InJersey

In journalism, one of the hardest things to do is hit “publish” (or “send”) on a story that’s still unfolding. Deadlines often force your hand, but it’s frustrating to know that your account isn’t finished, that there are still facts and details and color “TK” — “to come.”

That is very much the sentiment of the InJersey team today. After two years of running InJersey, we have made the difficult decision to suspend publishing our community blogs, knowing full well that the larger hyperlocal movement that we belonged to is as vibrant and innovative as ever.

When we launched in June 2009, in seven towns across NJ, we set out to create something new in the emerging hyperlocal space. We had plenty of inspiration: entrepreneurial journalists like Baristanet‘s Deb Galant and RedBankGreen‘s John Ward, the New York Times’s brilliantly executed “The Local” blogs, and Warren Webster’s wildly ambitious Patch.com (then still an baby, in just three towns). While many of these and other sites did an outstanding job of engaging with town and community leaders, we wanted to do more. To not just talk to and interview these folks, but to give them a platform to contribute posts, photos, updates, and more. Aside from the open-registration, what made InJersey special was that our contributors didn’t just use a form or email template to submit; we gave them full publishing access, and all submissions appeared alongside our staff posts.

As reporters, editors, and web developers for the Gannett New Jersey newspapers — the Asbury Park Press, Daily Record, Home News Tribune, Courier News, Courier-Post, and The Daily Journal — we cared deeply about the quality of writing and reporting on the sites. But we trusted and worked with our contributors to make sure the posts were always civil, relevant, and most of all, a good read. At our height, we had 16 sites covering as many towns, all with reporters, editors, and community members contributing daily. Many competitors, including Everyblock and Patch, have since worked to open up more and more of their platform to contributors.

Along the way, we had a lot of fun and some indelible memories. From the Freehold InJersey “bureau” in Zebu Forno (really just a computer desk with a big pasteboard sign) to the blogging seminars at the Cherry Hill Library (“Do you need to go on the computer to see a blog?”), we did our best to bring the site into the downtown. We’re extremely proud to have had a (small) hand in helping form the New Jersey Hyperlocal News Association (the first of its kind in the country), and our partnerships with groundbreaking startups like SeeClickFix, PaperG, and Outside.In were beyond rewarding.

The greatest joy of all was getting to work alongside the tireless, talented, and terrific team that made up InJersey: Jake Remaly, Walter O’Brien, Julia Hays, Kristi Funderburk, Jim Namiotka, Sergio Bichao, Gene Racz, Deirdre Pitney, Cindy Capitani, Lavinia DeCastro, Adam Smeltz, Loren Fisher, Linda Sadlouskos, Brad Wadlow, Whitney Rhodes, Steve Reed. And especially Colleen Curry, who came to us via a curious tweet (“Do you need writers?”) back when we were prototyping, and who spent the next two years pouring her heart and soul into Freehold InJersey. (Use the links above to follow any of these rock stars on Twitter.)

The decision to close InJersey was not one borne of financial pressure or corporate mandate. Yes, it is true that we recently lost a number of our colleagues who worked on the sites due to layoffs. And it is also the case that InJersey did not sell enough local advertising to make it self-sufficient enough to pay for a full-time staff. But the real reason is that we realized we’re simply not doing what we set out to accomplish — both in terms of original local reporting and community conversation.

We haven’t given up on the hyperlocal movement, and you may soon see the friendly faces from InJersey pop up again soon (on Facebook? Twitter? Your local cafe?). This isn’t a farewell, but rather an “Until we meet again.”
-Ted Mann
Founder, InJersey.com

We’ve been hard at work for several months on a new design for the the InJersey town blogs. In the last year, as we’ve grown our little hyperlocal family, the biggest complaint we’ve gotten about the design of the site is that, once you sign up, it’s not totally clear what you’re supposed to do.

We always intended InJersey to be a simple, easy-to-use blog interface, which anyone could post to. Alas, logging into the backend of our blog software, WordPress, wasn’t exactly intiutive (at least, not if you’ve never used WordPress before). All of which explains why we’re so excited to unveil our new look and feel.

