The “pitch this!” session is unlike any other. The tension is palatable, as people are sitting around the table, as if in a boardroom, ready to pitch their project in 3 minutes or less to professional investors and strategists.
Images and Voices of Hope goes first. The initial pitch is a little fuzzy (by contrast with the “judges”, I have the luxury of being able to pull up the site to read more about the organization), but the judges bring it back on track with no-nonsense, to-the-point questions. Don’t worry, no one gets fired at the end: this session is designed to help community-oriented initiatives deliver a lean and mean pitch to take it to the next level.
NewsTrust has been very visible so far in this conference. The no-frills website capitalizes on all the ingredients of social media, while offering some trust-ranking mechanism (“a Digg-like for grown-ups”) to address the ever-present credibility issue of “citizen media”. “Very crisp pitch”, lots of possibilities. The discussion yields new perspectives to leverage the proprietary technology beyond the mere news business.
Magnify.net is all about communities and video 2.0. Users can come in and create their video channels, skin them, and build their communities. By comparison with similar sites, users can manage the meta-data, yielding powerful metrics to the advantage of advertisers and… users who can benefit from the 50/50 revenue-sharing model. Verdict: definitely interesting, go talk to (investor’s name withheld for obvious reasons 😉
The Press Institute for Women in the Developing World project is a perfect fit for this conference, as hyper-local content and user-generated reporting in hard-to-access places have been a major topic of conversation so far. All judges are impressed by the project, one-upping each other with good advice to help the project scale and find partners.
Pegasus News offers an interesting mix of professional content for local news and user-generated content. Rather than compete directly against local papers, Pegasus provides local news about hyper-local events not covered elsewhere.
The J-Zone, by the International Center for Journalists, gets pitched as a “facebook” for jounalists”. As large media organizations cut back on their international correspondents, the J-Zone offers an opportunity to build up a network of journalists around the world, offering advice, best-practice sharing, and assignment opportunities.
Stateline.org (hey I know these guys) covers policy and political news from all 50 State capitals: inside-the-beltway people to cover outside-of-the-beltway policymaking. How about working with other publications and syndicating content to other media organizations? Otherwise, charging a subscription-fee to lobbyists –a prime audience- appears to make a lot of sense (as long as citizens don’t get shut out in the process).
The last orator gets the prize for the most emotional and convincing pitch in terms of improving the livelihood of communities (in sub-Saharan Africa as it turns out) through an ingenuous idea of “buddy payments” via mobile technology. Good idea, already-available technology: next step is to package it and … pitch it.