A few weeks ago I was invited to speak at the Cronkite School of Journalism in Arizona by my friend and mentor Dan Gillmor. It was a gathering of journalism professors from around the country who are going to build their own curriculum to teach entrepreneurial journalism. Dan asked me and Mark Luckie to come speak about our experience going from J-school to startup. It’s a different career path from many and the point is to show professors that it’s a viable path.

Without a doubt it is a real path. I’ve been living it for so long (even before Spot.Us I had been working on “experimental projects”) it doesn’t even seem like a question to me. Sometimes I am looked at as a poster-boy for entrepreneurial journalism. And on those occasions I’m happy to evangelize what is a totally viable path.

But one of the professors at the Cronkite J-school gathering asked a very important and a totally fair question. I’m paraphrasing here: “I know it’s a real path, but it can’t be all butterfly’s and kittens. What are the tradeoffs? What are the hard parts of going down this route? I don’t want to send off students without a healthy dose of reality.”

Sometimes those of us who have drank the entrepreneurial Kool-Aid like to point out success stories and perks without mentioning just what you have to give up to go this route.

I wouldn’t change a thing about the career path I’ve chosen. It has absolutely worked out for me. But if I were to advise a younger me – I would be remiss in my egoistic duties if I didn’t convey both sides of the question “should you go out on a different kind of career path.” There are plenty of positive things I would say. I often shout out about how awesome it is to start your own project, blog, company, nonprofit, etc. But that’s not the purpose of THIS blog post. I’m playing the contrarian so that our Carnival isn’t one big “yes we can”-fest. With that in mind there are THREE big areas that somebody who is thinking of going out on this path should keep in mind.

1. There is a time burden

I used to joke “that the Internet doesn’t sleep and so neither can I.” I’ve gained some wisdom on how to balance certain aspects of work/life but if you have gone out on your own to start something up it is not a 9-5 job. It is not a Monday-Friday job. “What you gain in freedom, you lose in free time.”

2. There is a mental burden

The buck stops with you. There is no “boss” to complain about. If things have taken a turn for the worse, the only person you can blame is yourself. In fact, as other people start to rely on you for a paycheck it becomes an even bigger mental burden. You don’t want to let anybody down. You must learn to live with that mental pressure. What you gain in potential reward you lose in mental security.

3. There is a path burden

It is a career path. Once you start walking down that road, it is difficult to go back. When I made the choice to go down this path I was a hard working tech-reporter. I have followed some of my tech-reporting peers and admired their careers. In fact, my replacement at Wired is still there holding down a solid job. It is a path I could have gone. If I wanted I could still go back to being a reporter/writer – but after several years being out of that game, I’d have to do some backtracking. I’d have to work underneath that guy at Wired (ironically enough, I interviewed/hired him). I’d have to sharpen my skills again. It is difficult to go back. Moreover – you might not want to go back. There is a bit of the “take the blue pill or the red pill” aspect to striking it out on your own.

As you probably picked up – there is an upside to all of these downsides. As with most things in life it isn’t black/white. There are shades of grey and you have to be prepared to paint with those shades. It’s amazing what you can do with only a few colors.

(image credit)

Spot.Us launched in November of 2008. Counting the months of planning (and applying for the Knight News Challenge) that went into the launch and I’ve been working on Spot.Us for almost four years. In that time we’ve pushed boundaries, had many successes and shortcomings which I’ve tried to share along the way. As I’ve always said – Spot.Us will never be perfect. It will never be “done” and that as long as we can strive for something we are making progress.

Today we are taking a big stride by formally being acquired by the Public Insight Network. There is a lot to suss out with this merger but when you sit and think about it the merger makes a lot of sense. Here’s the official press release.

The Public Insight Network (part of American Public Media) was co-founded by my friend Michael Skoler, now at Public Radio International. It’s a software platform (similar to Spot.Us) that has long been at the forefront of how Public Media can interact with and take cues from the public by giving them a means to inform journalism. Individuals can provide insight to make stories more informed, insightful and reflect the community in a truer sense. Spot.Us is built on a relationship with the public giving them a kind of editorial control and influence over what stories should be done. Both create a media that is more responsive and responsible to the public’s needs according to their own volition. Combined we offer both opportunities to readers, creating a more nuanced relationship between a news entity that uses PIN/Spot and the public.

Creating and managing a more nuanced relationship – that’s what “public media” should do. I hope that as Spot.Us and PIN merge we can continue to push the boundaries in transparency and participation in the process of journalism so that media organizations can better serve the public.

All of this is under the backdrop of my gig at UC Berkeley’s J-school which is a blast. Spot.Us is my baby, but just as it is time for it to grow up and move out of the house, it was time for me to tackle new problems. Through this merger both are happening.

I will continue working at Berkeley’s J-school and I will remain the founder and a part of the Spot.Us team moving forward. But it is high time for Spot.Us to grow wings and move beyond what any small team can accomplish. I believe under the PIN leadership of Joaquin Alvarado Spot.Us can grow to accomplish much more and I intend to be there as we reach for higher goals and aspirations.

There will be much to write about in the coming months (years). I’m happy to say that Spot.Us is able to fund itself as a project for the first year of this merger and if revenue grows, could do so indefinitely. But for the moment I want to keep this post short and sweet. Spot.Us will continue. For the moment it will be status quo. There will be changes moving forward but we will remain an open platform that will fundraise for independent journalists and news organizations.

And to close it off – an excerpt from the first IdeaLab post I ever wrote about Spot.Us.

As I see it – community funded reporting is low-hanging fruit. The Knight News Challenge is all about doing research and development – the kind that isn’t done elsewhere in the industry.

Now, it may turn out that this low-hanging fruit is poisonous. But aren’t you glad that somebody is at least going to give it a good honest bite to find out? More importantly – aren’t you glad it’s somebody who shares the values of the news industry? Fact is, this idea is going to be a learning process. My goal isn’t to solve the business woes of journalism. I don’t think anybody can do that. But I do intend to taste the fruit of community funded reporting and report back as clearly as possible how it tastes. Fact is, this idea is going to be tried by somebody. My fear, however, is that those who get to it first successfully don’t have journalism’s best interest in mind – but the bottom line.

