Calling all media, technology and social dreamers: The 2012 We Media PitchIt Challenge is open to entries. The challenge offers $50,000 in seed funding to help turn ideas for innovative media and technology startups into something real.

To submit an idea to the challenge or vote on others, visit the PitchIt Idea Hub.

The submission and online voting deadline is Wednesday, Feb. 29, 2012.

A group of 6-8 finalists selected by We Media will pitch their ideas live before a panel of expert judges and the audience at the We Media 2012 conference on April 18 at Gannett, Inc., in McLean, Virginia. Two winners selected by the judges will be offered a $25,000 sponsorship to help them bring their ideas to life.

The public can also comment and vote on the ideas submitted online. The three ideas with the most votes will be named Community Choice winners.

PitchIt, which in 2011 was ranked by the web site StartupSmart among the world’s top startup challenges, gives a boost to people with big ideas – but not fully formed startups. It’s for would-be entrepreneurs who have bold visions for using media and technology to improve the human experience in the digital world.

PitchIt is unique among startup challenges because it’s open to both commercial and non-profit entries. In either case, the potential for social impact is among the criteria used to judge submissions.

We’ve created a platform for founders with ideas to take center stage – and we’ve helped launch some amazing companies built on powerful ideas. Past winners have included SeeClickFix, Sparked, Audimated, NewsIT and Stable Renters.

This is the sixth year for the challenge, which grew out of activity at the annual We Media conference, where we bring together an influential mix of media, technology and social visionaries for conversations on big ideas driving innovation, investment and opportunities in the digital culture. This is the fourth year with a sponsorship on the line to help the winners do something big with their big ideas.

The challenge is organized by We Media for iFOCOS, a non-profit research center and innovation lab, and sponsored by the Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Our partners for 2012 include Ashoka Changemakers, a global network of social entrepreneurs, and Gannett, Inc., the US media company that publishes USAToday.

If you’d like to attend the 2012 We Media conference, join the We Media mailing list to receive registration and program details. We’ll be sending invitations soon.

Contact us now if you’d like to participate as a sponsor or exhibitor.

Mark your calendar and plan to be there: The annual We Media innovation conference will be April 18 at USAToday / Gannett in McLean, Virginia. We’ll be sending invitations and registration details soon. Contact us now if you’d like to participate as a sponsor.

The conference program will also include the live finals of PitchIt, our annual seed investment challenge for innovative startups and social ventures. Last year PitchIt was named one the world’s top startup challenges, along with competitions organized by MIT, IBM and the SXSW interactive conference. We offer $25,000 to each of two winners, along with advice and help from We Media – and access to a network of We Media Mentors who work one-on-one with the winners.

If you’re working on a pre-launch, unfunded startup, or need a kick in the pants to help turn your brilliant idea into something real – read up on the criteria and get your plans in order now. We’ll be open for submissions later this month.

Ben Sacks was a 2011 winner of the We Media PitchIt Challenge for a social startup idea to help renters learn more about landlords. In addition to $25,000 in seed capital to help them get going, PitchIt winners gain access to a network of We Media Mentors – and they agree to “pay it forward” by sharing their experiences to help others who follow in their footsteps. The 2012 PitchIt Challenge will open for entries in January – sign up for the We Media email list or catch us on Facebook for early announcements.

On January 20, StableRenters will go live with landlord identity and a score based on complaints per unit for nearly every rental, co-op and condo property in the five boroughs of New York City!

As you can see, much has changed at StableRenters. I found a developer, made too much work for my part-time self, quit my day-job, and am gearing up to launch a more advanced beta version than I ever imagined.

How in the world did this happen in just two months? After looking tirelessly for the right developer and finding mostly over-qualified develop/design shops that wanted to take all my money and produce a great final product from start to finish, I decided to look farther afield. I wanted a small demo app that I could show the world and gauge response and value before going further, and no one qualified that I knew in NYC would do that for me.

I finally decided to check out Odesk, an online market for freelancers. There I found a qualified and enthusiastic Ruby on Rails developer that was willing to do the project for a few thousand dollars, a common rate among developers in Lahore, Pakistan. Along with a low intensity site administrator I found on Sortfolio to manage access permissions, I was set to begin.

I began working with these two when I still had a job, and quickly it created more work than I was able to handle in a few hours each night. Also, my wife was ready to kill me. I wasn’t sure where this would lead.

Then, December rolled around and I still had about $15,000 left from the Pitchit challenge that would be taxed if I didn’t spend it all on legitimate business expenses by the end of the month. I mapped this out, thought of extended consulting fees, a year’s worth of office space, an iPad, a new computer, and a desk. But as fast as I figured this payment schedule out, I was getting increasingly irritated by the workload of my decreasingly relevant non-profit fundraising day-job, and decided it was time to quit. I bought a few things and took the remaining money as salary. My last day at work was December 16. After taxes, I only had enough money for a few months at my current salary, but I took the plunge. If I hadn’t quit, I’d have known this venture’s outcome 100 percent. Now, at least there’s a chance at funding and success.

So after three weeks of fulltime startup-dom, I made the decision to apply to the BigApps Challenge. I found that the city had released 2 useful datasets: the identity of all landlords, management companies and the shareholders of every rental, condo and co-op property with 3 units or more in the five boroughs, as well as the complaints made to the city by these buildings’ tenants.

Sure, the Big Apps Challenge could win me $10,000. But a friend showed me last weekend that in the 2011 BigApps Ideas Challenge (just ideas for apps, not launch-ready products), one of the winners selected by a panel of judges was a platform that allows “residents to rate their building’s owner, management co., and landlord, and lets interested renters browse those ratings.”

I couldn’t believe I missed this news and it sounded too familiar to pass up. Besides, it’ll be a great opportunity to persuade the city to open up more of its data by showing the value of what could be: a site that uses every relevant piece of city data, including still-closed housing violations and lawsuits, to force slumlords to shape up and reward responsible landlords for the first time with free marketing and a flock of renters eager to do business with an honest professional.

If you know anyone that lives in New York, please like my Facebook page, and in February vote for StableRenters in the BigApps Challenge. It will make your life and city better.

Old plan: Scrape all data, build giant app, spend all money.

New plan: Build small app, get data from city government, make app bigger, spend less money.

Since my last post I found a developer after months of looking. It was a team of three techies, highly skilled in data scraping, visualization and database architecture. They had everything I needed, and if I went with them, I’d be on my way to launching a great beta site and be dead broke at launch day. Data scraping from very old and finicky databases can cost a lot of money.

But after some helpful conversations with Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) and Anil Dash (@anildash), two of the We Media Mentors I was introduced to during the Pitchit Challenge, my new plan is to make a small app that functions for about 50 addresses, and show it off to city agencies in hopes of persuading them to hand it over in a usable form. This allows me to save money otherwise spent on data scraping, and forces me to build relationships that will no doubt prove vital.

The New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) produces this data by taking tenants’ complaints, conducting inspections, issuing violations, and occasionally bringing legal charges against delinquent landlords. Whatever administrative fee is needed for HPD to part with this data must be nothing compared to the costs of scraping the data of 1 million addresses myself.

So, forging this kind of relationship will certainly be an important step for Stable Renters. But the collaboration created will exponentially increase the impact of HPD’s work, allowing New Yorkers of all kinds to make sense of the important datasets they produce and put them to good use every time they rent an apartment.

With NYC’s Road Map for the Digital City and a newly created position of Chief Digital Officer (former We Media contributor @rachelsterne), this type of relationship is not unfathomable. Stable Renters is just one more way for the city to get the maximum value from the wealth of data it produces every day. HPD recently released its Property Registration information (aka the identity of the landlords and management companies for most rental properties) through NYC’s Open Data hub. This information should change next year as the effects begin to be felt by Intro-87, a city ordinance passed in August 2010 that will require landlords to provide real names and addresses for all human (not corporate) stakeholders holding 25% or more of a property. This will make it harder for landlords to hide behind a different corporation name for each building they own, and easier for tenants to find out who actually owns a building. That’ll be a great day for New York City.

Ben Sacks has a big idea, $25,000 to spend on it and a strong network of advisers. But he’s still searching for the right web developer to help him build and launch Stable Renters, a service that will gather data on landlords. Does the “do good” tone to Ben’s business make it unattractive to coders? Or has Ben simply stumbled into a startup challenge that every good founder needs to solve? For another perspective on how to find the technical yin to your idea yang, see: Please, please, please stop asking how to find a technical co-founder

By Ben Sacks
What a kick in the pants! The We Media Pitchit! Challenge really got me to start moving. Not only did I have a chunk of equity-free change to start building with, We Media introduced me to some seriously knowledgeable people.

Everyone pushed me to move as fast as possible towards launching the product in some form. I shouldn’t worry about getting set up with a corporate structure, planning for the project to be larger than it has to be at first, or even soliciting additional investment (if I don’t need it yet) until I get public buy-in in the form of real usage. “Your users know more than you do,” one person said to me. “They’ll even tell you what you want to hear if you just give them a place to say it.”

Stable Renters was pretty hard to think about in minimal terms. Virtually everyone I speak to has a new idea for where it can go. But it has at least one unique aspect: it uses specialized data that few others have endeavored to leverage. If it turns out that no one cares how well buildings are managed, then I’ll know I need to come up with something new.

So not long after I wandered through the train with an enormous check, wondering if I could exchange it at a check-cashing store, my goal became to hold down the fulltime day job and get a lead developer to launch something by the fall.

But it’s been two months since then, and I’m still looking for that developer. Yes I’ve advertized on Craigslist, related Meetup groups and at university departments, and I told everyone I know that I’m looking. But while Scott Heiferman (@heif) celebrated the flourishing of NYC’s startup scene at the New York Tech Meetup last month, a professor in a local CS department sent me a form email (literally said, “Dear So and So”), basically telling me that there were no students that would fit my unmentioned criteria.

And yes, I have met developers. “Oh yeah? What languages do you work in?” I often ask. “Everything, really everything” is my least favorite answer, especially when it’s followed by, “Oh, no, not Python. Not MongoDB.” But while some have presented the right technical capabilities, it seems that many in the startup world don’t care about the social benefit, about media innovation, about real impact. I hear far too often that all these good things must come with a financial drawback. And yet, few question Stable Renters’ profitability. Entrepreneurs don’t let that stop them for some reason. But many think that this revenue model’s inherent social value will hold the company back.

I should note that the terms of employment have almost never come up in these conversations. I’ve been quite flexible as to whether the position would begin on a roadmap to co-foundership, would remain as lead developer, or gain differing amounts of equity as the work progresses. Virtually all of this is on the table in some form. And in only one case did the terms offered actually raise an objection, one that was quickly rectified. In even this case, it seems as though the concept of doing good in exchange for money gives entrepreneurs the willies.

So I want to take a moment to talk about social entrepreneurship. While definitions abound, examples of the phenomenon can be found in almost any industry. And this is where I begin to disagree with the naysayers. In a society with no banks, lending money for just about any purpose could arguably be social entrepreneurship. A society without access to capital means that risk takers can rarely seize opportunities, and that the needed and possible improvements to the public good will go unrealized. Banks fill a real need.

So if banking counts, then what are developers afraid of? If you question profitability, fine. But don’t let good will scare you away. Banks do their job, they make money. We do our job, which happens to do something good, and we make money.

