Cit Media

In the past several weeks, with a brief timeout, I’ve been thinking hard about the new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship that I’ll be starting at Arizona State University next year. To say that I’m excited about this is an understatement; I can’t wait to get started.

As I finish up some other work, ponder transitions of ongoing work and deal with the horrible chores of moving residences, etc., I’ve managed to have some conversations with several friends in the media and startup arenas. Nothing is set in stone yet, but I do have some initial thoughts.

The most important thing is simple: This is a time of incredible opportunity in media, and entrepreneurial thinking is absolutely key to the future of journalism.

Much of the worry in the traditional organizations is well warranted, given the implosion of their business models, but even there I’m seeing plenty of creativity spawned by the realization that what worked, business-wise, in the past is at best unlikely to work in the future due to the end of the monopoly and oligopoly eras of news.

Meanwhile, activists and entrepreneurs are seizing the chance to make a difference when it counts. Everywhere I go, I talk with people of all ages who have great-sounding ideas about media projects. The major question remains, how do we make these things sustainable?

As noted elsewhere (and principally in this case by Clay Shirky, whose work has given me several light-bulb moments over the years), one of the most important shifts in the digital landscape has been the declining cost of experimentation. Anyone who has an idea about media can try it out for a relatively low cost, perhaps merely the investment of some time.

That is made to order for the university environment in an obvious way. At the same time, semesters have start times and end times, and that students have other work to do besides our course and independent study projects. Entrepreneurship is about many things, and focus is one.

I’ve already met, spoken with or emailed with several ASU students who are looking at the new center as a possible fit for their own work. And next Monday and Tuesday, I’ll be on the campus, where I hope to meet with many more.

More thoughts soon…

Was a bit under the weather this week, but back to normal… Thanks to folks who inquired about the absence of blog posts.

Jay Rosen’s new experiment: These Beat Reporters Will Try the Social Network Way.

Thirteen sites want to see if it works: from the Houston Chronicle to the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, PA, plus ESPN.com, MTV, the Seattle Times… Some of the beats: Child welfare, Dallas public schools, “green” tech, Big Pharma, digital music, Procter & Gamble.

This is going to be an important test of new media. Can’t wait to see how it works.

(This is the sixth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

Once you have a decent readership or a clever idea, you may want to start merchandising. When successful, selling merchandise on your site not only brings in revenue, but also can be valuable marketing for the site.

One simple way is to take your logo or design idea to a local shop that makes t-shirts. You can make a batch of 20 or so, take a picture, and display the picture alongside a PayPal button on your web site. Once a reader sends payment through PayPal, you package and ship the shirt to them. Creative Commons, for example, raises some funds via a store on its site that displays available t-shirts, stickers, and buttons. Interested supporters are taken to a form to enter their shipping/contact information, then directed to PayPal for payment.

Beyond PayPal, you can create an eBay, Amazon, or Yahoo store, making your merchandise searchable and opening it up to a much larger audience. While PayPal charges a fee per transaction (link to fee schedule), a “Basic” eBay store starts at $15.95/month (plus traditional eBay transaction fees), Amazon WebStores are $59.99/month, and a “Starter” Yahoo store goes for $39.95/month. While they provide many features that may be great for those looking to jump into e-commerce (for example, the ability to set sales tax rates by area [owners are still responsible for paying their own taxes, if applicable…more on this in a later post]), these store-hosting services are probably more than any citizen journalist would need. Nevertheless, you can read some pretty decent reviews and comparisons of these services here, here, and here.

While making and shipping products oneself is theoretically simple, it can be time-consuming in practice and requires at least a small up-front investment. For many site operators, an online branding service may be more attractive. Sites such as CafePress, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, and PrintFection allow you to put the graphic or text of your choice on any one of hundreds of different products like t-shirts, posters, hats, mugs, and key chains. As everything produced by these companies is made-to-order, there are no overhead or set-up costs unless you choose one of their premium services, which usually isn’t necessary. They will also take care of credit card processing, shipping, and customer service. CyberJournalist, a blog about how technology is changing media, has a CafePress store that’s a good example of the variety enabled by this sort of production.