I’m happy to report back that the fruit isn’t poisonous. In fact, I think it’s time we begin to harvest at a larger scale.

(Image Credit: Jules Brelaz)

That driving force has taken my career in all kinds of fun and exciting directions and today I’d like to announce a new one.

This year I’ll be working with UC Berkeley’s journalism school. Specifically I will be working with the schools’ three hyperlocal sites (MissionLocal.org, OaklandNorth.net and RichmondConfidential.com) to come up with new products for their website. Some of these products might be editorial or service related – but the main thrust will be to experiment with new business products.

Before haters eagerly call Spot.Us a failure let me type this reassuring paragraph and get back to the lede. Spot.Us has enough money in the bank to give us a runway of at least one year – possibly more (August was our first break-even month!). That includes salary for myself and our C.T.O. Erik Sundelof in addition to any money we would raise for reporters. In fact, Spot.Us is in PERFECT position to scale up and that’s exactly what we are working on. I will remain an active part of Spot.Us and in the coming weeks we should have some exciting news which will cement it as an ongoing business (elevated from a mere experiment) for at least another two years. So Spot.Us is doing business as usual right now and soon might be doing even more of it!

But back to the point: As an entrepreneur and somebody who likes to push boundaries (see first sentence) I felt like it was time to get my hands dirty with something new. There were certain experiments I couldn’t try with Spot.Us which, rightfully so, cornered itself into the non-advertising, nonprofit world. Some of these experiments are ambitious, some are quick and light, others are yet to be thought of – but I’m sure will be fun.

The hyperlocal sites at Berkeley already have a lot of traction. In fact, they don’t get enough credit for what they’ve accomplished. These are real world sites run by students but they’ve become integral to their communities. I am eager to jump into their fertile ground for product experiments that could educate both the individuals involved (students and myself) and the larger journalism industry. As always you can expect to learn about our success and failures on this blog and The Local Report, a blog set up to capture lessons from Berkeley’s hyperlocal sites.

I am also excited about the opportunity to have a positive impact on the curriculum at UC Berkeley’s J-school. The program already has amazing journalism professors and the students come out as superb digital storytellers. But storytelling doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A rounded journalism education should take into account the ecosystem of the web, the know-how of participatory media (including social media) and an appreciation of entrepreneurial skills. That’s what I hope to rub off into the program.

Combine all this with my own sense of Cal-Alumni pride (undergraduate class of 2004) and you can see why I’m terribly excited to begin working at Berkeley. Expect to hear more about this and Spot.Us as things move forward.

If you aren’t familiar with the journalism program at UC Berkeley or their hyperlocals, the video below will give a small introduction. Note that this video was from their launch in 2008. Since then the sites have continued to grow – publishing year round. Again those three sites are: MissionLocal.org, RichmondConfidential.com and OaklandNorth.Net.

Got ideas for Berkeley’s hyperlocal sites to try? – LET ME KNOW!

One could argue that this is one reason why journalism and the media are so important. They set the agenda for local and national conversations. It gives us space and a reason to face ourselves, confront topics and converse with our neighbors. With the help of the Whitman Institute sponsorship Spot.Us is exploring how we talk about the news with our colleagues, what we discuss and why. The results of our last 200 person survey are below with some analysis. See the first Whitman Institute survey here.

Our next Whitman Institute survey just went up. You can go to Spot.Us and click “free credits” on any pitch. Taking the survey not only informs what we know about how you think/use the media – but funds an the independent reporting project of your choice!

As always it’s important to note that Spot.Us is not a polling company, but these do represent real answers from unique individuals.

Our first question was just to see if indeed people do discuss the news with family, co-workers or friends. Only 1 percent of respondents didn’t discuss the news at all. The majority (57 percent) of responders say they discussed the news on a daily basis with another 25 percent saying they discussed the news “a few times” in the past week.

The next question we wanted to ask was about the nature of the conversation. So much of our political discourse is polarized. We wanted to get a sense of whether or not that was the case in our every day lives too. Do conversations around the news get too heated? Or are we simply talking with folks we already agree with avoiding any debate or confrontation?

According to the survey results about half of the conversations we have on the news are “a back and forth conversation, cordial with disagreement.” Only 5 percent report having a heated debate with another 32 percent saying that the conversations were cordial because “we saw eye-to-eye on the issues.”

There are many ways to interpret these results. That half of our conversations are cordial with disagreements does show a strong contrast with what we are presented on television, where almost every conversation turns into a shouting match. And yet roughly a third of our conversations are with people that we already agree with. While I think we could use less polarized bickering on cable television, perhaps we could use some more heated (but healthy) debate in our everyday conversations?

All bar graph results mean that individuals could choose multiple answers. This means the total possible number of ‘votes’ was out of 200 instead of a percentage in a pie chart of 100.

When we asked individuals who they discussed the news with, it turns out that the winner was “friends.” Nearly 80 percent of all respondents or 157 individuals discussed the news with their friends in the past week. Family was a close second and only 94 individuals (nearly 50 percent) discussed the news with co-workers.

Something the graph below doesn’t show was where answers overlapped. Almost all individuals that discussed the news with co-workers also discussed it with friends. If you discussed the news with family you were more likely to also discuss it with your friends than co-workers. It was these two predispositions that allowed “friends” to come out as the most popular answer.  Only 25 percent of respondents felt comfortable discussing the news with all three types equally.

Funny enough the most popular “other” example that was given was – strangers; either in person (on a bus) or online.

The survey results here were surprising because it goes against everything we hear about news preferences online. Instead of niche news (topical, including sports) being the most popular, it was the least. Perhaps because Spot.Us is a self-selecting community the most popular news to discuss was national and local news with international news following right behind. This could also be because during the survey the debt ceiling news was reaching a fever pitch and international markets are in turmoil.

