Congratulations to Ben Berkowitz, who has just been named a 2010 Technology Game Changer by the editors of The Huffington Post. He’s in good company, named with people like Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Disney-Pixar animator John Lasseter.

Friends, fans and members of the We Media community learned about Ben 18 months ago, when his pitch for a mobile community solutions app called SeeClickFix was one of two winning ideas that earned $25,000 seed investments in our 2009 PitchIt Challenge. Since then, the New Haven, Connecticut, company has been on a roll, expanding to hundreds of communities and thousands of users worldwide.

SeeClickFIx is a mobile app and web site that helps cities fix potholes and other non-emergency problems. Anyone can submit reports of local trouble spots – and then map and track progress on getting things fixed. The company has pursued growth through partnerships with local governments, community groups and local media, such as the Boston Globe, where its service is integrated into the Globe’s hyperlocal YourTown community sites. A partnership with MSNBC.com’s local data service, Everybock, like one with Journal-Register Co.’s 18 newspapers, has helped SeeClickFix expand its user base and the number of reports it tracks. Here’s an example of SeeClickFix reports embedded in Everyblock in Chicago, and here’s an example of the service in use in Mumbai, India.

As for the Huffington Post awards – all I can say is: Yes. More power to them. The winners deserve recognition and discussion, and The Huffington Post is a powerful engine to drive that. We were organizing Game Changer Awards before Arianna – but we didn’t come up with the idea either. Awards help draw attention to achievements. That includes my attention. The never-ending process of seeking We Media awards candidates has been an excuse and ongoing research device to help me discover people, projects, ideas and organizations leading change and inspiring a better world through media. It expands my horizon. That led us to Ushahidi in early 2009, when we named the crisis alert service a “>We Media Game Changer for its work in Kenya to help people get around a news blackout during post-election riots there. Ushahidi founder Ory Okolloh is also one of this year’s Huffington Post tech game changers.

More at:

2010 Huffington Post Game Changers
SeeClickFix
SeeClickFIx blog
2009 We Media PitchIt Challenge winners
2009 We Media Game Changers
Everyblock partners with SeeClickFix – PaidContent
Everyblock blog

Interview by Josh Wilson

Born in 19th century out of the vast suffering of a world at war, the Red Cross movement brought a singular humanitarian perspective to the global stage. Since then empires have risen, fallen, and been reborn, transnational economies have changed billions of lives — and not always for the better — and the Red Cross remains as relevant as ever. In the aftermath of the Haiti and Chile earthquakes, the American Red Cross is fusing the humanitarian impulse of the pre-digital era with the emerging gobal community of online citizens, to singualar effect. Josh Kittner of the Red Cross sheds some light on it all.

What’s the best way for a person to support aid efforts when disaster strikes?

The best way to support relief efforts when disaster strikes is to make a donation. People can donate in support of the relief effort in Haiti at www.redcross.org or by calling 1-800-REDCROSS. Mobile donors can text “Haiti” to 90999 to make a $10 contribution.

A $10 donation would provide a first-aid kit equipped with enough ointment and bandages for a Red Cross responder to treat 15-20 injured earthquake survivors. A $10 donation also can provide a family with two water cans to store clean drinking water, basic first aid supplies or a blanket.

You can also help support relief efforts by spreading the word to your family and friends.

What sort of online tools does the Red Cross provide to those who want to support aid efforts?

The Red Cross is active on its blog, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. Everything the Red Cross puts on these sites is sharable and we encourage our amazing supporters to use it all. The Red Cross also actively encourages its fans, followers, and other stakeholders to share tools with one another.

How have the Internet and wireless tech affected Red Cross humanitarian operations in the field?

Internet Service Providers in Haiti were affected by the earthquake: infrastructure was hugely damaged and communications to the outside world was significantly reduced. Given the magnitude of the disaster, and overall damage to infrastructure and services the time-frame for repairing these communications and re-establishing connectivity was unclear.

The Red Cross network, through its two IT/Telecommunication Emergency Response Units that were deployed to Haiti, (with one from the American Red Cross) were able to establish both IT and telecommunication infrastructure to jump-start the immediate communication needs for the overall Red Cross response efforts in Haiti. They maintain the communications networks for the ongoing operation – both IT at Red Cross operational headquarters in Port-au-Prince and to radio-based communications to connect teams of Red Cross disaster specialists to each other while in the field.

The overall advent of internet connectivity has allowed for instant information sharing within and between the Red Cross and humanitarian world during a disaster. It’s provided the necessary means to effectively communicate the immediate needs and information about the disaster on the ground and to the world.

Also, information sharing between agencies, and access to secondary information allows increased analysis and a clearer understanding of where other agencies are working, what they are finding, and what they are planning on providing in terms of humanitarian aid. This has lead to a better coordinated and integrated response from all humanitarian groups on the ground during a disaster. There is much more communication, coordination and integration; and much less confusion.

What has been the impact of Twitter, Facebook, your blogs, etc.?

Joe Gray’s analysis is an excellent response to this question:

Within hours of the earthquake, @RedCross tweeted: You can text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross relief efforts in #haiti. This text meme quickly took root in social networks. According to web analytics firm Sysomos: There were 2.3 million tweets about “Haiti” or the “Red Cross” from Jan. 12 to Jan. 14, and nearly 150,000 tweets that included “Haiti” and “Red Cross.” Of the 2.3 million tweets, 59% were retweets. There were also 189,024 tweets that included “90999.” This is clearly an unprecedented case of the effects of social media on fundraising.

What’s the future of communication technologies and aid operations?

The increased use of GPS technology allows for more accurate and predictable reporting on where the immediate needs are, and where organizations are helping. GPS also allows for the accurate identification of key people, places and things during a response to a disaster.

In addition, cellular phones are commonplace now in the developing world and can now be a tool to be used to communicate directly to people. In Haiti, the Haitian Red Cross, in partnership with a local cellular phone company, has been able to disseminate health information messages, such as where to find medical assistance and how to keep clean in the situation to customers with phones. To date, over 17 million health messages have been sent this way.

