News Leadership 3.0

June 23, 2009

A news entrepreneur lives her obsession and makes it pay

In a guest post, Julia Scott of BargainBabe.com offers tips for news entrepreneurs. BargainBabe.com helps people save money on everyday expenses.

Knight Digital Media Center recently hosted a bootcamp for news entrepreneurs. Most were start ups in the making, but Julia Scott’s BargainBabe.com is up and running. I asked Julia to share a few lessons and tips from her experience so far.
Scott says she is “a cheapskate by nature and a journalist by training.” She makes a living off her savvy-spending BargainBabe.com.

By Julia Scott

I left my job as a reporter/blogger/columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News in January 2009. Now I work for myself as a blogger at BargainBabe.com, which helps people save money on everyday expenses. In almost six months of working for myself I’ve learned a few things.

- The customer is no longer the reader. My site is free to visitors but I make money by syndicating my content and selling advertising. As a print reporter, my primary goal was to serve readers. In business, you answer to the people who pay you - your customers. As an entrepreneurial journalist, I combine both priorities: meeting reader needs and serving customers. Without both, I won’t survive.

- Social media is as important as everyone says it is, but also because it’s free. I’m bootstrapping BargainBabe.com not just because I’m frugal, but because I have little money to invest in my business. If you are an entrepreneurial journalist, you will find yourself in the same moneyless boat. You need to be on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to gain new readers and develop your brand in the Internet age, but also because it costs nothing. No publicity is bad publicity, but free publicity is even better.

- Learn from failures. Working independently means forcing yourself to find successes in each misstep, because otherwise it really is too depressing. You’ve got no one to gripe and vent and commiserate with. Plus, self-doubt can kill your tolerance for risk. And without taking chances and pursuing many, many opportunities, you probably won’t be successful. Instead of carrying out failures, create successes from them by taking away a lesson or remembering what you did well.

- Do what you do best. The internet will run you over unless you are hyper-efficient. Not only are 100 people or more doing something just like you, many of them are probably doing it better. You could spend all day running after a story a rival beat you on, or you could link to it and move on. Figure out what can you alone offer and crank that out. Do what you do best, and link to the rest.

- Forget loving what you do, you’ve got to be obsessed with your job. That means telling every person you meet about your site, constantly forging business relationships, and living your brand. When people ask what I do I take it as an opportunity to recruit a new reader by telling them about BargainBabe.com and passing out one of my hot pink fliers. I write my own press releases partly because PR firms are so expensive, but also because I can’t pay anyone to be as passionate about my business as I am.Harness your passion for your business and share it with the world.

By Michele McLellan, 06/23/09 at 3:14 am
Posted in Blogging | Business model | Emerging roles and jobs Comments (2) • Permalink • Tell-a-Friend

June 22, 2009

Guardian to users: Help us investigate

The British news site asks its users to help it examine thousands upon thousands of pages of expense reports of members of Parliament.

The Guardian is conducting a massive crowdsourcing experiment that invites users to help it investigate nearly a half million pages of expense reports and documentation submitted by members of the British Parliament.

The instructions are simple:

You’re amply justifying our hope that many hands can make light work of the thousands of documents released by Parliament in relation to MPs’ expenses. We, and others - perhaps you? - are still using these tools to review each document, decide whether it contains interesting information, and extract the key facts.

Some pages will be covering letters, or claim forms for office stationery. But somewhere in here is the receipt for a duck island. And who knows what else may turn up. If you find something which you think needs further attention, simply hit the button marked “investigate this!” and we’ll take a closer look.

How to get involved:

Step 1: Find a document
Step 2: Decide what kind of thing it is and whether it’s interesting
Step 3: Copy out any individual entries
Step 4: Make any specific observations about why a claim deserves further scrutiny

Examples of things to look out for: food bills, repeated claims for less than £250 (the limit for claims not backed up by a receipt), and rejected claims”

And the results are starting to show. Readers who combed through nearly 100,000 of 457153 pages of documents in the first two days of the experiment were turning up numerous questionable expenses or documentation.

The effort may not turn up any major fraud. But it’s a great way to engage a community as watchdogs and to increase awareness of how lawmakers spend public money. I bet the MPs will be more careful with their expenses if they know someone will actually look at them - and be able to post about them on the Web.

Could this be a model for local news organizations in the United States? Government expense reports, bids and contracts, and political contributions all seem ripe for crowdsourced scrutiny. The key may be to find a way to engage people with limited time in something that will end up worthwhile.

What’s your idea for a crowdsourced investigation in your community?

By Michele McLellan, 06/22/09 at 2:08 am
Posted in Audience development | Interactivity | Emerging roles and jobs Comments (1) • Permalink • Tell-a-Friend

June 13, 2009

Weekend reading: “Why we link”

Link: Ryan Sholin offers a compelling list of reasons news organizations and journalists can benefit from the linking network

Be sure to check out “Why we link: A brief rundown of the reasons your news organization needs to tie the Web together” from Ryan Sholin of Publish2
A taste:
- Because we owe it to our readers to give them as much information as we have at our fingertips.
- Because linking to sources and resources is the key gesture to being a citizen of the Web and not just a product on the Web.
- Because it will make your job easier.

Are you part of the link network? What benefits do you see to linking to the content of others?

Also, check out “9 Crucial UI Features of Social Media and Networking Sites.”

By Michele McLellan, 06/13/09 at 4:26 am
Posted in Aggregation | Emerging roles and jobs Comments (1) • Permalink • Tell-a-Friend

June 04, 2009

Foundations to the rescue as local news organizations diminish?

“New Media Makers” documents a growing role of foundations in supporting new community news outlets to fill information gaps and that holds promise for creating a new news ecosystem that is more diverse and more engaging to citizens as the news industry declines.

A new report pushes back at the notion that the decline of traditional news organizations will inevitably result in a vast wasteland of bloggers with agendas dominating the information stream.
Instead, the Knight Community News Network report finds that new structures for producing journalism are emerging to fill information gaps in local communities, often with support from foundations.
“New Media Makers,” says 180 foundations have contributed $128 million to support 115 news projects in 17 states and the District of Columbia since 2005.
“Philanthropic foundations are increasingly embracing the idea that journalism projects can be a funding fit,” says Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab, which operates the Knight Community News Network.
“These are not random acts of journalism, such as eyewitnesses uploading photos or videos of a major catastrophe. Nor are they the rants of Internet cowboys opining on the state of neighborhood affairs in their individual blogs,” the report says. “Rather, these new projects are often organized acts of journalism, constructed with an architecture and a mind-set to investigate discrete topics or cover geographic areas. The projects provide deliberate, accurate and fair accounts of day-to-day happenings in communities that nowadays have little or no daily news coverage.”
The report profiles four news organizations: New Haven Independent, PlanPhilly in Philadelphia., Voice of San Diego in California and the New Castle News & Opinion Weekly in Chappaqua, N.Y.
Perhaps of most interest to established news organizations is a database of foundation-assisted news organizations. Editors can use the database to discover sites in their areas that may be helping to fill coverage gaps.
These emerging organizations may not offer the complete, daily, fine-tuned packages that traditional journalists associate with quality news coverage. But their entry into what could be a more diverse and citizen-engaging news ecology is welcome.
(Disclosure: I coach community news startups as a consultant to the Knight Foundation, which is partnering with local community foundations to fund new initiatives through its Community Information Challenge. New Haven Independent and Voice of San Diego are among the projects receiving funding.)