The immediate positive aspect of this pitch is obvious. When discussing the news we feel stimulated. But because these answers are not mutually exclusive we also feel anxious, depressed and invigorated almost equally.

A total of 41 individuals or 20 percent of respondents said they only felt either depressed or anxious. Meanwhile 90 individuals or 45 percent felt either only invigorated or stimulated (51 individuals ONLY felt stimulated).

The news we discussed was overwhelmingly abstracted from our deeply personal lives. The vast majority of the news we discussed impacts us in a broad sense ie: the national debt ceiling. But some of the open ended answers about what news we were reading shed light on this further. The 20 percent who discussed the news that did have a direct impact on their life felt a deep connection to the stories whether it was Carmageddon in Los Angeles or a local shooting.

OPEN ANSWERS: “Tell us about the story you discussed.”

These are the full answers about news stories discussed by Spot.Us community members, but their names have been withheld.

What DON’T I discuss? I’m obsessed with the Murdoch takedown. OBSESSED. I have discussed the debt crisis, local crime, the governor of my state and what he’s up to…I’m a big chatty newsy person. I love to talk about all the news all the time.

Carmageddon, obviously. Even my parents back in Boston had heard about it. I was actually kind of amazed it was national news, so we talked about that.

The women’s Soccer World Cup, the News of the World scandal,and a local issue concerning the merger of my city’s CVB and Office of Cultural Affairs

Michele Bachman and the catholic church

Schools, government (FL), peak oil, doom

Rupert Murdoch’s impact on politics in the UK and the US. The US national debt. Republicans.

Discussing impact of sunspot activity, global weirding + local weather

Political wrangling going on in Washinggton.

One story was about Seattle City Council passing an ordinance allowing food trucks on streets and not just private lots. Another was about the Women’s World Cup final game. Another was about the Seattle Sounders match.

Too many to mention. one that still stands out is a radio show on the situation of human trafficking, and the apathy of many that goes along. also the bay area seems to be an international hub of sorts for such illegal activities. who knows about such?

Police shooting of 19-year-old boy by SF Muni police.

I discuss news stories at least twice a day. Usually more often. This particular news story is regarding the fires in the Southwest, specifically New Mexico. Our drought. And the causes of the fires and drought = climate change.
Discussing news is helpful….it informs life and makes us better, engaged people.

The first of these surveys went up last week and looked at the release of Sarah Palin’s emails and Anthony Weiner’s photo scandal. We asked over 200 individuals how much time they dedicated to these media stories, if it was worth their attention and what (if anything) they’d rather see covered.

You can find the full results of that survey published at the trusty Spot.Us blog.

It should also be noted that the survey results are a secondary win to the primary of supporting independent journalists. Every person who takes a survey on Spot.Us earns credits that are directed to the reporting project of their choice and create real funds for that reporting endeavor. Huzzah!

Since the results of this first specific survey can be found on Spot.Us’ blog I thought I’d take this space to look at the larger issue, especially since the Whitman Institute afforded us the ability to do several of these types of surveys I want to try and articulate what I hope we can achieve and open up to suggestions on what future surveys/polls/questionnaires might accomplish this.

One of the founding principles behind Spot.Us is that the public can and should have a seat at the editorial table to determine what coverage the media will serve. The media talks about this concept all the time but rarely meets it head on. At best on cable networks you’ll see a few minutes dedicated to reading Tweets on television. This is a kind of faux power. A manipulation of Andy Warhol’s 15-minutes of fame and passing that off as power (in modern society we too often interpret fame as power).

So why doesn’t the media (and I’m talking more about broadcast news for the moment) tackle this more head on? One could argue that they don’t need to. They are responding to what media consumers want. In fact, they cater to it already and that’s why we have news that skews towards the sensational. This leads to a chicken/egg dilemma. Do media consumers pay attention to sensational news because that’s what they want or because that’s the only thing they are served up.

Part of the problem is, if we are serious about this question, the answer is a bit of both. Turn on PBS Evening News and you are likely to start snoring. Turn on Fox News or CNN and you might have a seizure from all the flashing bright lights. I refuse to believe that these are the only two options we have. There must be a way in which we can seek the feedback of the public in determining coverage, reflect that in a serious manner without forcing consumers to feel as though we are force feeding them broccoli.

One type of organization that gives us glimpses into this middle road is the Pew Research Center for The People and the Press. Pew also runs the “Project for Excellence in Journalism.” In some respects what Spot.Us is attempting with these surveys is a quicker/lighter version of Pew polls that give us insight into how the public think/feels about topics.

While our method is less scientific, it is faster while maintaining a basis in real quantitative answers from a diverse but digitally savvy audience. Perhaps some day the Project for Excellence in Journalism will even help sponsor some of these surveys and thus help independent journalists at the same time.

The goal in these surveys is to get our fingers on the pulse of a conversation.

For example: If it was relevant we could launch a survey tomorrow about Google+ and Facebook.

Everyone is going to have their blog posts on the best features of Google+ or why it will/won’t be better than Facebook, etc. But one post by one person is just that. Even if I go out and aggregate several posts, it doesn’t take into consideration background information from those individuals or even ask them to tackle the same questions and that is what we really need in order to understand what Google+ is and how it may fit into our lives – by asking people who are using it.

I am not 100% sure what the topic of future surveys sponsored by the Whitman Institute will be. They’ve given us pretty open ground. At the same time I want to stay true to the parts of their mission which overlap with Spot.Us’ – to give a platform for the general public to converse and understand what they want from media and hopefully have the media respond back in kind.

I want to keep my ear low to the ground and create surveys around topics that have varying opinions but one where nobody is really asking the right/tough questions of THE PUBLIC and not just media insiders asking themselves or ‘experts’ what is important to understand for a given topic.

We want to know what drives conversation, how those conversations spread and why. What is or isn’t important to media consumers. What threads they follow, what threads they spread and what influence that might have.