The changes will soon be spread across all of our sites, but for now you can preview them on our newest town, East Brunswick. Some of the important new features:

• A login widget on the right of the blog
• Once you log in, you’ll see a button to “Join blog” — which lets you contribute news stories to the center rail of content
• If you join a blog, you’ll immediately see a simplified set of fields to write your post. Put in your headline, content, photos (if you have them), keyword tags, and an address (again, only if you have it). Hit “Post It,” and BAM!, you’ll be published.
• There’s also another button to “Join Group” — which allows you to post on our new “Chatter” group on the sidebar. This is for short takes, news tips, and quick updates. Given that you might not always be up to the challenge of writing a full-blown story, this area sets the bar lower, encouraging anyone to submit quick, short takes on things in your community.
• You’ll also see a place to contribute status updates and group updates on our root site, injersey.com, which is where you can go to easily switch between towns, view member profiles, browse groups, and interact in other ways on the site.
• You can also sort all the activity on the site using the activity stream on injersey.com, which allows you to filter by news posts, groups, @ mentions, friends, and favorites.

We hope you enjoy the changes. This project was a joint effort between Belmar website development shop WebDevStudios, Gannett NJ, and the site editors on InJersey. A special shout-out to Brian Messenlehner and Chris Cochran at WDS, who did most of the design work and programming on the new themes. The new frontend posting apparatus is made possible by the innovative WordPress theme P2, and the Groups functionality and posting is all done with a WordPress plugin called BuddyPress.

Please send me feedback about what you like and don’t like, as well as any suggestions for further improvement. InJersey is all about making it easier for you to share news with the rest of your community, and we hope these changes will be a giant leap forward in helping accomplish that.

Our intrepid editors — and early adopters — here at InJersey have been using the location-based game FourSquare more and more lately. We have a heated battle in Cherry Hill, NJ, between site editor Julia Hays and myself over who will retain the crown of Mayor of the Courier-Post.

Today we discussed new ways to use FourSquare to share local news with residents when they check into neighborhood businesses and restaurants. And almost the minute we got off the phone talking about it, lo and behold, InJersey tips started showing up at shops all around Collingswood.

Check out Julia’s Collingswood InJersey FourSquare Page.

If you like or work in one of the towns with an InJersey site, be on the lookout for tips from your local site editor. We’ll also post links to our InJersey FourSquare accounts as we get them set up.

Incidentally, props to the Wall Street Journal for paving the way for this type of news sharing with their FourSquare page, and many thanks to Jodi Gersh at Gannett/ContentOne for giving us the spark of the idea.

I was recently interviewed by Shields Bialasik, who runs LocalsGuide (devoted to Ashland, Oregon). We talked about all things hyperlocal, including our efforts here on InJersey, some of our competitors, and the future of niche websites like these. I don’t quite know if I agree with Shield’s identifying me as a “hyperlocal expert” — like everyone else working in this space — I still have far more to learn than I do to teach, but it was an interesting conversation.

Read the full interview over on Hyperlocal101.com.

Starting at 5pm tonight, the Citizens Campaign — a non-profit group dedicated to teaching and nurturing community activists and citizen journalists — is hosting a “South Jersey Call to Service Summit” at Stockton College. Among the speakers will be yours truly. Hope you can make it.

Here are more details from the Citizens Campaign website:

The South Jersey Call to Service Summit has a new date, Tuesday March 16, 2010 from 5-8pm. SIGN UP ONLINE.

Want to actively participate in your community? You are invited to join government and political experts from around the state to discuss how citizens can effect positive change- from cutting your property taxes to rooting out government corruption.

This free South Jersey Call to Service Summit will provide you with insider knowledge and skills to effectively tackle the problems facing your town and county. The Summit will offer free training, including expert analysis and insight from political insiders, and open discussion on each of these topics.

