As always I’m doing a lot of plotting and scheming about the future of Spot.Us.

As such – I don’t have a long reflective post for you. This post will be filled with tasty hyper-links (courtesy the Publish2 plugin that has been a fun toy to play with this week). I hope they keep you coming back for more and convinced that I am indeed alive and working.

Hyper link bomb has been dropped.

Journalism Students Need to Develop Their Personal Brand | PBS
PBS Mediashift
Some reporters may bristle at the idea of thinking of themselves as a brand, considering it the equivalent of selling out. This overlooks the fact that a journalist’s identity has always been a part of the job, otherwise why have bylines?
Tags: Digidave

Why aren’t we paying for news?
Reflections of a Newsosaur
With their backs against the wall, 2009 was going to be the year that newspaper publishers finally got together to charge for the interactive content they have been giving away for free for more than a decade. Nearly two-thirds of the way into the year, however, there has been far more talk than action.
Tags: payment

Star Wars West Coast Defense
flickr.com
An awesome collection of photos showing Star Wars on the West Coast
Tags: photos, star wars

Social networks: 8 ways to engage users with news
socialmedia.biz
Here’s a slightly revised version of the Social Networks: Engaging Users With News webinar J.D. Lasica gave to a few hundred virtual attendees when I flew out to the Poynter Institute in Florida in May.
Tags: presentation, social media

New York should copy DataSF.org
megantaylor.org
Today, I saw an example of where New York should be heading. Infosthetics pointed out San Fransisco’s open data initiatives, including DataSF and San Francisco CrimeSpotting.
Tags: datasf

NPR – On the Tipping Point?

McSweeney’s LISTS: Status Updates Since My Mother Became My Facebook Friend.
I wish my father didn’t protect his Tweets because they are hillarious. They are all to me and he isn’t 100% sure if they ever reach me or what he is doing there.

The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get
The more I get away from reading and writing inverted pyramids, the more I agree with Matt’s conclusion: “As news consumers, we should be demanding these things as well. After all, right now we’re only getting the lamest part of the story.”

Video of Helen Keller and her teacher Anne Sullivan

DataSF.org and SF Crimespotting: San Francisco City Opening its Data
DataSF [datasf.org] is an online repository of datasets available from the City & County of San Francisco. Similar to the goals of the data.gov and USASpending.gov initiatives, DataSF aims to improve access to data, help the community create innovative apps, understand what datasets the public likes to see, and receive feedback on the quality of the data. Included data ranges from all the trees located in the San Francisco streets (planting date, species, and location) to all its building permits or complaints.

Digging into Oakland crime statistics
For about 2 years now I’ve been doing monthly graphs & analysis of the OPD crime stats. I load up the data from CrimeSpotting.Org into an access database, and look at it 16 ways from Sunday.
Tags: Local, oakland, crime

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods
I Tweeted this early yesterday and it received more re-tweets than ANYTHING I’ve ever Tweeted before.
Tags: visual, resource

The headline of this blog post says it all – a quick contrarian post.

I am often asked if “right now citizen journalism could replace professional journalism.” My response is…. no.

There are certain characteristics of news organizations or “professional” journalism that if it were to stop tomorrow wouldn’t be easily replaced – if replaceable at all.

Since I’m often viewed as a poster-child for participatory journalism I can imagine some old-school journalists giving each other a hi-five, walking a littler taller, and feeling a sense of victory from a response like that.

But what I want to point out is the silliness of that question and pose its opposite.

The silliness of that question: If Major League Baseball stopped tomorrow would all the little leagues in the country be able to replace it? If industrial sweater factories shut down tomorrow would knitting hobbyists be able to replace them?

Nobody would ever ask these questions because the goal of little leagues and knitting groups isn’t to replace their professional counterparts. Instead, they are to create a sense of community, a positive activity for children and if they were to disappear there is no way their professional counterparts could replace them.

So I ask: If citizen journalism activities were to stop tomorrow could professional journalists replace them? My answer is no – and that will be part of my response to this question from now on.

In truth, however, that is the tit-for-tat response. So what is the real lesson here?

