Project reports submitted by the teams that participated in GonzoCamp II, Nov. 13, 2009 at the Seattle P-I building.

NewsMeter

Our Team: Amy Rainey, Thomas Schmitz, Chuck Taylor, Carlos Pedraza, Brian Chin, Robin Barre, Glenn Thomas.

Our team formed around Robin's idea pitch: Know your crowd. She expressed an interest in understanding what audiences are doing on news websites and knowing what people are actually going to use.

Our team expressed a variety of ideas and perspectives, including addressing the interface design of news sites and studying news consumption habits. One idea suggested looking at the top news sites and compiling the best design practices for a reader-centric news site. Another idea was to create a self-optimizing home page based on data. Yet another idea involved looking at referrals from social media sites. After lots of discussion, we decided to narrow down our ideas to an actionable goal for the day.

We ultimately decided to focus on creating useful data that will help news publishers better understand what their audience is doing. Managers of news sites don’t easily have access to data that could help change the way they build, create and market their sites. Google Analytics is powerful but doesn’t necessarily answer the questions that journalists need answered. We decided to create a dashboard that simplifies the data into actionable information to help publishers make strategic changes.

Our simplified, user-friendly dashboard answers these core questions:
Where do your readers come form?
Where are your readers going?
What are the top and trending articles?
How are readers responding to stories through sharing and comments?
When are your readers exiting the site?

A key attribute of our dashboard is that it distinguishes between the core community of readers and the random tourist readers. This allows the publisher to respond differently to traffic patterns among core readers and tourists.

This product would be offered on a freemium model. The initial version of the dashboard would be free. Our company would then aggregate and analyze the data across the news industry to create reports that would be available for sale.

(Submitted by Amy Rainey)

Newspaper-Subscriptions.org

Team: John Bito, Rick Sass, Joe Boydston and Dan DeMay

We began our day by discussing the level at which our pay wall prototype was going to operate. Would it be for the large national newspapers, or only for smaller community newspapers? Clearly the best audience and highest likelihood for success lies in the small local community news groups.

Joe Boydston works for McNaughton Newspaper Group and they have implemented a pay wall system for their daily newspapers. In these smaller communities, it has been very successful. Because they are able to gather so much demographic information - right down to physical address - they are able to offer advertisers specific audiences. That is, they can advertise the tire shop on D Street to John Doe who lives on D St. and has been looking at tire ads online.

We decided that the metropolitan papers’ content is so easily available for free, that it would be too hard to present a solution to this in so short a time. So community newspapers it is.

Based on Joe’s model, we built our prototype to provide local, community newspapers with a pay wall platform. Essentially, as an invisible hosting service, we work with multiple newspapers, a network, and when a reader hits the newspaper site that they want to view (xyz.com), they get a homepage that is designed by the publisher with a limited amount of content; i.e. headlines and photos, with top stories having the lead also displayed. The amount of free content would be decided entirely by the publisher of each paper.

When the reader clicks on the story, our invisible hosting service would determine if they are a subscriber or not. If they do not have a cookie (the server doesn’t remember the individual user), it would prompt them to login or to subscribe to get the rest of the content. Note that anything in world or national news pulled from the AP wire service would have to be offered for free (papers cannot charge for wire service content), and in fact, most local news groups really should not be trying to compete for the national and world news space anyway (other than through links).

When users subscribe, we would collect all their important geographic and psychographic information that would be used in advertising and store it in a database. For their subscriptions, newspapers would set their own prices, but would be encouraged to offer a deeply discounted rate to users outside of their market (someone in South Dakota who wants to read a paper in Oregon would get it cheaper). This is where the collaborative network of papers comes in to play. The users would only be able to get this discount after their initial subscription, and potentially would get a better discount for each additional subscription, to a point.

This was a point of much discussion because we wanted to consider the publisher, who wants some value for their content, and the consumer, who wants the cheapest way to get their news (we offer the network to give them the ease of a one-stop model, where one payment can cover several subscriptions). We decided that this would be beneficial to the publishers in that it would allow them to collect some revenue from readers that otherwise would not subscribe to their paper. For readers, it would be a cheaper way to get content from, say, their hometown across the nation that is interesting to them, but not very valuable. These readers would not benefit the local advertisers, but the small revenue collected for the discounted subscriptions would give the publisher something for their content. Our prototype would tout this as a possible way to subsidize the low cost of using our platform.

Generally, we would be looking for longer-term subscriptions, but would offer things like a three-day pass for someone who comes into town and wants to get a taste of the nightlife or something similar, or even a one-day pass for someone seeking a single news story off our site.

In the 3 hours available, John Bito developed a prototype in Ruby that implemented a ‘paywall’ for lodinews.com. Simulating a DNS change with an entry in the local hosts file, the prototype server acted as a gateway to the news site. It allowed all requests for the paper’s home page. Requests for ‘premium’ articles were recognized by the URL and the gateway inserted a confirmation page. Requests for ‘free’ content were also distinguished and were delivered to all users without any confirmation.

(Submitted by Dan DeMay)

CanYouTrust.Us

In a world where any iReporter can be a journalist, knowing who can be trusted as a reliable news source is only going to get more difficult.

Team CanYouTrust.Us formed with goal of giving readers, editors and other journalists an opportunity to know if those who provide the news are really practicing journalism values.

The Web site aims to give readers transparent profiles of journalists and information about associations, employer connections and professional testimonials. It also gives readers the opportunity to rank and evaluate journalists.

It gives journalists the opportunity to promote their work, get rated by readers and other journalists, and participate in a professional marketplace.

It allows editors or employers to review journalist profiles, examine portfolios, search for freelancers and new hires, and participate in candid discussions about specific journalists.

The Web site service would rate journalists on five factors: clarity, depth, credibility, accuracy, transparency and engagement. It also includes static information for the journalist to include, such as contact info, work history, professional activity stream, social activity stream, scores/rankings and colleague/employer testimonials.

The ratings in turn would be averaged into a general scale from 1 to 5.

As journalists become more exposed and open to critics, they will be held more accountable to their values and work.

To promote fairness and accuracy within the ratings, rankings can also be rated and journalists will be allowed to respond to critics in the comments that would not impact their personal rating.

Members of CanYouTrust.Us included Jill Blocker, Jonathan Fitspatrick, Nikhil George, Monica Guzman, Seth Long, Vivian Luu and Aaron Ritchey.

(Submitted by Jill Blocker)

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