Speakers include:

Keynote Speaker: Gil Medina, Cushman Wakefield, former Secretary of Commerce, former Camden City Councilman

Christopher Daggett, former DEP Commissioner and gubernatorial candidate
Debra P. DiLorenzo, President & CEO of the Chamber of Commerce of Southern New Jersey NJ State Senator Joseph Kyrillos
Paul Josephson, former Chief Counsel to the Governor and Legal Counsel to State Democratic Committee
Joan Wright, former Gov. Kean Cabinet Member & former Assemblywoman
Ted Mann, Founder, InJersey.com and Digital Director, Gannett News
Dr. Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., President, Stockton College

Summit Program:

• 5-5:30: Networking & Registration (A Wing Gallery)
• 5:30-5:40: Welcome to the Jersey Call to Service (Alton Auditorium)
• 5:50-6:50: Break out Panels (B & C Wings)
• 7:00-8:00: Call to Service Celebration (F Wing Atrium)

Break Out Panels:

• Tools for Citizens to Control Prpoerty Taxes and Cut Government Waste
• Citizen Leadership Service- New Opportunities to Serve on Government Policy Boards under the Citizen Service Act.
• Citizen Control of Political Parties- Exploring the New Party Democracy Act
• Citizen Journalism- A Cure for Closed Door Government

Sign up online now!
Car Pooling available! Contact us 732-548-9798×2

While the recent foul weather has certainly put a damper on things in the garden state, there is one positive thing to come out of the last couple days. Two actually! Over the last few days we’ve rolled out two new InJersey sites devoted to Woodbridge and Morristown

The former is headed by Home News Tribune reporter Sergio Bichao, while the latter is being spearheaded by Daily Record editor Jim Namiotka and his team.

We hope you register to join these new sites and if you’d like to become a regular contributor, or just have questions about the site, please email Ted Mann, our site administrator.

InJersey has had a few upgrades lately, the most notable of which is the new interactive activity stream. If you’ve ever used social sites like Facebook and Twitter, this should be very familiar!

At the top, you’ll find a box where you can post status updates or information you’d like to share with groups you belong to. Very soon, you’ll also be able to post to community blogs you belong to. And around the same time we’ll also be incorporating these activity streams onto the town blogs (Freehold, Flemington, Cherry Hill, etc), so you can use all these neat features right there.

A couple useful things to know:
• If you use @username (putting in a user on the site — e.g. @colleencurry), the person you’ve mentioned will be notified.
• URLs in your posts are automatically turned into hyperlinks.
• You can sort the new activity stream using the “Filter” dropdown (e.g. show only your friends, or only your groups)
• You can reply to other items in your activity stream by clicking the “reply” button next to each item.
• Click on “Favorite” to save an item to your favorites list for future viewing.

For those curious about how this came about, the activity stream is one of the key new features of BuddyPress 1.2, which is a WordPress plugin that InJersey is built on. We plan to make even more use of it in the coming months, and use it very prominently on the site, as this is, we believe, a much easier path for our users to submit their own content.

In honor of what’s coming to be know as iTablet week — or is it iSlate? — we wanted to make our own little offering to the Apple Gods. The InJersey iPhone app is simplified little interface you can use to browse through the latest updates on InJersey, or your town. It isn’t the first self-described “hyperlocal” app — I counted four others, not to mention related apps like SeeClickFix and Fwix — and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

You can’t yet publish using the app, though that’s something we’d like to build into it in the not-so-distant future. For now, though, you can download the WordPress 2 app and add your InJersey site of choice, and you’ll be able to publish on the go using that.

A visitor to InJersey, Jim Parker, just let me know about a video of my presentation at WordCamp NYC that’s up on the web. In it, I recap what we’re trying to do with hyperlocal jounalism on InJersey, as well as the software we’re using here — WordPress and BuddyPress. Many thanks to Jim for the head’s up, as well as the kind soul who shot this. Enjoy!

Our Freehold site editor, Colleen Curry, has a great blog post today on the SeeClickFix blog about all the great ways that our users have taken advantage of the tool to report issues in their communities that need fixing. Check out the full post here:

Hi there, SeeClickFix folks. My name is Colleen Curry, and I run Freehold.InJersey.com, a hyperlocal news website in New Jersey and one of Gannett’s first hyperlocal sites in the country. We’ve been using SeeClickFix on our site for a few months now, and it has helped engage our readers, generate stories, and impel action in our local community. Ben asked me to share a few of these highlights with you.

via SeeClickFix blog