As well, cellular systems are becoming more robust, and rapidly cellular is replacing satellite systems in terms of communication between entities. With networking of towers, and not dependant on land lines, cell phone system can be prominent part of communications.

During a disaster, it’s always an advantage to rely on a technology that doesn’t depend on infrastructure for it to function. In many disaster locations, the Red Cross uses High Frequency (HF) radios to communicate over long distances or over areas that are mountainous. They do not depend on satellite systems or repeaters to boost their signal.

Is social media a new way to communicate the moral imperative of the “worldwide movement” that the Red Cross is part of? What can our world learn from the principles of that movement?

Our approach to using social media tools is to help people prevent, prepare for, and respond to emergencies. Our approach to the social web is to celebrate and give voice to Red Crossers of all stripes. The Red Cross tries to be relevant and inclusive while fulfilling our mission and exuding our fundamental principles.

What kind of Web traffic do you get?

• Total visits, January 1, 2009 – December 31, 2009: approximately 10 million
• Total visits, January 12, 2010 – March 2, 2010: approximately 19.7 million

Howbout online donations?

• Number of online donations in 2009: approximately 102,000
• Since 1/12/2010: approximately 1.5 million

Josh Wilson is the co-founder of Independent Arts & Media and the publisher of Newsdesk.org.

Demand Media is one of the few media companies that has a research-and-development department, Byron Reese, the company’s chief innovation officer, doesn’t hesitate to point out. The reason, he said, “is that we view content production as a manufacturing process, not a creative process.”

That perspective surely challenges the assumptions of a few traditional media companies, which in the olden days considered writing to be a craft, not a widget or “workflow process.” But the companies that focused on hand-crafted narratives are now being rivaled by more disciplined firms that can leverage the scale of the Internet to find efficiencies in every step of the editorial process, from choosing topics to write about to editing to headline writing and compensation.

The company has grown tremendously rapidly using this new model. Four years ago it didn’t exist. Now the company has 500 employees in Santa Monica, Calif.; Austin, Texas; Bellevue, Washington; New York and London. After $355 million in investment, the company has produced more than 1 million text articles and 200,000 videos — mostly in the how-to genre. Last month its 500 employees and 7,000 freelancers generated 101 million users, according to some measures.

Most of what Demand Media does most closely resembles reference materials, not journalism. That’s a wide-open business that few are doing well, Reese said.

“We are really trying to put the world’s information on the Internet in an exhaustive fashion,” he said. “We are trying to fill up every question people ask with an appropriate answer. The Internet overproduces certain kinds of content and underproduces other types. It overproduces Britney Spears. But it doesn’t have so much about how to unclog your toilet. People are kind of left on their own to find the right answers.”

For now, all the content Demand Media produces — on a range of sites including eHow, Livestrong.com and Golflink — is in English. But the company, which has done pilot projects in half a dozen languages, intends to go international in 2011.

Asked what content the company produced has made a difference in readers’ lives, Wadooah Wali, senior director of communications for the company, said most of it was extremely practical. She sent along this tweet as an example: “THANK YOU @EHOW my dog swallowed meds & your ‘How to induce vomiting’ http://tinyurl.com/y8eld9r saved hm.”

The company has come under criticism from some journalists, saying Demand Media cannot possibly produce quality content for the low prices it pays freelance writers. David Carr’s takedown in the New York Times particularly got under the company executives’ skins.

In response to the flurry of critiques, the company has set up an editorial advisory board that includes Kevin Smith, the president of the Society of Professional Journalists. The company also produced a “manifesto” explaining why quality and quantity are not in conflict in what it calls a “disruptive content model.”

“It isn’t as if we’re coming in somehow, and undercutting other people’s work,” Reese said. “What we’re doing is coming in and adding assignments. There’s no one who’s not getting an assignment from GQ. I would like to meet the person who says their rate has fallen because we exist.”

Demand Media has partnered with newspapers, such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on things like travel writing.

“It’s journalism with a little J, not a big J,” Wali said. “We know we can monetize that. We know that it’s the traditional news that people want but that is hard to support in the current economic conditions.”

We Media – Game Changers: Awards and conversations with Winners from KnightCenter on Vimeo.

WeMedia Miami speech as delivered March 10, 2010

I’d like to start by thanking Andrew Nachison for bestowing a fancy new title on me.  In his announcement that the Banyan Project and I had won the balloting for the Game Changer Community Choice Award, Andrew referred to me as “journalism and democracy visionary Tom Stites.”  Whoa!  When I first saw that a new image of myself suddenly formed in my head.  The title strikes me as something to strive for rather than to claim.  So I hope that what I have to offer you this morning will prove at least somewhat worthy of it.

Right at the outset is a good place for full disclosure:  So far, the Project – which includes me and the 26 remarkable people who make up Banyan’s advisory board – has been all thinking and talking and planning, which is to say we’ve been working through our visioning phase.  Our conceptual work reached critical mass a few months ago and we’re just now ready to enter our “doing” phase.

We’re laying plans for pilot sites in three cities that will help determine whether our distinctive approach to journalism – we call it Relational Journalism, and I’ll tell you more about that in a bit – will help us find out whether our approach can change the game in the real world.  Basically, we’re setting out to do four things that will activate a wholly new model for journalism and, most fundamentally, strengthen democracy:

First is to deliver trustworthy professional journalism, through the Web, to a huge, ill-served public.

Second is to publish the journalism through software that pulls people into deeper civic engagement and, at the same time – third –

Invites rich feedback to editors that makes the readers co-creators of our journalism, and, finally and fundamentally,

Make sure Banyan’s distinctive journalism is so relevant to the public it serves that it helps them make sounder life and citizenship choices.

–0–

But my mission this morning is not just to tell you about Banyan but also to seize this opportunity to urge all of us to join together to change the game called the future of journalism by stretching its boundaries, by widening its horizons, by enlarging its discourse, and, most important, by grounding it in the huge needs of our wounded democracy.