Work for me. We’ll make money and feel good about it. And as long as even one landlord continues to contemplate stiffing a tenant, we’ll never need a bailout.

Photo by Shayan.

What happens after the big win? The winners of the We Media PitchIt challenge don’t give up equity for their checks. Instead, they gain access to a network of advisors and agree to “pay it forward” by sharing their experiences – and by seeking more input from the global We Media network. Do you have ideas or advice to help them go further? Add your comments or contact them directly. – AN

In April, I won $25,000 from the We Media PitchIt competition. The following photo
shows how I felt:

The experience with We Media was my inflection point. Since then, we’ve made
some beautiful progress. Fundraising is a lot harder than anticipated (where are the
billionaire philanthropists who write checks for $250,000 over coffee??), but we’re
getting there.

Following the win…

• I met with Merrill Brown, one of my new We Media mentors. (A veteran
  journalist, media executive, consultant, and mocha-drinker.) He offered to
  make introductions to various foundations and venture capitalists around
  NYC.
• I leveraged the We Media win to convince a Palo Alto VC fund to commit an
  additional $50,000. (They rarely give money to nonprofits, but they are
  making an exception because, obviously, Pando is awesome.)
• I met with Stowe Boyd, a web anthropologist, We Media mentor, and urban
  lumberjack. He was incredibly generous and invited me to The Guardian
  Activate Summit, where I met incredible people including Andrew Rasiej,
  who runs the Personal Democracy Forum.
• I met with Steve Rosenbaum, the author of “Curation Nation” and another We Media mentor. Steve has trendy hipster glasses and an amazing business mind. He strongly suggested that I think of ways to open a for-profit arm of Pando.
• I met with Esther Dyson, a We Media mentor and mysterious female VC. It
  was hard to gauge her feelings about Pando, but she did offer to help me
  speak at the New York Tech Meet-Up, whenever I’m ready.
• I met with Charlie O’Donnell, a We Media mentor and Principal at First Round
  Capital. He was incredibly cool and recommended that I spend the summer researching Pando’s competition and carefully planning out our online platform.

For the next three months, I have three goals:

• Plan out and design the official Pando website, which should be capable of scaling to support thousands of projects.
• Recruit two team members: a CTO to build the site and a COO to help me execute our vision.
• Raise $250,000 in seed funding, which will be used to fund the official website and hire two paid staff members to develop the materials that people need to execute their projects.

I’m incredibly grateful for all these introductions, and for the legitimacy that We Media have given Pando. I’ll continue to post a blog every month, to let you know about our progress. Thanks for reading! If you’d like to learn more about Pando, you can reach me at milena@pandoprojects.org.

Journalism startup NewsIT has launched a crowd-powered investigation of the safety of the Washington, DC, subway system.

If you live in Washington, DC, and can offer a little bit of your time, sign up and check out the project details. You can go down into the subway to see how long it takes to escape, or assist with mapping data and other text, photo and video tasks.

Sign up and share this link to invite your friends:

http://newsit.net/assignments/454

I’m rooting for team NewsIT, and I’m biased. NewsIt won our 2010 PitchIt Challenge, and we’ve been advising the project since then.

A few elements of the DC Metro investigation are innovative and notable for those who care about the future of journalism. First, NewsIt is doing its work in public. That’s a departure from the traditional cloak of secrecy that shrouds investigative journalism until the work is done – followed by the traditional “big reveal.” NewsIt has told us exactly what they’re working on – and they’ve asked for help.

Second, they’ve asked for help in a manner that should be appealing and practical to a broad network of individuals who care about the investigation and its results – whether or not they care about or want to call themselves citizen journalists. This rips a page out of citizen science – built around volunteers who collect data to contribute to large-scale research projects; and from the world of micro-volunteering pioneered by services such as Sparked and SeeClickFix. (Both of those also launched as winners of our PitchIt challenge).

This version of collaborative, volunteer-powered investigative journalism curated and produced by a commercial, professional hub also offers an alternative vision for the future of local journalism – compared, for instance, to AOL’s Patch, which is building out a network of local sites built around volunteer bloggers. You don’t need to be a dedicated or good blogger to make a meaningful contribution to NewsIt.

Finally – this project is an important test for NewsIt, a startup from Washington founded by journalist Melinda Wittsock (@cncpundit). NewsIt needs to prove its model to prospective investors and industry partners.

Australian web site StartupSmart has ranked the We Media PitchIt! Challenge among the world’s top 10 startup challenges. Wow – and thanks! We’re humbled to be listed among some truly ambitious challenges conducted by IBM, MIT, SXSW and others. Here’s the full list.

One thing the Aussies liked, and we do too, is that the PitchIt prize does not require commercial winners give up any equity. But we do ask for something back from the winners – they’ve got to “pay it forward” by sharing what they learn with founders who follow in their footsteps. We think that’s a fair bargain with real value on both sides.

We’re working on plans for the next PitchIt Challenge. For news and announcements on submission deadlines, join our email list, follow along on Twitter or Like us on Facebook.

NEW YORK – Projects that support community activists and renters were the big winners in the 2011 We Media Pitch It! Challenge, which concluded at the We Media NYC conference on April 6.

Pando Projects and Stable Renters each earned seed investments of $25,000. The prizes represent the first funding for each project.

The We Media PitchIt! Challenge, ranked one of the world’s top startup competitions, begins each year with a simple goal: to find brilliant ideas and help turn them into something real with advice from funders, investors, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs, attendees and media. The contest is open to commercial and non-profit ideas.

Stable Renters

Pando Project

Nine finalists will present their ideas for new ventures at the We Media NYC conference on April 6, 2011. A panel of judges will select two winners – and each will receive $25,000 and access to a network of mentors to help them launch. Clear Health Costs is one of the finalists. To register for the conference, click here.

Clear Health Costs
Location of operations: New York, N.Y.
Presented at We Media NYC by Jeanne Pinder
http://clearhealthcosts.com/

Contact
Jeanne Pinder, founder and CEO, jeanne.pinder@gmail.com, 914-450-9499

Jeanne Pinder founded Clearhealthcosts.com. She volunteered for a buyout from The New York Times in late 2009 after more than 20 years there as an editor, reporter and human resources executive. While she was reinventing herself post-Times, she was lucky enough to take a class at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism with Jeff Jarvis (”What Would Google Do?” and www.buzzmachine.com) and Jeremy Caplan (director of education for the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism) in the fall of 2010, during which she developed and refined the idea for clearhealthcosts.com while she acquired new journalism skills and sought new frontiers in the form of a job.

At the end of that class, in a capstone new-business pitching competition with her fellow students, she won a $20,000 grant from CUNY to move forward with this project. She’s humbled and gratified by the support she’s received and by the votes of confidence from Jeff and Jeremy and others, and she’s been working on clearhealthcosts.com fulltime since early January.

In addition to her New York Times career, she also worked at The Associated Press and The Des Moines Register, and as a Russian-language teacher and graduate student at Indiana University and at Leningrad State University.

She learned journalism at her family’s small-town newspaper, The Grinnell Herald-Register, in Grinnell, Iowa, which her grandfather bought in 1944 and which continues valiantly in family hands today.

The idea
We’re bringing transparency to the health-care marketplace. We are creating a transparency platform, a Web 2.0 community for a broad, consumer-driven conversation – with actionable information – about the enormously important topic of rising health care costs.

Rising health care costs are one of the biggest problems facing this country today, coupled with the opaque nature of the marketplace.

Nobody knows what things cost in the health-care marketplace. Prices are a complete mystery. Why would anesthesia for a half-hour operation in the New York area cost $2,000 in one place and $6,000 in another? Why would a simple New York area procedure like an MRI cost $2,426 one place, and $500 another place? Why does a New York area colonoscopy run from $750 to $7,500? How do insurance companies decide whether to reimburse $750 or $7,500? And why should I have to pay a bill that’s incomprehensible?

The system is rife with information asymmetry, just one symptom of the crisis. Because our health-care system is so problematic, and because of waste and inefficiency, rising costs threaten family budgets. Everyone knows someone who’s uninsured, or has a story of foregone doctors’ appointments, skipped prescriptions, and small conditions that become big.

In the worst cases, people are denied treatment. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they are bankrupted.

Businesses and governments are seeing a rising tide of cost increases for health care. But the question of what a procedure or an item actually costs is a mystery. Meanwhile, another symptom: my Cobra bill is approaching the size of my mortgage payment.

How is your idea a useful solution to the problem?
My site has five main components:

Sourcing and curating existing public and private data from the web.
Crowdsourcing – by using simple survey tools, I am inviting consumers to contribute information anonymously to a database that will be free and accessible so that people may give and get real information about costs, insurance coverage and the like.
Reporting. We are calling providers and asking for their self-pay or cash prices, and they’re telling us some surprising things.

We’re also writing a newsy, reported blog about these central questions: Why does it cost so much? And what can we do about it?

A forum, where people can give and get information in narrative form.

It all adds up to a community of people talking about health-care costs.

If the marketplace is transparent, consumers and businesses will be better able to make choices about health-care costs.

The Web has brought transparency to any number of markets. Airline ticket sales used to be opaque: Now we have kayak.com and itasoftware.com – and Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and so on.
It’s the same with real estate: once it was a mystery; now there’s Zillow and Trulia, and local realtors’ listings. It’s the same with car sales.
The health-care marketplace is the last big opaque marketplace. It’s time for that to change.

What’s the big innovation?
Clearhealthcosts.com is using the interconnectedness of Web 2.0 to make a place for people to get and give useful price information to consumers. It’s consumer-driven, easy-to-use and interactive. Health-care pricing information is closely held by providers, by insurance companies, by drug companies and other manufacturers, and by employers. Many of the prices represent not so much the cost of the thing, but something more akin to “manufacturer’s suggested retail price.” Or something else. How can the price of the same procedure in the same locale vary by a factor of 10?
The people who don’t have good pricing information and need it most are the Crowd (or the people formerly known as the audience). If we join together, in crowdsourcing, in sharing knowledge, we can collect price information and use it for good.

How did you come up with the idea?
A few years ago, we had three 30-to-45-minute surgical experiences in my family in the space of 14 months. The bills varied widely: anesthesia alone was $2,000 for two, and $6,000 for the third, the shortest one. One of the drugs used in that surgery was billed at $1,419; I found I could buy it in that size online in bulk at $2.47.

This experience gave me comparative health-cost information, which few patients have. I asked naïve questions, which is a journalist’s habit. I came to the conclusion that the prices often can’t be explained cogently; quite often, it seems, the price is “what the market will bear.”

What’s driving your business?
Several factors are driving the health-care marketplace toward change:

• Markets’ move toward transparency, and our habit for comparison pricing
• Pain in the health-care arena from rising costs
• Disruption in the industry
• Web 2.0 interconnectedness, which brings new ways of having conversations about all sorts of things, including pricing

Change is inevitable. In the next 10 years, the system will look quite different. We can help that change happen.

Who will use it and what for?
Uninsured or underinsured people looking for low prices. People going out of network, or out of pocket. People on high-deductible plans. People with high co-pays or payment denials who want to argue with an insurance company. People shopping for a provider; people wanting real information to compare health insurance plans.