All of these mass customization sites are pretty easy to set up: upload your designs, type in your text, select the products you want to sell, tweak the look of your presentation, and integrate it with your site. The biggest technical challenge for you will be the formatting of your graphics to look how you want them to look on the product (dark-colored clothing, for example, present some challenges). It’s easier to do these things now than it was in the past; most, if not all, of these sites offer some good tutorials and templates.

CafePress is the ten-ton gorilla of custom merchandising. It offers one of the wider assortments of products, but in the free “basic shop” only one version of each product is allowed. An example of a basic shop is the one set up by phpthrowdown, celebrating a recent events by selling a commemorative “Yeah, I got what it takes” t-shirt. For $6.95/month you can sign up for a “premium shop,” allowing you unlimited product designs and better shop customization/organization. While other sites offer somewhat similar services without charging, CafePress does have an advantage in traffic. All of these sites have a marketplace in which people search for designs. If your product could stand alone—if it’s not just a logo that people who don’t frequent your site won’t recognize or care about—it could very well bring in revenue (and perhaps readers) via people’s search results in the CafePress marketplace. A good example of a citizen media site using CafePress is iBrattleboro. The local Brattleboro, Vermont, journalism site runs a shop offering a wide range of products with clever little descriptions like that from a logoed infant creeper: “Babies love Brattleboro, too. Crawl around in style!”

Zazzle has no monthly fee for any of its services, but it’s somewhat more difficult to integrate with your site and you have no way to remove its giant corporate header from your presence on its site. Instead of stores, it hosts “galleries” and provides you with a “Flash Panel” for placement on your page. The Flash Panel is a bright, sometimes gaudy, scrolling display of your products that links readers to your gallery. One of the best features of Zazzle is its product API, which allows your readers to do some of the customization. Perhaps best illustrated by the Zazzle-supplied example, License Plate Shirts, the API allows you to create a template with placeholders for dynamic text or images. Zazzle also boasts the friendliest return policy (the “Zazzle promise”). While this doesn’t appear to directly affect you, the seller, remember that experiences your readers have with your products (and the companies that you have service them) can hurt you.

Spreadshirt, founded in Germany but with a growing US service, looks like a solid option for those with a European presence. Its services and product offerings function very similarly to CafePress, offering good integration with your web site and a tiered account system. As an example, the online windsurfers’ community iWindsurf has a store just offering a couple t-shirts. Merchandising may be particularly successful for community sites like this since members are likely to associate the site with their identity and thus more likely to want to brand themselves as such. For $10/month, a premium membership allows for removal of all Spreadshirt ads, better branding, and special sales tools like “limited time offers.” One of the major drawbacks is in the Spreadshirt payment system, which mails checks only on a quarterly basis, much less frequently than the rest.

PrintFection is the youngest of these four custom merchandisers, but it offers a lot. For starters, it’s selling a basic white t-shirt with a custom design for $2. The company also has advanced integration and design customization features, the ability to remove PrintFection ads, no limit on product offerings, and no account status that requires payment for an upgrade. When thinking about how the products could reflect back on you, the issue of quality probably comes to mind. A frequent suggestion in merchandising forums and comparisons is to buy a comparable t-shirt or other product from each company and judge for yourself. If not for the fact that it offers a lot of features at no cost, PrintFection may be a good place to start simply because they’ll sell you your first shirt for $2.

The major drawback to using one of these custom merchandisers versus the traditional route of producing and selling products yourself is the payout. These services all use a base price per product that you can then mark up as much as you want. A basic white t-shirt will generally have a base price of about $13. If you sell such a t-shirt on your blog for $15, you will be paid $2.

