Jay Rosen: Introducing the new Huffington Post Investigative Fund (And My Own Role in It) The announcement of its birth, along with the $1.75 million starter budget, is really the launch of a new Internet-based news organization with a focus on original reporting. You might say the Fund’s operating principle is: report once, run anywhere.

As newspapers fail, the news ecosystem is finding a way forward. This project, like ProPublica and Spot.us and several other projects, will help fill in the gaps.

We need a hundred such experiments, not just a few. Here’s hoping we’ll see more local ones, not just national ones.

A key question, as yet unanswered: What copyright license will be used for the output of this material. If it’s not Creative Commons, then it won’t have nearly as much value as it might.

Chris Anderson (Columbia University):  What’s So Hard About Local? Where should our foundation dollars go? Perhaps they should go towards assuring that the so-called “lowly” (and yet, so oddly difficult to fund either a peer-produced or market based substitute for!! so much for lowly!) beat reporter, police bureau chief,  crime reporter, city hall reporter, can survive.

You have a web host, you have a domain name, and you have an idea for a great site. You might even have a plan to earn a little income with it. The only things left to do before you start writing articles and showing off your vlogs are to design and develop it. That means deciding where the different elements of your site will go, what color scheme you’ll use, how everything ties together, and basically figuring out how to make it look and feel like you want it to look and feel.

The easiest solutions to your development challenges are a) to use a web or blog hosting company’s design tools, which allow you to easily plug your content into pre-created templates; or b) to hire someone to do it all for you; the latter is, of course, monetarily impractical for most individuals just getting off the ground. Fortunately, it’s probably unnecessary, too. Years ago, you had to be a pretty savvy programmer to be able to set up a web page. Today there are so many easy web development tools available that you can launch a pretty nice site without having to call in a professional. Many of the templates offered by web/blog hosts are attractive enough and functional enough to get you started (sometimes good enough to stick with) and web design programs make it possible to create professional-looking websites in a few hours with no programming experience.

So when should you think about hiring a professional? Ask this question first: Will you be selling anything directly through your site? CafePress shops and PayPal transactions don’t count. Do you want to be able to save and retrieve customer or user information? Do you want a message board or a wiki? Answering “yes” to any of these questions means you may have some challenging work ahead of you (and some legal issues related to taxes and maintenance of customer data). You can learn to do it yourself, but these may be the times when—if you have a budget that allows it—you might want to consult a professional. Keep in mind when you’re looking at your budget that beyond the costs of initial setup, you will likely need the designer’s services occasionally down the road, too, for updates, changes, some kinds of maintenance, and so on. There are a number of guides available out there to help you pick the right designer (see here and here, for example).

Once you’ve decided to take care of the design yourself, there are a few different things to consider.

The preconfigured layouts (templates) provided by your web or blog host can look pretty good, but the problem with these (other than their relative indistinctness) comes when you want to change one little thing about it, and you suddenly find yourself digging through a pile of CSS codes. Templates also make outside-the-box designing more difficult because you’re just rearranging a set of elements and altering their colors or putting pictures in them. See our previous post about blog-hosting sites for more on templates and some tools you can use to tweak them.

If you’re starting from scratch, you might consider using a web page design program, roughly equivalent to a word processor. These will generally allow you to type in text and add pictures to a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface using the types of graphical icons and familiar applications that are found in most software suites. The most well-known such software are probably commercial packages like Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage/Expression Web, but there are also a number of cheaper (even free) programs out there that may be worth checking out. KompoZer and SeaMonkey, for example, are two very good, free, cross-platform (made for Windows, Mac, or Linux) web editors that, while offering different features, both exist as evolved versions of the now discontinued Mozilla Composer (SeaMonkey is still connected to, though not officially developed by, Mozilla). Another interesting free option is Amaya, the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3) web editor, which is also available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but might cater to a slightly more tech savvy user. For Mac users there is also iWeb, which ships with most—if not all—current Macs as part of the iLife suite. For some less-expensive commercial product ideas, you might want to take a look at Softpress Freeway (Mac), Evrsoft First Page (Windows), and Sandvox (Mac).

While use of this software has obvious advantages, and is probably the preferred method of most amateur developers, there are some problems that occur when it translates the page you’ve designed to a real web page. Often what you see in the program’s preview screen looks or functions a bit differently than it does when actually accessed via web browser (or particular browsers, which is why you should use Browser Shots as soon as you publish). This isn’t usually devastating, but means a fair amount of trial and error will be required if you don’t know how to look at the code and find the problem.

Note: If you plan to use FrontPage, make sure that your web host has “FrontPage extensions” turned on to make publishing easier for you.

