InJersey

Below is a video of a panel I hosted a few weeks back at an event at CUNY, hosted by Jeff Jarvis, about hyperlocal websites. The title of the session was “Setting up Shop,” and since so many of these sites are blog-based, I invited Jane Wells of WordPress/Autoamattic, David Jacobs of TypePad/Six Apart, Jason Morrow of Blogger/Google, and Jeremy Zilar of the NY Times to join me on stage.

Setting Up Shop: Tools, Technology & Tips from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.

We’ve been hitting the interview and conference circuit lately to talk about what we’re trying to build here on InJersey.

In addition to speaking at several events (from WordCamp to the Citizens Jouranlist Conference to HyperCamp), I also gave an interview to WPMU.org — which covers WordPress MU, the software that powers this site — about how we’re trying steer the hyperlocal conversation here.

Check out the full Q&A here.

We’ll be helping stream live video of the citizen journalism conference tomorrow, being hosted by the Citizens Campaign at Monmouth University.

Tune in at 11am to watch the event live. (click on the “+” icon to turn up the audio)

We’ll be on hand next Wednesday for an exciting conference being put on by the Citizens Campaign, all about citizen journalism and how we can combat the “culture of corruption” in New Jersey. From their site:

Citizen Journalism; Countering the Culture of Corruption

This conference will discuss the current state of local news reporting and how we can utilize new, innovative web tools and our own civic knowledge to report what’s happening in City Hall. Find out how you can be a hyperlocal or citizen journalist in your community.

Agenda
11am: Registration and Coffee

Price: free
Register for the Citizen Journalism Conference by emailing: Heather@JoinTheCampaign.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or call (732) 548-9798 x.1 Register online by creating an account and then logging into the website and selecting register at the bottom of this page.

Venue: Monmouth University
Street: 400 Cedar Ave, Wilson Auditorium
City: West Long Branch

Today I spoke at WordCamp NYC about what we’re building out here on InJersey. WordPress is the software that makes InJersey possible, and my talk focused on how we use it here, as well as how we employ BuddyPress to help build up and communicate with our network of community bloggers.

It was a great session — despite being held at 5pm, very near to the end of the day, when I imagine most attendants were more interested in getting their drink on than in learning about hyperlocal journalism. Still, I’m still flattered that we had such great attendance and such engaging questions. Thanks to everyone who turned out, and please, don’t be shy about shooting me any and all questions about how we use WordPress.

Here are the slides from my talk:

One of the things that Day 1 of WordCamp has inspired me to do is upgrade BuddyPress to the latest version. Please excuse any wonky behavior while I set out to do this in the next day.

It’s been a week of hyperlocal brainstorming for me at both the New Media Women Entrepreneurs Summit in DC and the Hypercamp conference in New York yesterday. Luckily, editors and practitioners from around the country agreed on a few best practices for media partnerships and monetization for hyperlocals:

Media Partnerships

Some ambitious hyperlocal blogs are earning extra money and broadening their audience by syndicating their content in other publications. For hyperlocals with reporters on the ground, the ability to scoop major media outlets can be profitable: newspapers and broadcast networks are sometimes willing to pay for breaking news or investigative work that they don’t have the resources to cover.

Other blogs form blog networks, where they actually partner with niche blogs in their same area. As Jarvis said at Hypercamp, “Do what you do best, and link to the rest.” Under this philosophy, a hyperlocal editor would spend her time focusing on local news, but might partner with an existent sports blog in the area, or a blog that focuses on state-level politics. By sharing content and information the blogs can generate more content and reach wider audience.

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Yesterday, I got to attend the New Media Women Entrepreneurs Summit in Washington, DC, where a group of 13 hyperlocal editors gave me some great ideas for recruiting and training citizen journalists, partnering with other media organizations and non-profits, and monetizing in innovative ways. In this post, I’ll discuss what I learned about recruiting help on the ground.

Finding Help: One of the biggest challenges all of the hyperlocals agreed on was finding help on the ground to report all the news, take all the pictures for slideshows, and create a community of voices and perspectives–especially when those helpers are volunteers.

Some of the tips they found useful, which I can’t wait to try, were:

* Tapping into the journalism job market: There are a lot of out-of-work journos right now, and by using sites like journalismjobs.com, mediabistro.com, etc., editors might be able to find freelancers with solid skills who are looking to keep their portfolios fresh & learn new media. Offer to help them learn new media in exchange for stories; don’t be afraid to barter, beg, and cajole.

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