The facts are these: The Guardian (please see disclosure below) has opened a small shop called #GuardianCoffee in the fashionable neighborhood of Shoreditch in London, near the newspaper’s headquarters. It offers coffee from a local roaster, as well as iPads that are free to use — and Guardian social-media editor Joanna Geary apparently plans to spend at least some of her time in the shop, interacting with readers as well as doing live interviews.

The launch generated some fairly predictable reactions: the idea that this would give new meaning to the “daily grind” of a journalist’s life, some pointed comments about how the salary of the baristas at the Guardian coffee shop (reportedly up to $52,000) would make the job look pretty good to many struggling reporters, and some comments about how customers would have to make their orders conform to the Guardian‘s left-leaning focus (i.e., no calling your coffee “black”).

I'd rather spend £2 on a latte, thanks all the same. #guardiancoffee—
Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) May 30, 2013

The idea of having an “open newsroom” that allows journalists to mingle with readers and have coffee or other condiments around isn’t new: the Torrington Register Citizen in Connecticut, part of Digital First Media, opened up its newsroom to the community in 2010 and offered coffee and internet access — readers are also invited to attend story meetings, and can get help with tips on reporting or video editing if they want to practice any “citizen journalism.”

Coffee, sandwiches and journalism

The Winnipeg Free Press in Manitoba, Canada also launched a coffee shop venture called the News Cafe in 2011, where some of the paper’s journalists spend part of their time in the shop interacting with readers, and the newspaper does live interviews and contests (Note: An editor emailed me to say journalists don’t regularly work in the cafe, but the live events are very popular). The cafe even gets good ratings for its coffee and sandwiches on the Urbanspoon app, although one commenter says the latte is “rubbish.”

In a sense, the Guardian’s coffee shop is just another element of editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s approach to opening up the journalistic process, which has also involved allowing readers into the story selection process and launching a mobile app that encourages users to post tips and contribute to stories in other ways. Rusbridger talked about the idea of open journalism during an interview at our recent paidContent Live conference in New York, which is embedded below.

Update: A reader noted that an ambitious project by an investment firm in the Czech Republic aimed at opening a chain of hyperlocal newspapers and coffee shops failed and was shut down in 2010.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover and Jim Waterson

While BuzzFeed has relied on reader content for years, the new vertical will increase the visibility of such contributions. It will also increase the chances of a viral pay-off from the site’s high-tech publishing tools. The new “Community” section includes a formal submission process that permits users to submit one post per day until their (what else) “Cat Power” increases, which will allow more frequent submissions.

“Community has always been a huge part of our site — some of our best posts have come from community submissions — and now we want to reinvent community for the social web,” editorial director Scott Lamb said in an email statement.

BuzzFeed’s decision to expand the scope of user-generated offerings comes at a time when media outlets are increasingly looking to commenters as a source of talent and future hires. My colleague Mathew Ingram explained the phenomenon well earlier this week in “Want a job at Gawker Media? You can get a head  start by being a regular commenter.”

The new section is consistent with BuzzFeed’s improbable quest to become more serious and more inane at the same time. In recent weeks, the site has been at forefront of major news stories like the Boston bombings while also churning out its regular fare like “14 cats who think they’re sushi.”

At first glance, it might not look like Nextdoor and Patch are even in the same game: after all, Nextdoor describes itself as “the private social network for your neighborhood,” while AOL has always described Patch as a source of news and information, more like a community newspaper. But when it comes right down to it, these are really just two different ways of looking at the same problem: how to get important information about a community to the residents who care most about that information — whether it’s school closings or local government ineptitude or criminal activity.

Blurring the line between news and social network

That kind of content has always been the core of what small town and community-level newspapers have done, and the best ones have been similar to a social network in many ways as well — in the sense that readers pay more attention to the birth and death notices and the letters to the editor than they do to the actual “news.”

This is the goal that EveryBlock was going after, first as a data-driven startup launched by programmer/journalist Adrian Holovaty with a grant from the Knight Foundation, and then as a subsidiary of NBC after it was acquired in 2009. In 2011, the service added a lot more human-powered and community features — which Holovaty said he had come to believe were crucial for such a network to succeed — but it wasn’t enough to keep the service afloat.

