The question of the opening panel at the September 24  Block by Block conference in Chicago, which is focused on local and community media is "How do you make community engagement work?

I am the moderator of this discussion, and with my panelists--Tracy Record of The West Seattle Blog, Andre Natta of The Terminal (Birmingham, AL) and David Cohn of Spot.us--we'd like to provide some best practices, some stories, and some answers.

Only, we only have 90 minutes. And we could all undoubtedly go on about this for hours. As could you(if you have read this far).  So, here's the invite to you all:

If you are involved with a local community site, however you choose to define it--but with a serious online publishing component, can you please share some of your experiences with me and this panel so we can add you into the discussion?

Here's what we'd like to know:

What are the questions YOU ask about community engagement you'd like to see others ask as well--and get answers to?  3-5 would be ideal

What is something YOU learned this year about making community engagement work that you'd like to talk about at this session? Something connected to your site/project?

Please send your responses to me--or leave in the comments, and I will add them into our mix.

Jan Schaffer of I-Lab invited me to give a talk last week at the AJEMC conference in Denver. The topic: women entrepreneurs, local new, advice & challenges.  I’ve just posted the slides from the talk to SlideShare; they include a list of women entrepreneurs(and a few guys) who inspire me, and tips on being successful as an entrepreneur (including the notion that when you are small, you can at least try to pay people promptly.) Here’s the slde deck

If you wonder where this blog went, my local start up ate it--check oaklandlocal.com

Just read the news that Match.com is going to take over Personals dating on Yahoo. Sadly, it was inevitable. During the time I was running product at Yahoo! Personals, we had at least 3 different SVPs the unit reported to. Not only did the group get switched around repeatedly, it was clear no one at the top had strong interest in managing this kind of transactional revenue, despite good ROI, strong team, etc.

Now, 3 years after the first flurries, Yahoo! has accepted the Match deal. Good news--or bad?
Match taking over Yahoo's Personals category is a great idea if you believe that the unit was on life support, being run for 18-24 months as a cash cow to capitalize on traffic till the earlier investment paid back.

It is a great idea if you believe Yahoo! should focus on a small set of core businesses and divest of things that are distractions (though, 2 1/2 years out of Yahoo! I have no idea what those core business area).

And it is a great idea if Yahoo's best plan is to be an aggregator and make $3-4 MM a year in affiliate referrals via partner payouts for customer acquisition rather than manage greater revenue against greater cost.

But is is a great idea?

Not really, But Yahoo! stopped having great ideas a long time ago.

Ancient history note: I used to run Product at YP.

What if I knew someone who had a workplace where there were no people of color?

What if when asked about the lack of diversity, the person who ran that workplace said " There aren't any people of color who can do these jobs," Or, they said, "People of color aren't interested in this work."  Or he said "I tried to find some non-white workers, but the one I found didn't want to work here."

Would you believe that person? Or would you think they were racist?
Would you be angry about the opportunities they were denying qualified people who were not of their race--or think the fact they felt they made a best case effort be good enough?

As a person who is trying to make--and support--positive social change and a more diverse meritocracy--I'd hold the person who ran this workplace responsible for the range of the workers and not let excuses get him off the hook. I'd say it was his responsibility to reach out and build the bridges that make it clear people of color are wanted and needed,his responsibility to make the change occur.

And which I don't think sexism is the same thing as racism, I feel exactly the same way about the need to make sure women are represented.  People who don't see women professionals, who overlook them or look past them, have a gender bias that is very close to the kind of race prejudice that makes it impossible to consider a person of color as a professional or an authority. 

Workplace worlds without women  are biased and sexist--and the arguments that women are a) missing  b) not interested  c) not up to the same quality are self-fulfilling prophecies based on the biases of the speaker.

Acknowledging these truths is what makes a post by tech developer and innovator Chris Messina powerful.  Not only is Chris one of the cool tech people (he has 22,000 followers on Twitter) , he's actually a privileged white male tech insider who is willing to say that exclusion of women--and lack of gender balance--in all too many tech conferences is WRONG.  Instead of justifying that status quo,
Chris argues that excluding women from tech events is not only unfair to woman, it dampens down innovation.  What white men should do, Messina argues, is take their power and share it, even give it away.

"So this power that we white men have? It's only power if we actually give it away and spread out our privilege as much as possible. In whatever form it might take, this potential power means nothing unless we actually use it -- so by working to fix the problem, we're actually proving what kind of man we are."