If you have ideas for future survey topics – send them my way. Note: The next two weeks I will be more or less offline (getting nuptial’d) but upon my return we will take a close look at where the media is taking the public and give the public a chance to respond.

The rules: It has to be a project you failed in and it has to be your failure (no pointing fingers).

There are lots of projects I’ve worked on. Some have worked, others have not. There are various degrees of failure, something I realized in last week’s #wjchat where I co-hosted around this same topic.

I had written up a nice post about more insight into Assignment Zero. In the end one of the lessons I took from that is listening to your gut. If your spidey sense tells you that something is wrong, then it probably is.

But I decided that much has already been written about on Assignment Zero by myself and others. So let’s talk about something else rather than dissect something that, in my mind at least, has been analyzed every which way since Sunday.

Spot.Us expansion – it aint Craigslist

As many of you know, I work on a site called Spot.Us (go, click free credits, do it!). For the most part, as an experiment, I consider it a success. When I first started talking about the idea publicly it was insane. Funny how only a few years later I think the idea is rather tame (depending on what community you role in) but since at the time nobody knew if the thing would even get off the ground, I’m pretty happy with how things have gone.

When we launched, all pitches were local to the Bay Area. In my mind, I figured we would expand region by region. For better or worse I wanted to stay committed to the idea of funding local civic journalism, which is tough to get an audience around. But we’ve had success in the Bay Area. In fact, we still get pitches regularly in the Bay Area. I no longer feel the need to go out and solicit pitches. Which is great, because we then expanded into Los Angeles in partnership with USC. And work began on soliciting pitches in the LA area.

Perhaps through the partnership with USC and support from the California Endowment for Health, we’ve had success getting pitches in LA regularly. I suspect, however, without those two critical connections, we would only get a trickle of pitches.

We’ve had pitches on Spot.Us in Montanona, Washington State, Washington D.C, New York, Pennslyivania, Wisconsin, Florida, Colorado, etc etc.

So we have had success in getting pitches with geographic diversity.

But when we originally started expanding I thought we would expand with sub-domains. Think Craigslist.

There was an sfbay.spot.us, an la.spot.us, a seattle.spot.us, etc, etc.

But that isn’t how things went. Not by a long shot.

What happened?

Once I created a Seattle and Minnesota subdomain I began spending a lot of time reaching out to various organizations in the regions. One thing I discovered – each community has its own media-scene and it can be very insular. Not everyone likes outsiders. A few sites in each community adopt Spot.Us, and they’ll create pitches – but the rest look at you like your a roaming nomad ready to eat their children. This isn’t their fault, it’s just that they already have a media ecosystem and Spot.Us was trying to jump in on it.

Meanwhile folks in distributed areas around the country wanted in. Somebody in Milwaukee wanted to create a pitch.

Well, I couldn’t create a full subdomain on account of one pitch.

But I shouldn’t tell this person to piss off just because they aren’t in one of my pre-determined regions of growth.

What was I to do?

The solution is easy, kill the subdomains, right? In the end, that’s what we did. No harm, right?

Well, yea. Eventually we came to the right decision. So in the end, as failures go, I’m okay with it.

The sting, however, comes when I think about how much time/money went into creating the sub-domain system and the navigation that went along with it. A system that is now, more or less, defunct.

It’s painful. It’s even doubly hard to talk about because the fact is, I’ve been very privileged with Spot.Us. I received a grant from the Knight Foundation to get started. FREE MONEY, right! Sure, but that comes with a sense of responsibility not to waste it. I also have received a few grants from small family foundations. One sizable grant helped fund the development effort of the subdomains.

I wouldn’t consider the grant money “wasted.” We were going to try the subdomain method and this grant helped us execute it quickly without dipping into our Knight Grant. We would have failed either way, so in some respects, this gave us a nice cushion so that we didn’t burn through all our money on this failed feature-set. That would have sucked even more. It’s very possible that we would have gone through a slow and painful drain of funds had we not gotten this private grant.

So what are some of the things I learned.

1. In a general sense, when it comes to expansion, don’t try and dictate how and where it’s going to happen.

2. General project management stuff (cash flow, development issues, etc – I’ll spare the details for another post)

3. Learn to bounce back, accept your defeat and backtrack.

Spot.Us has expanded, we have pitches from all over now, but it required us to rip out the sub-domain feature set that we worked so hard on. It just wasn’t making any sense. We still have the ability to create “networks” and sub-domains (if anyone is interested – I’ll make you a sub-domain) but it’s not something we really push. It just didn’t work for us and it was important to accept that. Running an organization is enough of an uphill battle, why wear a backpack at the same time?

At SXSW I had the opportunity to catch up with Kurt Huang, founder of ThankThis, and test the latest iteration of his startup called “Juicy Bits.” I should start with a disclosure: I’m an advisor to ThankThis. But this post will not be a “pitch.” Rather, it’s a call for participation with a startup that has cuffed its ears and is listening for advice.

The original concept behind “Thank This” was to create a “Thank” button publishers would place on their content. Happy readers would click the button and a brief ad would be shown that would create funds for both the publisher and the charity of the readers choice.

In short – it’s a social action button for good. When you take an action the reader gets points that can later be redeemed and the publisher is able to get funds to further its mission. At the moment the ads are text based google ads, but in the future they could be “deal of the day” ads, etc.

You can still see an example of these buttons on my personal blog (click into a post). Feel free to give this blog post a “Thank” and experience this first version of ThankThis.

There were two big problems with this first iteration.

1. Convincing publishers to put in an untested button.
2. Aside from altruism what is the incentive for the reader?

The next pivot of Thank This turned the social action into a social sharing button…. for good! Instead of shortening a URL with Bit.ly you could shorten it with Thank This and get points. This circumvented the need for publishers to get started and also motivated folks to curate content – because they would Tweet or Facebook the URL. But it required an iFrame experience which some folks don’t like. You can see a Thank This curated link of Spot.Us here.