People who share a health issue, say, perhaps the infertility community. Using a transparency platform with a few simple common procedures, they can anonymously enter their info and compare their provider, their insurance coverage, their charges, with those of others.

A union trying to beat back health-care costs? A nonprofit like AARP or the National Women’s Law Center? Businesses seeking to reduce their costs? All could find good ways to use a transparency platform.

Can you pull this off? What background, skills, network are you bringing to the project?
I’m a lifelong journalist. Reporting and understanding complicated problems at a world-class level and at world-class speed is what I did at The Times. I’ve developed a strong, smart collection of advisers, and a widely spread “kitchen cabinet” of medical professionals, people in the industry, health economists, consultants, current and former Times journalists, consumers, neighbors, friends and other interested people. They are on my beta tester list, which grows every day — every time I tell someone what I’m doing, and they say something like “transparency in health care – now that would be a wonderful thing.”

I’ve made some extraordinary connections – perhaps most important, with some people inside the industry who want change.

Among my advisers: Jeff Jarvis (“What Would Google Do?” and www.buzzmachine.com); Jeremy Caplan (director of education for the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism; Lee deBoer, founding partner, Propeller Partners; Carl Lavin, managing editor, MainStreetConnect.

What’s the current status – have you raised any funding, is there a prototype, have any partnerships, developers, designers or other team members been recruited; etc.

I won a $20,000 grant at CUNY, as I noted above. In an interview after the competition, Jeff Jarvis, my lead professor, said: “I’m proud of all the students who took the course and presented today. And Jeanne’s success was well-deserved. It’s a great message to other similarly motivated journalists. Not only are we launching a program as part of the Tow-Knight Center that will lead to the nation’s first Master of Arts in Entrepreneurial Journalism, we’re also offering a Certificate in Entrepreneurial Journalism for professionals looking to find new opportunities amid the profound changes that are disrupting the news industry.”

Then on Feb. 15, I was chosen one of three inaugural winners from more than 100 proposals by the International Women’s Media Foundation in its Women Entrepreneurs in the Global Digital News Frontier grant program.  Key criteria included innovation in delivering the news and a clear business plan for sustainability.

“Promoting women journalists’ professional advancement — in both traditional and new media — is a central tenet of the IWMF’s mission,” said Liza Gross, executive director of the IWMF in a press release announcing the awards. “We look forward to working with these pioneering women entrepreneurs as they launch their exciting digital media startups.”

My beta site has been up since last November at http://clearhealthcosts.com/.

Since January, I have been building my database, using a group of freelance reporters to call New York area providers to get their cash or self-pay prices for a limited list of common procedures. We now have lists of abut 15 procedures, with anywhere from 10 to 30 cash prices, varying by a factor of as much as 10. I am also sourcing big datasets on the Web, while blogging a bit as well.

I think I just found an extremely knowledgeable and capable data partner (I can’t talk much about that at this point).

I’ve hired a freelance Web designer and am re-launching the Web site soon as a Minimum Viable Product, and making great connections and potential alliances. I am going to meet my self-imposed deadline of re-launching in three months.

How will it earn money/be sustained?
Consumer revenue stream: sponsorships, banner advertising, perhaps targeted advertising. Consumer buying guides? The site will be free for people to come and go; no pay model or subscription is envisioned.

Business revenue stream: this portion I understand less well at this point, but I am certain that there will be some business-to-business play. In the next few months I will take the information and the business plan to my potential customers (health-care-related companies, service providers, small businesses, trade unions, nonprofits like the AARP, patient groups) to better understand the business-to-business revenue side – consulting, white papers, analysis and the like are all potentials.
Other potential opportunities: a freemium model, events like conferences.

Market overview, competitive analysis
There’s a lot of medical information on the web. The big gap: price information for the consumer. That’s the gap I’m going to fill.

Four in five Internet users have searched the Web for health care information, often checking on specific diseases and treatments, a Pew Internet Project survey found. Pew also found that 61 percent of Americans regularly use the Web for medical advice, and that 20 percent have posted information about their health conditions at online forums.

A Harris poll found that 175 million Americans go online annually to look for health data, 32 percent of them regularly. Increasingly, they are looking for pricing information, partly as a result of the fact that more people are uninsured or on high-deductible plans, or because employers are pushing costs for premiums and co-pays onto employees.

Here are some web sites in the health space, and their users, in monthly uniques: Qualityhealth, 3.6 million; HealthCentral 1.7 million; Everyday Health 6.4 million; WebMD 15.1 million; patientslikeme.com, 71k.

In the health care costs space, there are a number of Web sites that are working to deliver some pricing information, many of them thoughtful but incomplete or vastly off the mark, for example: Healthcarebluebook.com 20,000 monthly uniques; Zocdoc.com 80k; Pricedoc.com 39k; outofpocket.com, 3k; Newchoicehealth.com, 25k; faircaremd, a total of 786 monthly uniques. (None of these are comprehensive sites.) There are also sites for consumers to shop and compare insurance plans (vimo.com, ehealthinsurance.com).

There are other companies that are not direct competitors, but are in that space: Some big companies use employee-specific information to beat back health costs. www.castlight.com, a California company, just got $60 million in venture capital to do something like that. Verisk, outside of Boston, was just described in Atul Gawande’s New Yorker article about using analysis of large amounts of data (employer source) to beat back costs. www.changehealthcare.com has a different company-service model: fee-for-service for self-insured companies. Qmedtrix, in Portland, Ore., analyzes data on behalf of the insurance industry.

As the health-care marketplace undergoes continued disruption over the next few years, there will be more opportunities, and more reasons for consumers to want this information.

Financial/budget overview
April and May, after my site re-launches, are my target months for selling sponsorships and banner advertising to start to scale. I have been using the Times buyout money to live on, and that is running out, so I am motivated to make clearhealthcosts financially sustainable.

I used to sell advertising at the family newspaper, and I’m pretty good at it. I also intend to be strategic: founding sponsorships for chosen early supporters, for example, instead of remnant advertising.

My running costs are low: $2,500 for reporting so far, and $1,500 for developing the modest web site re-launch. Web hosting, Wufoo subscription, post office box, etc. are all minor.

If you win the challenge, how will you use the $25,000 to help you go further?
Three things, all needed immediately: data analysis to create a more robust service; a deep and thoughtful focus on user experience, building a community from the ground up; a COO or someone similar to help me.

Building a strong, viable product is tops on my list (and also paying the mortgage and my hefty Cobra bill).

Looking forward, my biggest costs are data services (analysis and visualization), where I think I have found that potentially very important partner; reporting and blogging; and the expectation that I will have to move off WordPress and onto Drupal; off WebFaction for hosting and onto some more robust server as I scale.

I am planning to add to the price list of procedures in the New York City area, then move out to other cities.

Final words: How will this investment impact the project?
This is a big problem. Together we can work to solve it. Thank you for your support.

Nine finalists will present their ideas for new ventures at the We Media NYC conference on April 6, 2011. A panel of judges will select two winners – and each will receive $25,000 and access to a network of mentors to help them launch. Fast Cast is one of the finalists. To register for the conference, click here.

FastCast: Mobile Video News
Based in San Francisco, CA
Presented at We Media NYC PitchIt Challenge by Founder and Executive Producer Mariel Myers

Contact:
Mariel Calizo Myers
mariel.myers@fastcastmobile.com
415.680.4321

http://fastcastmobile.com

THE TEAM
Our management team includes two award-winning broadcast news veterans, an engineer with experience at start-ups and Fortune 500 companies, and a former editor at an online journalism start-up.

Mariel Myers

Founder/CEO and Executive Producer Mariel Myers is an Emmy award-winning producer with 14 years experience as a local news producer and video-storyteller. She recently launched a daily, live, interactive TV news and talk show on ABC7/KGO-TV, where she oversees the editorial content and social media interactivity. As Managing Editor of Yahoo’s Digital Media Bureau, she produced original video content for social media, as well as internal and consumer broadcast. For 10 years, she was a news producer at CBS5 in San Francisco, where she won an Emmy for Best Daytime Newscast and the Associated Press, Television and Radio Association Award for Best Webcast. Mariel was also selected for the Knight Digital Media Center’s Multimedia Journalism Fellowship at UC Berkeley and is a graduate of the Asian American Journalists Association Executive Leadership Program.

Alex Wong

Engineer Alex Wong is an independent software consultant with more than 15 years experience. He has helped companies of all sizes, from nascent startups to Fortune 500 corporations, successfully delivering on software projects by providing expertise in development, architecture and management. He has built solutions in everything from large-scale distributed systems to rich internet frontends for clients such as Sun Microsystems, Chiron Corporation, Verizon, Skype, BrightRoll and MaestroConference.

Kaizar Campwala

Kaizar Campwala is a graduate student at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, where he is focused on corporate strategy. He is also adjunct faculty member at the Poynter Institute, researching sustainable models for producing high quality journalism in this data rich, digital era. Kaizar is the former editor of the online startup NewsTrust, where citizens can rate stories for facts, fairness, context and other core journalistic principles. At NewsTrust, Kaizar coordinated editorial activities on the site, managed partnerships with organizations such as the Washington Post, USA Today, and Huffington Post, and oversaw the growth of the community to nearly 20,000 members.

THE IDEA
FastCast delivers a local, personalized, video newscast straight to mobile, capitalizing on the booming mobile user market.

THE PROBLEM AND THE FASTCAST SOLUTION
People need local news to help them live their lives. TV news is often inconvenient and irrelevant, with no control of the delivery or content. People do not have time to wait for a TV newscast and sit through stories of little interest to them. Checking news online is a multi-step process that can be impractical, time-consuming and overwhelming. You have to log on, click in and out of numerous stories, and sort out which stories are reliable and worth your time. The video news found online is often a regurgitation of the TV news broadcast, requiring a lot of effort to find the stories you want. News has to go where the audience is, and there is a huge, growing mobile audience.

FastCast offers an efficient and convenient way to watch a personalized, local newscast anywhere, anytime on your mobile device. With the app, you select topics of interest and touch one button that immediately launches a personalized newscast of short video segments summarizing the top stories. So in 3 minutes, you could get caught up on 12 stories in a variety of topics without a lot of effort. Instead of shifting through layers of information or multiple screens, users get the news headlines they care about in a way that is easy to access and digest.

Professional, multi-media journalists will create the high-quality local news and video to keep you in the know on the go.

What makes FastCast innovative?
Disruptive Distribution: No one is creating personalized, video newscasts exclusively for mobile distribution and consumption on the local level. It could effectively reach diverse groups of people, like students, working parents and business travelers who increasingly rely more on mobile devices to stay informed as well as disenfranchised TV viewers and Millennials who do not watch local news.

Personalized News: FastCast provides people a voice in the news they consume, unlike the one-way flow of information from most TV and online news outlets. It will also include interactivity and social features, allowing for user feedback.

Content: Locally Relevant, Created not Aggregated: FastCast’s content will focus on local news unavailable in a convenient way elsewhere. It would cover topics such as high school and college sports, community news, business, health, tech, education, parenting and local events. No one is making easily digestible, user-friendly, three-minute newscasts with local content. It is challenging to produce properly, from the editorial to the production to the distribution, if you do not have experience creating video news content on a daily basis. We will be using the best practices established over the years in local TV news adapted for the mobile platform.