Patch recently did something similar: instead of relying exclusively on journalists, it is opening up the service in an attempt to make it more of a community noticeboard. The main goal seems to be to cut the costs of the network, which AOL has poured more than $150 million into. According to comments made during its latest conference call with analysts, Patch is doing well — but it is still well short of the revenue targets that AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong has repeatedly promised to hit.

Instead of starting with the news and then trying to add social-networking aspects later, Nextdoor started with the social networking side: the idea behind the service is that you and your neighbors need a place to talk about those school closings or crime reports or even where to find a good mechanic or babysitter, and doing it on Facebook or Twitter or another public network isn’t appealing for a variety of reasons, including privacy concerns.

High barriers to entry improve the signal

So what Nextdoor does is make it as difficult as possible to join — the exact opposite of what Facebook and even Patch try to do. Only people who actually live in a specific neighborhood can join the Nextdoor network for that area, and the service doesn’t just accept your word: it verifies it by checking your credit-card information, calling your home phone or sending a postcard directly to your house with a special registration code on it.

Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia says the company is sending out about 15,000 of these postcards every day, and admits that the service builds in “a lot of friction to join” the network.

In part because of Facebook, we are used to thinking of social networks as being more powerful the more open they are, but in the case of Nextdoor the private and restricted nature of the network could be its biggest strength — and it’s almost certainly why David Sze of Greylock, an early investor in LinkedIn, was interested in the company. In many ways, Nextdoor is like a LinkedIn for your neighborhood, but even more restrictive: so if you are interacting with someone on the site, you have a high degree of confidence that what they say is going to be relevant to you.

When it comes to monetization, Nextdoor and its backers say there are some fairly obvious advertising or e-commerce tie-ins to such local content — and given the network’s focus on keeping the signal-to-noise ratio high, an argument could be made that it is more likely to succeed at this strategy than either Patch or the existing hyperlocal media players (newspapers, etc.) in those regions. Nextdoor says it has doubled in size in the last six months and now covers over 8,000 neighborhoods in all 50 states.

Images courtesy of Flickr users Jason Parks and Pew Center

Atwood, who left Stack Exchange — the company that manages Stack Overflow and a number of other similar sites — about a year ago, launched his new venture on Tuesday with a blog post in which he lamented the fact that commenting and user forums have not changed much in the past decade. The vast majority of these platforms, he says, still fail to capture real conversation and are too difficult or expensive to implement.

Figuring out who to trust is the holy grail

The Stack Overflow founder says his new platform, which is known as Discourse, differs from other commenting systems in a number of ways — including the fact that it is fully open source. Atwood used the blog-publishing platform WordPress as a model (see disclosure below), and says the company will rely on selling hosting, support and other services for revenue.

Discourse has raised funding from a group of venture backers including Greylock and SV Angel, although Atwood wouldn’t say how much (another hosted commenting solution, Livefyre, also just closed a round of financing).

In addition to some other innovations, such as links that automatically expand within a comment (in the same way Twitter’s “expanded tweets” do), Atwood says he is trying to build a reputation system that will grant users new abilities based on the level of trust the platform has in them. Although he doesn’t provide a lot of detail, in a comment on a Hacker News discussion thread he suggests that it will be based on behavior such as flagging abusive posts.

Measuring trust and rewarding good behavior is something online communities have been trying to do for years, with mixed success. Some believe that sites like Slashdot — which has a moderation platform that awards “karma points” for certain behavior and appoints moderators automatically — have a good solution to the usual problems of trolling and flame wars, while others argue that these systems are almost always fatally flawed. Metafilter (which charges users $5 to become members) has many fans, but it is also a relatively small community. Branch is another attempt to reinvent user forums and discussion as invitation-only hosted conversations.

Trust takes effort, not just algorithms

Atwood says he wants to use a badge system for rewards (something Huffington Post also uses), but Gawker founder Nick Denton said in an interview last year that a similar reward system his sites used was a “terrible mistake,” because it was easily gamed and encouraged the wrong kinds of behavior. Denton has since completely revamped Gawker’s commenting system in an attempt to make reader comments the centerpiece, as well as a potential business model.