An important thing to note about this iteration and others is that the main thrust of Thank This hasn’t changed. In both cases the button is a social button for good that, when clicked, shows an ad and creates points (later turned into money) for charities and content creators. The main difference is what the ad is wrapped around and why people would click the button. In the first case to support a publisher in the second case because a trusted Twitter friend shared the link.

The latest iteration “JuicyBits” abstracts the Thank This button one step further by creating a reader for Twitter. Think of it like a version .01 of a different kind of TweetDeck.

Here’s the feed for Clay Shirky. It shows all the recent Tweets by Clay that contain a link. If you click on the boxes below you’ll be shown the content he linked to, stripped of ads. It’s actually a nice reading experience. If you like that piece of content you can click “Thank This” and it will create points for you, the Twitter feed that originally shared the link and the content creator. All points can be redeemed to support a charity or the publisher and all points are tracked based on Twitter’s authentication API and the URL that generated content.

I personally like this latest iteration the most. The reading experience is arguably better than the iframe from the second iteration. With enough development it could almost replace TweetDeck or any other Twitter Reader application. That’s actually what I think is the biggest hurdle. It’s a matter of closing the gap between Twitter.com’s web interface and this one. The big hurdle right now being I’m only able to read one Twitter account at a time.

Give this Twitter reader a whirl yourself. The best (cleanest) feeds have stars next to them on the home page of the Juicy Bits reader.

And here’s why you should give it a try. Thank This is a startup with a concept I stand behind. The idea is to create an engaging advertising experience with the right incentives so that people will consume and share content the same way they do right now on the open web, but it will create revenue for publishers. Kurt and myself are under no allusions. We don’t know what people want. Is this the right direction to go? Could a site like this, if improved, ever become the way you catch up with your friends content on Twitter. Or is Thank This barking up the wrong tree?

This is a beta project. The concept has lots of potential but we need feedback to get started. And here’s the best part – just using the Juicy Bits reader can give us that feedback. Kurt will be watching where people click, how they use the site, etc. That will inform future iterations.

In the two years since our site has launched, we’ve funded over 160 projects with the help of 5,000 contributors, a fifth of whom contributed more than once. We’ve done this in collaboration with 95 organizations, and our reporting projects have won eight journalism awards.

We’re pushing forward, but we need advice, ideas and support from the public. You can read more at the full “State of the Spot.”

Meanwhile, we’ve had two Carnival of Journalism blog-o-rama-fests thanks to the Reynolds Journalism Institute. They’re fun and exciting, but I want input from the participants here as well. There are two more #jcarns that I’m going to host. After that, I want a fair and honest way to give the emerging community control without losing the momentum that comes from somebody taking the wheels. Got ideas? Leave them in the comments.

I have learned a lot in my experience running Web projects including Spot.Us, a non-profit startup organization that fundraises for independent journalists. Building anything from the ground up requires myriad skills. One skill in particular played a pivotal role and enabled me to avoid many pitfalls that entrepreneurial journalists face as we tread into the unknown future of our craft. The fundamentals of journalism are still required. An organization must know how to produce engaging content. But it also needs at least one person who can do project management.

Project management isn’t about middle-managers, paper-pushing or other forms of newsroom bureaucracy. Project management at Spot.Us doesn’t entail dealing with our accountant, managing freelancers or planning our publication cycle. Managing a project isn’t about “business as usual” and has nothing to do with the day-to-day grind of putting out a publication.

Project management is the ability to plan, organize and secure resources necessary to see a project from start to finish, such as building a website or mobile application. One way to think about projects is in comparison to our understanding of games (video games, board games, etc). Like all games, projects have a stated purpose, an end point or definition of winning. They also have rules or constraints. Get caught as a “fish out of water” and you lose Marco Polo. For projects, constraints are either budgetary, time or scope. And like games, projects need a player who is making decisions to try to reach the end goal within those constraints. This is the project manager’s mission, should he or she choose to accept it.

Some organizations have the wrong vision for a project. This is a natural and acceptable position to be caught in. May a thousand flowers bloom and the industry learn from these mistakes. A much worse fate, and one that is not applauded, is a vision that never comes to fruition at all because of failed project management.

Once the vision and idea of success is articulated and agreed upon, the first conversation a project manager needs to have is around constraints. All too often this conversation is absent and the project suffers. It comes down to picking and choosing battles.

TWO OUTTA THREE AIN’T BAD

Games have very real constraints. Many have a limit of “lives.” Lose your last life in Mario Bros. and the game is over; the player’s actions in the game reflect this. Other games don’t have a sense of “life or death” but put in constraints of “points.” In Monopoly the points are literally “dollars,” and you only start the game with so much, but by taking risks you can earn more. It’s a game that requires an enormous commitment of trial and error in order to build a “monopoly.” Players in Mario Bros. may be cautious, where Monopoly players will try to buy up lots of property while they can, each reacting to their constraints.

These constraints are known to the player, but if an observer doesn’t understand them, it can be confusing. Project managers need to convey their constraints to everyone involved, especially the stakeholder. I often use the following phrase: “There’s good, fast and cheap. Pick two.”

In other words, project management constraints are usually some combination of time, budget or quality. If you want a website done cheap and fast, a capable project manager will find cheap developers and designers. But be prepared for the website to have bugs. If you want quality on a low budget, the project manager may have to rely on volunteers who’ll work at their own pace. The ideal scenario is to get a site built that is both good and fast, but it will cost you a pretty penny. If you have that option, congrats; you’ve been dealt a good hand.

The project manager doesn’t make the rules, but she does play by them. There is no wrong/right choice, but these are constraints a project manager will need to know in order to make the right decision. Constraints should be made in cahoots with stakeholders so there aren’t any surprises. A good project manager finds out the budgetary and time constraints, does research, and explains what is reasonable to deliver and at what quality. Then negotiation of constraints can happen in an informed manner.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

To rescue the princess in one popular video game, Link always needs to accomplish annoying side tasks. These feel like distractions, but it’s really a matter of timing and getting things in order. He can’t kill the dragon until he has acquired the sword. Link can’t find the sword until he has won the archery contest, and you can’t win that archery contest until you earn the rupees to buy the damn thing.