It is not an either/or question and what spawned this post is really just being tired of framing the question as such.

What I want to know isn’t if one can replace the other – but how the two might work together.

Twitter turned three years old recently and I celebrated my two-year twitter anniversary. Also – last November I had my three year blog-birthday (First posts in 2005).

Looking at my early blog posts and Tweets are informative to me now. You can tell in the beginning I wasn’t sure what to do. My first @ message was to my friend Mary Specht and it was a complete accident (start at the bottom of the Tweet feed below to see the first tweets). My second post was a massive throat clearing. My fourth blog post was about Digg and how I used it to find original stories. The irony today being that anything on Digg is already old news. My fifth post was pure satire (I am officially over Amanda Cogdon)

Regardless of what you Tweeted, blogged, etc – it is important to take a step back and look at how you first engaged with these tools. Hindsight being 20/20 what would you do differently? How can this help one prepare for adapting to use the next tool that comes around? Because there will be a next tool. Remembering what it is like to have fresh eyes, how would you design your own startup to change journalism?

On a p.s: Also interesting is how you remember things better when you have jotted down notes like this. The lunch, for example, was with MrBabyMan – now the #1 Digger in the world. A community which, I’m sad to say, I’ve fallen out of touch with since Spot.Us turned my life into a whirlwind.

Then you might notice my “Useless Mutant Power” meme. That is in reference to my guilty pleasure blog “Useless Mutant Powers.” Yes – even my hobbies are nerdy. More than anything, however, this side-blog and my early Tweets were baby steps.

What baby steps did you take and how might that of influenced where you are now?

As the liberal U.C. Berkeley graduate now living in San Francisco I was bummed about Proposition 8 being passed, which outlawed gay marriage.

From the video below, I think you’ll see that this is more than just a proposition on the California ballot – this is about civil liberties. Why should I have the right to marry a person of my choosing if a homosexual can’t?

That’s just as absurd as me being able to drink from a certain water fountain or having first dibs to the front of the bus because of my skin color. It just seems wrong to me.

As I see things, it’s only a matter of time before gay marriage becomes legal. That’s how civil rights movements go. Does anybody really believe passing a law making gay marriage illegal will squash the desire of homosexuals to marry. That their fundamental desire to be together will just disappear? Like anybody else they love their partners and if they are lucky enough to find somebody they want to spend the rest of their lives with, they want a legal ceremony to recognize that union. Making it illegal is stalling the inevitable.

Maybe if you aren’t exposed to gays in your daily routine you think the issue of gay marriage will just disappear. That is naive. I just walked out my apartment and saw the following. If you watch the video below then try and leave a comment below that all this is a fad and it will disappear. I’m all ears.

It’s a motto for all things in life. But I do find that the internet/social media community has had a larger portion of this Kool-Aid than most.

Regardless – it’s a topic worth exploring, especially for any journalist (young or old) that wants to explore their entrepreneurial side.

If you aren’t passionate about what you are doing, stop right now, because you will fail.

Nobody makes a better case for this than Gary Vaynerchuk
who absolutely oozes passion. Here are two of his recent posts: “Execute on Being You” and “PHCC (Patience, Hustle, Community and Content).” I hear Chris Brogan is also somebody to note on this topic, but haven’t followed him much yet.

(on a side: I love watching Gary’s videos. At first I found him
obnoxious and wanted to tell him to stick to decaf, but slowly I got it -
he’s good at pumping people up. Let his enthusiasm wash over you and
see if it spreads.)

PASSION – IT’S WHAT’S FOR BREAKFAST

• More than Just a Slogan

Saying “you must have passion” isn’t selling snake oil. It’s legit, and I’m finding out every day what that means.

I’m now dealing legal, marketing, hosting, development, design, community building, and other aspects of Spot.Us – the likes of which I never planned on making a part of my livelihood (it wasn’t long ago that I was a humble beat reporter).

I never would have expected dealing with these issues to be fun. But they are – because they all add up to creating digital poetry. I continue to love every minute of every day working on spot.us. I’m exhausted, yes – but loving it.