Scalable: The concept can be executed in a variety of cities. Distribution channels may also include airlines and hotels.

Form and Function: The FastCast content will be different in length and format from local TV news. Producing video news for mobile requires a different presentation to address the unique user experience. On mobile, people usually consume content in short bursts at their convenience instead of sitting around for 30 minutes at a designated time to watch TV news.

What’s the current status?
The FastCast Team is working on the second version of a prototype after receiving feedback on an initial computer demo that mimicked the experience on an iPhone. From the feedback, users liked the distribution, presentation and interactivity, but they wanted even more localized content. We are now developing a second demo for wider distribution and testing, identifying the appropriate local news sources and developing a more efficient news-gathering process.

We are currently bootstrapping the project.

How will it earn money/be sustained?
FastCast will pursue a diversified revenue strategy including video production, local ads and partnerships.

1) Special event services [year one]
Produce FastCast segments delivered through an event app or FastCast app targeting event participants, such as convention attendees.

2) Event promotion [year one]
Create promotional videos for local event organizers for distribution on mobile and linked to mobile check-ins.

3) Local advertising [year two]
Local, personalized mobile ads

4) Partnerships with hotels [year three]
Hotels and other hospitality providers would offer FastCast local newscasts as a premium service to their guests.

5) Partnerships with airlines [year four]
Airline passengers would arrive at their destination and a FastCast newscast for that city would be programmed to automatically download to their mobile device for a quick local news update.

Market overview, competitive analysis
A majority of Americans still get their local news from television, but viewership has dropped dramatically. Nielsen found local TV stations lost 4.1 million viewers in 2009, twice as many as they lost in 2008. According to the Pew Research Center, news viewership was down for the fourth year in a row among network affiliates in all of the major time slots.

Meanwhile, Nielsen estimates one in two Americans will have a smartphone by Christmas of 2011 and also found, on a year-to-year basis, the number of people watching mobile video increased more than 43%, while the amount of time spent doing so was up almost 7%.

Currently in mobile, most news apps are text-based, aggregated content or are smaller versions of TV news websites. Most local TV news outlets have pushed their websites onto the smaller mobile screen with hard-to-find video and require extensive navigation. They fail to produce new or edited content that is geared to how news consumers engage with video content on their mobile devices.

The Open Mobile Video Coalition, along with the broadcast group Mobile Content Venture, are working to broadcast live TV on mobile, essentially simulcasting their broadcast signal. However, similar to live TV, there is no time-shifted viewing or personalization of the local news content.

There are few, professionally produced local video news services online. Most online video news ventures are more national in scope. Amateur local news content is available on sites such as YouTube, but is not comprehensive, well-contextualized, or particularly easy to find.

FastCast will maintain high journalistic standards since professional multi-media journalists would create and oversee the editorial content. Users would get the best of both worlds–personalized and professional news, delivered in a convenient and easy way, to watch whenever and wherever they want.

If you win the challenge, how will you use the $25,000 to help you go further?
Fastcast’s most important assets, a staff with significant experience producing high quality video news content, is already in place and ready to start producing content for the launch city of San Francisco.

Therefore, the $25,000 prize would be used for finishing development of the first versions of our mobile applications for iOS and Android. With this critical piece in place, FastCast can begin producing and distributing our local news product.

How will this investment impact the project?
FastCast aims to make local video news relevant again in people’s lives. We want to help people who are disenchanted by, or otherwise disconnected from, local TV news to reconnect with their communities. For the generation of people who have turned away from local TV news, FastCast is a chance to capture their attention, bring them into the local news fold and engage them with the community they live in, not just the community they socialize with online.

We hope to change how local video news is produced, distributed and consumed, and help build mobile as another platform for constant news and information. We want to demonstrate a sustainable business model for journalism, mobile news and local advertising. An investment from We Media will help jump start this mobile news revolution

Nine finalists will present their ideas for new ventures at the We Media NYC conference on April 6, 2011. A panel of judges will select two winners – and each will receive $25,000 and access to a network of mentors to help them launch. Meridian Stories is one of the finalists. To register for the conference, click here.

Brett Pierce
24 Cunningham Road
Freeport, ME 04032
207.232.0148

- Company URL: www.steelriverproductions.com

Brett Pierce has unique professional expertise and passion which sits at the intersection of two worlds: education and entertainment media. He is an experienced program developer, producer and educator who has spent over 25 years working in media production that aims to address defined educational curricula objectives by engaging audiences through entertainment.

Brett is currently the Co-Executive Producer of Salam Shabab, a TV series (funded by the US Institute of Peace – USIP) for Iraqi youth that showcases youth’s stories, in film and in word, in a competitive environment, with the aim of empowering Iraqi youth to be confident, responsible and participatory citizens. (The series will premiere in April of 2011 in Iraq and a promotional video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9076IjlpVs8)

Brett recently completed four years as the Executive Director of Panwapa, an initiative from Sesame Workshop, the creators of Sesame Street, where Brett spent twenty years of his professional life. Panwapa, designed to inspire and empower young children to become responsible global citizens, was produced as a print, video and web initiative in five languages: Arabic, English, Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish. Prior to his role on Panwapa, Brett served as an Executive Producer on media projects about topics including math, science, public health and conflict-resolution, for youth in countries including China, Macedonia, Indonesia, Poland, Cyprus and Ecuador.

Brett graduated from Kenyon College and holds Master Degrees from both Middlebury College (MA) and Columbia University (Ed.M). Brett lives in Maine with his wife, Kerry Michaels, and two children.

The Idea – Summary
Meridian Stories is a digital media platform that will work at the crossroads of two powerful trends: the rising co-creation of digital content by today’s youth and a vital social issue: education reform. To harness the massive power of digital media to help address education reform, Meridian Stories is designed as a YouTube-like environment, driven by regularly scheduled, global competitions between schools, around short-form storytelling using image, words, film and music. The goal is to help teachers creatively engage students with the curriculum through competitive/collaborative storytelling that capitalizes on the technological and co-creative tools of this generation’s culture.

The Idea – Elaboration
Meridian Stories will create a digital community that offers Middle and High School classrooms (and secondarily, after-school settings) in the US and around the world a wide range of opportunities to participate in story competitions that carry universal resonance and correlate to curricular guidelines.

Every week, Meridian Stories will post a range of new competitive and collaborative opportunities in which classrooms can participate. From an international film competition (90 seconds) around gender identity – what’s it like to be a boy/girl in your culture? — to an intra-national word slam about the aesthetics of the Fibonacci Sequence; from a mural competition about what peace looks like, to a mobile phone competition about 1960’s fashion and politics, as told by parents/grandparents in a three minute podcast. The result is a YouTube-like destination that is framed by socially responsible, reflective and globally engaged content.

Winners are chosen based on a vote by the site’s users and select experts in the field.

Some of the basic architectural pieces informing this idea include:

- Two areas of the site: one for 11 – 14 year olds and one for 15 – 18 year olds.
- New competitions/collaborations are posted every week. Each competition/collaboration can last between 2 and 4 weeks, depending on the nature of the task.
- Each competition has a social media component to it that allows the competing youth to engage in a dialogue with each other while developing their entries.
- Winners are determined by the vote of the site’s audience and by select experts in the field.
- The competitions will follow a variety of local, national and international tournament structures. Some examples include the following:
o International competitions modeled after the World Cup whereby students need to qualify for entry and then advance by rounds to the semis and finals.
o Smaller, more locally-based competitions which serve to train kids, classes and schools in the art of storytelling through film, imagery, poetry/performance and music.
o Collaborative competitions where schools from across the globe are paired together on topics which delve into issues of language, clothing, food, music, local politics or the environment.
- There is a section of the site with tools, templates and practice models for how to develop, storyboard and write a short film; prepare a poetry slam; write a song; or create a poster or photo montage that has impact.
- Finally, there is a non-competitive section where students are regularly invited to create pieces in response to that week’s current events.

As a student entering the site – which can only be done through the auspices of their school, in order to insure quality control – they will have the option to create content, or view and vote on content.

This latter experience – viewing and voting — is a critical part of the Meridian Stories experience. Part of what makes YouTube so phenomenally successful with youth is the idea that it represents a digital shared experience. If there is a popular video on YouTube, everyone wants to see it and everyone wants to talk about it. Meridian Stories seeks to inspire a similar experience…but with an added, participatory feature: the vote. If there is a provocative video about Roma culture, the value of censorship, immigration or wind energy, we want the site’s users to view, vote and then talk about this shared experience.

What Problem is Meridian Stories Solving and how?
The problem is this: How do we get youth, ages 11 – 18, to channel the massive, daily energy that is expended online away from simple extensions of their social lives and toward deeper explorations of their identities and the critical issues that surround them? The digital resources at their disposal to explore personal, communal, global and educational topics are without precedent in the history of education.

John Seeley Brown, Co-Chair, Deloitte Center for the Edge, USC, believes that this plethora of digital media is altering the very objective of education:

“Probably the most important thing for kids growing up today is the love of embracing change. In a world of rapid change, the need to memorize something is a 20th century skill. [But if you can learn] to navigate in a buzz of confusion … then the world is yours. ”

This is a beautifully sweeping statement about how technology and media are creating new living and learning conditions for today’s youth. But are schools teaching them how to navigate through the ‘confusion’?

Generally speaking, …no. Youth is not being guided, on a consistent and sustained basis, in ways to use these inimitable resources toward ends that advance social responsibility, global awareness, communal participation and educational mastery.

Why? Because the generation ahead of them – their educators and parents – don’t know how. Christopher Lehmann, Principal, Science Leadership Academy, Philadelphia, PA, asks: “How can we leverage media in schools? We can stop being driven by fear. ”

Meridian Stories is a potentially vital tool that addresses schools’ fears about embracing media and technology in a non-threatening way that combines the world’s oldest form of literacy – storytelling – with the world’s newest form of literacy: digital media.

What’s the Big Innovation?
Meridian Stories is innovative by providing a unique, common place where both teachers and students can excel. Teachers can apply their curricular and pedagogical expertise inside of the new digital literacies. Students can work in a language and way that is consistent with their generational expectations and cultural norms.

MacArthur Foundation Education Director Connie Yowell, who runs the program for Digital Media and Learning, recently spoke about the importance of intergenerational learning. She talks about how the older generation is vital in communicating questions around ethics, civic engagement and morality to the younger generation while they can educate the older generations about digital media .

Meridian Stories was partially developed as a response to the realization that there aren’t many vehicles out there whereby youth are directed in digital media by adults who are experienced in learning methodologies. This is because the adults don’t have the experience in digital media. But they do have the experience in questions around ‘ethics, civic engagement and morality’, and they do have experience with the power of traditional narrative. With that expertise, they can help students craft their digital skill set to address the issues that will allow them to ‘navigate in a buzz of confusion’. And the primary vehicle is the story…

One of the reasons why The Diary of Anne Frank is such a seminal book in education is because her personal story gives us access to an experience that is otherwise inaccessible. Stories, so often, open the door to understanding

Today’s kids have stories to tell as well. But they want to tell them in a way which is consistent with the tools of their generation. Meridian Stories allows them to do that.