The future-of-journalism discourse is urgent and intense because journalism’s crisis is so wrenching and the stakes are so high.  As everybody here knows from lived experience, the discourse is charged with tension between the worldviews of old-line journalists on one side and of bloggers and citizen journalism advocates on the other.  All journalists thrive on conflict, and maybe that’s what’s keeping the future-of-journalism discourse so dangerously narrow, so binary.

The danger is that neither camp seems even close to a breakout moment where it will ride to the rescue and deliver the journalism that democracy needs.  In fact, I see little hope that the two camps combined can ever deliver what democracy needs in an era when so many antidemocratic forces, particularly multinational corporations that are larger than many nations, are threatening to overpower We the People.  Please take a moment to think on this:  What’s the trajectory you see?  Starting from the perspective of democracy’s needs, do you detect any evidence of a coming journalistic breakout, anywhere?

So, to broaden the discourse, let’s set the binary conflict aside, start with a blank slate, and ask ourselves:  What journalism problems does democracy demand that we solve?  Let’s see how wide the horizon of possibility really is.  Let me name some problems all of us are tackling or could be tackling.  Whenever I mention one you find important, raise your hand, let me hear from you:

• Who’d raise their hands for getting the news covered reliably and consistently at the community level?

• How about strengthening investigative journalism in this wildly corrupt era?

• How many think we need to find new revenue streams to replace vanishing ad revenue?

• And who’s in favor of eliminating biased gatekeepers?

• Anybody here think we need to create new, sustainable business models?

• Who’s for ensuring that journalism serves the ill-served, that it gets people in all walks of life engaged with the news, and not just the affluent?

• Anybody think it would be good if we could find ways to re-employ discarded professional journalists?

• How about finding ways for bloggers and citizen journalists to make money?

• And who thinks its would be good to open ways for more community people to express themselves through journalism?

• Anybody think it would be good for democracy if we could find ways to neutralize the great flood of commercial, political and religious deception and propaganda that poisons our culture – and our journalism?

• And would it be good for democracy if we could do journalism in ways that strengthen civic adhesion?

Judging by the hands that went up, these are all things that can help create the healthy glow that an informed electorate gives to democracy. I’m sure that if we opened up for discussion the fine minds in this hall would add several more.

So what’s the most important problem I’ve not named?  Go ahead, shout out your nominations.  Come on, don’t be bashful.

[Engage with audience for less than a minute.]

Well, here’s my nomination:  Re-establishing the public’s trust in journalism.

The poll results on trust just keep getting grimmer.  Last June, Gallup’s annual survey of confidence in U.S. institutions found only 25 percent of respondents saying they had “a great deal of confidence” or “quite a lot of confidence” in newspapers, down five points in five years.  Only 23 percent expressed confidence in television news, down seven points over the same period.  Both are now half their highest Gallup confidence level.  Half.  As for blogs, people don’t adhere to ones they don’t trust – it’s the nature of the blogosphere.  Unfortunately, the niche of the public that trusts and adheres to news-related blogs – largely political junkies and policy wonks, labels I gleefully claim – is a tiny fraction of the broad public that democracy so needs to be well informed.

–0–

Trust is one of what I think of as the Big Three problems facing journalism.  I’ll get to the other two shortly.

Re-establishing trust is No. 1 on my list because it if trust is poisoned, its toxin infects all of journalism:  How informed can the electorate be if people have scant confidence in the journalism they’re getting or, worse, ignore it altogether because their distrust is so deep?  The citizen journalism pioneer Dan Gillmor, a stalwart Banyan advisory board member, is working on an antidote for this through a book to be titled Mediactive.  Dan’s aim is not only better journalism but also helping people learn to engage with it in its myriad forms and to master the skill of sorting out the reliable from the blivet.  This is crucial, but I fear that not enough people will go to the trouble to learn new skills.  So democracy still needs at least some reliable journalism that’s worthy of people’s trust.

No. 2 on my list is already the main focus of the discourse and needs no elaboration from me:  That’s creating sustainable business models.

And No. 3 is way outside the discourse, but profoundly important to democracy.  That’s serving the ill-served.

These are all terribly challenging problems.  That’s why it’s so important for us to stretch the game called the future of journalism, to widen the way we think.

Now here’s a happier thought:  If you solve the Big Three problems, many if not all the others on our list might very well be solved in the process.  Take a look at this new grouping.

This was presented on a PPT slide

Big Three

1)  Re-establish Trust

• Gatekeepers
• Neutralize propaganda

2) Sustainable Models

• New revenue
• Jobs for journalists
• Income for bloggers

3) Serving the Ill-Served

• Hyperlocal
• Investigative journalism
• Community contributors
• Civic adhesion

I can’t promise you they’d all resolve this neatly, but knowing where to focus your effort can be a big help.

–0–

So let’s revisit the current narrow discourse about journalism’s future.  How are the legacy media doing with the Big Three problems?  And how are the bloggers and citizen journalists doing?

Let’s start with No. 1, trust. To the bloggers’ credit, they’re devoted to a model that structurally eliminates biased gatekeepers.  But, sadly, it’s clear that the tide of distrust is coming in faster than the bloggers and everybody else in journalism can bail it back out.

As for No. 2, sustainable models that support original reporting, some newspapers will surely be with us in five years or even a decade from now.  National papers with upscale readerships are the strongest candidates to remain sustainable, followed by community papers in prosperous suburbs.  But is there any reason to believe that what’s left of the weakened survivors will be able to regain and sustain the role in democracy that newspapers, with all their warts, fulfilled at their heyday?

NPR looks indefinitely sustainable.  So does PBS.  But quality network news, except for certain newsmagazine shows, is at least as hollowed out as the newspapers.

On the Web, Talking Points Memo seems to be self-sustaining, even growing, and Huffington Post might be, but both appeal almost entirely to the political junkie/policy wonk elite.  Brave new metro Web journalism nonprofits such as Voice of San Diego and the New Haven Independent, plus newer models such as the Chicago News Cooperative, show little sign of having found the path to a sustainable financial future.