What Passion Won’t Do – Replace the Need to Hustle

The hustle part of Gary’s video (second link) is incredibly important.
But you have to realize that all that hustle isn’t romantic. If you
aren’t passionate about what you are doing – all the travel,
handshakes, link-love in the world won’t make you happy. In the end -
you gotta believe in what you are doing, or inside you’ll feel like a
phony.

• Passion is contagious

No man is an island and nothing, especially on the web, can work without collaboration. But you can’t just expect people to work on any old project. They want to know what makes your idea special. They are often looking for inspiration – and that can come in the form of your passion.

Your passion can ooze and effect other people.

I’m incredibly lucky that I have people like Hashrocket, Jeremy Toeman from Stage Two Consulting, lawyers like David Ardia, diverse advisers like Dan Gillmor and Neil Vineberg, organizations like Public-Press and so on pitching in.

I’d like to think they’ve all come to help as a direct result of my passion, but that would be a stretch.

Success breeds success. Networks never stop with one person – they expand and bloom as more passionate people join.

What Passion Won’t Do – Get People to Work For Free Forever

Know your strengths and apply all your force to them. For things you can’t do – learn to rely on your network, but don’t exploit it. That’s not what passionate people do. Sharing your enthusiasm,  doesn’t mean exploiting people for short-term gain. Sometimes it’s hard to express your appreciation – but you must find a way, otherwise your passion won’t spread and all your good will goes to waste.

• It’s Authentic

You could probably try to fake the funk, but it won’t work. It’s what drives you to get up in the morning, answer that last email, make the extra phone call, and strive to create the best product you can.

At Columbia J-school a professor once told me to “never be a hack reporter.”
We all know what that hack-job article looks like: It has a classic inverted pyramid lede, one or two quotes from the go-to source and wraps up the piece with a cliche.

Never be a “hack anything” …. and the best way to ensure you won’t is if you really believe in what you are doing.

What Passion Won’t Do – Pop Up Out of Nowhere

It has to be genuine. Don’t think you can will your passion into existence.

• It Never Ends

You can run out of a lot of important things….. but passion is, in most respects, under your control and discretion. Nobody can take away your passion. They might disagree with you – perhaps with as much passion as you.

Be an adult about it. Take in their concerns and questions and see how you can learn from it. But even if their points are valid, passion can still be your guide.

What Passion Won’t Do – Convince Everyone

The flip side of passion being contagious: Just because you believe in something adamantly doesn’t mean that other people will agree with you. Learn to construct logic around your passion to state your case, but don’t assume de-facto agreement.

• It Keeps You Focused

What Passion Won’t Do – Your Actual Work

Which is why I have to end this blog post and get back to making stuff happen. Lots to do.

Long time readers will know a side passion of mine has been the proliferation of this idea I call “CopyCamp” – which was thought of with friend NoNeck Noel after attending a PodCamp.

Background on the idea: CopyCamp – an Unconference for News Organizations.

On Saturday the San Jose Mercury News held the first ever Copycamp. It’s amazing when you get to see an idea become a reality. What’s even better is taking a step back, figuring out what worked and what didn’t, in the hopes that the idea will improve and benefit others in the future.

How it all happened. Pre-planning.

This is probably the most laborious part of putting on any kind of unconference.

1. Organizing Principle: It requires somebody at the helms. That person was Chris O’brien. Without Chris’ dedication to the concept – wrangling in other Merc staff and inviting members of the public, this never would have happened. I’m not sure how many hours Chris put into planning this but I assure you – these things don’t organize themselves. Using the CopyCamp wiki will help – but won’t make it magic.

2. Food. Creativity and innovation require food. The Mercury News was gracious enough to provide bagels, coffee, sandwiches and sodas. Total money spent: about $350. I can imagine a local pizza place sponsoring food in the future, bringing the cost of having a CopyCamp down to $0.

3. Space: The Mercury News had a perfect assembly room space that could easily fit everyone. In the event a newsroom doesn’t have space cost goes up unless a local YMCA or civic-center place is willing to help out.