Some web hosts provide their own website building software, which are usually in-browser applications that function like extremely simplified versions of a Dreamweaver or FrontPage. For uploading to your server you usually just click “publish” or “submit” – and due to the more basic capabilities, this is about the easiest way to set up your website other than simply choosing an as-is template. Take caution when using these tools, though, because many (RVSiteBuilder, for example) have license agreements dictating that designs created through use of the software cannot be transferred should you switch hosts. In short, if you use RVSiteBuilder to create your website, you must start your web design anew if you decide to switch hosts. Even if you find one that does allow you to transfer your files, the next host’s builder may operate very differently and you may not be able to easily input what you’ve already made. Learning a third-party program like those discussed above will ensure that your design—not to mention the skills developed when using the software—will be able to go wherever you do. See the Citizen Media Law Project’s Legal Guide for more information on evaluating terms of service and other legal issues to consider when getting online.

Most guides to creating web pages recommend that you learn at least some HTML if you’re not hiring someone who does. Having some working knowledge of the language is the best way to ensure that your page looks and works how you intend it to and can save a lot of design and troubleshooting headaches. There are a number of on-line tutorials that treat the subject in varying depths. Community journalism how-to site J-Learning has a tutorial meant specifically for citizen journalists that even covers XHTML, which combines traditional HTML with a newer standard, XML. HTML Goodies and Webmonkey also have HTML tutorials for beginners. If you want to go even further in your education, Lynda has a comprehensive paid-access library of beginner through advanced tutorials that cover Flash, JavaScript, Photoshop, AJAX, CSS, and other useful tools in addition to every language and program we’ve talked about here.

[Note: Thanks to the Citizen Media Law Project for sharing some of this content with us]

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

The last two Citizen Media Business Issues posts concerned registering a domain name and finding a web host. Among the suggestions in the latter was to generally avoid free web hosts, but providing for the notable exception of blog-hosting services. Here we’ll discuss what these are, their pros and cons, and some differences between companies.

First, a blog (short for weblog) is a collection of hypertext writings, typically displayed in reverse chronological form and including a variety of content including text, images, audio, video and more. Blog software makes it easy for the author to regularly update site content without editing HTML files or creating new ones. Due to the ease with which new content is added, blogs are ideal for anyone with a lot to say or report on.

There are two primary ways to get blog functionality on your website: download blogging software and install it on your web server (or your web host’s server) or use a blog-hosting service. This post will primarily concern the latter—the alternative to finding web hosting, not just the software. For more information on the kind you download, the Wikipedia entry on blog software has a good list of possibilities and Weblog Matrix has a great tool to compare features.

Advantages and disadvantages of using a blog-hosting service

• Ease of Use – Blog hosts are often the easiest way to find a home online. Not only are they easy to set up via design templates, but also simple to use via a web-based interface that you just type into and upload media with a click of a button. Designing your own website from scratch, on the other hand, is much more complex (though we’ll give you some pointers and resources in the next Business Issues post). These sites are often free, but additional features—such as a greater ability to customize the site’s appearance—may come at a premium.
• Credibility Concerns – The very ease of their use may lead a blogger to adopt standard blog-hosting templates and thus project a less professional appearance than a well-designed, customized website. Also, use of the web address you’re given by one of these services may result in you not being taken as seriously as you would be if you had your own domain. For example, some blog-hosting services give you an address that they choose, like “www.blogservice.com/3k6jrv,” or they append your name to their URL via a folder or subdomain, like “www.blogservice.com/yoursite” or “yoursite.blogservice.com.” One possible way around this is to register a domain name like “www.MyBlog.com” and have that redirect to your bloggingservice.com page. This allows you to promote your site using your “www.MyBlog.com” while retaining the ease and cost benefits of using a blog-hosting service. Even better, a feature usually called “domain mapping” allows you to treat your space on the blog host the same way you would a web host (more on this below). For more information on domain forwarding, see the previous post on <link>Registering a Domain.
• Functionality – When you use a blog-hosting service, you’re operating on their site, so you don’t have access to all of their site code to make your page do exactly what you want it to do. On some blog-hosting sites it can be difficult to do much more than a straight, reverse-chronological record of posts with, perhaps, a collection of links in a side bar and a place for users to leave comments. This means there often cannot be any non-blog pages (like an About page, Features, Topics, Contact Us, or anything else that isn’t a blog entry). Further, while they are customizable to a degree, that customization can be limited compared to the possibilities provided by a conventional website. The more ability to customize, the better. (The major blog-hosting companies do provide a substantial degree of customization.) Even if you don’t know anything about HTML or CSS now, you may still want to change some things later. Access to template code and CSS is a must.
• Anonymity – For some people who deal with controversial material, the major advantage of blog-hosting providers is that they often provide the easiest way to write anonymously. Many of these services do not require names or identification for registration, so by signing up through an anonymizing service using a free e-mail account, you gain greater protection from being unmasked, even in the face of a subpoena to the hosting service. For more about anonymity, see the Citizen Media Law Projects section on Anonymity.
• Advertising and Revenue Generation – Unlike free web hosts, blog hosts that force you to display their advertising are rare. In fact, some don’t allow any advertising at all. Many that do allow advertising have affiliations with particular ad networks (such as AdSense or BlogAds) that you can implement for your own profit with the click of a button. While this easy integration is a good start, it can sometimes make it difficult to bring in alternate or additional advertisement systems. It’s important to think about where you want to go with your blog in terms of expanding your revenue model. While a simple Google AdSense sidebar may seem fantastic early on, you should consider your future needs for expansion. Also, the “real estate” available on your page for ads may be limited to certain areas (like along the left side, in the top-right, along the top, between two toolbars, or at the bottom of every post). If you create your own website from scratch, the type, format, and location of the ads on your page are much more customizable.

