Local news, advertising and commerce took center stage at the MIT Enterprise Forum dinner last night in Bellevue. While it was one of many subjects discussed, local (and “hyperlocal” and “microlocal”) strategies and opportunities were given the most attention by the speakers at a dinner called “Breaking News: How will the pieces be put back together again?”

The highlight for me was seeing the founder and editor of West Seattle Blog, Tracy Record, positioned on stage next to MSNBC.com president Charlie Tillinghast. Two years ago, who would have believed that a neighborhood news site would warrant the same consideration as one of the giants in the online news world. (And the event planners did plenty of due diligence in finding and screening speakers, interviewing more than 20 people – including me – to fill four spots.)

The conversation was mostly entertaining and occasionally informative for someone who follows the disruption of news media by technology, but probably more informative to the general audience. Todd Bishop of TechFlash did a masterful job moderating, keeping the conversation flowing while challenging the panelists with more than just softball questions. The most interesting points included:

• Patricia Lee Smith of the Seattle Times repeating time and again that she didn’t have an audience problem, just a revenue problem, and that she needed technology to solve it. She rattled off a host of statistics to illustrate how viable print remains as a medium for advertisers (including the U.S. pre-print business is nearly $6.7 billion a year and up 30% and accounts for 90% of coupons redeemed in-market.)
• Tillinghast reported that MSNBC.com had a record revenue year and profits missed projections by only 1%. “We’re making plenty of money,” he said. Which begged the question (that didn’t get asked): how is MSNBC.com monetizing its audience better than seattletimes.com? Is it the strength of a national brand/audience or simply the lack of a legacy business to support?
• Record said her operation continues to grow and is looking to bring on more people to assist in the growth. So, again, revenue apparently isn’t a problem for a hyperlocal operation – if done right. Which is why big companies like Fisher are jumping into the fray, hoping to tap into some of that marketplace, a strategy Smith didn’t think was too promising. “Where’s the money?” she repeatedly asked when queried about hyperlocal opportunities.
• And even though her business is doing fine, Record didn’t think her operation should be attempted at scale by big companies, either. She cited a letter someone forwarded her from a town on the East Coast that’s the location of a new Patch.com site as an example of how a company like AOL (Patch.com’s owner) is missing the point: the letter told the resident that the new Patch editor couldn’t wait to “learn all about your community.” That’s much different than Record’s model, which grew out of already knowing all about the community.
• Bishop asked Tillinghast about the future plans for hyperlocal aggregator Everyblock, a website and team MSNBC.com recently acquired. Contrary to popular assumption, Tillinghast said Everyblock, which was launched with a $1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant, may not be integrated into the flagship MSNBC.com site but rather grown as an independent entity.

Since the audience allegedly included several investors, Bishop joked at the beginning that if the panelists, which also included 1Cast’s Anthony Bontrager, wanted to form a joint venture, they probably wouldn’t get out of the room without at least a little angel money. Mirroring the recent trend with these discussion, there is more optimism than hand-wringing, which is refreshing. After all, as I’ve often said, the news business isn’t dying, it’s just changing.

It’s hard to pinpoint the single best thing about GonzoCamp.

It can be watching journalists learn from programmers how to define a problem and find the right approach toward solutions. Or the way students bring fresh perspectives and are enamored with working side-by-side with professionals to build something that’s real. Or the suspense that builds throughout the day as teams take an original idea and craft and mold it and produce something that may be totally different by the end of the day.

But, in the end, it’s the fact that ideas get done that I enjoy the most. And that’s what makes GonzoCamp different than other conferences, workshops and meet-ups.

From the other side of the country, Xarker Dan Conover recognized this and posted to Twitter:

You learn by doing, after all. And racing against a clock, in the same room with other teams in the same race, injects a certain energy into the event that I haven’t seen elsewhere. When our lunch speakers from the Seattle P-I, Pat Balles and Michelle Nicolosi, came to give a quick talk and answer questions, it took several tries to get the teams to take a break. The momentum they had created in just over an hour of forming their ideas and projects was difficult to pause.

The urgency of a one-day event helps frame the projects. A team can’t try to take on too much with such limited time. But this urgency is not contrived. Not if you subscribe to the notion, as I do, that the news industry had better get moving faster with innovation in the digital age.

“The news media business faces a stark reality today: innovate or die,” John Cook wrote on TechFlash to lead off his report GonzoCamp: Five entrepreneurial ideas to help save journalism? “Some organizations will make the transition to the digital world. Others won’t. And while one could argue that it took far too long for newspapers, magazines and TV stations to recognize the transformational power of the Internet, at least some newsrooms throughout the country are awakening to the opportunities. The new entrepreneurial spirit was alive and well Friday in Seattle as journalists, developers, laid off newspaper hacks, students and others gathered at GonzoCamp II.”

