

Thanks in advance.

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Those of you who read this blog regularly (ahem, both of you) have probably spotted a monthly Carnival of Journalism post here for the last few months. As it turns out, those questions are the topics of conversation for the conference, which bears a tagline along these lines: “Alternative recommendations to implement the Knight Commission report.”

So, I suppose it could come off  we’re marginalizing ourselves a little bit. We’re the young change agents agitating for alternatives?

Maybe. But I’d bet the Knight Foundation has an action item on their list somewhere: Get input from young change agents.

Happy to oblige.

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Quick disclosures: Hey, I was a Knight News Challenge winner in 2008, and Michael and I worked for the same company for a few months, quite recently.

Hi Michael –

Ryan Sholin here. We’ve crossed paths once or twice at your previous gig, and had a good conversation or two about what you were up to back there.

Anyway, I wanted to write you to give you a bit of unsolicited advice about what to do about funding innovation in journalism and media at the Knight Foundation. (Well, OK, Dave Cohn solicited me, but he didn’t have to twist my arm or anything.)

A few ideas:

1. Fund some for-profit companies. Startups. Take some equity. Focus on companies providing tools supporting new revenue streams and business models that support journalism. Alternatively, fund some disruptively innovative companies (Flipboard comes to mind) and point them in the direction of business models that support original, local journalism.
2. When you do give out grants to journalists and not-for-profit innovators, include mandatory business sustainability training. Instead of asking grantees “How are you going to turn this into a sustainable project when your grant runs out,” make figuring that out part of your job from the beginning.
3. It seems like the Knight News Challenge team has been working hard over the last two or three cycles to find grantees from outside the journalism world. Good idea, but make sure you don’t end up with a crop of edge case grantees building tools for edge cases. There are plenty of would-be innovators at small, unglamorous news organizations across the world. Do they know about the Knight News Challenge? They don’t read Nieman Lab or Romenesko or the Carnival of Journalism (not that there’s anything wrong with that). They just bust their tails 24/7 to put out a range of local news products, and when you look a little closer, you’ll often find they’re innovating their way around resource, technology, and even language issues to reach their community.
4. Bring your IDEO-style innovation chops to Knight in full force. Send teams into underserved-by-journalism communities and find out what they need and want from local news sources. Then push grants, grantees, and programs in those directions.

That’s all for now. Eager to see what you do, and talk about it in person when we cross paths next.

Thanks,
Ryan

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That’s one of GateHouse Media’s largest papers/sites in terms of readership, launching a metered access plan (15 free stories a month, unlimited views of “public service news”) with pricing tiers for print subscribers and non-subscribers.

The paywall is being handled by Press+ (neé Journalism Online), and if you were paying attention way back in the day when they announced the incredibly large number of papers signed up to do business with them, you’ll note with a sense of smug confirmation that GateHouse owns around 350 papers.

(Disclosure: I used to work at GateHouse, but I wasn’t involved in any sort of paid content investigation at the time whatsoever.)

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Christopher "Moot" Poole at SXSW in 2010, as photographed by mirka23.

Striking, isn’t it, how Moot appears to be some sort of anti-matter to Mark Zuckerberg’s matter? How Facebook and 4chan can simultaneously be ubiquitous, but you’re much more likely to admit to an account on one than the other?

In the throes of my constant and ongoing research and curiosity about comments and commenting systems, I couldn’t help but quietly raise an eyebrow as Facebook launched a sort of Facebook Anywhere commenting system in recent weeks. It’s a little bit like a Disqus with nothing but Facebook for authentication, if that helps compress the explanation for you.

Now there’s places where this — “this” being mandatory use of a Facebook account to leave a comment (whether the account uses a “real” name or not is a bit of an identity-is-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder problem, eh?) — might work, and places where it might not, but I wasn’t especially surprised to find out that at TechCrunch, using the Facebook commenting system quickly cleaned up discourse, right up to the brink of boring:

“But the other interesting thing we’re seeing is that whereas trollish garbage used to infest the comment section, now we’re seeing almost the opposite. Many people are now leaving comments that gush about the subject of the article in an overly sycophantic way. It’s quite odd. The cold pricklies have turned to warm fuzzies.”

That said, they seem to be happy with the quality of discourse, even if the quantity has decreased:

“With the Facebook system, the most popular posts are only touching around 100 or so comments (obviously, the ones about the commenting system have more). But of those 50 to 100 comments, many of them are actually coherent thoughts in response to the post itself — you know, what a comment is supposed to be.“

The emphasis on that last clause is mine.

“What a comment is supposed to be.”

Well, we certainly have high hopes about that, don’t we?

Look at the universe we’ve just discussed, where users with a real identity say nice things about products they like and contribute meaningful bits of commentary on the issues.

Now look at 4chan. [I'm linking to the Wikipedia entry so you can make the call on whether to actually, physically, look at 4chan.]

Before we go any further, let me admit that I fudged a bit in the title of this post. 4chan a social network? Not exactly. With all its users anonymous, no real history of what a user has said or posted, and memes that are carried on into the future more by abstract institutional knowledge than permalink, it is remarkably easy to label 4chan “the antisocial network.”