4. Focus: Unconferences are “unstructured” – but they have a focus. In this case the Merc was inviting community leaders into the newsroom to discuss issues of race and demographics and how the Merc could do a better job telling that story in the bay area.

What happened: The Day Itself

1. Setting up: People arrived 10am. By 10:30am everyone was socializing. Chris and the Merc team did an excellent job of getting a fantastic cross-section of community and civic leaders. Many of them knew each other, but we had nametags and plenty of time for everyone to do introductions.

2. Getting ready: By 11am the 35 in attendance sat in a circle and had already finished quick introductions (Name, affiliation and why they came). Then we asked participants to suggest topics that we could break into and discuss.

3. The topic breakouts: They were (a. Journalism that matters – ensuring that the Merc and journalism stay strong. (b. Racial marginalization – making sure certain topics aren’t overlooked completely. (b. The immigrant experience in the bay area. Each group had a note taker who, after lunch, reported back to the larger group.

Low point: I’m willing to admit the day didn’t go perfectly. The main issue was one of moderation. It was very easy for community members to accuse the Merc of not doing a good job or not listening to their readership enough. Conversely the Merc staff could have made the situation worse by retorting that their job is incredibly tough and the public just doesn’t understand (the later didn’t happen).

There were a few moments where it seemed that, as a paper, the Merc was taking on some harsh criticism. Criticism is good – as long as it’s put forth in a constructive fashion. This whole day was planned to be a constructive event, not a shouting match. Luckily it never got out of control. The community members involved had a genuine interest in seeing the Merc succeed and their criticism had the best intentions and the Merc staff never took a high road in reaction.

Still – the point stands. These situations require the type of moderation that is a developed skill. We could have benefited from somebody with more experience in managing open space technology, especially in highly volatile situations.

The High: The end of the meeting was certainly a high. There was discussion about “next steps.” YES!!!!!

As a group CopyCampers seemed excited about the fact that the news staff was listening to them and had invited them in to get their feedback. The paper belonged to them. They had the Mercs ears. Conversely it was a way for the Merc staff to explain some of the struggles and decisions they face day-to-day. That’s the type of understanding that allows groups to move forward.

Perhaps it will help lead to the Merc becoming the host of community blogs? Perhaps it was just a morale boost – but connections were made, people who want to make a difference were introduced and from that there is no telling what could happen.

Future vision: What now?

For the Merc: Chris will have to spread the word about what the community members said that day. He will have to report back to the collective if there are any responses from the higher-ups at the Merc. Perhaps in 4-6 months there could be another CopyCamp that is twice as large – and will be able to start where we left off this weekend.

For your paper: HOST A COPYCAMP. The instructions are above and at our blog and wiki.

The potential: I would to see a copycamp with a different focus on “lessons we can share” – where local bloggers and citizen journalists can come in and talk about blogging, podcasting, twitter, etc and news reporters can talk about beat reporting. My bet – each part wants to learn from the other.

You name the issue: I think a CopyCamp could be convened.

More reading: Chris Amico got some good video as we were leaving.
Rob Knight’s post: “CopyCamp was Awesome”

p.s. I will try and follow this post with video at CopyCamp.us.

In keeping with last months Carnival of Journalism which focused on a theme, our host Andy Dickinson has posed the following question to the lot of us: “Is (digital) journalism better the more local it is and what does that do to growth?”

This question obviously goes back to the Rob Curley fiasco of LoudounExtra from a few weeks ago, which can (and was) dissected in every way possible.

What interests me more about this question is the second part, “what does that do to growth”? As for the “is local journalism better” part – that’s a value judgment. As I see it some will say “yes” others will say “no” and they are both right. I’m not going to tell anybody “your opinion is wrong.”

I will say this: national or international news isn’t going to disappear and because of its larger scope – what is said below might not apply to that type of news coverage.

It was said best at the Future of Civic Media conference last week (I believe Dan Gillmor): “dog bites man” is news to somebody – especially if you are the dogs next door neighbor, or the man’s co-worker, etc. That’s the case for hyperlocal.