Depending on the project, there will be any number of side tasks. They are not distractions, and the order in which you do them can be fatal. For example, when building a website, you want to start with a clear description of every feature, then lay out those features in a design (forgetting aesthetics/logo). You will discover new features and priorities along the way, and that’s why you save development for last, right before the aesthetics and skin of the site. Otherwise you could blow through your development budget, and any discovery in the layout phase will result in a sub-par product. If you start with the logo, you’re just plain doing it wrong.

DISTRACTIONS OF TECHNOLOGY

There are, of course, tons of practical decisions a project manager makes. What technology platform should a site be built on? Who should we hire to build or design it? What hosting service should we use? A project manager cannot be an expert on everything. But she should know how to communicate with experts, interpret their knowledge and put it to practical use.

There are always trade-offs. If a decision is made and the project manager isn’t aware of what is sacrificed, even if it turns out to be the right decision, it is being made blindly and is a poor decision. If you build a site in Drupal, you are choosing a robust starting point and sacrificing flexibility to build out custom features. If you choose Django, you are making the opposite decision. When you hire someone straight out of college, you are sacrificing experience for a lower salary and hopefully some enthusiasm. Again, there is no right or wrong. But there is informed and uninformed. Doing anything in the latter could bite you in the butt.

Every project is unique and has its own constraints. But it’s the job of the project manager to make decisions in light of constraints so the job still gets done. There is always a finish line in sight for a project manager. As news and technology collide and combine, publishers will increasingly find themselves in the position of technology companies. And technology companies live and die around their ability to launch new projects. In the near future I suspect we will all shout: “Project managers for the win!”

Public media has been on the minds and lips of a lot of Americans. Certainly the last few years have seen a growth in public media across the board from Corporation for Public Broadcasting entities (PBS, NPR) to less formal public media entities like PRX and PRI. Recently, as a follow-up to the work of the Knight Commission Barbara Cochran wrote a policy paper “Rethinking Public Media: Mort Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive.” From the Knight Commission blog post:

At a time when government funding for public broadcasting is hotly debated, Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive, a new policy paper by Barbara Cochran, offers five broad strategies and 21 specific recommendations to reform public media.
It’s an excellent piece of reading that breaks down some of the roadblocks and opportunities that lay ahead for public media.

Beyond white papers, however, it’s important that the public be able to speak their mind about public media. That’s why thanks to the support of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, the institutional home of the Knight Commission on the Information needs of communities in a Democracy, Spot.Us surveyed 500 members about the state of public media in their community.

The goal was to find out where public media is strong, weak and what suggestions the public might have for public media. Not only did this survey raise awareness about the growing role of public media, it supported media as well. Every member of our community that took the survey was given $5 in credits to fund the story of their choice on our site.

And The Survey Says….

How Big Is Your Community?
Before we can examine the survey in depth I should remind folks that this is a sponsored survey of a somewhat self-selecting community (and our community is perhaps more media-savvy than other websites). That said, our first question was aimed at getting a sense of where people lived. One of the trends we often hear is that major metropolitan areas are better served by public media than smaller locations. Our survey affirmed this.

Just over 60 percent of respondents were from major metropolitan areas. Another 17 percent were from large cities. Only a handful (12 percent) came from towns with a population of 50,000 or less. Our survey skewed toward major metropolitan areas and in total they were happier with public media than folks in more rural areas. This should be kept in the back of our minds when we dive into the remaining question and answers.

Spot.Us community member Mike Labonte summed up the frustration with public media in small towns when he wrote his suggestion to improve public media in his town: “Presence. The only public media in my city of 70,000 is the local public access cable TV station.”

The next question in our survey allowed for multiple answers: “Who has an influential role in shaping media in your area?” It’s an important question to ask because while the ecosystem continues to change many charge public media with the role to unite various media forces together. The results of this question were interesting proving once again; as much as things have changed — they also stay the same.

Newspapers and national broadcast television were considered influential by the most respondents. Just over 75 percent of people who took the survey selected papers as being influential. Local bloggers garnered 188 votes or just 37 percent of those that took the survey. While that’s still a hefty number, it was the lowest concrete choice (it performed better than “other”) and came in just below “elected officials.”
Community member Laurie Pumper noted: “One small but telling example: Public radio went out of its way to keep a citizen journalism organization from providing livestreaming of a gubernatorial debate in Minnesota. If an organization accepts public funding, I expect better cooperation with other sources of media.”

Next we asked how people got involved in public media. The respondents had three overwhelming answers: Social media, the general website and donating. The overlap between these three was also very strong. Almost everyone who said they donated engaged through the website and social media. Although the reverse trend was not as strong (i.e. somebody who engaged through social media might not donate) there was still a correlation.

In light of the number of respondents who said they volunteer or worked for public media, the number of people who attended events at their local public media station seemed a little low. Getting out the word can be very important as community member Ben Melançon said : “Dedicating the resources to come and ask what’s up, once a month. Taking matters of interest common to multiple local areas they cover and doing very in-depth reports on them.”
Next we got to the heart of the survey: How effective is public media at serving the needs and interests of diverse members of the community? While the responses to this aren’t an abysmal failure, it does show large room for improvement. A total of 11 percent thought public media in their community was doing a poor job of reflecting diversity. The vast majority of responders selected either “good” (33 percent) or “fair” (32 percent). Because these two combine for 65 percent of all responders it’s worth examining the exact language of this answers choice:

• Fair — There are occasional examples of diverse programming, but it’s not the norm.
• Good — While not perfect, there are obvious efforts to make programming more inclusive.