(Complete reports from the five teams are being posted on the GonzoCamp site as they become available.)

What’s next? How about a national “tour” of GonzoCamp events? Maybe it will become a competition like the Global Innovation Tournament. While it’s not clear how it will continue, the energy and interest that GonzoCamp has created means it will continue in some form in 2010.

“It was really amazing for me to get to just hang around and soak up all the years of experience in the room, let alone participate with them in creating something so cool,” student Daniel DeMay said in an email. “Some really intelligent people who are very motivated for sure. I look forward to the next event.”

RELATED:

• GonzoCamp: Tomorrow happens here
• Less talk, more action: GonzoCamp is back
• GonzoCamp report: An emerging role for journalism when mixed with technology
• The race is on at GonzoCamp
• GonzoCamp goals: discover, play, learn

The second GonzoCamp is over and produced a bevy of on new and interesting ideas for the future of journalism and news in the digital age. I’ll post a complete report on Monday after I receive group reports on from the 5 teams that participated. The (four-hour!) after-party spurred allowed the innovation/conversation to continue, thanks to MSNBC.

UPDATE: John Cook beat me to the punch with his review and anlysis of the presentaions on TechFlash:

GonzoCamp: Five entrepreneurial ideas to help save journalism?

In the meantime, here are some snapshots from the culminating presentations:

The second GonzoCamp is under way at the Seattle P-I building. There are 5 teams working to develop prototypes or fully baked ideas to present by the end of the day.

Predictably, mobile and paywalls earned some focus, as 2 of the 5 teams are taking specific ideas related to those topics.

But there were many other ideas pitched during the morning session, too. In fact, there were 12 different categories represented in the 20-some ideas pitched.

The three other ideas currently under development are a “Yelp for journalists” (proposed by Monica Guzman) that was combined with 3 other ideas relating to credibility and reputation. Imagine clicking on a byline from a news story or blog and being taken to a Yelp style page with reviews, ratings and comments about that author.

Another team is working on “know your crowd,” (proposed by Robin Barre) which would produce better stats around user experience (where do they get their news?), user needs (what do they need to know?) and user desire (what gets users excited?).

The other non-mobile/paywall idea to make the cut is “pitch map” by Daniel Bachhuber. Imagine a platform where anyone can suggest a story that needs to be covered to a map where any journalist could “take the assignment.”

That’s how the ideas were pitched. We’ll see what they look like at the end of the day during the presentations.

NOTE: Follow the stream by searching Twitter for “gonzocamp.”

Yes, I stole that slogan from SXSW Interactive, but it definitely fits tomorrow’s GonzoCamp event that I’m very much looking forward to. (Speaking of”South-by,” I’m also excited to be presenting at the 2010 SXSW Interctive Conference about my new book. Hope to see you there.)

The official slogan for GonzoCamp is “Programming the Future of News.” And we hope to do some programming tomorrow, as well as brainstorming and executing ideas. It’s innovation on steroids (but legal) and I can’t wait. Joe Boydston suggested we use the event as a way to generate proposals for the Knight News Challenge and even published his ideas in advance. (Thanks, Joe.)

Participants will be gathering tonight at a local watering hole to get introduced to one another and begin the idea exchange. Even if you’re not attending GonzoCamp but are interested in being part of the event, you’re invited to join in tonight and tomorrow at the after-party. (Full details here.) And if you’re nowhere near Seattle, you can follow @gonzocamp on Twitter.

Special thanks to our sponsors and volunteers who have made the event possible: Monica Guzman, Amy Rainey, Brian Chin, Jonathon Fitzpatrick, Rick Sass and Brian Chin. We have special prizes (yes prizes!) thanks to Seth Long at Sound Publishing and Michelle Nicolosi has agreed to join us at lunchtime to give us an update on the online-only Seattle P-I.

Get ready to get your Gonzo on!

RELATED:

• Less talk, more action: GonzoCamp is back
• GonzoCamp report: An emerging role for journalism when mixed with technology
• The race is on at GonzoCamp
• GonzoCamp goals: discover, play, learn

Dan Gillmor is at it again.

He started the first blog for a mainstream news organization when he was a technology and business columnist at the San Jose Mercury News. Then he wrote  We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People in 2004, an important book that remains relevant today. His work has always been about democratized media, about tapping into the power of the crowd and harnessing the power of digital communication to create a more informed reader, and one that is empowered to publish, too.