As my colleague Jeff Roberts noted in a recent post, the Huffington Post has also launched what it hopes will be a new feature called Conversations, which allows popular comments to become full-fledged blog posts of their own. The Verge — a tech blog run by Vox Media — is doing something similar with its site, in order to try and encourage more discussion and community. But both take a lot of manual effort.

Veteran blogger Anil Dash pointed out in an insightful post in 2011 that one of the only ways to maintain and encourage a healthy conversation — regardless of what platform you use — is to be involved in those discussions yourself as much as possible (a point Bora Zivkovic of Scientific American also made recently). Unfortunately for publishers looking for a quick or inexpensive fix, that kind of engagement is almost impossible to automate.

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Sam72 and Yan Arief Purwanto

As Alex Hern at New Statesman describes it, the issue exploded into public view after the moderators of a Reddit page called r/politics said they were banning the posting of any links from Nick Denton’s Gawker Media network. Why? Because Gawker writer Adrian Chen was reportedly planning to expose the real identity of a moderator running a page devoted to creepy pictures of women called r/creepshots (the same person was also a moderator on another sub-Reddit called r/incest, which was deleted by Reddit last year, as part of an attempt to crack down on offensive and/or illegal content).

Banning links to protect freedom of speech

The moderator in question — who went by the name violentacrez — appears to have deleted the sub-Reddit and all of its posts, and has also deleted his Reddit account completely (Jessica Roy at Betabeat also has a good roundup of the story). And moderators of other pages, including r/politics, decided to block links from Gawker as a way of showing their displeasure at the attempts to force violentacrez to reveal his true identity. The moderators of r/politics posted a statement saying:

“We feel that this type of behavior is completely intolerable. We volunteer our time on Reddit to make it a better place for the users, and should not be harassed and threatened for that. We should all be afraid of the threat of having our personal information investigated and spread around the internet.”

As more than one person has pointed out, these comments are filled with unintentional irony on a number of levels, including the fact that a site which champions free speech is banning links to a specific news outlet for something it hasn’t even reported yet, and the outrage that it is complaining about is the act of revealing information about a person in public — a person who moderates a page where people post revealing photos of women without their consent. Even some Reddit defenders seemed to be taken aback by the hypocrisy of the r/politics moderators in this case.

To complicate the picture even further, a Reddit critic set up a Tumblr blog called Predditors, which posted photos and biographical information about the users who were active on the r/creepshots page, including photos from their Facebook pages, as well as racist and offensive comments made by them, details about their families, and so on. Some Reddit users responded to this attack with further outrage, saying their privacy was being invaded — even though (as Choire Sicha at The Awl pointed out) all of the information was already publicly available on the internet, and was just aggregated by the Tumblr blog’s author.

Can we count on communities to self-regulate?

The Predditors blog was removed by Tumblr, apparently because the site was afraid the photos were not legal, and then it was later reinstated, but it now it requires a password to access. The Jezebel blog (which is part of Gawker Media) spoke to the creator of Predditors, a 25-year-old woman who said she is a Reddit member but was outraged by the content on r/creepshots and decided to do something about it:

“Reddit’s defense of [CreepShots] is that it’s ‘technically legal.’ So I’m doing something that’s technically legal, but will result in consequences for their actions.”

If you’re an optimist about the power of online communities like Reddit and its cousin 4chan (which has been home to even worse content, if that’s possible), you could see this as a kind of self-regulating process at work. Given the ability to post anything whatsoever, with little or no oversight from any site editors — apart from periodic attempts to remove illegal content — it’s natural to assume that every dark element of human nature will be represented. And in some cases, moderators will actually trample on the principle of free speech even as they allegedly are trying to protect it.

At the same time, however, Reddit does self-regulate — and even the appearance of the Predditors blog could be seen as part of that process. The site has taken action in the past to crack down on offensive behavior, and it’s worth remembering that the Reddit community can also be a powerful force for good in the world, by calling attention to worthwhile causes like the fundraising for young Caine Monroy, or engaging in random acts of kindness such as arranging for strangers to send birthday wishes to a retired Army vet in a small town. Or random acts of journalism.