Common features

• Domain mapping – Whereas forwarding a domain name just redirects www.yoursite.com to yoursite.blogservice.com, domain mapping effectively changes yoursite.blogservice.com to www.yoursite.com. This makes the blog host truly act as a less flexible web host.
• Import/export – This must-have feature refers to the ability to move your blog from one site to another relatively painlessly.
• Template code access – Another must-have. You need control over what your site looks like. Even if the starter templates look great, there will almost certainly come a time that you’ll want to change at least some detail of your site’s design, which you often cannot do without access to the code.
• Integrated advertising capability – As discussed above, this is a common feature but not a huge one. At best, it saves you from pasting code in the right place. At worst, it precludes you from signing up with another, perhaps more appropriate company.
• Categories/tags – Useful systems to organize your posts.
• Non-blog pages – Allows you to have web pages that are not blog posts. This can be very useful, but you can’t always find this at no cost (WordPress is one example of a service that does offer this without a premium account).
• Templates – All blog hosts have some kind of design/layout preconfigurations available to you. Some will look and function better than others, but you’re probably best to come up with your own (although perhaps based on a template). There are a few tools out there to help you with this, but they’re service-specific. For Blogger, there’s PsycHo’s Free Template Generator, for WordPress there’s the WordPress Theme Generator, and CSSEZ works with both WordPress and TypePad.
• Cost – Many are free, many are not. Some, like WordPress, allow you to create a free blog, but will charge for features like CSS access and domain mapping. If you’re paying, remember that you’re really just paying for the convenience of the interface. Regular web hosting isn’t much more expensive (if at all), and while it’s more difficult to set-up, there are a number of free blogging programs you can download to run directly on your website. A major consideration if you host your own blog, however, is keeping the software and plugins up to date. Blog hosting companies rapidly update to eliminate security risks, and if you run your own software this becomes an essential chore.
• Mobile blogging – The ability to send blog posts, images, or audio directly from a cell phone is getting more and more popular as more and more people own cameraphones and smartphones.

There are a number of services to choose from when picking a blog host, so shop around. The Citizen Media Law Project has a comprehensive comparison of the three largest (Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad) including an examination of their Terms of Service. Other useful comparisons can be found at Online Journalism Review, Climb to the Stars, and ProBlogger.

As a final bit of advice, before you sign up anywhere, make sure to read the terms of use! All of the services mentioned here have extensive terms that govern who owns the content and data you and your users create, when the service can remove content that it deems to be problematic, and what your rights are if a dispute arises. The Citizen Media Law Project has a great guide to Evaluating Terms of Service that’s definitely worth a look.

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

Boston Globe: Media entrepreneurs test new ways to get the message across. Boston was home to the first American newspaper. A Medford radio station was among the first to try selling advertising to support its programming, in the early 1920s. Researcher Ray Tomlinson was working in Cambridge when he sent the first e-mail over the Arpanet, the predecessor to the Internet, in 1971. Each innovation created a huge industry, and changed the way we communicate.

Now, at this moment of tumult in the media world, entrepreneurs in Boston and the wider New England region are trying to develop the next successful models for conveying information. But even as advertisers and consumers spend an increasing amount of money and time on the Internet, building a profitable digital media business isn’t exactly a cinch. Some local start-ups have already had to reduce their staff, and others will find themselves hunting for additional funding later this year from reticent investors.

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in January 1787. “And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”

Today, we are dangerously close to having a government without newspapers. American newspapers shoulder the burden of considerable indebtedness with little cash on hand, as their profit margins have diminished or disappeared. Readers turn increasingly to the Internet for information — even though the Internet has the potential to be, in the words of the chief executive of Google, Eric Schmidt, “a cesspool” of false information. If Jefferson was right that a well-informed citizenry is the foundation of our democracy, then newspapers must be saved.

There’s so much wrong with this essay that one scarcely knows where to start. In one critique, Alison Fine grasps a key reason the proposal lacks weight: Its “fundamental premise that only newspapers can hold government accountable” is absurd on its face.