The other critical element that distinguishes this approach is competition. In Salam Shabab, we consistently found that competition can bring out the best in kids. It was the friendly, competitive nature of that program – which challenged Iraqi kids to create short performances and films around select themes, which were voted on by a studio audience of their peers – that inspired such exciting and provocative stories. It is competition that makes events like Science Olympiad, Odyssey of the Mind and the Model UN such deeply memorable experiences for the participants. Competition, when crafted inside of a friendly spirit, can motivate kids to excel and this notion is an integral part of the innovation that drives Meridian Stories.

How Did You Come up with This Idea?
For the past five years, I have been working both as the Executive Director of Sesame Workshop’s Panwapa, and as the Co-Executive Producer of USIP’s Salam Shabab

I thought that these two uncommon experiences, taken together, might yield a fresh perspective on learning and media. I set out to excavate the key successes in each of these enterprises and ended up with this list of elements that I believe are critical to educational success:
- Educating inside of a global perspective;
- Integrating digital tools on a consistent basis;
- Utilizing narrative structures as a basis for exploration, connection and engagement; and
- Valuing competition as an educational catalyst, when used responsibly.

Meridian Stories is the idea that resulted from mixing these elements together.

Can I Pull This Off?
I have extensive skills and experience in four areas that are critical to the success of Meridian Stories:
1. Hands-on understanding of schools and the classroom – Trained as an educator, I taught high school for three years and continue to teach college courses around Media and Social Change (Fordham University, Colby College, University of Southern Maine and Maine Media Workshops)
2. Global media applied for educational purposes – I have supervised creative and curricular development of television series and websites around the world for over 20 years.
3. Outcomes-oriented development and production – All of the projects on which I work have built-in formative and summative components that require setting clear and measureable objectives.
4. Team management – With budgets ranging from $500,000 to $5,000,000, I have led projects with teams of thirty or more.

What’s the Current Status?
Meridian Stories is still in the formative stages. The encouragement I have gotten from being a Finalist in the WeMedia Pitch It! Competition has been an important step which has allowed me to take this idea out to my colleagues to get their input, as well as explore their desire for further involvement. The project needs partners that can help with schools distribution, curriculum development, digital design and business planning. To date, I have begun discussions with:

o Joan Ganz Cooney Center (NYC) – Advancing Children’s Learning in a Digital Age
o The Telling Room (Portland, ME) – The Place Where Stories Grow
o Maine International Center for Digital Learning (Portland, ME)
o Bowdoin College (Brunswick, ME)
o Simmons School of Management (Boston, MA)

In addition, my network includes exciting and innovative players at Sesame Workshop, the Games for Change community, and the US Institute of Peace (USIP), as well as international educators and producers in countries that include Mexico, Iraq, Jordan, the UK, Canada, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Jamaica and Macedonia.

I am also beginning to flesh out a two year business plan which will broadly outline the objectives, processes, and costs/revenues that I can conservatively expect during that period.

How will it earn money/be sustained?
Meridian Stories will be a non-profit 501(c)(3) whose aim is to fully sustain operations through revenue generation after two years.

Primary Income Source – Meridian Stories is designed as a subscription-based service. Schools, school districts or after-school groups (YMCA, Boys and Girls Clubs, etc.) can subscribe on annual basis, which will provide them with access to all of the competitions and training tools. Or, individual classrooms can pay a fee to enter a select competition.

Secondary Income Source – Meridian Stories will sell curricular packages that would be comprised of the user-generated content from our competitions.

Imagine taking the best entries about, say, ‘immigration,’ and placing them together to form a youth-inspired, globally vetted, visual Wikipedia of what the idea of ‘immigration’ means. Those select entries could include stories form relocated refugees, anti-immigration advocates, illegal immigrants and second generation immigrants. Collectively, they will comprise a fascinating unit that reflects a mosaic of subjective truths about a very complex issue. In short, a primary source, thirty minute collection of youth-generated stories on immigration that allows students visceral access to a mind-boggling and multi-faceted issue – content that is not available to teachers from anywhere.
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Tertiary Source of Income – Advertising and Sponsorship.
Advertising: By the end of two years, Meridian Stories would evolve into a destination site in its own right. The concept is designed to perpetually build and showcase content assets. The select display of those assets will make Meridian Stories a destination site for non-subscribers. For example, the home page will serve as a 1) digital gallery for youth to go to see the best work; 2) place to vote on the current submissions; and 3) a site to hear what youth from around the world are saying/seeing/singing about the planet’s current events.

Sponsorship: We would invite companies to sponsor competitions around topics that promote their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) objectives.

Market Overview, Competitive Analysis
There are two kinds of general players in this arena. The first includes organizations that sponsor annual one-off media competitions. They include Techsoup’s Digital Storytelling Event; the Plural + Youth Video Festival; and UNICEF’s One Minute Jrs, which asks kids to create sixty second films as part of a yearly festival. They are annual contests that find an audience in the sponsor’s cluster of partner organizations and field offices. Often the process is that kids get trained; they create and produce; they see their videos on the web; they lose or they win.

Meridian Stories is more comprehensive because it views substantive media creation as a sustained and normative activity. It is not a one-off: a special event. It is, in fact, a new literacy that needs regular nurturing, guidance and analysis.

The second category is significantly broader in its overlap with Meridian Stories. It includes players that are heavily invested in the successful marriage of digital technology and education. They include content providers like iEARN, Brainpop, coolmathgames.com and Curriki; and digital platform providers like ePALS and Gaggle. Of all of those, iEARN is the closest to Meridian Stories. iEARN’s focus is on the use of technology to connect schools globally, offering registered schools access to a huge swath of cross-cultural projects in which they can become involved. So, for example, participating schools from Belgium, Peru, the US and Pakistan can connect around a project that involves creating a booklet about local heroes, real and mythical.

Meridian Stories is both different and complementary to these organizations. In fact, Meridian Stories might approach a few as partners to help access the school markets in which they already have a significant presence.

Financial/Budget Overview
The two year plan for Meridian Stories involves a focus on four main areas:

- Curriculum development
- Pilot projects
- Digital platform research and development
- Domestic and global financial/distribution partnerships

Curriculum Development
The team would begin by investigating the organizations that use storytelling as an effective educational vehicle. We would work with teachers (who would become part of an Advisory Group) – in the US and overseas — to develop the site’s objectives, as well as specific curricular thru-lines, around which we would develop a range of competitions.

We would work with artists in the fields of film, video, language arts, the visual arts and music (who would also become part of an Advisory Board) to develop tool kits for teachers and students, as well as explore creative approaches to their respective medium.

School Pilots
The most critical time would be spent testing out several strains of competitions (intra-national, international, film only, poetry only, etc.) in select schools around the world.

Digital Platform Research and Development
Technical specifications required to support this idea, as well as the start-up and on-going costs, need to be determined. However, I am optimistic that the costs to develop this are not overwhelming because 80% of the content will be crafted by the users. But, having said that, I strongly believe in the power of design and will fight hard to make Meridian Stories beautiful and efficient

Domestic and Global Financial/Distribution Partnerships
For Meridian Stories to succeed, teachers need to know about it. We will need partners to promote it; to incorporate it into their own programs; and/or to sponsor its use in a country or language.

This could involve the Department of Education or the US Institute of Peace, in connection with their projects in the Middle East We could approach ePALS, which is in over 500,000 classrooms in over 200 countries, or begin a dialogue with a UN agency like UNICEF or UNESCO.

To be successful and sustainable, Meridian Stories will need partnerships that can offer both marketing and financial support. Creating a viable network for that support will be one of the key objectives for this two year period.

I am currently estimating the annual costs at between $200,000 – $300,000, for the first two years. I will apply to foundations and grant-making organizations for these start-up costs, after which the goal is to be self-sustaining.

If I win the Challenge, how will I use the $25,000 to help me further?
The $25,000 will help me do all of the above…but in miniature. The general breakdown is as follows:

o 10K – Website BETA development and production.
o 3K – Content and Curriculum Development
o 2K – Legal and Misc. Business Costs
o 5K – Business Development, Marketing, Partnerships and Grant Writing
o 5K – Run the pilot and assess the results

This money will allow Meridian Stories to a) assemble a team; b) assemble an Advisory Board; C) look for funders, sponsors and partners; and d) Run a pilot program. The basic assumptions for the pilot are as follows:

o Focus on High School only and on one curricular area: Language Arts.
o Create the content for a minimum of four competitions, which will include both domestic and international schools.
o Design objectives and assessment tools.
o Run the competitions in the Fall of 2011.

Final Words
Meridian Stories is a big idea. It is premised on taking the creative, digital energy of kids and providing them with a thoughtfully scaffolded, global framework to release that energy. That’s pretty big and I fully recognize that. There is a lot I have to learn, understand and develop in order to bring the idea to a reasonable and practical place, with aspiring, but reachable (and measureable) objectives. But ‘big’ often means complicated and enigmatic, and Meridian Stories isn’t that kind of ‘big’. I’d like to believe that this is ‘realistic big’.

This investment, very simply, will allow this big idea to take flight.

Nine finalists will present their ideas for new ventures at the We Media NYC conference on April 6, 2011. A panel of judges will select two winners – and each will receive $25,000 and access to a network of mentors to help them launch. Stable Renters is one of the finalists. To register for the conference, click here.

Ben Sacks – Founder & CEO
Since graduating from Hampshire College in 2007, I have worked at publically oriented, non-profit cultural institutions. I am currently a fundraiser for the Center for Jewish History in NYC, which houses one of the country’s most sophisticated bibliographic records management systems, disseminating records and digital images of more than 100 million documents. Every day, I work to broaden public access to valuable information in these holdings for users of all kinds, and to collate and curate them appropriately for use by a wider audience. Through Stable Renters, I have forged connections with tenant advocacy organizations and community-based non-profits throughout New York City, and have gained access to a web of allied groups in cities across the country.

The idea – what is it?
Stable Renters will assemble a profile and score for every rental property and owner based on a history of violations, lawsuits, pending charges, bedbugs, ceiling leaks and more. With a score for each property – and a separate score for each landlord and management company that is based on an average of the properties they run – renters will be empowered to make assertive decisions when seeking a home, allowing market forces of supply and demand to reduce the rent that delinquent owners are able to charge, and equalize the accountability mechanisms used on tenants and landlords.

What problem is it solving?
Today’s landlords are not held as accountable as their tenants, a problem illustrated by the punishments levied in response to delinquency. A tenant who is sued for violating a lease must fix the problem and most likely face eviction. Tenant-screening agencies then sell lists of these names going back 7 years to real estate brokers and landlords nationwide, making it difficult for once-evicted renters to find housing in the future.

While this longstanding mechanism weeds out bad tenants, there is little to shield well-meaning renters from the landlords with government-verified histories of delinquency. Landlords that are sued for violating a lease or housing code must fix the problem and incur a fine. But unlike a tenant’s eviction, a landlord’s fine is a punishment that stops upon payment. According to the NYC Citywide Taskforce on Housing Court, these fines are often waved and are rarely levied frequently or drastically enough to deter the repeat behavior of those landlords bent on gaming the system. The situation has allowed a financial incentive to fester that encourages landlords to refuse services if it saves them money. Because most tenants in housing court cannot afford attorneys, existing legal avenues that privilege those with professional representation are insufficient for protecting tenants from irresponsible landlords.