Maybe we should think of Reddit the same way we think about British tabloids — they contain all kinds of unseemly content, nude photos and ridiculous conspiracy theories, but occasionally they also have actual news in them, and so they are probably worth keeping around.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Hoggarazzi and Jennifer Moo

Reddit’s success and growth since the acquisition by Advance is unusual, as Carr notes — the history of web-based communities and other similar digital businesses after they get acquired by media giants is not exactly filled with happy stories. Typically, the larger media entity imposes various restrictions on the asset it has acquired and ruins whatever made it successful in the first place. But for whatever reason, Advance didn’t do this with Reddit: there were no failed attempts at “synergies” with the rest of the company, and no tinkering with the formula that made the service so appealing to so many — namely, a frontier-style freedom similar to the somewhat notorious community 4chan.

Communities are fragile — don’t mess with them

So the most obvious thing that a media company could learn from Reddit is the benefit of leaving well enough alone, especially where your users are concerned. In other words, when you have something that seems to be working, the best way to avoid screwing it up is to just let those who built it do whatever they want with it (within reason, of course). As Carr describes in his piece:

Steve Newhouse, the chairman of Advance.net, decided very early on that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit, and for the most part, left well enough alone. “We had some ideas about what would be good, but it might not have worked,” Mr. Newhouse said. “We paid attention to the community instead.”

That’s a pretty rare comment for a media executive to make, especially if they have paid tens of millions of dollars for an asset like Reddit (although the New York Times‘ ownership of About.com — which is being sold to Barry Diller’s IAC — was reportedly also fairly hands off). And it’s probably rare in part because media companies like Advance don’t typically buy digital-only startups like Reddit. But the other key to what Newhouse said is that at some level he recognized that the power behind Reddit came from the community itself, and that messing with it would be a huge risk (although it should be noted that communities can also carry some risks, since content can be posted that runs afoul of various laws).

Although he didn’t mention it, there’s a pretty powerful contrary example to Reddit: namely Digg, the pioneering link-sharing and discussion community that ruled the early days of what was then called “Web 2.0″ and drove so much traffic to websites that it could literally shut their servers down in a matter of minutes. Digg — driven in part by the need to please the financial backers who gave it tens of millions in venture financing — messed with its design and functionality to the point where it destroyed what community it once had and was eventually sold for spare parts.

Newspapers need to figure out how community works

These lessons are especially important as newspapers like the New York Times become much more reader-focused, since reader contributions now make up more than half of the paper’s revenue — having recently overtaken advertising revenue as the single biggest contributor to the bottom line. And they are equally important to newspapers like the Times-Picayune and others that are cutting back on print and trying to justify their move to either a mostly web-only or fully digital-only strategy. What is likely to be the single biggest determining factor in the success of either of these ventures? An engaged community of readers — much like those at Reddit.

As we’ve seen with the site’s coverage of breaking news stories like the mass shooting in Aurora, Colo. and another in Canada, the Reddit community can be an incredibly powerful engine for reporting and for the distribution of real-time information. Why has no major newspaper tried to invest in or build this kind of community? Not only could it produce news-related benefits, but getting to know your readers better has other advantages as well. The NYT has tried to implement some low-level community features such as reader membership with special benefits, but has not gone much further.

Advance has taken a lot of heat for what has happened in Ann Arbor, Michigan since the daily newspaper there stopped printing and went digital-only. According to a recent piece in the American Journalism Review, many readers find that the website version of the paper is a pale imitation of the original, with a sharply reduced staff producing underwhelming content. And there is widespread concern about what will happen to New Orleans as the newspaper there stops printing several days a week and becomes digital only, because of the role that the printed paper is said to play in the community.

As they try to move online, or become reader-supported the way the New York Times is, more newspapers and other media outlets are going to have to get serious about building community — and that means more than just trying to get a bunch of Twitter followers who will retweet a headline. Reddit is a great example of a real community, and Advance has clearly seen the power of what that kind of community can do given the right circumstances. But can it take those lessons and apply them elsewhere? It and other newspapers are going to have to figure out how if they want to survive online.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Christian Scholz and jphilipg

One of the main things the new Digg seems to be missing is any sense of community, or even comments. The items on the site have reactions attached to them that come from Facebook and Twitter, but that’s it — no ability for users to post a comment the way they could on Digg. For anyone who recalls the original, this is a significant loss: before Reddit or Hacker News built a community around online discussion, and before Twitter popularized the sharing of links to interesting news, there was Digg. And for better or worse (depending on your perspective) the Digg community was a big part of what made the site fascinating.

