More than 300 people were at our SoCon09 event yesterday and maybe I heard the word blog used a few times. This year it was all about: Twitter, Twitter and more Twitter. Indeed read all about the full day Saturday Tweet by Tweet here.

Here are a few of my favorite Tweets:

tarynp: I’m still amped from yesterdays #socon09! So many great relationships forged.I’m committed to going to as many similar events as possible.

garbers: Back from #socon09. Great sessions, interesting people, stimulating conversation. Will certainly attend next year. Thanks to all who helped!

Mallory8: Great day at #socon09 now need a nap. (Witt: At least one other person, said he needed a nap, I think that is a good thing, we wore them out. )

Co-host Sherry Heyl gives a quick overview of the day at her Concept Hub Inc. site.  She says she misses the live blogging, and I do agree. Twitter is fast and furious, but alas a bit of depth is lost. However, parts of the day will be captured by the Georgia Podcasting Network thanks to Rusty Tanton and Amber Rhea . We’ll let you know when they post the podcasts.

Of course, if it had been liveblogged, the person or persons doing that heavy lifting would have had lots of people pushed their way by the the Tweeters. Personally I am much less interested  in the Twitter chatter than I am in using the Tweets to link me to  more interesting more in-depth reporting.

Of course, out of eight possible breakout choices in the early afternoon, I picked the one on Twitter run by Grayson Daughters. Lots of interesting information. Most interesting: UPS has a team assigned to do customer relations work on Twitter. One of the team members was at SoCon09.

Of course the whole day was perfect for me, starting with the announcement of the $1.5 million Harnsich Foundation gift for the Center of Sustainable Journalism at Kennesaw State University and having  Daniel Papp, president of Kennesaw State University, and  Ruth Ann Harnisch (virutally), president of the Harnisch Foundation, there to make the announcement in front of the 300 people.

When Lauren Booth and Jeannine Jones, who were taking care of the event logistics, ran up to me mid-morning saying we had to order more food, I knew we were breaking new attendance records. Fortunately, we got the food. You don’t want to disappoint 300 people with Twitter power at hand.

Personally I made several great new contacts, two I need to speak with soon — Lyle V Harris, who left the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to start the Georgia Online News Service, and David Pope of Inteletix.com which does Social Network Analysis. I am hungry for that kind of information.

I counted 40 people still hanging around having conversations half hour after SoCon09 officially ended, then headed over to the Mellow Mushroom to have a couple of beers with probably another 30 people from SoCon09.

Should have gone home and had my own nap, but went to the Kennesaw State men’s basketball game at which one of the KSU’s team members lobbed a three-point buzzer beater, tied the game and drove it into overtime, during which KSU came on strong and won amidst great cheering by the multitudes.

As I said I had a great day yesterday. Let’s end with this Tweet from Eli Wendkos, product manager for Social Media, mobile, video at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

ewendkos: Refreshed after #socon09. Good news: future looks good. Just going to take much work. Made many friends at the con – hopefully they help

(Photos by Hyku, see more SoCon09 photos here.)

Ruth Ann and I found each other thanks to the power of the internet in this digital era. Of course, this power is also disrupting how journalism is practiced and is especially changing the old business models.

The Center for Sustainable Journalism will seek new business models so that high quality, ethically sound journalism continues to have a role in our democratic society. I am in the midst of our SoCon09, conference where the gift is being announced. So I must get back to that, but here is the full press release with the details and a link to an excellent profile about Ruth Ann.

$1.5 million gift will establish innovative journalism center at KSU
Harnisch Foundation award advances work of distinguished communication scholar

KENNESAW, Ga. (February 7, 2009) In the midst of an annual conference designed to pinpoint the Southeast’s niche in the digital media revolution, Kennesaw State University announced receipt of a $1.5 million gift from the Harnisch Foundation to establish a center to research and develop innovative ways to produce and distribute news.

Kennesaw State President Daniel S. Papp announced the award and the creation of The Center for Sustainable Journalism Feb. 7 at the SoCon09 “Unconference” attended by more than 300 business, non-profit and media professionals, bloggers and digital media enthusiasts.

The center will be overseen by Leonard Witt, Kennesaw State’s Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication, eminent scholar and associate professor, who organized the SoCon09 conference. Witt is a pioneer in developing community-supported journalism models and exploring the potential of online social networks to disseminate news.