On top of revenue from sales, almost all of these sites offer some kind of affiliate program through which you can earn an additional percentage, often even when referring people to your own store (for more information on affiliate programs, see this earlier post).

For a more varied comparison of these sites, the T-Shirt Forums is a pretty active message board dedicated to such topics.

The world of mass customization is broader than just clothing and doodads. Some authors are turning to sites like Lulu.com for publishing books and other media. Lulu makes it easy to create not just a book, but handouts, brochures, DVDs, and CDs. This opens the possibility to make paper copies of a series of news stories you’ve written, CDs for your podcasts, DVDs for your videocasts or event footage, or a booklet made up of words taken from your blog archive. These services work much the same way as the merchandisers above in that you determine your profit margin above a base price and have several options for customization. Mia Garlick of Creative Commons conducted an interview with Stephen Fraser of Lulu in 2006, which covers much of how the site works as well as licensing options.

Another merchandising service that may come in handy for journalists who use photography in their work is DigiBug, a company that allows you to sell prints through your site. Using DigiBug API, sites like the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge are able to sell photos in various print options and even create separate price lists for different events or categories.

While doing all of the production, marketing, packaging, and shipping may yield a better profit margin, sites like CafePress give you an easy way to make some extra revenue. Even when the branding service takes a large portion of the profits, $2-$6 is not such a bad return on something that is pure promotion for your site.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

Clark Hoyt, the paper’s public editor, notes the NY Times’ continuing publication of pieces by Henry Blodget, one of the Internet bubble’s most notorious characters. In “Taint by Association” Hoyt asks two key questions:

One is whether The Times properly identifies Blodget when he writes for the paper. I don’t think so. His name was big in financial news at one time, but many readers do not know him.

The bigger question is whether The Times should be publishing him at all. Like Nocera, I believe in second chances, and Blodget seems to be doing fine establishing a new career. But why would The Times give a former analyst who lied to investors a platform to write about financial markets? If he wanted to write about how investors can spot phony reports by analysts, that would be one thing. But each time the newspaper uses Blodget as it has, it is conferring greater expert status on him.

These deals work two ways. The Times’s luster may help Blodget. But some of his taint rubs off on The Times.

Hoyt has it exactly right here. The newspaper is sullying its own name by lending Blodget its columns.

(Note: I own a small amount of stock in the company.)

UPDATED

If you’ve sent me email at my citmedia.org address in the past 36 hours or so, I haven’t seen it due to a server malfunction. We’re working on it. (I don’t think I’ve lost any mail…fingers crossed.)

UPDATE: Mail is back up. Let me know if you sent me something in the past day and I didn’t reply.

In this morning’s piece in the Boston Globe, reprinted below, is a suggestion for new kind of political debates that would:

unfold online over the course of days, or even weeks and months. Imagine that one candidate takes a position and poses a question. The opponent would answer with a written response of some predetermined length, but with the help of staff, experts, and the general public. Then the first candidate, again with the help of anyone who wants to join the process, would dissect the response and reply with (we’d hope) a truly nuanced update. Continue this process at length - and repeat it with many other topics.

Here’s a bit more detail on how such things would occur:

While they’d include audio, video and other media, they would exist primarily in the more traditional form of text, which is still by far the best for exploring serious issues in serious ways. Questions would be posed by candidates to each other, as well as by journalists and the public. But an answer would not be the end of that round; in fact, it would only be the beginning.

Rebuttals and further rejoinders would be the meat of these conversations. They would not be done on the fly, but would come after the candidates and their staffs had some time to consider their responses. They’d point out flaws and inaccuracies in their opponents’ statements, drilling down into details where warranted. Wherever possible, people would use the Internet’s elemental unit — the hyperlink — to point to source material or other supporting information.

The public’s role could be crucial in this system. They would help their own side come up with rebuttal arguments, offering corrections, new facts and other supporting material. Candidates could use this, or not, as they wished. Wise candidates and their staffs would encourage as much participation as possible.