Pros: The new Digg is clean-looking, fast and mobile

It’s tough to be too hard on the new Digg team about missing features, since they managed to rebuild the entire site in just six weeks. According to Betaworks founder John Borthwick — who is now also the CEO of Digg — the old code base and design of the site was just too expensive to operate, and so the company decided it had to re-engineer the whole network. What it launched on Tuesday is very different from what Digg used to look like, with its long pages of links and comments: the new version is very clean-looking from a design perspective (although that too has its critics), and it makes good use of images.

At least one person has called it a Pinterest for news, which is a pretty apt description so far. And while a number of critics have complained that the new Digg requires users to log in with Facebook, at least the site is trying to take advantge of the network effects of other sharing services. The new Digg has also launched an iPhone app that is just as stripped down as the web version, and moves with impressive speed — a smart choice at a time when an increasing amount of content is being consumed on mobile devices.

That said, however, there are a number of other players targeting the same sandbox that Digg wants to play in, whether it’s the Twitter network itself — with its increasingly curation-driven approach to the content that it distributes — or newcomers like Prismatic, which like the new Digg uses a variety of algorithms based on sharing activity in your social graph to determine what links to show you (Digg also has human editors or curators selecting content as well).

Can Digg create a new community around news?

News.me, the Betaworks startup that merged with Digg after the incubator bought the company, was also working on a news-sharing service that started out as an iPad app — originally created by two developers working for the New York Times — and morphed into an iPhone app that founder Jake Levine said he hoped would become like an Instagram for news. Given that building a community around news sharing was one of the things Levine said he was trying to do, there is hope that later versions of Digg might contain more social elements, but for now it is little more than a bulletin board with news items pinned to it.

There’s no question that we need smart aggregators in order to help us filter the vast amounts of information that are coming at us every day online, and the ones that interest me the most (and others such as Clay Shirky, a big fan of News.me and its curated email briefing) are networks or services that take advantage of the connections I’ve made through my social graph and use that to help show me information I am more likely to be interested in. Digg can do that, but what makes it any better than anyone else out there doing the same thing? The power of its algorithms?

In a blog post, Digg says that “experimenting with new commenting features” is one of the things on its to-do list as it develops the service over the coming months, but that’s a long way from building — or even re-engaging with — a community (many of whom have long since left to join Reddit in any case). That’s the part that is arguably the most valuable of all, but it’s also the hardest thing to build.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Montecruz Foto

Margaret Atwood doesn’t really need to find new ways to get attention: after all, the 72-year-old Canadian-born author and poet has already won a slew of awards, and is seen by many as a candidate for a Nobel Prize. Most authors her age would be resting on their laurels somewhere, but Atwood seems to have an unquenchable curiosity about new things, including Twitter. Now, she is working with the online writing community Wattpad to try and encourage new writers, and is also involved in a crowfunded effort to create a service called Fanado that authors can use to connect with their readers. Other authors may want to slow down, but Atwood seems to have no interest in joining them.

Wattpad is a Toronto, Ontario-based startup we’ve written about before that recently raised $17 million from a group of venture backers including Khosla Ventures and Yahoo founder Jerry Yang. An online writing community that writers can get involved with either through the web or via mobile apps, Wattpad has more than 3 million users and over 5 million pieces of content uploaded to the network. And as Khosla Ventures partner Andrew Chung pointed out after the firm financed the company, the kind of interactive model that Wattpad is based on is very different from more traditional self-publishing services, which is one of the things that attracted Atwood about it.