Government data about landlord behavior is collected and made public by several agencies in New York City. Similar data is available in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle, and Stable Renters is working to secure its availability in other cities in the U.S. But because these are disparately connected data sources that rarely communicate amongst themselves, few renters take advantage of the opportunity to distinguish the good landlords from the bad, and use their power as a consumer the way they are able in other monetary transactions.

How is your idea a useful solution to the problem?
Stable Renters will bring all this data under one roof and compile a score that reflects a landlord’s quality of service. The tool will retrieve data on housing violations, harassment lawsuits, bed bugs, landlord identity and other issues from publicly accessible government databases and curate them in a map-based interface. Users will be able to search by address, landlord name or management company to see scores for each as well as the evidence these scores are based on. They may also post comments about their own experiences living in a particular location. If apartment-seekers see that a building is known to have bed bugs, or its landlord consistently denies its residents hot water, or its management company has a bad reputation, they are likely to choose another equally priced apartment with similar amenities.

Stable Renters will produce a printable report that details all the available data on a given address, or on the portfolio of a landlord or management company. The reports will mimic the look and purpose of credit reports that are often required of tenants during the rental process, and will offer renters the power of a legitimate document with professional branding that gives affirmation to their own experiences. Reports could be used in landlord-tenant disputes either in or out of court, and will generally act as the physical manifestation of the data seen online.

Users will be allowed to privately associate themselves with a particular address, post information and receive email updates detailing when and why their building’s score changes. Stable Renters will keep tenants up to date on their building’s conditions, alert them when ownership changes hands, and facilitate communication between users associated with the same address or landlord, allowing them to stay involved with organizing efforts in their own residence and in their landlord’s other properties.

Stable Renters scores will eliminate the financial incentive encouraging landlords to refuse necessary services, and bring market forces to the industry in a way never done before. Landlords will have to think twice before using the not uncommon tactic of locking tenants out of their rent regulated apartments in an effort to pressure them to permanently vacate the premises and allow the rent to rise. This and other infractions will affect their score and future ability to rent at the market price. For too long, landlord quality has been a missing factor in a renter’s choice of a home. Stable Renters will simply add this feature to the slew other thoughts in a renter’s decision. While Stable Renters will not make it easier for tenants to win housing court cases, it will give far more weight to the cases that do exist.

What’s the big innovation?
Stable Renters exemplifies a for-profit activism that responds accurately to a widespread problem in a way no existing tool does today. It is able to mimic the service model of a traditional tenant-screening agency while refining its revenue stream to avoid charging its primary consumers.

Stable Renters works to best-fit information for social profit, and is ahead of the curve in its vision to open up data for the public and maximize its value. While, plotting massive amounts of data on a map is no new invention, the use and synthesis of this data is unprecedented. The NYC BigApps Challenge offers money to engineers that develop software for the public good using specific government-generated datasets. But it did not include housing violations, complaints, or bedbugs as eligible possibilities.

Stable Renters also redefines the notion of a media outlet and may transform journalism in new ways. For too long, citizens would consult their favorite newspapers, TV channels, radio frequencies, and now these organizations’ websites, for information concerning pertinent issues of the day. Stable Renters empowers media consumers to conduct research themselves, serving as their own investigative reporters and sending the information on to neighbors and friends. In this sense, the journalistic trend of tailoring reporting to niche audiences and allowing them greater choice in the news they consume may reach ever higher levels with Stable Renters, which allows consumers to produce their own answers to the questions they ask on their own. The first newspapers began as scrolls transported between small communities that would each add their knowledge of current affairs to be passed on to the next. In an age in which technology has raised the quantity of news while sacrificing its quality, Stable Renters may serve as a model for technology to provide a helpful return to the basics.

And of course queries made to Stable Renters could form the basis of countless articles from traditional news organizations as well. Reporting on a real estate developer could go beyond mentioning the company’s name and citing previous articles for evidence of a history of wrongdoing. Indeed, Stable Renters will allow journalists to report that X agency has neglected the terms of 40% of its leases, has let 30% of its properties fester with infestations of insects, mold and rodents over the last decade, and appears to have raised the rent each year in spite of these persisting conditions. This will change the nature of reporting, adding to the stories produced by interviews with victims, officials and perpetrators, to provide evidence for why these injustices continue to occur.

Stable Renters is also a new style of website. The Internet has seen thousands of websites that allow users to post information that gradually increases their value as a public resource. Craigslist and Facebook are examples that rely entirely on their users for content. Yelp does too, and adds only minimal information such as each business’s contact information, failing to even integrate into each profile the health inspection ratings that must be displayed on the doors of New York’s restaurants. The opposite kind of website, destination sites, project information at visitors rather than accepting it from them. White Pages is a good example, as are hundreds of news outlets, some of which allow very limited, and often censored, commentary. But with all this mix of information flowing back and forth, rarely do we see a site that combines the qualitative user commentary of blogs, which Stable Renters will emphasize, with the quantitative statistics that Stable Renters prides itself on. Stable Renters will provide its users with valuable information they did not create on their own, while hosting a forum for each to participate in the dissemination of more. A two-way interactive model that combines host-generated data with user-generated experience is what the Internet 2.0 should really be about. It could revolutionize the way local, state and federal governments assess their constituents’ most pressing needs and gauge the effectiveness of their own operations. In reality, we all contribute to generating government data when we call a housing inspector or simply pay rent on time. Stable Renters brings this process forward a few decades into a new era of public information management. It is quite fitting, then, that the Great Recession brought on a rise of the nation’s rental market during a time of unprecedented movement towards open data practices by governments across the country.

How did you come up with the idea?
The impetus for Stable Renters was my own experience in the rental market. Searching for new housing in New York City in the summer of 2008, I was required to submit a credit report and to pay for an extensive background check by a real estate broker. When I asked to meet the landlord, who was the only other resident in the two-unit building, my request was denied on the ground that it was “highly irregular.”

At the time, I didn’t expect a simple meeting with the landlord to tell me how many violations had been placed on the property or whether he or she had been sued for harassment in the last 7 years. I just wanted to meet the person whose rules I would inevitably have to abide by, whose music I would no doubt hear, and whose personality I would have to navigate. In the end, I took the apartment. And my landlord’s overall sensibility combined with the gifts of fresh tomatoes and basil from the backyard garden make her the best landlord I could hope for. If I ever decide to leave, I will be faced with the dilemma of finding an apartment managed as responsibly as this one, already a deterrent to my departure.

In the conversation with the broker, I felt the inequality of the arrangement, and considered asking her for the landlord’s credit score. I felt it would be a (poetically) justified request and should be granted. After all, I didn’t want to move into a building that was likely to be foreclosed upon. But then I realized I wouldn’t know how to interpret the credit report; and even if I had known, it still wouldn’t assuage my fears of living in close quarters with a crazy person. Stable Renters responds to my own personal need. It provides the most basic information regarding legal actions taken against a landlord’s irresponsibility as well as the user experiences gained from living under their roof in a readable way for public citizens lacking any formal knowledge of tenant-landlord law.

Can you pull this off? What background, skills, network are you bringing to the project?
In my current position as Development Manager for Institutional Projects at the Center for Jewish History, my job is spilt between two areas. I am constantly selling new projects and ideas to potential funders, and have raised more than 20% of the institution’s operating budget in each of my 3 years of employment. I also work every day to tailor the style of collections access that we offer to the constantly changing needs of a diversifying public. This has included studying the feasibility of virtually recreating the largest Jewish library in Europe prior to the Holocaust y digitizing thousands of long-ignored book volumes, and making recommendations to improve the institution’s massively complex database in order to provide better usage statistics and a more accessible patron experience; both natural predecessors to my work with Stable Renters.

As a student at Hampshire College, I began a campaign to rebuild a popular community space that was to be demolished due to disrepair. The work included uniting disconnected and disinterested departments and inviting outside expertise to weigh in on the controversial subject, for which I received the College’s Ingenuity Award for bureaucratic navigation. In 2010, the project was finally approved, and a student-led $250,000 capital campaign was completed. Due to my role in this and other projects, I was recently accepted into StartingBloc’s New York Institute for Social Innovation, a life-long fellowship in creative leadership and entrepreneurial training.

In addition to my own qualifications, Stable Renters is currently working with Magnificent Fang, a web design team with expertise in digital curation, front-end development, branding, digital/viral marketing, illustration, graphic design, and photography. Among Magnificent Fang’s past works is a robust social network for Fountain House, an organization working with college-aged individuals suffering from a variety of mental illnesses.

What’s the current status – have you raised any funding, is there a prototype, have any partnerships, developers, designers or other team members been recruited?
Stable Renters is in the ideal stage to receive $25,000 in seed funding. With the help of Magnificent Fang, a beta site is currently in production and will be up and running by the end of May 2011. This will allow the site’s broad functionality to develop, will enable more accurate cost and revenue projections, and will position the project to take the next leap in soliciting additional funding, engaging clients to its API subscription and premium services, and expanding with a full scale marketing strategy.

Stable Renters has connected with several organizations – Tenants and Neighbors, Right to the City, and Chhaya Community Development Corporation – that have shown support for the site and signaled they would recommend it to their patrons. Staff members of NYU’s Furman Center on Real Estate and Urban Policy have expressed interest in Stable Renters advanced premium services as described in the revenue section.

Along with the money from the We Media Pitchit Challenge, already committed funds will cover back-end web development, legal fees, and web/server hosting, bringing the beta site to its fully functional level and enabling the project to solicit more substantial investment.

The Stable Renters Advisory Board consists of the following members:

Emily Baillieul, Director of Online Marketing at Goby Technologies

Katie Goldstein, Coordinator of Outreach and Leadership Development at Tenants & Neighbors, a tenant-organizing center in New York State

Michael Horn, Of Counsel at Buhler Duggal Henry & Pak LLP, a boutique law firm handling emerging businesses and startups

Justin Kang, Regional Director at the Unreasonable Institute, an international accelerator and investor in high-impact entrepreneurs

Jasmine Stine, Analyst at Accelerating Possibilities, an angel investment community

How will it earn money/be sustained?
Stable Renters will be sustained through a variety of revenue sources:

• Advertisements will appear on the destination site;
• Localized advertisements will be imbedded in email updates sent to users interested in the changing score and conditions of a particular address;
• A section will host advertisements for apartment rentals made by landlords, real estate brokers and other supporting entities;
• A subscription-based API will sell the site’s functionality to other rental advertising hubs; and
• A Premium version of the site will allow greater back-end manipulation for journalists and urban researchers seeking broader housing statistics on a particular geographic environment

Market overview, competitive analysis
According to the American Community Survey, nearly 900,000 people found new housing in New York City in 2009, or about 11% of the city’s population. Most of New York City’s residents either rent from a landlord or live in a building with a management company tasked with maintaining the building’s condition. All of these people are possible patrons for Stable Renters, whether as users of the destination site when considering a new home, or by receiving email updates on the conditions of their building and its score.

No tool exists that tells renters about the experience they might have living under a landlord and in their apartment. Other sites described below offer landlords and brokers a place to advertise apartment rentals. One aim of Stable Renters will be to emerge as a magnet for their advertisers, who will follow the renting public as it learns the benefit of knowing an apartment’s score.