His new project, Mediactive, continues that effort and appears to be a promising next step. The goal is to create a user’s guide to newtworked media, according to the site, and “help people become active and informed users of media, as consumers and as creators. We are in a media-saturated age, more so all the time, and we need to find ways to use media to our — and our society’s — best advantage.”

Gilmor, now director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, is combining a blog, website and book into one project.

“I’m pretty confident, given the huge amount of experimentation in journalism and business models we’re seeing already, that we’ll have an ample supply of news and information even after the current shakeout in traditional media,” Gillmor told me via email. “I’m less confident that we’ll have the right kind of demand — that is, active users of media instead of the mostly passive consumers we were trained to be in the past half-century. We need better journalism, of course, but even more we need better audiences who demand more of information providers, and of themselves. This isn’t an eat-your-spinach (assuming you don’t like spinach but know it’s good for you) exercise. Being an active media user is rewarding and, sometimes, a lot of fun.”

In a welcome video, he suggests the project will also be “exploring the nature of what a book is” and I look forward to that. The book component has a compelling outline and will be hugely helpful in classrooms and in general (the book is due out in March). One of the complaints about the digital age I hear often is how little the audience understands about media now that they are part of it, too. So I especially like chapters 5 and 6:

5. Why everyone needs to be a publisher about him/herself: If you don’t define yourself, others will define you in this increasingly public world. How to create and maintain your Web presence.

6. Why journalism still matters: The methods and best practices for people who aren’t journalists but who may occasionally commit a random act of journalism, which is to say almost everyone.

This is important work, for journalism, for media and the future of information. Gillmor is the right person for this ambitious project, but he can’t do it alone. So make Mediactive a part of your RSS reading habit or follow Dan on Twitter (@dangillmor).

Now that (most) journalists are working in digital – using audio, video, social media, blogs and databases in their reporting – how do we define whether any of it is good or not?

It’s a tough question, and one that I’ve tackled a couple of times recently at workshops and conferences, most recently at the National College Media Conference. To help me find some answers last week in Austin, I enlisted the help of some smart people from differing backgrounds:

Gary Chapman, director of The 21st Century Project at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, the graduate school of public policy at the University of Texas at Austin.

Bryan Murley, director for innovation, Center for Innovation in College Media, and assistant professor, Eastern Illinois University.

James Wickett, general manager, Community Impact Newspapers, a growing hyperlocal publisher based in Austin.

The topic is so thick and we had such limited time that I was only able to ask the panelists and handful of questions:

1. Journalists have been told for years they need to “go digital.” Many have, but in a “ready, fire, aim” manner where getting going with digital was accomplished but quality was never assessed. How does anyone know whether what they’re producing in breaking news alerts, blogs, video and other forms is good journalism?

2. Should news organizations and journalists have a sense of urgency about defining what is good in digital journalism? If so, what advice do you have for establishing this urgency?

3. What is an example of good digital journalism you have seen recently (that you can hopefully talk about with some authority)? We’ll have a projector so we can show best examples if you bring links.

All three agreed that a sense of urgency was needed in defining what’s good in digital journalism, and Chapman said it best:

“Journalists need to discover their sense of mission. Otherwise it’s just going to be a bunch of cats flushing toilets.”

Chapman also said the “continuum of information isn’t going to change” even as the methods for sending and receiving communication change rapidly. He suggested that journalists are still not using analytics as effectively as they should be and recommended more effort be focused on them.

“It’s important to split the media from the medium,” adde Wickett, whose company is print-focused with a growing digital presence. “There’s still a place for print.”

Murley came the closest to attempting a rigid definition for quality, suggesting that technical merits on multimedia and additional components to a package (timelines, maps, etc.) can help steer us toward a standard definition and a goal to shoot for.

I closed with a few minutes on how to take a practical approach back to a newsroom for standards in defining what’s good. Here’s a link to the supporting “slides” for the preso, even though it may be difficult to use by itself.

It’s a conversation every newsroom and classroom ought to be engaged in these days. Getting going with digital was the first step, but maintaining and improving quality is an equally important second step.

Natalie Weinstein, a reporter at CNet News, and Jon Lebkowsky, a social media strategist, joined me to discuss “The Big Picture” at the National College Media Conference in Austin last week. Our mission was to help those who attended the session “understand the latest developments in the digital transformation of journalism, and how the news media’s relationship with readers is changing.” It was a good discussion, but since you probably weren’t there, I thought I’d share some of the notes that Natalie and Jon shared with me in advance as we prepared for the appearance.

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