Wattpad allows young writers to experiment

Instead of just uploading books, many members of Wattpad’s community upload unfinished chapters that are still in development, or pieces of poetry they need feedback on, and then get comments and advice from other users of the service — both other writers and readers. In a piece she wrote for the Guardian recently, Atwood talked about how that process could help young writers experiment and develop their own voices, giving them tools that writers of her generation never had at their disposal:

No one need know how old you are, what your social background is, or where you live. Your readers can be anywhere. And if you’re worried about adverse reactions from your teachers, your grandmother, or others who might not like you writing about slavering zombies or your relatives, you can use a pseudonym… [and] not only that, you’ll have readers who leave encouraging comments on your message board, thus boosting your morale.

In the past, Atwood says, writers like her had to scribble in notebooks or journals, experiment with poems in high-school yearbooks and keep their most heartfelt writing “in our sock drawers” for fear of ridicule. As they grew older, they helped to create literary magazines and journals that were chronically underfunded and handed out in coffee houses and other locations after Poetry Night or other open readings. The feedback that Wattpad writers can get, she says, is not only invaluable but actually recreates the kind of process that writers like Charles Dickens got when they serialized their work in magazines.

Atwood also notes that networks and communities like Wattpad aren’t necessarily a replacement for the traditional publishing industry, but more like an enhancement or addition to it. Some members of the Wattpad community have already gotten interest from mainstream publishers based on the response and the following they’ve gotten from other members of the service (in addition to becoming a member of Wattpad and posting poems of her own, Atwood has agreed to judge a Wattpad poetry contest). As she describes it:

Publishers bring a lot to the joint venture that is producing a book. Not everyone wants to read those kinds of books, and not everyone wants to write them – but they remain a huge aspiration for many. For those who want to hone their writing skills, schools and tools are increasingly available. In my view, Wattpad is not a replacement for publishers, but a gateway leading to them.

Atwood is also helping to create an interactive artists’ platform

In addition to her work with Wattpad, Atwood is one of the founding artists involved with a startup called Fanado, which is trying to raise funds through the crowdfunding service Indiegogo in order to launch a kind of digital-community platform for artists. The campaign, which closes at the end of July, has already raised $53,000 towards its goal of $85,000 and offers a number of perks — including the chance to become a character in a new Atwood novel, which comes with a donation of $10,000 or more (one fan has already claimed that perk, but two more are still open).

The idea behind Fanado is to give authors tools that they can use to interact with fans remotely, including the ability to share live video and audio of readings or get-togethers with a community, and to sign and distribute both electronic books and printed books, as well as CDs and other offerings related to a work. In some ways, Fanado is the logical extension of an earlier project that Atwood was involved in, which led to the development of an electronic book-signing device called the “Long Pen” — which authors could use to sign physical books in remote locations while on a virtual book tour.

But my favorite part of Atwood’s piece defending her experiment with Wattpad is when she talks about how people seem to see these projects as undignified in some way, as though they are beneath someone of her advanced age and/or standing in the literary community. As she puts it in the Guardian post:

Once again people are giving me strange looks… “But Margaret,” you can hear them whispering. “You’re a literary icon at the height of your powers; it says so on your book covers. Why are you sneaking out with an online story-sharing site heavy on romance, vampires and werewolves? You should be endorsing Literature, capital L. Get back up on that pedestal! Strike a serious pose! Turn to stone!

At her age, the literary legend argues, “you can afford to be undignified; you’re free to explore, and to guinea-pig yourself, and to stretch the boundaries.” Not only is that what Atwood wants to do, in multiple ways, but her support of Wattpad seems to stem from the belief that young writers need somewhere to do that as well, and that writing as a whole is better off for it — and that’s a pretty inspiring message.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Jeremy Mates and Peter A. Wolf

We’ve seen a ton of digital ink spilled over the implications of media startup Journatic faking bylines for some of its content, including my post about the underlying economics that have forced newspapers like the Chicago Tribune to outsource their hyper-local content. While some critics choose to see outsourced journalism of the kind Journatic produces as unethical “pink slime,” the controversy over the startup’s practices actually says a lot about how difficult it is to find new ways of producing that kind of content — in part because the traditional media industry and its supporters want to force everything into old models and familiar formats.