And even that would be a stretch. Network? It’s a message board. But more like a giant jellyfish, its tentacles spreading over the Internet and getting all tangled with the Reddit octopus and the Tumblr school of anchovies.

So what does Moot (neé Christopher Poole) have to say about the new Facebook Comments system, and the idea of real identity on the Web?

“I think that’s totally wrong.”

The quote is from this VentureBeat story on his talk at SXSW.

Read on:

“Poole argued that anonymity allows users to reveal themselves in a ‘completely unvarnished, unfiltered, raw way.’

[snip]

‘The cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself,’ Poole said.”

And so we come back to the characterization made back on TechCrunch. The one about what a comment is supposed to be.

And yes, I’m going to make this about your news site. What is a comment thread supposed to be, on your news site?

A watercooler by which to carouse and argue and shout and laugh and snort?

A serious space for questions and answers about important issues in the community?

A suggestion box?

A tip line?

All of those? Really? You’re expecting users to stick with the same (real, perhaps) identity and the same interface for all of those functions?

Interesting.

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Considering your unique circumstances what steps can be taken to increase the number of news sources?

So without much further ado, we’re going to have a little “NOW IT CAN BE TOLD” moment here at Invisible Inkling. I promise it’s not (too) salacious, just an outdated, stale sort of secret project that never came to fruition.

To be specific, it was a Knight News Challenge entry submitted late in 2009 in the “remarkably private considering how many people must have screened and discussed the idea” category. It made the final 50 entries that year, and was my backup plan for what to do for a job in 2010-11 if I needed a backup plan.

Interesting story, eh? Well, to maybe four or five of you, so let’s move on to the actual idea, shall we?

LOOK LOUDOUN

The short version:

Using a smartphone app, “readers” take photos with location-aware mobile phones, and the phone provides them with a list of nearby news organizations to send them to.

Here’s the pitch, in full, as it stood abandoned in early 2010:

Look Loudoun will be a resource for local news organizations of all shapes and sizes to connect with the community in Loudoun County, Virginia, largely via photos taken with mobile phones.

The first product from Look Loudoun will be an iPhone application, using the geolocation feature set to suggest local news organizations to send a photo to, giving the user the opportunity to route photos of news in their community directly to a wider audience via local newspapers, hyperlocal news sites, and their own social media profiles.

Additionally, the project will begin to generate revenue by charging local businesses to list themselves on the screen using the same geolocation feature set. If the Look Loudoun user takes a photo near their business, they’ll have the option to send it their way, as well, supplying the business with content for their own efforts to engage the local community.

The revenue generated by Look Loudoun will go toward building a sustainable business — the long-term goal will be to share any profits with the participating local news organizations.

Loudoun County, a suburban, exurban and rural area in Northern Virginia (yet a short drive from Washington D.C.) is fiercely local and at the same time, highly connected, as a radically diverse base of families speed from work to school to activities to community service.

The county is covered by dozens of news organizations, some as large as the Washington Post, but many on the smaller end of the continuum, hyperlocal blogs run by passionate community members in their spare time. Local blogs Dulles District and Viva Loudoun are among the best sources for neighborhood news online, complementing a range of print newspapers that include Leesburg Today, the Loudoun Times-Mirror, and the LoudounIndependent.

You’ll notice a couple key things there:

1. Yes, it was a KNC pitch in 2009, so it starts in one local community — the always popular for hyperlocal experiments Loudoun County, where I happen to live.
2. Loudoun’s always popular for hyperlocal experiments because it shows up often at or near the top of the list of “wealthiest” or “richest” or “most full of money to be taken from consumers” counties in the country. Keeping that in mind, there’s a revenue component to this pitch: Users of the app can send their photos to local businesses, too. The business pays for the content, and/or the service of being included in the app, and the news organizations get a cut. Maybe the users get a deal?

Mobile! Location! Revenue! Hyperlocal!

What could go wrong, right?

So to answer the Carnival question directly:

A smartphone app like the proposed Look Loudoun, but on a larger scale with local, regional, and national news organizations taking part, would connect individual news “sources” — call them “citizen journalists” if you must — with traditional one-to-many channel news organizations in an unprecedented way.

Sure, 100 news organizations might have 100 of their own vendors/platforms/apps for collecting mobile photos from readers, but what I’m proposing here is 100 news organizations in one app, instead. Make it simple for the user to send their photo to the relevant news organization based on their location, no pre-existing relationship necessary.

Oh, by the way, here’s a Posterous blog I used as a brief scrapbook of inspiration at the time. Keep in mind this was pre-Instagram, pre-Facebook Places, and pre-Foursquare adds photos to checkins.

Now, it would be pretty easy to imagine Foursquare adding some features along these lines. I wouldn’t be surprised.

I’ll add some more bits of the old KNC proposal to that Posterous. If you were a screener back then, I’d love to hear what you thought of the idea. Like I said, it made the top 50, and having learned from my experience with ReportingOn, I was asking for enough money to make Look Loudoun my day job for two years.

(And yes, of course, I’m extremely pleased at the moment with the way things have worked out since the KNC entry was rejected, but it seemed like the right time to share the idea.)

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