These moderated events would run for days, maybe for the entire campaign season. They would not be debates in a classical sense, but would definitely be the kinds of conversations that would illuminate the public sphere.

What technologies should we bring to bear on this? We’re limited only by our imaginations. We might, for example, use a “virtual world” such as Second Life, where people would create avatars (representations of themselves), helping personalize what might otherwise feel too remote. We could use online forums for part of the conversation. Wikis, which are sites where anyone can edit the pages, are another potential venue; among other intriguing recent ideas, the International Debate Education Association has launched “Debatepedia,” and its work could help us sort out the possibilities.

But if I were organizing such an event, I’d start by asking smart people from the political and tech worlds to work together, and with the public that cares about such things, on identifying the best methods. This itself would be a useful debate, and could be a template for a portion of what’s to come.

Again, active moderation would be essential. These online communities could self-police to some degree using tools that work well for this purpose, but the events would likely need some help from people whose role would be to intervene on the side of maintaining civility. Sadly, some people like to wreck anything they find, and politics can be particularly poisonous in the online world.

I’m going to be thinking harder about this in coming months, perhaps in a project format. It’s a start, anyway.

I have a piece in today’s Boston Globe called “Net gains” — some suggestions on how to improve politics in the digital age, specifically political debates. Here’s what the Globe ran. In this posting I amplify, as promised, on one part of what follows.

On Thursday night, most of the Democratic presidential candidates will travel to Las Vegas for the latest in this election cycle’s “debates.” The quotes around that word are deliberate, because political debates are stuck in a world of television sound bites, after-the-fact spin, and almost blatant contempt for voters.

Mass media, the communications technology that became supreme in the 20th century, has ruined debates. The Lincoln-Douglas confrontations in 1858 and other verbal contests were once among the deepest and most revelatory of conversations. They revealed intellect and passion, and illuminated the issues of their day. Today’s mass media, reflecting a cultural short attention span, elevates shallowness.

This year’s endless series of events, with so many candidates aiming for the nominations, have been especially puerile, little more than mini-press conferences and spin sessions. Even when the questions are serious, the time limitations on answers puts a premium on regurgitating canned, semi-clever lines that entertain instead of illuminate. These things are to real debating what motel room art is to Picasso.

But technology can also help restore the debate. The Internet and digital tools - search, blogging, online video, wikis, interactive games, and virtual worlds - are made to order for serious conversations. The collision of technology with media offers an unparalleled chance to hold debates that would illuminate our problems and opportunities and give us true insight into the people who want us to elect them.

The role of technology in politics has always been prominent, notably in communications. The pamphleteers of America’s Revolutionary era, and newspaper people later on, knew how powerful the printing press could be. The telegraph sped the news. Telephones, a one-to-one device, transformed personal communications. Radio and then, even more, television became the ultimate tools: one-to-many megaphones of unparalleled power.

The Internet subsumes all that came before, and adds a many-to-many capability. The democratization of media means that anyone can publish; that what we publish is available to a potentially global community; and that creation naturally leads to conversation and collaboration.

The Net has, of course, already made itself felt on the campaign trail. Howard Dean’s 2004 team innovated with blogging and online fund-raising ideas. Former senator George Allen lost his 2006 reelection race in part because of an unflattering video posted on YouTube. In this cycle, the presidential candidates are all over the Internet map, and so are their supporters - witness the now-famous “I’ve got a crush on Obama” video and Mitt Romney’s invitation to his supporters to create advertisements, among countless other efforts.

We’ve seen some modest attempts to make the Internet part of the debate process. The CNN-YouTube Democratic event during the summer (a Republican version is scheduled for Nov. 28), demonstrated at least one thing of value: Regular folks can ask questions that are at least as penetrating, or vapid, as the ones posed by journalists in more typical settings. But post-event chatter focused, to a major extent, on what questioners looked like - and whether CNN and YouTube should have let the audience, not just the journalists, select the questions posed to candidates (the answer is obviously yes). Still, this was a sideshow. We learned almost nothing useful about the candidates or their views.