Nice words, eh?  Worth taking to heart?  Would you be surprised to hear they were written 4 years ago--and that very little has changed?
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It's been great talking with media organizations in Oakland and learning more about what everyone sees as the issues. I am learning alot, and it is influencing how I partner with other groups,  But there's also some mis-information  floating around, so I am going to step back and correct some of the things I have read that are just so not true:

1. I've been working in the field of local media and community content since 1992. I stepped out of the pure media space when I worked at Yahoo! as Senior Director for Product Development from 2006-2008, but I've been in media the rest of my career, from my days as an arts activist in my 20's to my jobs for publishing companies and web businesses after than.
Check my resume at Linked In or Google me on the web if you need to see for yourself.

2. Robert Rosenthal had no role in creating Oakland Local; I didn't know him when we started planning the site in Jan 2009, and I didn't meet him until summer 2009.  I started working part-time for CIR as a web strategist in August 2009 and continue to work for them on a part time basis. My work at Oakland Local is all unpaid; we pay the writers, but I work as a consultant to pay my bills..

3. The terms hyperlocal journalism and citizen journalism are used interchangeably when referring to writing by non-professional (whatever that means) journalists linked to a place.
I think Wikipedia has a good article on the basics of this concept.

If anyone has any more questions about my background, send me a note: susan at oaklandlocal.com

In Oakland, we have an angry community member who is telling his peer group that Oakland Local is going to "gentrify the web"--i.e take traffic away from his site and the other grassroots sites that have existed for the past 4 years.  This person is an angry cyber-bully who talks about conspiracy theories, and Big Brother, but the question he raised--could you gentrify the local web?--was interesting enough that I went home and did a little research and want to share what I found.

Basically, gentrification means that local people who live in a area and have roots there are pushed out as outsiders come in and improve the buildings and raise the cost--and value--of housing. This is a classic pattern of displacement that happens all too often in cities, often with the new people as white gentrifiers and the displaced people as people of color. In Oakland, where neighborhood have been disrupted due to development, gentrification is a big issue--as it is in many cities.

So can this happen on the web? Understanding whether the local web could gentrify--or, to be specific with these accusations--was the existence of Oakland Local actually taking audience and attention away from pre-existing local sites, particularly those few run by people of color--seemed a worth exercise.

In Oakland, where Oakland Local launched in October 2009 and had an immediate, popular impact (we have over 3,000 Facebook fans), there were a large number of web sites and blogs already in existence--over, 1500, to be precise (see the Blog directory we built for more details),  Oakland Local's M.O. is to be a portal, or community hub, where we feature and send traffic back to content and community partners, as well as feature original writing and multimedia.

To test whether Oakland Local--and other new media sites in Oakland--were indeed gentrifying, or taking traffic away from older local sites, we did a little experiment with metrics--follow along and see what the results were.

First, we identified a set of local sites to test with:

• Block Report Radio--the web site of the person who was so angrily calling OL out
• The Black Hour at Laney College, a student web site
• Oakland Rising, web site for an East Oakland project to register voters, particularly in the Latino community

Next we set up a research methodology--look at the free, public Alexa data on each site and see how the traffic was being reported as increasing or decreasing over the past 3 months. Then, check Google search, using custom date ranges and the URL of each site, and see if the number of referring links--a way to measure influence--had increase or decreased over the past 11 months. To do that, we established two sets of date ranges--one from June 2009-October 2009, before Oakland Local launched, and the other from November 2009-May 2010, when Oakland Local was active.  We did not factor for issues of quality, frequency of updating, relevancy or any other issues that actually bring users to a web site--we just went for the basic comparison.

When we ran the data on these sites what did we find?

In every case, the discernable traffic for these sites--and the number of links they receive in Google--has gone up, typically by 30-60%.  These number show that The Block Report, rather than losing traffic since Oakland Local launched, has gained traffic, and that these other sites in Oakland have gained traffic as well.
.
In other words, this suggests the local web is NOT like a city block, or a local neighborhood. The concept of displacement--of a web user abandoning one web site in favor of another--is not supported by this data. Instead, it suggests what common sense dictated all along--web sites compete for audience based on the quality and relevancy of what they offer, and most people spend their day visiting several--certainly, in Oakland, they have many to choose from.

Block Report Radio

Alexa.com statistics  for Block Report Radio report that the site grew 90% in traffic over the past 3 months, and 300% in the past month.

The Google links to the site between June and October 2009 were 155; the links between November 2009  and May 2010 were 252.

