"TellYourTown" Community News Wire
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge:
$480,000Total cost of project including all sources of funding:
$660,000Expected amount of time to complete project:
2 - 3 yearsOur team is poised to create the first open-source geo-targeted community news wire network called Project: TellYourTown. During this endeavor we will build a network of 20 geo-targeted community newswire sites and create the software so anyone can create a community newswire for their town, village, or neighborhood. This software will be open source and available as a free download on a site called TellYourTown.org. The first “tell” site, www.TellToledo.com, is being built for proof of concept and to learn how grassroot news development improves a community.
A TellYourTown web site allows anyone in a geo-community to post news/information into the news database and have it distributed to the media, and more importantly -directly to the public. Think of this as a community driven news and information wire that citizens can contribute to and also subscribe to for instant "personalized and individualized” news content that is generated by their peers.
Hence the project name: “TellYourTown”.
Newspapers, Radio and TV use to be the cement that held communities & information together, but not any longer. We feel that “Ground Up Publishing” is a new era in bringing communities closer together, by creating free flowing information directly between the people…especially as publishing networks go hyper-local, eventually down to the neighborhood level. With this free flow, we experience an empowered and enriched sense of community.
In short, the TellYourTown project is an effort to create geo-targeted news networks that allow for the immediate release of personalized news that is created by members of the community in which it serves. It combines elements of geo-local, personalized news, and citizen journalism.
0 commentsHow will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
Why does traditional news have to change?
We’re entering an era of radical change for news creation and news delivery. Faith in traditional news creation is waning while faith in our peers is rising. Peers trust peers to learn what is happening in the community. Top-down news is loosing traction, while ground-up buzz, is gaining power. Newspaper readership is at levels that date back to the sixties and 100’s of millions of blogs are erupting with amazing information being created by amateurs.
This is a world of “peer production” which is a result of a new breed of online tools that have been created in the open source space. We are at the dawn of an age of mass volunteerism by amateurs to expert writers. Many of these producers are unpaid and the only difference between them and their professional equivalent/counterparts is the gap in resources/tools available to them to extend their work. But that has all changed with the free tools like Blogger, Movable Type, Word Press and now the TellYourTown mash-up. When these production tools are available, everyone becomes producers.
We believe that there is a public need to have a central touch-point where ANYONE can post information and press releases that then can be distributed to media outlets and most importantly, directly to the public.
The New Way: A TellYourTown site uses “Ground Up Media Production”. This is where you, a member of our community, plays a role. You can become a publisher of your information directly from the ground up vs. the old “Top Down Publishing” models. Here is your chance to contribute and shape the communities news and information directly. No need to to wait for a writer and editor to get the word out.
The Old Way: With “Top Down Publishing” one had to submit a press release to a writer, have it accepted, then approved by an editor (the Top Down metaphor). This antiquated process involves too many steps and too many gatekeepers of news and information. Most print media has a very limited life (1 day in most cases) and has limited content space.
The TellYourTown community news wires will be paving the way to improved community communication. We envision citizens contributing and consuming the news in the form of personalized news. This means that they will be able to choose how it is delivered and what category of content will be sent to them. For instance they may be able to choose that they want a daily digest of Arts and Cultural news and information as well as any restaurant openings. They will choose to have it emailed to them, texted, or read it via RSS.
All news on the wire will be freely available to any other web site or publication that wants to pick it up.
Please visit www.TellToledo.com, our first experiment for TellYourTown concept. Our efforts have been undertaken to learn how new media benefits the community and how it can improve the way news is delivered and the way that news is consumed.
0 commentsHow is your idea innovative? (New or different from what already exists.)
How many local stories go unprinted or unpublished each day in a communities' newspapers, TV stations or radio stations? 1000's?
The invention of the Gutenberg printing press was an amazing innovation in 1439. It allowed the printing of one edition of a newspaper per day and always has. You get the greatest common interests of the community in this single edition. This was the birth of news, but the same newspaper can’t service our community anymore. We all have many interests in thousands of different topics. For instance a paper like the New York Times (or even a small local newspaper) passes on thousands of stories a day. These stories are simply not reaching the people that desire them. Now people of our communities “hunt and gather” for the news that interests them. One size does not fit all any longer.
TellYourTown is a local solution for this problem. It has an unlimited amount of storage space and opportunity for publishing almost anything.
The TellYourTown is a new and original concept using the internet to create a sense of community. Local news and information is a pulse of a community. We are creating a central location for information to be contributed to by the public. This exchange is always free and open to even other news producers like newspapers, TV, radio and other city portals.
Our team at Toledo.com created an innovative and experimental web site called TellToledo.com, the first community news wire. It is a very simple test creation to see if the Toledo Ohio community were interested in our concept. So far, it has been well received. Year to date (Jan to Oct 2008) we have had 24,000+ visitors, 980 stories posted by 542 people, and 700+ people (200+ are members of local media companies) subscribe to the daily digest email. All this with a single mass email to 600 community assets like our local zoo, metro-parks, newspapers, museum of arts... etc.
Here is what we have learned so far from our TellToledo.com experiment and some innovations that we expect to happen with additional funding via the Knight Grant.
1. Currently, TellToledo.com is geo-targeted to the entire Toledo Community. We see our site going hyper-local into the suburban towns and soon to the neighborhood level. So each suburb could/should have its own niche community news wire.
2. As the site gets more readers and more posts, the information is morph from primarily press releases to citizen style journalistic content. We have found that there are citizens that have become regular writers and contribute regularly. At this early stage we can see we is the start of citizen journalism.
3. We think that we may need to add more categories for content and allow users to sign up for truly “personalized news”. Time is becoming more compressed. We think that the future of news is personalized and individualized to each user’s personal interests. We want to explore this and adapt to the changing needs of the community.
4. A revolution in news delivery is coming. The newspaper industry is plagued with paper waste and inefficient delivery methods. News will be delivered daily via email, SMS texting or even to a printer in your home via TellYourTown web sites.
5. The creation and maintenance of this site is very efficient. It takes one person 1 hour a day or less to activate/approve the content so it goes live. We consider this person the community advocate.
4. The Knight grant will allow us to create a team, fund the exploration and development of a finely tuned piece of software and give us the experience we need to learn how to deploy these systems into a community. We also will create standards that we can educate others to be able to duplicate our efforts.
The Knight Foundation Grant will allow us to create a team, fund the exploration and development of a finely tuned piece of software and give us the experience we need to learn how to deploy these systems into a community. We also will create standards that we can educate others to be able to duplicate our effort
0 commentsWhat experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?
Our team has been involved in creating and maintaining online geo-targets communities since 1997.
We are the team that makes up www.Toledo.com, a online community portal for Toledo, Ohio.
Here are a few facts about our team.
- Ian Hartten created the first ISP in Toledo in 1994 which was sold to Global Crossings in 1999. During this time he gave birth to Toledo.com as a community portal .
- Toledo.com was one of the first 8 founding city portals of www.AssociatedCities.com - a community of only geo-targeted community web sites. Chicago.com, Richmond.com, Barcelona.com and 110 others.
- The Toledo.com team is comprised of 6 full time and 5 contract or part time employees. We have programmers, journalists, PR persons, content researchers, designers and marketing people. The scope is well within our abilities.
- The Toledo.com founder is a seasoned entrepreneur with many successful start-ups under his belt and has learned from a few rocky ones as well.
- Toledo.com currently builds online communities and consults with other existing online communities daily. This is our domain expertise.
In addition to these facts, we are a team that is very interested in being a part of this new media era, not just watching it. We talk and brainstorm daily on what is happening around us. We want to get our news from our peers and believe this is the future.
0 comments