While these lukewarm answers were the majority only a handful of responders thought public media was doing an “excellent” or “very good” job of reflecting a communities diversity.
And then came the meatiest question: “How well do public media do of informing you about local issues?”

Again we find mixed results, but the overall trend was positive. A majority 69 percent said public media was doing either “average” or “above average” at covering local issues. While it’s great to see so few select “poor” (six percent) or “below average” (17 percent), there is still lots of room for improvement when we note that only eight percent of responders thought public media was doing “fantastic.”

In an interesting contrast with an earlier comment, community member Alexis Gonzales said this about the size of a town:

Because I live in a large city, news media — including public media — just don’t cover ‘neighborhood’ issues. Frankly, I stopped expecting them to do otherwise until I spent time in smaller-but-not-that-much-smaller city (Portland for example) and noticed how public media seemed so much closer to and integrated into the local community. I think Public Media could do a better job of covering local issues by reconsidering what is newsworthy … i.e., neighborhood issues can be of broader interest to the greater community.

Taxes

The survey also threw in a playful question regarding taxes. Since public media’s funding has been a topic of discussion, why not ask the public what they think? The question was arguably loaded, but still worth asking.

The exact language was: “British citizens are taxed $80.36 a year to support the BBC. United States citizens are taxed only $1.36. Knowing it would mean more taxes you believe the following.” Then respondents could decide if they wanted to lower taxes to $0 or raise them to “beat the British.”

This question was asked in part to educate, since many people don’t realize how little our media is subsidized by taxes compared to other countries and in part to provoke responses around a hotly debated topic.

About 20 percent of responders thought the taxes should stay the same or even be lowered to $0. Nearly half thought of expanding the taxes a little either doubling it to $2.70 or expanding it to $30. And perhaps because of how the answer was worded  (“Let’s beat the British”) a whopping 34 percent wanted to raise taxes to $80.37 to fund public media. Either the Spot.Us community has lots of public media fans or a reminder that the British public media is out-funding ours 80-to-1 was too much to bear. (Also note 49 individuals who took the survey work for public media according to their answers to question #3).

From the public’s mouth

Finally, our last open ended question sought advice and input about how public media could improve at the local level. We received 500 responses and below I have republished some of the best with the survey respondents’ permission.

Wendy Carrillo

I live in East LA / Boyle Heights. It’s very rare that good positive stories are told about my community via TV news. LA Times covers some good stories, but it’s not the norm. I would like to see my community being covered w/ national issues other than immigration. Like Latinos who serve in armed forces, or those who are making a difference in the classroom.

Tom Davidson

Engage the emerging local blogosphere — providing them promotion/audience and, potentially, revenue via bundled sales using the bully pulpit of public media. In other words, why can’t a local PBS or NPR station serve the same role as a TBD.com in Washington?

Tim Gihring

They could spice up the reporting. The no rant/no slant approach is appropriate, but the reporting is often simple, dry, and probably not engaging as broad an audience as possible as a result.

Henry Jenkins

Right now, Los Angeles seems poised to lose its PBS station, which is going independent. This is a good news, bad news situation. Some of its best current projects are local and these will continue and grow. But we will also lose some of the programs from PBS which we have come to expect and they will be missed.

Ruth Ann Harnisch

Deploy the resources of journalism majors and graduate students in the many universities and colleges located in and around the major metro areas. Collaborate with universities and colleges to cover more beats, produce more stories, create more outlets, uncover more potential advertisers and train better journalists.

Tom Stites

My community, Newburyport, Mass., is an hour north of Boston, a half hour south of Portsmouth, N.H., and an hour and 10 minutes south of Portland, Me. I listen to public radio from all three, and no one covers Newburyport or its surrounding area. In fact, we’re in a fringe reception area for all the stations. What would be really cool would be to have a low-power, listener-supported station right here in Newburyport. There’s a local AM station that plays old music but has no local news presence.

Perhaps where I live makes me an outlier, but I suspect that my situation is quite common — most public radio stations are in big cities or on university campuses in smaller places. That said, most smaller communities, including mine, don’t have colleges.

Jake Bayless

Public Media is largely the only not-for-profit trusted local and regional source of info, and source of curated content. I’d like to see that trust “capital” realized — my local station is in the process of retooling for the new media revolution — it’s not easy to change the battleship’s direction. More and amplified info like that from the Knight Commission needs to be put out there. The public at large doesn’t yet understand how vital public media SHOULD be in their lives as info consumers. Public Media orgs all should adopt “Community Media Projects” in order to learn, listen and meet the information and democratic needs of the communities they serve… everything else is broken, untrustworthy or unsuitable.

Arthur Coddington

Awareness that public media is frequently a partnership between national providers (NPR) and local stations. Those that don’t understand this partnership can dismiss the programming as not locally relevant. Visibility. Police who are present and interacting with local residents can generate greater trust and participation in public safety. Similar thing could be true of public media. If they are visible — if they are not “they” — then we feel more connected to the stories, more possibility to reach out to them when new issues arrive, etc. Engagement. Partner with schools, libraries and service orgs to unearth essential local stories, create broadcasts about them, and follow up to track impact.

Andria Krewson

Be more aggressive about giving up old ways (and sometimes long-time staffers) to free up resources and time to explore new ways of sharing information. Note on the tax question: I’d support more taxation for public media, but I’m discouraged about the track record used to spend tax money recently and would need total transparency (and some influence) on how money is spent in order to support more taxation.

Chris Mecham

We have a very active NPR-supporting community here but the simple fact is that they are charged with providing service to a huge, mountainous geographic area and while we may, as a community, have an above average rate of contribution, we also have greater infrastructure expenses than many other areas. Considering what Boise State Public Radio does with their resources I think they are doing okay. One of the features of public broadcasting funding in Idaho is that up to a fairly generous limit our contributions are counted as a tax credit. Not a deduction. A credit. “Do I want to give Butch Otter my money or do I want to give Terry Gross my money? Hmmmm.”