Just to recap, Journatic is a Chicago-based startup founded by former journalist Brian Timpone as a way of helping news providers cover local and community news more efficiently. The company has worked with a number of mainstream outlets such as the Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, as well as the GateHouse newspaper chain, providing the kind of commodity news that community papers specialize in: notices of events, local residents winning awards, real-estate transactions and so forth. Journatic pays staffers and freelancers — some of whom work in the Philippines — to produce this content from publicly available data.

The company was engulfed in a firestorm of criticism last week, after a Journatic employee (who has since resigned)told the public-radio program This American Life that it routinely used fake bylines for some of the content it provided to the Tribune and others. Timpone said in an interview with me that these manufactured bylines were only used for data-based stories that came from a sister company called Blockshopper, which aggregates data about real-estate sales in various communities, not traditional journalistic stories that were provided to newspapers — but he admitted that using the fake bylines was “absolutely a mistake.”

Why does the new have to look like the old?

As media industry blogger John Bethune pointed out in a blog post about the Journatic incident, the source of the mistake was a desire to make the content that came from Blockshopper look and feel like the stories that both newspaper owners and readers would be familiar with — in other words, a traditional newspaper story with the name of the author at the top. As Bethune put it:

The real issue was not that the company used fake bylines on its stories, but that it used bylines at all. Journatic screwed up because the company wanted to have it both ways: to embrace new-media principles while trying to disguise them. Instead of looking forward, it looked backward.

Timpone effectively admitted the same thing in his interview with me — that part of the mistake Journatic made was in thinking that the content it was producing needed bylines in the first place (much of what it provides to the Tribune for that newspaper’s TribLocal sites now simply says “Neighborhood News Service). Some critics of the practice have assumed that the fake bylines were intended to disguise the fact that contributors were from the Philippines, but Timpone said the practice was mostly designed to make the content look like a traditional story because that’s what the company thought newspapers would want.

But much of the content that comes from both Blockshopper and Journatic doesn’t really fit that model at all. Instead of being a story that a single individual produces (along with some editing), they are an amalgamation of data and contributions from multiple sources, some of whom scrape databases or make phone calls and others who edit or fact-check or perform other functions to produce the “story.”

Critics of the Journatic model, including Mandy Jenkins of Digital First Media and Anna Tarkov at the Poynter Institute, seem to want newspapers to continue to produce hyper-local community journalism in the traditional way, with reporters based in the community writing traditional stories. But given the kinds of financial pressures on the newspaper industry, that may simply not be viable for outlets like the Tribune or GateHouse. That’s not to say they shouldn’t devote resources to those communities, but it does mean that looking at alternative models for some kinds of content makes sense as well.

Not “pink slime,” just a potential new model

I think what’s important with a new model like the one Timpone is trying to implement is not to find ways of dismissing it as the “pink slime” of the journalism industry, but to see whether anything in it is ultimately worth keeping or is providing a worthwhile service for readers. Does Journatic or Blockshopper content inform readers about things that they might be interested in, and does it do so accurately? It seems to (no one has raised concerns about inaccuracy so far, just bylines). Do readers really care who wrote the post about the high-school student winning an award or the sale of a local property? I don’t know.

In a recent presentation about the future of media, Richard Gingras — former CEO of Salon and now director of news products for Google — notes that many of the models that newspapers and other media entities continue to rely on, including the traditional story format, are throwbacks to the days of print. Why do we need to use them online, where content is more fluid? Why not experiment with new forms? As Gingras puts it:

These were models that barely changed in 100 years — what, they added color? So people didn’t have a reason to evolve. [But] you now have people on the outside looking at the problem with a clean slate.

In many ways, this is related to the discussion that media theorist Jeff Jarvis and others have been having for some time now about how the news “story” needs to be blown up or dismantled, or at the very least re-thought. Since the way that news occurs and the ways in which information reaches us has been completely disrupted by the web and the democratization of distribution, the argument is that we need to have different models and formats for handling that information intelligently — whether it’s with tools like Storify or new ways of aggregating and filtering data in order to make it meaningful.