Witt’s work caught the attention of Ruth Ann Harnisch, president of the Harnisch Foundation, which supports and funds projects and programs that promote sustainable social change in philanthropy, coaching and journalism. The Foundation initially provided more than $60,000 to support Witt’s launch of a Minnesota-based community-supported journalism project.

“The continuing support we are receiving from the Harnisch Foundation enables KSU to further support the important nationally recognized research being conducted by Leonard Witt,” said KSU President Daniel S. Papp. “This major gift will go a long way in establishing KSU’s prominence in the emerging field of news dissemination through social networks.”

The current award, which will be spread over five years, will help underwrite applied research‚ build collaborations and advance innovative journalism projects regionally and around the country. The center will research and test a continuing stream of innovative journalism projects and nurture the best of them into self-sustaining entities.

“We are living in an era when old journalism models are failing, newspapers are faltering
and experienced journalists are losing their jobs,” Witt said. “This solution-oriented funding comes at a critical time, and with it, we can start to build new models that will ensure journalism continues to play its vital role in our democracy.”

Witt has been sharing his ideas about journalism innovation on his blog (PJNet.org) for six years.

“Technology has changed everything for everyone in every way,” said Ruth Ann Harnisch. “Len Witt understands how that affects the flow of information. I am investing in his leadership in the field because he’s willing to engage in bold experiments that could help shape the future of journalism.”

Witt said the Harnisch’s gift addresses a mutual concern for the future of traditional journalism.

“This gift is a tribute to the belief that Kennesaw State is at the forefront of helping reinvent journalism in this era when old business models are crumbling and new ones need to be tested and advanced,” he said. “It is also a tribute to Bill and Ruth Ann Harnisch, who understand the need to act now to ensure that we have high quality journalism in the future.”

For more information on the Harnich Foundation award to KSU and learn more about Ruth Ann Harnisch, scroll down on this newsletter.

Today in The New York Times media critic David Carr wrote:

Is there a way to reverse the broad expectation that information, including content assembled and produced by professionals, should be free? If print wants to perform a cashectomy on users, it should probably look to what happened with music, an industry in which people once paid handsomely for records, then tapes, then CDs, that was overtaken by the expectation that the same product should be free.

Here is what I wrote on January 12, 2007 exactly two years ago to the day:

Here is my biggest question. What will happen when only the journalism is left? It has grown out of a Christmas present I received. It is a small portable GPS. So I can walk about, tell it to find me the barbecue places or the department stores or the visitor center. In other words, what I might have needed a newspaper for in the past all pops up instantly in front of me when I need it and literally walks me to my destination step by step, street by street.

So who needs newspaper advertising if you have that, and, of course, soon everyone will have it in a more perfected form than we have now.

Today we have the iPhone and that is only a primitive example of what we will have in the future.

David Carr ended his piece today by saying:

Now all we need is a business model…

Well a week later in January 2007, I posted my manifesto of sorts called: The Need to Reinvent Journalism While We Can. In it I wrote about what we needed then and still need now. We need:

A model where everything goes back into paying for the journalism. High quality equipment, high quality reporters and editors paid an excellent wage, high quality connectivity with the communities served, and high quality journalism that helps the community members find their way, while always being ready to speak truth to power. We can do it.

Here it is:

Kennesaw State awarded $250,000 grant to advance community-based journalism
New business model envisioned to combat erosion of traditional news media

KENNESAW, Ga. (December 19, 2008) – Kennesaw State University and the KSU Foundation received a $250,000 grant from the Harnisch Foundation as part of an ongoing relationship to advance research aimed at discovering innovative ways to produce financially sustainable, high quality and ethically sound journalism.

“The continuing support from the Harnisch Foundation enables KSU to do important work in preserving journalism in our democracy,” said KSU President Daniel S. Papp.

Leonard Witt, Kennesaw State’s Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication and an eminent scholar, has been sharing his ideas about journalism innovation on his blog (PJNet.org) for two years. The grant from the Harnisch Foundation will help Witt expand innovative ways for communities to fund online news media.

“We are living in an era when old journalism models are failing, newspapers are faltering and experienced journalists are losing their jobs,” Witt said.

Earlier this year, The Harnisch Foundation provided more than $60,000 to launch a test run of “representative journalism,” a new concept developed by Witt. It allows communities, individuals and groups to underwrite their own journalists to deliver Web-based local and topical news. The pilot project is a collaboration between KSU and a Minnesota-based online news community. With the new funding, Witt aims to expand this and other concepts nationally.