And as for the third of the Big Three, serving the ill-served, journalism as a whole just gets feebler and feebler.

Four years ago, at the Media Giraffe conference, I devoted a whole keynote speech to laying out how metro newspaper publishers, in their need to serve their receding rosters of display advertisers, purposely aim their papers to appeal only to upscale readers.  I don’t have time to recap this today, but Pew polling numbers provide disturbing evidence that a disproportionate number of less-than-affluent everyday citizens have, not surprisingly, given up on the newspapers that have given up on them.

The new metro Web journalism ventures tend to do high-quality coverage that largely follows the approach of the metro dailies but reaches many fewer people – and with a narrower range of stories.  And the blogosphere, modeled as it is on a market, is a supply-and-demand equation whose “buyers” so far constitute a small and elite niche.

Network television news still reaches a broad market but it’s shrinking.  Cable news offers nothing local, and its ideological focus keeps intensifying.  Demagogues do not serve, they exploit; too much of cable news causes a misinformed electorate, not the informed electorate democracy needs.

No one has expressed the problem of the ill-served more succinctly than Ralph Whitehead, a Banyan advisory board member who’s a senior professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts and an expert on the sociology of working people.  In an email that was part of our visioning process, Ralph wrote:

“So far, the response to the crisis in the journalism business has been devoted almost entirely to the absolutely necessary but not nearly sufficient task of figuring out how to continue to serve the upper tier of the income distribution.”

And he added,

“It is now time to start thinking about how to serve the other two-thirds of the country too.”

–0–

This brings us back to the Banyan Project.  It’s a pleasure to discuss the project in Florida, where banyan trees are common enough that the name of our project doesn’t elicit as many puzzled looks as it does in Massachusetts.  The photo up there is only one part of a single banyan tree; the biggest ones cover two to three acres.

I picked the banyan as the main metaphor for our project because it’s a biological expression of some of the powerful principles that govern the Web:  It’s a network that grows from an originating node, the main trunk, and it grows in the ways that work best for it in its environment, with the least possible central control.  This is exactly what we have in mind for Banyan journalism.  We want its nature to be congruent with the nature of the Web.  There’s great efficiency in that – and great potential for not only delivering journalism to readers but also for bringing them together in online communities where they can organize to take action on issues of shared interest.

If legacy forms of journalism are Plan A and new Web forms are Plan B, our model is Plan C.  It starts as an A-B hybrid but also includes many other familiar ways business is done outside of journalism.  And it aims to solve all three of the Big Three problems.

Two of the Big Three are enshrined in the Banyan value proposition:  That it will serve the broad public of less-than-affluent everyday citizens with journalism that they experience as relevant to their lives, respectful of them as people, and worthy of their trust.

That addresses serving the ill-served and being trustworthy.  To solve the third big problem, the sustainable business model, we will rely on six revenue streams, with advertising in a secondary role.

Let’s build this model from the ground up:

We start at the bedrock level, with integrity.  We understand ourselves to be operating in what we call the Integrity Economy.  Here’s how that works:  The motive force of any economy is demand for scarce resources.  In our information-glut era, awash as we are in advertising and other manipulative messages, and with conflicts of interests everywhere we look, what’s scarce?  Integrity is scarce.  People yearn for it, and they value it hugely when they find it.  Integrity ensures trustworthiness, a safe harbor in a cultural sea of deception.  This sense of safety is what will attract people to Banyan’s journalism, and monetizing the value people place on its integrity is what will make the model sustainable.

Atop this bedrock we need to erect an entity to own and operate this venture. With the guidance of advisory board member Gar Alperovitz, the University of Maryland political economist who founded the Democracy Collaborative, we decided on a consumer co-operative.  It will be owned entirely by its end users, in this case its readers, the same way food co-ops are owned by their shoppers and credit unions are owned by their depositors.  In advertising-dominant publishing, conflicts between advertisers’ and readers’ interests are baked in.  Because the Banyan co-op is owned entirely by its readers, such conflicts are baked out.  Co-ops have inherent integrity.

Primary among the model’s six revenue streams will be a large number of tiny payments that result from unlocking the intangible value of the integrity that will draw many readers of our journalism to buy a co-op share.  The journalism will be free to all who wish to read it, and will be our main marketing magnet.  We believe people will buy co-op shares because they value not only Banyan’s trustworthiness but also the sense of belonging, self-worth and civic potency they get from engaging in the Banyan online community. Our selling of such intangibles is akin to Mercedes Benz’s selling of status.  We’ve also drawn up a list of tangible co-op benefits to test through the pilot sites to see if people will pay for them.

To scale to engage the huge public that Banyan seeks to serve, it will ape both the biological banyan tree and the Web, spreading naturally with the least possible central direction.  After the kinks are worked out of the pilots, we will start negotiating with groups of journalists all across the country about turn-key franchises that provide software, national ad sales, and back shop services.

So are you wondering when I’m going to get to the journalism?  Yes?  Well, we start with community-level sites that engage the lives of everyday citizens at the experiential level.  As soon as possible after funding is secured, we plan to launch pilots, one after the other, in three cities with very different cultures in states with different laws – Boston, Kansas City and Chicago.  These community news operations would consist of an editor, two staff reporters, and three interns from the journalism program of a local college or community college, plus some freelancers, stringers and co-op member/volunteers.

News coverage will focus on community power centers of all kinds in the limited areas the pilots will serve – not just official bodies but also, for example, community development financial institutions and major churches.  Starring roles will tend to go to local schools – rarely to the school superintendent.  Service journalism will call on community expertise – for example, doctors at neighborhood medical clinics.  Standing features will address personal health, education, personal finance, employment, and related service areas.  Columnists, writing as bloggers, will cover politics and public transit as they relate to the pilot community.  The sites will offer videos and slide shows as well as text, plus standard features such as calendars of events.

As the venture scales and revenue grows, we will add other categories of journalism one by one – metro, state, national, investigative – till every Banyan community gets a comprehensive report of relevant and trustworthy news, every bit of it edited to meet the value proposition.