The Black Hour

We then looked at this college-run site, which offers terrific coverage for Black students at Laney College, one of the Peralta Community Colleges in Oakland, Their coverage is also of keen interest to the broader community in Oakland. (Note: The Black Hour has been an active partner with Oakland Local, and we have published and co-published a lot of work with its editor.)
Alexa data on The Black Hour showed that the site had taken a 40% dip in the past  month, but that the site has grown 20% overall in the past 3 months.

Google links show that from June-2009-Oct 1, 2009, the site had 4 links; from  Nov-May 1, 2010, there were 10 links

Oakland Rising

Oakland Rising is a slightly different kind of site than the previous two, because it belongs to a non-profit project, but since it is both local and community-action focused, it seemed like a good choice to research (note: they are also an OL partner)

According to Alexa, Oakland Rising took a dip in the past month of  50%, but in the past 3 month, their traffic rose 150%.

From October 2009-May 2010, OR received 13 Google links, from June to September, they received 14, so that's pretty much a wash..

Other data

Although it is outside of Oakland, and has a very different focus than Oakland Local, we also looked at stats for the SF Bayview, a historically Black web site in San Francisco, since our accuser said we were harming them.  Was that true?

According to Alexa, traffic for SF Bayview was down 20% in the past month, but up 30% over the past 3 months. Google links for SF Bayview were 607 for June-October 2009,  and for November 2009-May 2010, 11,600 (!!!) ) (Clearly, I am not the only person who thinks this site is providing great news and value).

Oakland Local's data
It doesn't seem right to go through this exercise without also sharing Oakland Local's stats, which I ran as a comparison (and to understand whether our critic might also be motivated by jealousy). Here's that data:

Alexa says that our traffic has gone up 40% in the past month, 22% overall,
Google links: Oakland Local was not alive before October 19, 2009, so we don't have site results to report. From October 2009-May 2010, we have 14,500 references in Google.

 Conversation by Ai

We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don't tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of silk dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that's where I'm floating,
and that's what it's like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?

Ai has died. Not only one of my very favorite writers, but someone I knew back in the day, back when I was a young poet at the very start of my career and this burning young woman had a voice with the courage to say exactly what she wanted to say.

I was 20, fresh out of college, living in a loft in NYC; she was older, living in maybe New Mexico and coming to NYC to do the readings we'd arranged for her at The Academy of American Poets, where I worked.  Was she more than 7 years older than me?  She was a world away, a poet who was in touch with her voice in a way I had briefly, then lost.

We talked, we kept in touch a little, and then it was only her poems, poems I read and loved year after year, poems that kept me connected to so many truths I buried in my own life, voices I was afraid to hear except through other writers, like her.

Ai, I am so sad you have died.

Just wanted to let you know about this exciting event tonight in San Francisco.  Hope you can make it or help spread the word!

 

In less than a decade, a new breed of networked progressive media has engaged millions, harnessing a participatory online environment that has allowed our voices to influence political campaigns, public debates, and policymaking at unprecedented levels.

 

Please join us for this exciting panel--The Future of Journalism: Community-Building, Collaboration and Inclusion

 

^{Special thanks to our co-sponsors:}

Media Alliance, G.W. Williams Center for Independent Journalism, Bay Area Video Coalition, New America Media, Oakland Local

 

^{Jessica Clark is a writer, editor and researcher, with more than fifteen years of experience spanning commercial, educational, independent and public media production. A journalist and frequent media commentator, Clark is the former executive editor of In These Times, a national, award-winning monthly magazine of progressive news, analysis and cultural reporting. Her freelance articles have appeared in such outlets as the San Francisco Chronicle, the American Prospect online, The Ottawa Citizen and South Africa's Wireless. Clark is currently the Research Director for the Center for Social Media, Scholar-In-Residence for American University's School of Communication and a Knight Media Policy Fellow at the New America Foundation . She lives in Philadelphia.}

 ^{Tracy Van Slyke has dedicated her career as a journalist, communications professional and media producer to building a strong independent media infrastructure. She is currently the Director of The Media Consortium, a network of the nation's leading, independent, progressive media outlets. She is also on the board of National People's Action-a national community organizing group and Women, Action & Media, an organization dedicated to gender justice in media.  In 2009, she was a Progressive Women Voices member at the Women's Media Center. Van Slyke is the former publisher of In These Times magazine and has co-authored landmark articles on strengthening the progressive media landscape. She lives in Chicago.} 