“Professor Witt is a nationally recognized leader in exploring new ideas for creating and distributing important, ethically gathered, responsibly presented journalism that helps people make informed decisions,” Harnisch said. “Our foundation is pleased to increase its investment in his cutting-edge work.”

Witt’s test project was launched in Northfield, Minn., on “Locally Grown,” an interactive Weblog and podcast with a large participatory following of area residents and community leaders. In July, Bonnie Obremski, a former general assignment reporter for the North Adams (Mass.) Transcript, was hired to file in-depth local and topical stories on the citizen-run blog.

The new funding will help underwrite more applied research, build collaborations and advance innovative projects around the country to test the viability of citizen-funded journalism. “The days of advertising paying the lion’s share of the news and information delivered to a community are waning,” Witt said.

“Ruth Ann Harnisch has provided inspirational, intellectual and financial support for representative journalism from the beginning,” Witt said. “This gift is a tribute to the belief that Kennesaw State is at the forefront of helping reinvent journalism in this era when old business models are crumbling and new ones need to be tested and advanced.”

Watch PJNet.org for continuing updates on the progress made on innovative journalism funding models.

###

A member of the 35-unit University System of Georgia, Kennesaw State University is a comprehensive‚ residential institution with a growing student population of more than 20‚000 from 132 countries. The third-largest university in Georgia‚ Kennesaw State offers more than 60 graduate and undergraduate degrees‚ including a new doctorate in education.

Bill and Ruth Ann Harnisch awarded the check in New York this morning. The university will be putting out a formal press release, but I don’t want to get scooped. So you will read it here first, unless you follow Ruth Ann on Twitter, she sent a Tweet as the check was giving granted.

The Harnisch Foundation has supported the Representative Journalism concept from the very beginning. In fact, without Ruth Ann Harnisch’s inspirational, intellectual and financial support, Representative Journalism would probably just be an idea rather than a concept that is now being tested at Locally Grown in Northfield, Minnesota.

The funding will open the possibility of seeding more Representative Journalism projects, and I have always said this concept will work best when there are dozens of Rep Js across the country. In fact, I am in the beginning stages of a trial project with a public broadcasting station, but more about that later. First a gigantic thank you to Bill and Ruth Ann Harnisch for their visionary support for the future of journalism.

I am the person behind the Representative Journalism project that is taking place in Northfield, Minnesota via the Locally Grown blog. As many of you know, Bonnie Obremski, thanks to Harnisch Foundation funding, is now Northfield’s very own Rep J reporter.

Today in Northfield we are asking her to put all of her energies toward helping the folks of Northfield understand how the economic crisis is affecting their town. Griff Wigley, who along with Tracy Davis and Ross Currier runs Locally Grown, first posted about the economic meltdown in mid-September. Since then almost 200 comments have been added to that post.

In that post Griff wrote in part:

Looks like a real meltdown. Let’s try to make sense of it… especially how it might impact things locally.

Here was my comment today at Locally Grown addressed to the good folks of Northfield:

So why not add some evidence-based reporting by Bonnie Obremski to this discussion? Who are key people with whom she should be speaking? What stories could she do to answer your questions on how this economic crisis might affect Northfield? What effects are already taking place that should be reported in greater detail?

I have asked her to concentrate on what we are calling Spotlight on the Economy — she needs your help, your ideas.

The idea is for her to provide evidence based reporting and for all of you at Locally Grown to put the stories into a greater context, build upon what she finds, provide story ideas, tell your personal stories and when appropriate suggest ways to act on those stories.

I do believe with that combination of her reporting and your contextualizing we will have a greater understanding of what all this means to your private lives and to the public life of Northfield.

Then in a later comment at Locally Grown I wrote about the biggest challenge for any local reporter:

There is no way that Bonnie is going to do the international banking aspects of this story. She will do the local story. How is the fiscal crisis affecting Main Street and your neighbors right in Northfield?

Of course, the international banking story affects the local economy in profound ways. The Rep J/Locally Grown community’s challenge is to make sense of something which is driven by forces far from home.

We’ll keep you posted on developments as this phase of our Representative Journalism experiment in Northfield moves forward.

In that game, there was no one way to win. Each player decided on his or her individual formula for success based on what combination of money, fame and happiness was most important to that individual.

So it is with individual journalists of the future. Everyone gets to make up his or her own formula. There will be no one path. Life might be similar to that for musicians who come to Nashville. Everyone comes there with the idea of being the best, but alas some people end up playing the lounge scene, even though the pay is small. They are driven by their passion as are would-be actors in New York. They wait on tables or find more creative ways to have multiple streams of income so they can pursue their passion.