So how is this journalism relational?  Our software will set a new standard for rich and plentiful feedback from the readers, ensuring strong public participation in the journalism that the professional staff produces.  This feedback will give editors unprecedented opportunity to cover the news in ways that respond to readers’ expressed wants – and to understand their less-articulated needs well enough to deliver other news they’ll find meaningful without knowing they wanted it.  This is journalism from the readers up, not the usual journalism from the experts and institutions down.  What could be a sharper departure from the ways of legacy journalism?

There’s also a deeper relational structure:  Since only readers can be co-op shareholders, and it’s the shareholders who elect the board that hires the editors, Banyan’s professional journalists are accountable to the readers – its editors are still gatekeepers, but in this structure it’s their job to tend the gates in behalf of the reader/owners.

And what about the promised civic engagement?  This is relational, too, but in another dimension.  Our Web developers will be alchemists, mixing the best ideas from social networking and political campaign sites to create easy-to-use civic networking tools that invite people to join together to pursue solutions to issues they care about.

All these disparate pieces snap tightly together to make the Banyan model.  This diagram is oversimplified because it does not show the myriad relationships that connect the chunks – a full diagram would look a lot like a network schematic.  The ideas are laid out in much fuller detail at our website, BanyanProject.com.

But will Banyan work?  All wholly new business models are wildly risky.  Will this really prove to be a sustainable Third Way, a thriving Plan C?  If I told you I was confident that it would, that would be a signal for Dale and Andrew to get the hook and drag me off the stage.  But I can tell you that the advisory board and I are confident that we’ve developed a model that’s sound enough to test in the real world.  And I can assure you that I’m going bust my butt to do everything I can to make it succeed.

Thinking about this along with very smart advisory board members for two and a half years has been fascinating, but I’m much more a doer than a thinker.  I particularly love start-ups.  So I can’t wait to dive in, to launch the pilot sites, to tweak them and refine them – and to see what it takes to make this wholly new model flourish.

–0–

The reason I’m standing here today is that more than 3,700 people saw enough hope in Banyan as a Plan C to want to cast votes for it in the Community Choice Game Changer balloting.  But even if our venture proves sustainable and fulfills all that hope, it won’t be enough.  Our democracy is weakened by many powerful forces, and it needs lots more help than a fully realized Banyan could deliver.  Democracy needs not only Plan C but also Plans D, E, F, G, H, and on and on – a whole alphabet of plans.

So here’s a little journalism Mount Rushmore from the last century: Henry Luce of Time Inc., invented newsweeklies in the 1920s; Barney Kilgore of The Wall Street Journal, who invented national newspapers with multiple printing sites in the 1950s, and Ted Turner of CNN, who invented cable news in the 1980s.

It would be breathtaking hubris to claim that Banyan will ever make such a list.  But I’ll bet that somewhere in this room, given all the fine minds gathered here, at least one idea is incubating that will.  Maybe several.  So let’s all aspire for journalism’s Rushmore.  Let’s think in terms of a whole alphabet of ideas for attacking the Big Three problems in service of We the People.  I love the WeMedia view that “almost nothing has been invented yet.”  As Doc Searls likes to say, in the history of the Internet we’re only a few seconds out from the Big Bang.  We have a huge distance to go.  Our real challenge is to find out what fully realized Web journalism will look like.

Would fully realized Web journalism change the nature of journalism?  Would that be so bad? American journalism has already changed many times – pamphleteers, low-circulation mercantile sheets, political organs, the penny press, the so-called objective reporting of what is now the mainstream media, blogs, cable news demagoguery.  These changes came about because of advances in technology and shifts in the culture.  The crisis that brings us all together in this hall is such a moment.  The established forms are crumbling before our very eyes.  We’d better respond to the challenge by coming up with new and better forms, or we can pucker up and kiss democracy goodbye.

So we have a lot of work to do.  So much is at stake.

Thank you.

By Michael Stoll

Remember Copenhagen? The world’s last chance to save itself from climate calamity came and went last December. But if you heard of civil society’s concerns about the urgency of the problem, that may have been because of the global environmental marketing campaign by the people at the urgently named TCKTCKTCK.

About two years ago, “a number of the leading lights in the climate movement decided that what the movement really needed to create more momentum was a campaign similar to the Make Poverty History campaign or the One campaign in the U.S.,” said Jason Mogus, TCKTCKTCK’s digital strategy manager, who lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. “They decided that the movement needed to come together, and we needed to get on the radar of world leaders. We needed to change the direction of history by getting a global agreement of all nations to get a coordinated climate plan to deal with this issue.”

The campaign started with 18 partners, including WWF, Greenpeace and Oxfam, which realized that the challenge was bigger than any of them, and if they were to have an impact on world leaders they had to act in a coordinated fashion. So they decided to coordinate their strategies with a single brand suggesting a time bomb — “Tick Tick Tick” — and a single “ask,” what they termed a fair ambitious and binding climate deal — or “FAB.”

The campaign really only got off the ground four months before the conference, but was able to rally an astonishing 16 million signatures in support of the FAB agenda, now embraced by an expanded coalition of 250 nongovernmental organizations worldwide.

But the campaign was much more than a marketing coup. It represented an opportunity for the organizations — not all of which had been focused on the environment as their main issue — for the first time to work together on a common project.

“The biggest innovation we did was not technical, but building a collaboration model or a network-driven model into everything that we did,” Mogus said. “It wasn’t easy for us to bring together all these diverse groups into one common framework. This campaign was a lot more like a Facebook — we had to bake network principles into everything that we did.” The organizers called it an “open source campaign.”

The site launched in the end of August, and the campaign was done in mid-December. In that four months, TCKTCKTCK got 2.5 million page views, a little over half of them unique visitors.

Perhaps more importantly, Mogus said, more than a million people engaged in action on the streets. In Copenhagen in December, the organization, which had only about 40 staffers at its peak, set up a “rapid-response e-network,” including Grist, Huffington Post and bloggers from more than 80 countries. They also set up a Fresh Air Center in downtown Copenhagen that incorporated a “blogger support center.” The center hosted briefings during the day, and a live feed from the conference.