Lisa Morehouse

Experiment. Be willing to try and fail at new shows, new ways of delivering the news. Invest in reporting. Pay freelancers a fair wage so that journalists without financial support can enter and stay in the profession (not possible now).

Bill Day

Public media should pioneer efforts to build real-time citizen journalist networks. Using low cost distribution and collation tools, public media could become hubs for high-quality, low cost information sharing — school test scores, water quality, traffic needs, etc.

Sabine Schmidt

Through reaching out to organizations and individuals representing under-served parts of the community, especially economic and ethnic minorities. The demographic makeup of my metro area is changing rapidly due to growing Hispanic, Marshallese, and Hmong populations; except for some Spanish-language newspapers and radio stations, few media outlets report on issues such as immigration, wage theft, bilingual education, etc. Public media could a) report more extensively on those topics — not as “minority” issues but as issues affecting members of our community; this would require b) establishing a broader definition of what our community is; and c), public media could offer internships and fellowships to young and/or freelance journalists, especially because the local NPR station is run by the university’s journalism department.

Antonio Roman-Alcala

I like the Bay Citizen model, and the Public Press … one for exposing local issues to a broader audience, the other for in depth local news for locals. I don’t know if that counts as public media? Overall, I don’t pay much attention to TV news, even public channels…so I’m not sure about that. Public media seems generally underfunded; I’d like to see more funding for it, as well as movement towards a more public-serving private news media (though we know, of course, that’s easier said than done).

Alexis Gonzales

Because I live in a large city, news media — including public media — just don’t cover “neighborhood” issues. Frankly, I stopped expecting them to do otherwise until I spent time in smaller-but-not-that-much-smaller cities (Portland for example) and noticed how public media seemed so much closer to and integrated into the local community. I think Public Media could do a better job of covering local issues by reconsidering what is newsworthy … i.e. neighborhood issues can be of broader interest to the greater community.

Kaitlin Parker

Find positive happenings to report in communities that are typically only covered when something negative happens there.

Anthony Wojtkowiak

For lack of a better phrase, they need to grow some balls. My town in New Jersey is influenced by political boss George Norcross, the unions, and the mafia. And that’s not even the corruption and hubris that goes on in the city itself. What our reporters really need is assertiveness training, media law training, and self defense courses. But most of all, they need the courage to use all of that stuff.

Todd O’Neill

Our public radio and public television are separate entities that don’t work together. Although our public radio is beefing up it’s news reporting it seems simple to bring that reporting over to television. But public media is NOT JUST NPR and PBS. We have struggling cable public access community (no funding or support from the city) here and a number of online only community journalism operations (including a Knight grantee) that are all doing their own thing without coordination. Big Public Media (NPR/PBS) should be a leader to bring all of these “under the tent” and provide a real media public service to the community.

Charles Sanders

Actually, local issues aren’t my concern. I wish public media reinforced its international coverage and improved its drama, comedy … content. I envy the BBC.

Martin Wolff

As someone who listens to public media daily, it is sad that I have to try hard to think about a local issue being covered. In that respect, almost anything would improve the coverage as it feels almost, but not quite, non-existent. When local issues are covered they seemingly come in only two forms: 1. A feel good issue that is barely an issue and will create nearly zero discourse in the community. For example, holiday-lights festivals. 2. Wimpy. The interviewer/broadcaster will do nothing while two sides of an issue actively lie to the community and directly contradict each other. Fixing #1 is easy — nobody really terribly cares, so we don’t need 10 minutes of coverage about a mayor flipping the switch and lighting a tree up. Fixing #2 is harder. The public media must stand up for itself better and call out the guilty parties. The public media must step up its role as a sort of police officer of society and arrest those who break the rules.

Yvette Maranowski

ALWAYS retain vigorous capacity for citizen reporters. Fund them with equipment and training. People are busy now and have to work independently, but with lifelines keeping them connected to their media outlets. Use McChesney and Nichol‘s idea of $200 in tax credit going to every citizen, so that the citizen can donate their credit to whatever organization they choose — such as journalistic ones. Constantly produce and air/publish material about the importance of journalism — keep hitting the public with that message!

Andy Edgar

Survey people in the neighborhood for their backgrounds, locations and topics of interest, get them interested in issues that affect everyone. Focus on things like air and water quality, advice on picking up litter and why it’s important not to litter, community events, getting to know neighbors’ talents/skills, healthy alternatives to fast food and big box grocery stores. Community based ways to prevent crime/hate acts should be talked about explored and tried.

William Forbes

In my community (Minneapolis/St Paul, MN), “Public” radio and television are HUGE cash cows. They do a good job and are influential but the real inclusive and diverse media that truly serve the under-represented populations of our area are Community Radio Stations, in particular KFAI. MN Public Television/NPR/MPR/PBS could do a much better job but they are more concerned with maintaining (and increasing) corporate and government funding than with covering issues that don’t always have universal appeal.

Michael Hopkins

In its current state, public media is dangerous because it offers the illusion of complete objectivity and truth. Too many people listen to it uncritically because of this. I would like to see public media representatives ask much tougher questions of everybody and hire a much more diverse staff of journalists. The illusion will still be there, but it will match reality more closely.

Jeffrey Aberbach

My community now has a Patch website. It’s too early to judge how successful it will be in reaching out to our diverse community, but so far it appears to be more successful than the established, corporate-owned media outlet in town (a poorly staffed small daily newspaper that generates little local content).

Jeddy Lin

In my area, despite being close to a large university, not much of a public media movement exists. A more visible public media would go a long way towards creating a more progressive, diverse community.

Kitty Norton

They could provide better coverage for schools. They seem to report statistics and not real life goings-on in our schools to the community.

Luke Gies

I don’t have any television or newspaper service, so I am somewhat “self isolating” from our local media. I get most of my news from the internet, so I think one area of improvement for local media would be to increase the content and improve the usability of their websites. That is more of an improvement in distribution than in “covering the issues,” but distribution is a key component to the reporting of news.