But that’s exactly what leads to the second question “what does that do to growth”? Perhaps “dog bites man” is news to somebody, but the question is whether or not it is something newspapers can ever cover. Right now, probably not. Can they grow into that coverage?

Related to this question is – where do I see journalism in five years. What does a journalist or a news organization look like in the year 2013?

We constantly look at news and journalism as an industry – but the scenario played above “dog bites man” is more like life happening and being broadcast online. A newspaper isn’t going to send a reporter out to cover that event. But that event will end up on Twitter, a blog, or a citizen journalism website. It will end up broadcast online not as ‘news’ but as part of somebody’s life.

In my sci-fi vision of the world – there is no “media.” People just live their lives online and to that extent – their lives are broadcast. Who wants to call their life “media”? Not me. It’s almost as if the media dies – but journalism and news continues under a different name. This is something Jay Rosen has said many times. Lisa Williams describes it as “journalism surviving the death of its institutions.” The question is how we can ensure that the better parts of the media (the part that informs and empowers communities to speak truth to power) continues.

This means that reporters are going to be the thread that weaves between people’s lives. In my sci-fi reality if you want to professionalize news at the local level it has to be done by individuals who are already part of that community and also living their life in a public way. We see this now with Robert Scoble in the tech community. Granted – Scoble makes his living now from mainstream media, but I suspect if he left FastCompany he would find a way, perhaps even through small donations from readers, to continue as a source of news and information for heavy techno-geeks. As the blogosphere matures, I suspect we will see more Scobles for broader (local) communities.

The first time I had this realization was when I started working for Propeller as a scout. The best way to explain my job there is as a ‘news recommender.’ I get paid to recommend news articles.  Although not doing the reporting myself – I consider it an act of journalism. I am acting almost as an editor – helping to distinguish between what is and isn’t important news that day. Granted – my decisions are subject to veto and voting by the community, but through that I learn to react to the communities needs and desires. Either way, I’m a news recommender and the community values me as such by paying me accordingly.

Now take a look at Spot.Us. I envision individual reporters beholden to a community and reporting on topics that are of direct concern to them. It’s the Robert Scoble model I hinted at above. The reporter is a freelancer, a lone-gunmen, they make journalism happen without a news organization. It’s news without the newspaper, journalism without the media. It doesn’t grow, it just happens – because that’s what people want.

Where did I find out about Tim Russert’s death? Twitter.

Was it “media”? No, it was a friend who sent me a direct message knowing that I am interested in journalism. It was just two people living their lives and sharing information.

Now I could have found out about Russert’s death via the AP (which I can’t link or quote from article without being charged), but if that had been a local event (dog bites man) there wouldn’t have been any other source of information except my friends. It would have been up to us, as a community to either (a. Try and piece together the information ourselves or (b. Decide we don’t have time to piece it together and pay somebody else in our community to do it for us. That’s spot.us, that’s journalism in a world where local communities organize themselves online.

Where will local journalism happen? Between people. It will not be the media-sphere. The only way news organizations can play part is if they create the platform through which people live their lives. This requires a radically different approach to how newspapers organize their online presence. But that’s how it will grow. The real question is if that platform will be built by somebody who holds the same values of traditional media or somebody who wants to make a quick buck. And that, my friends, is a question with real-world consequences for local democracies.

Cnn’s new Ireport.com is getting a lot of attention. I haven’t played with the site too much, but at first glance, it’s pretty fugly and feels more like a site CNN felt forced into then something they really wanted: "Grrr this noise about citizen journalism won’t stop – let’s just build them a playground and be done with it." – Said old guy from Cnn.com.

I’m not the only skeptic out there. This site needs to decide if it wants to be serious about citizen journalism ala Current.tv or if it wants to try and compete with YouTube (don’t even try it CNN).

Anyways – rather than try to write something, I decided video would be easier. Besides, sometimes it’s funner to just rant – and that’s all this is. Don’t take it too seriously or personal CNN.com. I understand it’s a beta and hope/expect more in the future. But for now, your site has been relegated to into the fugly field.