“That became particularly critical when they shut bloggers and NGOs out of the out of the conference for the second week,” Mogus said. The combined effects added up to a lot of influence, both among participants in the conference, who were unable to go home and declare victory, and spectators worldwide.

“The power of this campaign,” Mogus said, “was that through all of these organizations we had millions and millions of people.”

By Josh Wilson

Why would anyone give money to a journalist? Even during their heyday, organizations that actually did pay the wretches — be they ink-stained or coiffed for the TV camera — made their money off advertising more than direct audience payments. In other words, the value of the reporting got somehow abstracted from the enterprise that sustained the outlet.

Which brings us to our present predicament, to wit: In an era of Craigslist, citizen media, Twitter and Wikipedia, why would anyone give money to a journalist?

Because of trust in the person, and in the enterprise. Yet for Tom Stites — a self-described “ink-stained wretch” and founder of the still-nascent Banyan Project, a consumers’ co-op for news seekers — solving the trust puzzle is more than a matter of enabling a transaction with a good product and good service.

After all, there are plenty of reputable media companies out there selling quality news products. Why, then, the deepening crisis for news media?

* * * * *

Stites got his journalism start at The Kansas City Times in 1962, falling into an internship there after dropping out of Williams College at the end of his sophomore year. “I heard the call loud and clear,” he says.

What followed were a string of reporter and then editor positions — managing editor at The Kansas City Times, Night News Editor at The New York Times, National Editor at the Chicago Tribune — that took him straight to 1990, at which point, he said, “I left newsrooms.”

Was it true? After almost 30 years as a newspaperman? “People asked me why I was leaving journalism, and my stock answer was that I wasn’t leaving journalism, that it had left me.”

Stites says he was “deeply concerned that all the journalism from all the major news organizations was all the same … The Trib and any other newspaper where I might have worked just no longer fit my idea of a newspaper business I wanted to be part of.”

He found himself “yearning for journalism with a voice that diverged from the pack to value democracy and the people rather than the neoliberal policy thought that dominated all the rest of the press — except The Washington Times, which was dominated by neoconservative policy thought.”

Guided by a “chosen” spiritual faith in the Unitarian Church that resonated with his idealism about journalism — “it is nonhierarchical and creedless, stressing in its principles both ‘the right of conscience and use of the democratic process’ and ‘the free and responsible search of truth and meaning’” — Stites took a turn away from newsprint to become the editor, and later the publisher, of UU World Magazine, serving an active, English-speaking Unitarian community worldwide.

So the seeds for the Banyan Project were planted. But they didn’t begin to truly quicken till 2006, when Stites gave a speech that took his ideas out of the realm of individual conscience, and into a much broader dialogue.

* * * * *

I first encountered Stites in June 2006 at the first (and only) Media Giraffe Conference at the University of Massachusetts. He was giving the keynote presentation, a PowerPoint show with the promising, if wonky, title: “Is Media Performance Democracy’s Critical Issue?”

It was lunchtime. People were chatty, and distracted by food. Yet before long, Stites had them hanging on every word. He was talking about being the associate managing editor of The Chicago Tribune, and how “all the talk among the news management was about editing the paper for the top two quintiles of the income distribution. That means that 40 percent market penetration is the goal, not 100 percent, and that The Trib cares little about 60 percent of the people who might be its readers.”

News media was failing democracy, he said, because the needs of the advertising model were distorting the editorial mission.

“Instead of having sympathy for the poor our newspapers discard them,” he declared. “Newspapers have forgotten that less-than-affluent Americans are also citizens that require easy access to quality journalism that squarely addresses the issues that affect their lives. Unless we do, there’s a good chance that our democracy is doomed.”

This, in the middle of a buzzy conference with panels about citizen media, new technology, and ways to invigorate the ad model. I recall looking at my colleague, Michael Stoll of the commercial-free nonprofit startup The Public Press.

“Who is this guy?” I asked. Stoll blinked, then said, “We gotta get ‘im.”

After the conference, stopping over in Boston before heading back to California, Stoll and I paid a visit to Stites in his offices at UU World. He seemed, perhaps, the tiniest bit bemused by these two young idealists, talking nonprofit startup news projects and serving the underserved. By the end of the half-hour conversation, he said that it was a “joy” to know there was still such inspiration afoot in the journalism world. We invited him to join the advisory boards of our respective projects. Later, when the Banyan Project began to really take root, we returned the favor by becoming advisers to his efforts.

The nonprofit paper-chase followed. Everyone was writing grant proposals, by the ream. We traded “three-pagers” outlining our diverse plans, providing feedback, egging each other on. Amidst it all, Stites pursued studies as a resident fellow at the Harvard Divinity School, and worked as a consulting editor of the Center for Public Integrity. He was editor and principle writer of the Center’s Collateral Damage series about the impact of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy — and the series won top awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and from Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Before long, though, Stites had assembled an impressive advisory team, including such leading lights as Dan Gillmor and Charles Lewis, as well as the lead Web developer for YouTube, who agreed to lead the platform-development.

Finally, his project — originally called Rhizome, after the networked root structures that allow plants to put up shoots far from the main body — acquired the name Banyan, for its central “metaphor” of a rich forest that really is just one single tree with a myriad sibling trunks and canopies spreading over the landscape.

* * * * *

What makes the Banyan Project a game changer? Trust. Not just trust in the transaction, but trust in the very processes by which an enterprise makes its product. If commercial newspapers have lost their way, it is because they have abandoned that trust — not their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, nor their sense of pride and quality control in the service. Rather, the nature of that service itself.

What good is a luxury car review to a single mother who’s struggling to make payments on a late-model minivan? What’s the value of a classical music review to a community that can’t afford a night at the symphony, and might not have interest in or even exposure to classical music? Whatever happened to the labor beat? Is it really just about reporting on unemployment statistics, or unions?