Could Journatic be one of those ways, at least for certain kinds of hyper-local content and information? It’s possible, or at the very least worth considering. And demonizing that approach as “pink slime” or something that is antithetical to journalism doesn’t really help.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Zert Sonstige

Twitter sent some shock waves through the technology community with a blog post on Friday that talked about its plans for the future, and suggested that those plans don’t necessarily involve third-party services and apps. Although the company phrased its statement as a move designed to standardize the experience for Twitter users, developers and others in the broader Twitter ecosystem clearly took the post as a warning shot across the bow — especially since the company simultaneously shut down a cross-posting partnership it had with LinkedIn . It seems clear that Twitter wants to control the network as tightly as possible so that it can monetize it more easily, but doing so also comes with substantial risks.

In his blog post, consumer product manager Michael Sippey talked a lot about the introduction of features such as “expanded tweets,” which show more information from providers like GigaOM and the New York Times when a link is included in a tweet. He said the company wants to broaden that program to more publishers, as well as giving them tools to display expanded tweets and other features on their sites — but he also made it obvious that developers who stray outside of the lines are taking a big risk:

[W]e’ve already begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners, for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.

Twitter has burned the ecosystem before

These comments set off warning bells for a number of developers, who said they were concerned that Twitter was going to crack down on any third-party app or service. One developer on Hacker News said that in his view, Twitter was trying to shut down third-party services so that they could “inflict a homogenized, boring, monoculture on their user base [that] they can monetize, which will make the experience progressively worse.” Said Turntable.fm developer Jonathan Kupferman:

Twitter seems to be mercilessly killing all developer apps of any interest businessinsider.com/twitter-linked… Light the match, hello #burningplatform

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Jonathan Kupferman (@jkupferman) June 29, 2012

This isn’t the first time that Twitter has upset the developer community by throwing its weight around. In 2011, there was widespread criticism of the service for the way it issued new rules around use of the Twitter API — and also the way it behaved towards those who crossed the line by shutting off their access without even a warning, as it did in the case of entrepreneur Bill Gross and his Ubermedia network. At the time, one critic accused the company of “nuking” the Twitter ecosystem.

The company also came under fire in 2010 for the way it handled relations with third-party developers after it bought an app called Tweetie. Hunch founder Chris Dixon said Twitter was “acting like a drunk guy with an Uzi” by telling developers not to bother developing Twitter apps, and a number of companies and investors that had been putting money and time into the Twitter ecosystem stopped doing so. So some of the negative reaction to Sippey’s post stems from being burned twice already.

Some observers have argued that Twitter is just doing what it has to do in order to control its network and build a sustainable business, and that third-party developers don’t have any right to expect favorable treatment, since they are piggybacking on its API and resources. Longtime Twitter users, however, say the service’s behavior is a betrayal of all of the other services and apps that helped generate most of the goodwill it is now busy monetizing. As John Abell of Reuters pointed out on Friday, much of the value that users find in Twitter comes from the way it connects to other services.

Twitter's value is its integration with other networks. Cutting them off is like being on the wrong side of history. allthingsd.com/20120629/twitt…

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John C Abell (@johncabell) June 30, 2012

Anti-user moves torpedoed both MySpace and Digg

And there is a very real risk to this kind of aggressive focus on control and monetization, as a commenter on Hacker News pointed out: restricting the ways that users can access and display their tweets, whether through strict API rules or moves like the LinkedIn shutdown, could irritate the user base that Twitter is relying on to click ads and do all the other things it is planning around monetization. Ultimately, the company could ruin the experience that made Twitter so compelling in the first place, in the same way that MySpace and Digg did.

There are plenty of reasons why MySpace failed, including the conflicting desires of a giant corporate owner like News Corp., but it also started to hemorrhage users because it focused more on monetization through ads and other elements than it did on maintaining a good experience for users. Digg did something similar — in an attempt to build a bigger company and leverage its user base for profit, it added a whole range of “services” and features that were designed mainly to appeal to corporate customers and advertisers. The end result was a wholesale desertion of Digg for other communities like Reddit.

Twitter has a tiger by the tail — it has an active user base in the hundreds of millions, it has become an almost indispensable tool for both news junkies and the media (although this carries risks as well) and it is starting to see some favorable responses to its ad model. But it is also a community, where the users provide the vast majority of the content that is being monetized, and while screwing around with that relationship may appear to make short-term financial sense, it could end in disaster.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and See-ming Lee