While government databases currently provide the public with the information Stable Renters will disseminate, they do not present a competitive threat. Their data is spread thinly across several sources with no central clearinghouse to aggregate it. These websites are not user-friendly, and often provide loads of information that is typically meaningless to the average citizen, such as the census tract that a building stands on, or the city’s “internal classification” system, which marks Class O as “heretofore erected existing class b” (don’t ask what that means).

Other proprietary sites are easier to comprehend, but either target brokers and developers (www.propertyshark.com) with an area’s sales history and resale value – less than helpful for renters – or they target the bulk of renters (www.streeteasy.com) with little more than apartment listings that have yet to move beyond the number of bedrooms and bathrooms in each apartment’s profile. This does not help for tackling the behavior of landlords themselves, and will make it easier for Stable Renters to compete with by providing added benefit.

The NYC Public Advocate’s office created a site that shows some basic data about the worst kept 350 or so properties in the city. But his service doesn’t help the majority of renters. Those who live in these buildings are well aware of at least some of the problems (as they have complained hundreds of times to the city), and the rest of New Yorkers would pay far more attention if the list broadened its scope to include their (all of New York City’s) addresses too. Hence, in its effort to publicize the actions of only the city’s worst landlords, the Public Advocate’s office has rendered the site useless to most of its residents. Moreover, due to the local nature of New York City government, this site is unlikely to move beyond the city limits and into urban centers across the country that also provide this data.

Renters need tools tailored specifically to their needs. They need a simple yet powerful system that can handle lots of data and can show both buildings they should like, and others to stay away from. Stable Renters will be a well-curated and flashy tool enabling dummies and techies alike to judge the accountability of every landlord in the city.

No form of social network exists that connects rental communities for organizing purposes. Keeping tenants engaged with their building politics is an easy thing to do with a small amount of information, and is a highly effective tool for organizing within a building. Most tenants won’t check government databases for new violations, complaints, inspections, and charges, as well as changes in ownership, management, and zoning, all of which affect them directly. But with updates and alerts about these issues, tenants will not only become more knowledgeable about their own living conditions, but may increase the communication they have with their neighbors, unifying around their own well-being within their buildings, and educating their communities affected nearby.

If you win the challenge, how will you use the $25,000 to help you go further?
Stable Renters will devote this money towards full-scale development, legal fees and server space. By the time Stable Renters has spent this and the additional money raised as a result of the award, the project will be up and running, receiving its first revenue dollars, and will be in an adequate position to raise further investment.

Stable Renters is in the ideal position to accomplish exactly what $25,000 in seed funding is designed to do: get to the next level.

Nine finalists will present their ideas for new ventures at the We Media NYC conference on April 6, 2011. A panel of judges will select two winners – and each will receive $25,000 and access to a network of mentors to help them launch. Longshot Media is one of the finalists. To register for the conference, click here.

http://www.longshotmag.com
http://one.longshotmag.com

Sarah Rich – Founder and Executive Editor
Sarah Rich is writer, editor and new media entrepreneur. She is a co-founder and editor of the Knight-Batten award winning Longshot Magazine and curator of the international conversation series, Foodprint Project.

Sarah is a former senior editor at Dwell and former managing editor of Worldchanging, the award-winning online publication focused on solutions for a sustainable future, where she co-authored and edited the bestselling book, Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century (Abrams, 2006). She is also the founding managing editor and current senior editor of Inhabitat, one of the most widely read websites on sustainable design and architecture.

Sarah received her BA from Stanford University in Cultural and Social Anthropology and began her professional life in the world of food. She worked as a food justice community advocate, a television production assistant for the Food Network, and a chef at the Berkeley Art Museum café. She is a founding editor of Civil Eats, a nationally-recognized website about farm and food policy, and writes a regular column about urban farming for Edible San Francisco.

Her work has been published in Wired, Gourmet, BusinessWeek, The Globe & Mail, Huffington Post, Creative Review, The Bold Italic and elsewhere. She has lectured in Brazil, India, the United Arab Emirates, and throughout North America, and has been a new media and sustainability expert commentator on NPR, BBC World Service, and Current TV. She serves on the board of directors for Project H, a non-profit organization working to promote humanitarian design, and Ambidextrous, the quarterly journal of the Stanford University Design School.

Mat Honan and Alexis Madrigal are the other two founders and executive editors of Longshot Magazine. Mat Honan is a contributing editor to Wired Magazine and Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic.

The idea – what is it?
Longshot Media is a hybrid media company that harnesses the tools of the Web and social media to create a print magazine. Longshot Media manages interactive, content-driven online campaigns to gather compelling stories, both written and visual, from a community—be it the residents of a single city, the survivors of a world-changing event, or a consumer market with a shared affinity. Then our team transforms that content into a visually stunning, smartly edited magazine, produced using print-on-demand technology.

The business case for the idea. What problem is it solving?
Speculation about the future of media, both in print and online, forms a constant refrain in today’s cultural discourse. We’re long on problems and short on solutions, and there’s far more talk than action as we try to find that magic bullet.

Longshot is a platform for action, experimentation and discovery at a time when the future of media is an open question. It is a low-risk, high-return method for catalyzing publishers, journalists, corporations and the public to find out what works, and create a high-quality, marketable media product in the process. While Longshot is not designed to be the magic bullet, it is a problem-solving tool in itself—a means of constructive exploration for an industry at a crossroads.

How is your idea a useful solution to the problem?
In a sense, Longshot is solving the problem of media paralysis, bringing a collaborative, active, open and nimble editorial engine to an industry that is stymied by legacy practices and daunted by unfamiliar tools. It is also a powerful engagement tool, inviting more smart, creative minds to take up the challenge of shaping the media future.

What’s the big innovation?
Unlike other “new media” experiments, Longshot is unique in that it does not reject “old media” but finds ways to draw the relevant and valuable aspects of the print magazine industry into a new model that revolves around cutting-edge digital tools. By hybridizing old and new, we create a spirit of inclusion that inspires people on both sides of the digital divide.

The other innovation is simply the speed, agility and flexibility of the process. With a 48-hour time constraint and a rotating staff of highly qualified editors and designers, Longshot is able to produce award-winning magazines with a profoundly low investment of time and money compared to traditional publishing. This is what makes radical experimentation possible, and also enables us to create ultra-current content.

The unique added benefit here is that while the active process of magazine creation is rapid and limited, the experience itself is a great driver of community engagement. For any company, from Nike to Hearst to a small start-up looking to build their market base, Longshot is a dynamic way to rally people around a participatory experience for a brief, exciting moment, and in doing so, naturally create a lasting affinity for the brand or company that made the project possible. Community engagement through social networks before, during, and perhaps most importantly after participating in a Longshot magazine event is above average and sustained.

How did you come up with the idea?
The idea for Longshot emerged out of a conversation about the future of journalism and the potential for print-on-demand production to change the nature of publishing.

Can you pull this off? What background, skills, network are you bringing to the project?
We have produced two successful issues and are in advanced talks about another iteration, this time with a creative partner and corporate sponsorship. Our first issue generated tremendous publicity and broke sales records for our publisher (MagCloud) within two days of its release. It also won the Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism 2010.

David Carr of the New York Times called it “a remarkable artifact, a testament to the proposition that even the most wired cohort of journalists in the country retains a fetish for the printed product.”

MediaBistro called it “a triumph of digital technology and creativity over the bloated and outdated modes of print publishing.”

What’s the current status?
We have not raised any funding outside of the small amount of revenue we have pulled in on sales of the first who issues. We have two prototypes, the more recent of which can be purchased as a print or digital edition at MagCloud and can be seen in part at http://one.longshotmag.com.

Our creative partners and collaborators are numerous and hail from the top magazines and online publishing ventures in the country, including Wired, GOOD, The Atlantic, New York Times, The New Yorker, Dwell, PBS, and countless others.

How will it earn money/be sustained?
Depending on the partners and communities with whom we work, our revenue models will vary. For commercial partners, the magazine can be supported through a flat fee for service or a fee paired with a scaling payment in accordance with the number of issues sold. For partners in the start-up or non-profit arenas, a sponsor can be sought to underwrite the cost of production or a micro-funding or fundraising model can support production, supplemented by sales of the magazine itself.

Market overview, competitive analysis
Some of the best examples of media properties producing community-generated, curated content include Pictory and Food52, which present photography and recipes, and both use the Web as their medium. Everywhere Magazine and the defunct JPG Magazine are both examples of print magazines that utilize crowdsourced content. To our knowledge, no model exists that is similar to the Longshot Media model. We are unique in that we hybridize digital and print platforms, taking the best of both and making something unprecedented through the combination of the two. We are also uniquely equipped, through our understanding and reach within the social media ecosystem, to open access points that generate diverse, intelligent, high-quality content. Finally, our editorial approach is broadly cultural and our team us multi-disciplinary, meaning we can produce magazines on a range of topics and in various geographic regions with a consistently high level of integrity.

Financial/budget overview
In order to build a consistent foundation for Longshot Media, we would be looking to invest in the development of a third issue that would set the stage for ongoing editions that focus on different themes and include different communities within a consistent brand framework. We would also build out a Longshot Media website that presents the work and services of the business. The initial $25,000 breaks down fairly simply for this:
• $10K to design, identity development, page templates, web development
• $6-8K for editorial development, content distribution planning
• Remaining funds for the printing of a run of copies that could be utilized to market the magazine, rather than relying entirely upon individual print-on-demand sales. At approximately $10 per issue (without a markup), we could print 750-1000 copies of the magazine to use as a launchpad for getting the magazine into the market.

If you win the challenge, how will you use the $25,000 to help you go further?
See above for details on budget. The initial investment would permit us to invest some time and intention into the development of design and editorial vision that could carry us through as a consistent platform on which to experiment with varying content types, community makeups, and marketing strategies.

Final words: How will this investment impact the project?
This investment would enable us to turn Longshot Media from a creative side project into a viable startup business, and to pursue some of the longterm visions for publication development that have been in our minds but dormant while we continue to support ourselves through other journalistic means. This would enable Longshot to become an ongoing, steady engine for exploring the future of media.

Nine finalists will present their ideas for new ventures at the We Media NYC conference on April 6, 2011. A panel of judges will select two winners – and each will receive $25,000 and access to a network of mentors to help them launch. Neighborhood Pages is one of the finalists. To register for the conference, click here.

Key contacts:

Susan Mernit, Founder, susan@oaklandlocal.com

Maiki Interi, Developer, maiki@oaklandlocal.com

Kwan Booth, Community lead, kwan@oaklandlocal.com

URLS:

(prototype: Oakland Local, http://oaklandlocal.com)

concept: House of Local: http://www.houseoflocal.org/2011/03/22/neighborhood-p…l-site-succeed/

FOUNDING TEAM:

Susan Mernit, Founder, Oakland Local, also Circuit Rider, Knight Community Information Challenge, Core facilitator, media entrepreneurship programs, Knight Digital Media Center/ Annenberg School of Journalism/USC, Los Angeles, CA.

maiki interi, lead developer, Oakland Local/House of Local, principal, interi.org, The developer of Oakland Local and lead tech for numerous other civic media community sites around the country. maiki interi is both a skilled drupal developer and a tech innovator with a strong interest in, and experience with, scalable back end systems and how they can be built with open source CMS tools.