Through a mutual connection, Stites was introduced to Gar Alperovitz, a political economy professor at the University of Maryland-College Park, who opened his eyes about consumer co-ops.

“I quickly understood [this] to be the most trustworthy of business forms,” he said. The value proposition goes beyond pure journalism to include the deep relationship between the member and the producer, to drive relevance, dialogue, quality and loyalty.

Banyan is conceived of as a consumer’s co-op, in which members (the readers, the users, the “people formerly known as the audience”) are the owners of hyperlocal news sites that act independently, but are unified by standards and best practices. They serve the local, but also work as a network.

“Hyperlocal is crucial to journalism and at least as crucial to democracy,” says Stites. “It’s at the community level that civic engagement thrives. But journalists keep starting from scratch, or largely so, to reinvent the hyperlocal wheel, over and over and over. And we do this in a world whose economies are politics are dominated by multinational corporations bigger than most nations … Scale matters!”

Banyan, he says, will enable today’s “throng” of journalism entrepreneurs to not only strengthen the hyperlocal model, but also to “create larger-scale forms that have the resources to do quality reporting about far-flung stories of local impact and about issues and policy in ways that actually relate directly to people’s lives. This is the kind of enterprise journalism and democracy need, and need desperately, and need right now.”

Josh Wilson is the co-founder of Independent Arts & Media, and publisher of its Newsdesk.org project.

We’re busy mashing mint, and a few other ingredients for We Media Miami next week. Please try to say hello to Dale and me if you’re there, and if not, join us, contribute and say hi online.

You’ll find tweets, bios, reports, video and essential links collected at wemedia.com/miami/.

Many of our participants will also be hanging out in the We Media Community, our online innovation network. That’s at wemediacommunity.org.

And, of course, you can find us on Facebook. You can find all of our digital outposts and pathways to participation on our fan page.

Personally, I’m looking forward to conversations with the 2010 Game Changers, and to the BBC’s World Have Your Say global broadcast, live from the conference at 1 pm EDT Wednesday, March 10. I also can’t wait to see the presentations from our PitchIt investment challenge finalists – and to hear what the judges have to say about them.

Dale and I will have a few ideas of our own to unveil, and I expect to sink into many others with our wonderful lineup of participants. Is it too mundane to even mention Twitter? Last year we hit No. 2 on Twitter during both days of our Miami conference! The hashtag is #wemedia, and please follow us and contribute @wemedia.

Photo Credit: RSVP Endurance Stainless Steel Mojito Muddler from Chef Tools

Here they are: the winners of the 2010 We Media Game Changer Awards. They’ll all be recognized and featured in keynote presentations at We Media Miami, March 9-11. Meet them there and learn more from them in person. There’s still time to register.

The winners are:

Demand Media
Founded by former MySpace chairman Richard Rosenblatt in 2006, the company’s Demand Studios has invented and defined an entirely new category of business: computational journalism. The company’s Demand Studios has changed the game for online news and knowledge by applying search data and algorithms to identify online content needs, quantify its market value and then manage production and quality control through a network of paid freelancers and editors. While controversial for driving down the pay rates for freelancer writers, videographers and editors and, some say, for engineering mass-production of low-quality web content, anybody concerned about how to create more efficient and sustainable news and information enterprises needs to study the revolutionary methods, workflow and processes that Demand Studios has pioneered. Byron Reese, Demand’s chief innovation officer, will accept the award and speak at We Media Miami.

TCKTCKTCK
Recognized for global advocacy through media. A web site and petition campaign produced by a coalition of more than 200 environmental groups urged leaders to take action at the 2009 UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen. It also changed the game for cause media by combining on-the-ground journalistic reporting with state-of-the-art digital advocacy, content and petition aggregation and community-building. Kelly Rigg, executive director of the Montreal-based Global Campaign for Climate Action, will accept the award and speak at the We Media Miami.

The America Red Cross
Recognized for engaging citizens to meaningful action. In the hours and days after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti we saw the emergence of a media-savvy, tech-driven, massively social communication network that extended from online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to all the major news companies, a network TV fundraising telethon, a partnership with the NFL and advertising during the Super Bowl. All executed within days of the Jan. 12 earthquake. The speed of response was impressive. Its scale and reach through media was extraordinary – and set a new standard for engaging citizens to action. Sam Tidwell, CEO of the Red Cross chapter in Miami, which was central to the relief efforts and communication for Haiti, will accept the award and speak at We Media Miami.

Tom Stites
As previously announced, Stites was selected as the Community Choice winner through public online voting. Stites, a former journalist who later was a fellow at the Harvard Divinity School, is honored for leading development of The Banyan Project, which aims to strengthen democracy through journalism serving and reflecting the needs not of the affluent but of the everyday citizens who are ill-served by mainstream journalism. All of the Community Choice nominees are listed here.

Beyond their individual achievements, consider the winners as a group. They symbolize the sweep of change and the scope of ambition to use, create and apply media in innovative ways – to invent new business models; to use technology to extract collective insights from our digital behaviors and shadows; to apply those insights to new ways of doing business; to connect individuals throughout the world more directly to governments and decision-makers; to use story-telling, technology and social media to stir individuals to action; and to imagine a world in which our digital networks lead to smarter economies, better governance, healthier communities and widespread human improvement.

We launched the awards two years ago to help us identify extraordinary achievements – and, just as critically, to extract some insights about what makes them special. We set a high bar of achievement to help us distinguish between good works and breathtaking innovations. For us, Game Changers are people, projects, ideas and organizations leading change and inspiring a better world through media. Considering the torrent of innovative ideas that seem to ooze from everywhere, that’s a tall order.

Here’s more about the awards and our criteria.

We’d love to know what you think.

Congratulations to journalism and democracy visionary Tom Stites, the winner of the 2010 We Media Game Changer Community Choice award. Stites will participate and speak at the We Media Miami conference, March 9-11. He’ll be recognized with a group of honorees selected by We Media judges as Game Changers: People, projects, ideas and organizations leading change and inspiring a better world through media.

We’ll announce the other winners soon.