Meanwhile, Slate and Yahoo joined forces a few weeks ago to offer a slightly more innovative, roll-your-own version. Voters could select specific questions and issues, and get a brief video lineup of candidates’ views. Yahoo says visitors to the site stuck around for an average of seven minutes, a long time on the Web but a pathetic span for serious voters. Perhaps they’d have delved more deeply had the site included more truly interactive features.

Better still is 10Questions.com, created by the TechPresident site working with The New York Times and MSNBC, a site that lets regular folks ask video questions and vote on the ones that get posed to candidates. Then the candidates answer, and the regular folks vote on whether the candidates actually answered.

But we can do even better, using a variety of media and techniques. Consider two approaches, different in character but both aimed at greater understanding.

First, the candidates should agree to hold lengthy, one-on-one debates and then put the results online for the public to slice and dice. Rather than having journalists and/or YouTubers ask the questions, we should leave the questioning to the candidates themselves. Give the candidates time to provide substantial responses, and give them full freedom to follow up on their opponents’ remarks. Moderators could help keep the debate on track and civil.

The videos should be posted online and made freely available. Media organizations, party organizations, interest groups, and private citizens could use increasingly inexpensive digital editing tools to help us sort through the mass of video; for example, someone who cares about healthcare could create a comparison of what each candidate said about the topic.

Then let voters decide what they want to watch. A few will watch everything. Many more will watch several debates, or parts of many.

Certainly this system would ask a great deal of the candidates, including perhaps more of their time than they might wish to spend. It would also demonstrate the utter shallowness of the so-called debates that broadcasters and interest groups sponsor today.

A second approach would be even more ambitious: A debate that would unfold online over the course of days, or even weeks and months. Imagine that one candidate takes a position and poses a question. The opponent would answer with a written response of some predetermined length, but with the help of staff, experts, and the general public. Then the first candidate, again with the help of anyone who wants to join the process, would dissect the response and reply with (we’d hope) a truly nuanced update. Continue this process at length - and repeat it with many other topics.

What would the site look like? What technologies would we use? I have my own ideas, and have posted them on my blog, but I’m just one person; we need a collective effort to figure this out, using much the same iterative process. The specific tools are less important than the willingness to deploy them.

Indeed, we’d start with an inventory of what people are already doing. Nonpolitical online conversations are already achieving remarkable depth and breadth using a variety of methods.

But before we finish yet another campaign cycle in the traditional way, let’s resolve to bring debating into the new century. We have the ability to turn top-down, sell-the-candidate methods of electioneering into edge-in conversations among candidates and the electorate. I’ll happen eventually. Why not this time?

The Citizen Media Law Project has created a new Legal Threats Database:

Our goal is to create an accurate and complete collection of legal threats directed at online speech. In order to accomplish this goal, we need your help.

The database is here. For background, here’s a news release.

Huge kudos to David Ardia, Sam Bayard and the amazing students and interns who’ve worked so hard on the project.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo asks readers’ help on two stories he and his colleagues are working on:

First, our reporters are digging into the Mukasey confirmation story, trying to find out just what went down yesterday, what the deal was that Reid held out for, how it was exactly that the presidential candidates didn’t get back or weren’t given enough time to get back for the vote. So this one’s particularly for our regulars up on Capitol Hill. Drop us a line, confidentiality guaranteed, and let us know what you know. I hear that at least some of the presidentials got little or no warning that the vote was imminent.

and the Bernie Kerik (Guiliani’s pal) saga:

So we’re going to put together what we hope will be a definitive list of Kerik criminality and ridiculousness. So send in your favorite Kerik scam or scandal for inclusion in our list. You can also post your entries in this discussion we’ve just started over at TPMmuckraker.com.

There are already some interesting results showing up in that discussion.