Kwan Booth, Co-founder, Oakland Local, lead, House of Local. Kwan is a journalist, media consultant and winner of a 2010 Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi award. He has held editorial positions at organizations including Broadband Network 3, NotforTourists.com and 10best.com. He has led workshops on online media strategy, journalism diversity and creative writing for organizations including the Knight Digital Media Center, Journalism That Matters, the Center for the Integration and Improvement of Journalism and Netsquared.

What’s the elevator Pitch?

Want to build a hyper-local news & community site without reinventing the wheel? Neighborhood Pages is a fast, affordable solution to get your site up and running—and get the training and support that will accelerate your success. Already have a local news & community site? Join us for training, resources, & a network.

Executive summary: Neighborhood Pages

What problem is it solving?

As newspapers and print media continue implode, the need and interest in local coverage for critical issues and events continues to expand. Driven by journalistic layoffs, a new understanding by civic organizations of the value of community engagement to economic health and even job development, and a perceived lack of barriers to entry in launching news sites, more and more community organizations and individuals are getting into local news—but making them work financially is very challenging and many go under by year 2.

Sadly, many of the challenges these individual sites around the country face are highly repetitive and predictable—difficulties in choosing and maintain a tech platform, a lack of business acumen in budgeting for sustainability & planning revenue models, inexperience in operating a community news site. In face, given the high bar that continuing to publish seems to entail for independent local news & community sites, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine that in many areas of the country so-called independent local news could actually become a monopoly run by big corporate entities such as AOL/ Huffington Post Media Group’s Patch, which has launched 800 local sites in its first 15 months of operation.

But is this what we want the standard for local news & community media to be? Towns and neighborhoods whose coverage is provided by staffers all hired by one centralized corporate entity whose priorities could change tomorrow?

Oh, please!

Speaking truth to power and making a variety of local voices heard both seem antithetical to such a monolithic approach. And yet, if we don’t find better ways to launch and maintain local news projects, these new corporate entities will be our only default choice.



How is your idea a useful solution to the problem?

Neighborhood Pages gives folks who want to build, launch, and operate a hyper-local news site a new, easy way to not only launch and maintain a web site, but an effective means to get hands-on training and support in making their project successful. By offering pre-configured custom software installs and high-quality affordable tech support for hyper-local news sites, we address some of the biggest problems in getting these projects started. Even more critically, our network membership and pricing model ensures that site operates have access to tested online learning modules, webinars, and learning circles on critical aspects of site operation, assessment and sustainability that can reduce problems and accelerate their success.

By providing some pre-configured models for local news and community sites, along with reliable, quality site maintenance and support, we address and remove a major pain point for many would-be community site operators around the country, who lack both the technical knowledge and the contacts to make the best choices around building their sites.

By combining the use of open-source technology with quality development and support resources, we streamline what for many has been a very difficult process.

Even better, the training workshops, materials and practitioners’ network we plan to offer gives site operators access to critical things they have to know to be successful. The array of online learning tools, virtual courses, individualized consultations and circles of interest we will offer, all based on what we have learned and taught over the past 3 years, will help thousands of independent local news and community sites achieve success.

Topics such as

• Setting up the workflow for news assignment, production and publishing

• Understanding how to manage ROI using Google Analytics

• Using social marketing for engagement and promotion, and

• Evaluating revenue strategies: where’s the low-hanging fruit?

Will help site operators improve what they are doing in a way that is not currently possible today.

What’s the big innovation?

The big innovation in Neighborhood Pages is that we have developed the means to easily and inexpensively build and launch open-source hyper-local news sites, and we’re experienced enough as site operators and consultants to provide a critical missing link—the resources and knowledge that will help each of these new local sites from making the same expensive mistakes over and over. Our product—which is both a software as services tool and a training and community network—will make it possible for local communities, big and small, to launch and maintain independent local media sites—without having to leave the field to the big corporate entities who will suck the local dollars back to their centers.

How did you come up with the idea?

For the past 2.5 years, this team has been hard at work creating and maintaining Oakland Local, a news and community site for Oakland, CA, that will served over 1.8 million pages to more than 70,000 monthly visitors this year. Run by a team that is all local to Oakland and that is 75% people of color, 70% women, Oakland Local has quickly become the largest and most engaging independent non-profit news site in the East Bay of California. OL has received support from J-Lab, The California Endowment and The Harnisch Foundation, among others, and has sold more than $15,000 in training and advertising services during the past six months.

At the same time that we have been working on Oakland Local, our team has also been working with grantees from the Community Information Challenge Program of the John and James L Knight Foundation, which supports community foundations that wish to start civic engagement projects in specific geographic communities and participants in KDMC Media entrepreneurship seminars who wish to start local news sites around the country, as well as participating in seminars and programs such as The Knight/McCormick/Patterson Foundation funded Block by Block 2010, a conference in Chicago for 175 local site operators (this conference will recur again in Fall 2011).

Understanding how many of the same questions—and problems—came up as obstacles over and over got us thinking about how we might remove some of the challenges and help more people who are operating local sites achieve success.

As we looked around, we realized that there was nothing that was comparable—although many non-profit entities and academic institutions have created white papers and online tutorials, they didn’t address all the technical issues and they didn’t cover all the operational questions, either.

Can you pull this off? What background, skills, network are you bringing to the project?

Our team is well poised to pull this off. Founder Susan Mernit is a long time media entrepreneur who successfully built and launched services for media companies including AOL, Yahoo!, and Advance Internet, as well as launching Oakland Local in 2009 with $25,000 in seed money from J-Lab’s New Voices competition. A former Senior Director of Product Development for Yahoo!, Mernit’s former start-up, People’s Software (with Lisa Williams), was selected as a Tech Star’s incubator company in 2008; although she shut that company down, she learned an amazing amount that has gone into Oakland Local and will go into Neighborhood Pages. Mernit’s 5,000-plus friends on Linked-In and Facebook and deep ties in tech and media innovation attest to her network connections.

Developer maiki interi is involved in the free and open source movement, using the open tools and standards to assist non-profit and community organizations to communicate and spread awareness about their missions. In the last six years maiki has used Drupal and WordPress to build flexible, low-cost community sites, such as Oakland Local. Co-founder Kwan Booth is a skilled trainer and curriculum developer who has taught workshops for Knight Digital Media Center/USC, for Oakland Local, and for numerous other organizations, including Netroots Nation.

The rest of our team is strong as well–and experienced in the areas we need.

What’s the current status – have you raised any funding, is there a prototype, have any partnerships, developers, designers or other team members been recruited; etc.

Investment—In the past 2 years, we have raised $105,000 in grants for Oakland Local’s launch, mobile development and training programs. The House of Local team has not yet asked investors for funding for Neighborhood Pages, though we have received expressions of interest from some experienced angels. Oakland Local is the prototype for our large-scale install; we are building a prototype for a smaller-scale project as well (URL to come.)

We are currently self-funding, but we are talking to some potential funders; the award would help move us forward n terms of both much-needed immediate cash and credibility.

Potential partnerships-We are currently reaching out to potential partners and additional team members on both the back-end site hosting and software infrastructure sides, and in terms of media and content partners.

Team development: Our potential team members have experience at companies including America Online, Hearst, and Rackspace,. We are creating an advisory board of experienced media and technology entrepreneurs and investors.

In the next three months, we can put the on the ground team together, launch our back-end prototype, build our demo and business plan and add 1-2 reference clients as we build our advisory board, finalize our business and financial plan and seek investment.

Press: Oakland Local has received tremendous press—we want the chance to scale and share what we have learned and accomplished.

• NEW: Oakland Local profiled as one of the 50 news sites from the Columbia Journalism Review

• OL featured in The Future of Social Media in Journalism, Mashable, Sept. 16, 2010

• Oakland Local featured in panel on Content & Community Engagement at Block by Block Conference, Chicago, Sept. 23-24, 2010

• New: Co-founder Kwan Booth’s series on The Bay Areas Toxic Tour; West Oakland, funded by Newsdesk and Spot.us; wins 2009 Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Awards for Journalism.

• New: Oakland Local co-founder Susan Mernit named one of the top 25 women to watch in tech by Always On

• Oakland Local highlighted as a success story in the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, annual State of the News Media report in March 2010.

• Oakland Local recognized in Mashable’s New Media Trends for 2010, Dec. 23, 2009. According to the article, “With many traditional and regional news organization’s facing cutbacks in staff and in some cases closures, local and community-based models and startups will look to fill the gap in content.”

How will it earn money/be sustained?

Neighborhood pages has a revenue model with 7 defined components:

a) Software services: fees for installs, maintenance, trouble-shooting

b) Training and support/the network: Membership model with pricing for additional training and materials

c) Percentage of revenue for secondary services: fees collected for ad network sells, content exchanges, buying-coops for web services

d) Events and event tracks at conferences

e) Consulting/expert advice

f) Web destination: ads and advice targeted at site operators (conversion funnel)

g) Books, merchandise & collateral materials

Our early spreadsheets show that we can hit profitability by Q 6 and accelerate revenue to where it looks really good by Q8.

Market overview, competitive analysis

There really isn’t much out there at this time that combines open-source software installs with training and support for local news & community sites. There are over 2,000 WordPress developers in the United States who are capable of using pre-defined themes to create local news sites, and there are problem several hundred who could build news sites in Drupal, but their availability, their reliability, their skill level and their cost structure are all random.

At the same time there are high-quality solutions that have a more general focus, such as Drupal Acquia ((http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-drupal), but they do not address the critical training, support, and networking aspects that Neighborhood Pages brings to the table.

A number of non-profit and academic organizations have gotten involved in developing and publishing materials designed to assist site operators with achieving sustainability, including The City University of New York under Jeff Jarvis’ direction, J-Lab’s Learning Network, the Knight Foundation’s examination of sustainability at 8 major—and very well-funded local news sites.

In addition, The Knight Digital Media Center at The Annenberg School of Journalism, USC publishes and makes available most of the materials used in their media entrepreneurship seminars, along with videotapes of many of the sessions. And the Block by Block 2010 gathering led to the development of a locally-focused wiki, and a series of ad hoc phone calls and twitter chats for some of the participants in that event.

However, there is really nothing out there on the market that combines an understanding of what practitioners need to know at the various stages their project goes through and offers options to quickly gain that knowledge through best practices and expert and peer advice with an easy to install, easy to maintain technology solution.



Financial/budget overview

Neighborhood Pages has a strong model for generating revenue from multiple streams, including software as services, tech services, training and support, events , collateral materials and subscription fees.

If you win the challenge, how will you use the $25,000 to help you go further?

We can do a lot with this money. We will use the $25,000 to build out two prototypes and spec the back end, and to create a full business plan and live demo of some of the critical tools and resources we will offer.



Final words: How will this investment impact the project?

The investment will give us seed money to get this project into gear and on its way toward launch!

This project has the potential to be a game-changer for local community news–and something we’re well=poised to do. Stay with us, share your ideas, and wish us luck at Pitch It! If you’re interested in being involved somehow, email pitchit@oaklandlocal.com