Stites, 67, a former reporter and editor for the Chicago Tribune, New York Times and other publications, and a 2006 Resident Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, was selected by public online voting conducted by We Media Jan. 25 – Feb. 3, 2010.

A journalist and entrepreneur with a passion for democracy, Stites, who lives in Newburyport, Mass., was nominated for his vision to change the game of journalism. He’s founder and president of the Banyan Project, which aims to strengthen democracy through the Web by using techniques that serve, engage and give voice to “less-than-affluent” everyday citizens. We’ll hear more about the vision and project at We Media Miami, and report more on it for the wider We Media community. Stites discussed the ideas behind the project in a 2006 speech, which you can read here.

We’ll recognize all finalist and hope to see many of them at We Media Miami. You can register for the conference here – and check out all of the finalists here.

A note on the Community Choice voting: More than 9,000 votes were cast. We encountered and resolved some voting “irregularities” with one nominee, including a flood of automated, repeated votes for that nominee. Those votes were tracked by our poll logs and were eliminated to determine the the final choice.

Thanks to more than 8,000 people who voted for the We Media Game Changer Community Choice award. The poll closed yesterday. Stay tuned: We are reviewing the results and poll logs to ensure fairness of the results. We expect to conclude the review and announce results later today. If you missed the poll – check out the finalists. In all, a very inspiring group.

Don’t forget these important We Media deadlines this week. By the end of the day on Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2010:

1. Register to get the early-bird registration rate for We Media Miami. CEOs, thought leaders, game-changers, investors, foundations and tech entrepreneurs will join us March 9-11 in Miami to inform and inspire the elusive models and realities of business in the digital age. Learn more and register at: www.wemedia.com/miami/register/

2. Vote for the We Media Game Changer Community Choice award. All of the nominees are inspiring, and more than 5,000 people have voted in the past week! Help choose the winner. Vote here: wemedia.com/awards/2010-community-choice-finalists/

We’ve just posted the Community Choice finalists for the 2010 We Media Game Changer Awards. Check them out, share, tweet, add your comments and cast your vote!

Your vote for the winner counts and will make a difference. The Community Choice winner, selected strictly by online voting, will make a keynote presentation at our upcoming We Media Miami conference, March 9-11. This is our annual think-and-action fest for game changers, visionaries and bold thinkers.

The Community Choice voting closes Feb. 3.

The finalists were selected from nominations submitted by members of the global We Media Community. Some we’d heard of, but many were new to us. As you’ll see, they reflect an extraordinary sweep of innovation through media. They embrace bold thinking and action around journalism, marketing, advertising, social justice, art, education, technology and freedom.

We’ll honor all of the finalists at the We Media Miami conference, and we hope you’ll be there too. Registration is still open. The program includes a live global broadcast with the BBC, conversations with a variety of leaders from business, culture, technology and government, and, we hope, a few surprises. There’s more about the conference program, participants and travel details at: wemedia.com/miami.

Which digital media people, projects, ideas or organizations have rocked your world – or changed the way you view it? We’re honoring Game Changers at We Media Miami, March 9-11, including one nominated and selected through online voting. This is our final call for nominations. The finalists will be invited to our annual Miami innovation conference – and the Community Choice winner selected through online voting will be recognized and present their story during the conference. Nominations will be accepted through this Friday, Jan. 15, 2010. To submit your nominations, click here.

Registration is now open for the We Media Miami ’10 Conference, March 9-11, 2010. Click here for more details and to register.

Seating at our annual conference is limited to just 300 people. This makes for an intimate and productive couple of days, but it also means we can’t fit everyone who wants to be there. We’ll post updates on the program in the coming weeks.

The schedule features conversations with Game Changers, hands-on workshops and discussion on current issues and opportunities, and presentations by a dozen entrepreneurs competing as finalists in the We Media PitchIt! challenge. We’ll invest $50,000 to help launch two winning ventures. (Entries open in December – more here). Mojitos and poolside chats are also on the agenda.

We hope you’ll join us, enjoy the tropical setting and facilities at the lovely University of Miami – and contribute to the can-do spirit that has come to define We Media conferences around the world.

Meanwhile, we hope you’ll also help us with the conference planning. We’ve also just opened online nominations for the We Media Awards. The awards honor Game Changers:
People, projects, ideas and organizations leading change and inspiring a
better world through media. The winners are featured in conversations and case studies at the conference – including a Community Choice winner selected through online voting later this fall.

Thanks for submitting your online nominations, and for spreading the word.

Who should be honored for their achievements? Please tell us. Learn more about the awards and submit your nominations now.

You can also follow our updates by joining We Media on Facebook
(http://www.facebook.com/pages/WeMedia/248421350296), following on Twitter
(@wemedia) or through email updates or feeds found at: www.wemedia.com/fans. Of course, you can always go old school and read/share your thoughts on the We Media web site. It’s been spiffed up – we’d love to see you there/here/anywhere you find us.

Nominations for the 2010 We Media Game Changer Awards are open. Click here for more details and to submit your nominations.

The We Media Awards recognize Game Changers: People, projects, ideas and organizations leading change and inspiring a better world through media. Winners will be featured in conversations and case studies at the We Media Miami Conference, March 9 – 11, 2010 (Click here for conference and registration details).

We invite entries from all fields. Big companies, little startups, social entrepreneurs, independent thinkers, brands, marketers, causes, tools, ideas, commercial, nonprofit – all are welcome.

You can read more about the criteria here. Think of it this way: Game Changers are extraordinary. They’re people, projects and ideas that take our breath away – they use media and technology in novel ways to change how we live or work, how we see the world, how we think about the art of the possible and the potential for inspired individuals and organizations to lead the world to a better future.

Nominations help us scan achievements across fields, disciplines and geography – and then narrow the field to a group of finalists. In December we’ll ask the public to come back and vote for a Community Choice winner.

Of course, we also hope you’ll join us at next year’s We Media Miami conference to meet and learn from the Game Changers. First – help us find them.

Click here to submit your nominations.