Harnisch believes there will be equally passionate people who are storytellers, who are curious about the world in which they live and who have an unstoppable passion to share what they learn with others. That passion is as old as the folks who did the cave drawings.

Here are some questions I drew from speaking to Harnisch:

1. What are your creative options for producing high quality, ethically sound content?
2. How will you get that content as widely distributed as possible and made universally available?
3. How will you create multiple streams of income so you can produce that high quality, ethically sound content?

Of course, the real message here is that journalists will have to start thinking more like entrepreneurs and will have to take more control of their personal futures. Jeff Jarvis’ CUNY conference New Business Models for News will be addressing the topic in October. The Poynter Institute is having a by invitation only meeting in November entitled: Who Will Pay for the News: A New Look at Consumers, Advertisers and Patrons, Baruch College in New York City is planning a journalism business models forum in early 2009. And Baruch, Poynter and I, via my Fowler endowed chair at Kennesaw State University, are looking to have a journalism jobs pre-convention conference at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) convention next August.

So, the discussion, thanks to people like Ruth Ann Harnisch, is moving from hand-wringing to looking for new business and career models for individual journalists because this is no board game, it is the real thing.

Here are a few excerpts:

Steve Yelvington, strategist for Morris DigitalWorks, talking of citizen participation says:

The key to meshing the bubbling social media elements of the site with the print product…is ensuring that the newspaper staff keeps tabs on—and participates in—online conversations. “When it works, the newsroom staff is engaged and comes back with a lot of impressions and leads they didn’t have before,” he says. “To me, that’s the way it fits with journalism. Trying to get people to go out and cover stories like a cub reporter doesn’t work very well.”

Kate Marymont, executive editor of the Fort Myers’ News Press, is quote in this passage:

Both the paper’s crowdsourcing and teamsourcing experiments have one thing in common: “A level of civic engagement I haven’t seen for a while…which is just fabulous.” While that’s a goal shared by many in the citizen journalism movement, it’s one particularly important for newspapers’ long-term survival as well.

And talking about our Locally Grown project in Northfield, Minnesota, in which we will provide the online community a fulltime reporter, I say:

“It’s not just an online newspaper that’s thrown on the online doorstep and the reporter walks away. The reporter is one voice in the bigger community—an informed voice, but one voice. Everyone else can jump in and add a bit of information, providing a higher-quality conversation.”

As I said read the whole white paper, it is an excellent overview of what’s happening.

 Representative Journalism Network Trial Project Team

Leonard Witt, Project Director — also the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University, outside of Atlanta

Chris Peck, Editorial Director — also Editor of the Memphis Commercial Appeal

Bill Densmore, Administrative Director — also Executive Director of the Media Giraffe Project, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Representative Journalism Network National Advisory Board
Updated: April 14, 2008

Bill Buzenberg, Executive Director, Center for Public Integrity
David Cohn, Editor at Off the Bus, BeatBloggers, NewAssignment.net
Oscar Corral, Reporter, Miami Herald
Ken Doctor, Digital Media Consultant, Content Bridges
David Eckoff, Media Consultant, formerly Turner Broadcasting VP
Amy Gahan, Content Strategist, Poytner & J-Lab
Mark Glaser, Host & Editor, MediaShift
Joel Kramer, Publisher, MinnPost.com, former editor/publisher Minneapolis Star Tribune
Dori J. Maynard, President and CEO, Maynard Institute
Ken Sands, Innovation Editor, Congressional Quarterly
Jan Schaffer, Executive Director, J-Lab
Venise Wagner, Chair and Associate Professor, San Francisco State University Journalism Department
Lisa Williams, Founder, Placebloggers

Representative Journalism Network Financial Support

A generous grant from the Harnisch Family Foundation with the inspirational and intellectual support from its president Ruth Ann Harnisch has helped advance the Representative Journalism concept and made the Northfield, Minnesota trial project possible.

An Update 4-02-08:

Representative Journalism Network Researcher

Rachel Davis Mersey, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication  at the University of Minnesota, is overseeing the assessment and evaluation of our Locally Grown, Northfield project.

Locally Grown Trial Project

The Locally Grown blog and podcast in Northfield is overseen by its triumvirate: Griff Wigley, Ross Currier and Tracy Davis.

“I feel like we’re pointing the way toward what news organizations of the future are likely to look like and do. If I’m right, we’ll be Chicago’s dominant news organization in 10 years. If I’m wrong, we won’t be around.”