The piece drew plenty of other attention from journalists and industry watchers including an interesting question from the Nieman Journalism Lab’s Zachary M. Seward, who wondered how much it would cost “to sustain every American newspaper in perpetuity as non-profit organizations” — and, after consulting with Alan Mutter came up with a guesstimate of $114 billion. Cough.

This is to save only the editorial staff, mind you. Journalists have an unfortunate habit of forgetting that other people also work in their organizations; and the logic here is that what we want to preserve is the jobs of the journalists who report the news — never mind that the people who still buy newspapers don’t do so entirely because of what fills the news columns, but also to see the ads and non-news features.

Seward reasonably points out that we’d be foolish to endow the newspaper industry as it currently exists. When I look at most local newspapers these days I see skeletons: businesses that have been systematically looted over the years, to send money to far-off corporate headquarters to pay fat executive salaries and boost stock prices. Preserve them? Why would we want to do that?

We’re unquestionably losing something important as the newspaper business model implodes. As a shareholder in three of those companies I’m unhappy about it, but I’m also not going to suggest that I blindly invested. Over the years I’ve made much, much more on my newspaper shares than I would lose now even if all of them (not a chance) were to fail tomorrow.

But we’re already seeing some models for the future emerge. One, just one, is nonprofit.

The idea that philanthropists should get into the community information business is not new, nor bad. It’s come up a number of times, most recently with the Knight Foundation’s funding support, along with community foundations, of local initiatives. (See also David Westphal’s recent Online Journalism Review piece on this larger topic.)

And not-for-profit media is hardly new. PBS, NPR and many other organizations don’t aim to make profits. But nonprofits are enterprises, too. They require business models as much as any for-profit enterprise.

Nonprofits generally exist, meanwhile, to ameliorate failures in the for-profit marketplace. Markets do fail, and they do so frequently. (I’m not talking here about the financial meltdown we’re experiencing, which is all about society’s failures in a much wider way.) Bill Gates’ worthy philanthropic efforts to rid the planet of diseases that aren’t profitable for the medical industry speaks specifically to this issue, as do countless other such enterprises.

The market failure most notable in the newspaper business of the past half-century was felt not by the journalists but by the buyers and sellers of products and services in communities. This was due to newspapers’ monopoly status, leading them to extract outrageously high profits from advertisers who essentially had no alternatives. Ask anyone who used the classifieds before eBay and craigslist and other better, cheaper competition came along — they’ll tell you what a failed marketplace looks like.

That era was good for the editorial staffs, which enjoyed long-term, stable employment and, in many cases, some distance from advertiser influence over the contents of the news pages. However excellent the journalists were, however — and many were truly superb — this was not a climate that bred risk-taking and innovation beyond imagining how to be better reporters. Improving the journalism was a great thing; but becoming conservative in other ways was not.

We’re seeing an explosion of innovation now. Some of it is coming from inside news organizations. But the majority is, from my perspective, coming from outside, from people inventing or adapting business models as well as journalism and information techniques. (Jonathan Weber at the wonderful New West Network is one of the people I’m counting on to help figure this out; do not fail to read his brilliant response to the NYT op-ed, probably the best of all the commentary on this issues.)

Do we need funding sources for these new and adaptive projects? You bet. Some has already been committed or is in the pipeline now. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.

I’ll wager, with little fear of losing, that a great deal of the community information we’ll get in a few years will come from for-profit sources. But that will still leave vast territories for two other models: volunteers and nonprofits. Sometimes these will overlap.

The most essential role for nonprofits is almost certainly going to be in addressing the new market failure. This is the category I call “eat your spinach journalism,” the reporting that we all agree we need but which requires money and time to do. Certain kinds of investigations and watchdog reporting, including such basics as keeping an eye on what the City Council and local/state agencies are up to, may not support for-profit ventures, and we’ll desperately need other sources of funding for those.

That the New York Times used its valuable op-ed space to showcase such shallow thinking by the Yale financial guys is depressing. At least their essay sparked some conversation. But please, let’s move onto realistic possibilities.

We know now that many books, especially timely non-fiction, can become major elements of intellectual ecosystems—including blogs, websites, magazine excerpts, speaking gigs, consulting and more. In the future those various activities could become part of a business ecosystem as well, where all work to the benefit of each other in more direct financial ways. This suggests collaboration on the part of everyone in the chain – author/speaker, publisher, book agent, speaking agency, et al – and sharing the wealth from the hopefully greater total value that’s likely to be created.

This is part of the future for media entrepreneurs: partnering with established companies to fill in gaps and take advantage of existing clout. Good for both of them.

Ethan Zuckerman: Is ad-supported journalism viable in a pay-for-performance age? (I)t’s possible that the way we’ve built media in the United States can’t survive a transition to a more rational market.