^{Steve Katz is the Publisher of Mother Jones. He joined MoJo in 2003 after several years as Vice President for Development for Earthjustice, the nation's leading non-profit environmental law firm. He has more than 30 years experience in raising money for the arts, neighborhood-based organizing, environmental advocacy, and journalism. While at Mother Jones, Steve helped found and was the first project director for the Media Consortium, a network of more than 40 independent, progressive media organizations around the United States. Steve has a PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruz (where his son, Noah, is also an undergraduate theater major), and lives in the Bay Area with his wife Rachelle, their dog Mingus, and two fish. Founded in 1975 to do independent investigative journalism rooted in progressive values, Mother Jones reaches an audience of 200,000 paid magazine subscribers and an online community averaging more than 800,000 viewers each month.}

^{Susan Mernit is the founder of Oakland Local (oaklandlocal.com) news & community hub for Oakland, CA focused on environmental, food, development and social justice issues, and the recipient of a 2009 New Voices grant from J-Lab at American University. She is also a consultant and trainer.}

^{A former VP at AOL and Netscape, and a former Yahoo Senior Director, Mernit was the consulting program manager for The Knight News Challenge (newschallenge.org) in 2008-09, as well as a consultant to organizations including Salon.com & TechSoup Global, where she led the re-design of their portal. She is the web & business strategist for The Center for Investigative Reporting and their new California Watch project (californiawatch.org). Mernit spent summer 2008 at TechStars, incubating a company that died; that experience has super-fueled her energy. She is a CE at BlogHer, a blogger, and a co-founder of Public Media Collaborative, a volunteer group focused on training nonprofits, ethnic media & community groups on using social media tools.}

^{A popular trainer and speaker, Mernit works regularly with The Knight Digital Media Center at USC's Annenberg School, and with The Maynard Institute, and was the Keynote program chair for the October 2009 Online News Association conference in San Francisco.}

^{Kevin Weston, writer, youth advocate and multi-media content producer is the director of new media and youth communications at New America Media (NAM). His essays and news reports have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, Oakland Tribune and the Boston Globe among others. Kevin was a founding editor at YO! Youth Outlook Multimedia and currently serves as the director and publisher of the youth media portal founded by Pacific News Service/New America Media in 1991. He has appeared on Al Jazeera English, NPR's 'News and Notes', 'Forum' on KQED Radio and is a frequent contributor to KQED TV's 'This Week in Northern California'. Kevin worked as a reporter, editor and graphic designer at The San Francisco Bayview and the Post Newspaper Group two of the premire African-American media in the Bay Area and he is the editor of African-America content at NAM. Kevin Has 15 years experience in the youth development and leadership field working as a case manager at the East Bay Asian Youth Center and Youth Together -- a multi racial violence prevention and youth leadership organization based in Oakland. Kevin founded the new media department at NAM in 2005.}

^{For more information about the book and the authors, please visit: www.beyondtheecho.net}

^{PRAISE for "Beyond the Echo Chamber"}

 

^{"Beyond The Echo Chamber tells one of the great untold stories of this decade: the evolution of an entirely new (and newly powerful) progressive media... It's a must-read for media practitioners, consumers, and progressives of all stripes."}

^{Christopher Hayes, Washington Editor of The Nation}

 

^{"From 'he-media' to 'we-media,'" Van Slyke and Clark document the shift from a media universe dominated by a few grim men to one in which progressive media can experiment, collaborate, report and have real impact."}

^{Laura Flanders, host of GRITtv and author of Blue Grit}

 

^{"[This book] takes us beyond the usual ideas about political media, message and movement building... empowering people to break out of conventional wisdom about politics and media and really start making their own change."}

^{Mike Lux, co-founder of OpenLeft.com}

 

 

News! Oakland Local was called out in a paragraph in The State of the News Media 2010 which was just released by Journalism.org---see the link in this huge report at  http://bit.ly/aTxEzF

"Some new sites like stlbeacon.org and voiceofsandiego.org, often launched with the help of foundation grants, show promise, providing critical community news and information.  And some have formed partnerships with established news outlets.

Others are mixing community building with professional standards of reporting. Oakland Local, a community site founded by Web entrepreneur Susan Mernit and funded through both a startup grant and advertising, is one example of such an experiment. It covers topics like the environment, food, development and education for its local community and in a recent month had 65,000 page views, 40,000 visits and 25,000 unique visitors."

This is super recognition for a new site, and I am feeling very honored--and proud of the team of people who so such great work on OL to make this happen.