Primary Contact Name
Describe your project
Big media is only now waking up to the power of the Web, databases and social media. A few media companies are beginning to hire developers and are trying to innovate online. They're building up expensive server hardware and programming new features, tapping into new technologies to reach readers anywhere they are. Newspapers with hundreds of thousands of readers and millions in ad revenues can do this. Thousands of small town weeklies, vital to the very survival of their towns, cannot. Many small town newspapers don't even have Web sites. With the Knight Foundation's help, I would like to build a world-class online content management system for small town papers - the weeklies and twice-weeklies for whom a high-quality CMS is unaffordable. The system would be built in Django, an open-source Web framework, and the code creating the site would be freely available. In addition to making the code free, this project would host sites for small town papers without cost for five years. I call the project a CMS for lack anything better to call it. It's much more than a CMS. I want to build a site that creates online social networks around the very real social networks that exist in small towns. The site will allow people to participate in and contribute to those social networks, helping breathe life into the site. The social networks will then drive a customized, personalized experience for users of the site. Beyond the social networks, I want to build the mechanisms for people in small towns to follow their institutions of government, schools and local sports through databases of public records, newspaper-created information or data entered by the users themselves. In short, I want to put the tools that big papers are just starting to use into the hands of small-town newspaper publishers who are far closer to readers than big media will ever be.
Organization or Business Name
Who would want to use it and why?
There are two audiences: The people who live in the town, and the people like me who moved away, but never really left. For the people who live in the town, a site using this proposed framework would provide access to more information about the town they live in. They would have more ways to share information about the institutions they are part of. For the people who leave, they would be able to follow what is going on in their hometown in far greater detail than they can now. I moved away from my hometown 15 years ago, but I still read every marriage notice, every obituary, every school board update. Interest in small-town happenings extend far beyond the borders of the town.
Why are you the best person or organization to develop this project?
I was born to develop this project. My life experiences are here. My grandmother spent her decades long journalism career at the Woodbine Twiner in Woodbine, Iowa, population 1,500. She was a reporter there. And an editor. And an ad saleswoman. And a typesetter. And a delivery driver. All on the same day. The Twiner has no Web site. Without something like this, it may be years, if ever, that the Twiner has one. I grew up in a small town in Nebraska. I return as often as I can. I read my hometown paper more closely now than I did when I lived there. It's a decent small-town paper, but online it could be so much better with help. The site is flat and almost no information is searchable or accessible outside the story-centric form of its print parent. And information stops at print's edge. For example, my father is on the School Board, but online I can only get the limited information contained in small stories about what the School Board is doing - what they voted on and how they voted, for instance. There's more to life than governance, though. When I was a boy, my father was president of the local Little League, and I was the head scorekeeper. Kids would approach me constantly about their stats. If the data is being collected, why shouldn't kids, parents and grandparents be able to get those stats? The answer shouldn't be determined by how large the newspaper company in town is. I now work at a large newspaper, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. My job is to use technology, databases and the web to reach readers. An example of my current work is PolitiFact, at www.politifact.com. PolitiFact is made with Django, driven by databases, and meant to inform voters who is telling the whole truth, the half truth and nothing close to the truth in the presidential election. This small town CMS project represents a chance for me to use those skills to make small-town journalism on the Web better, to bring tools to tiny papers, to bring important features to places where the online economics won't work for a long time, if ever.
U.S. State
Country
What potentially bigger thing might happen if everything went perfectly and the stars all aligned?
Two good things will happen if the stars align: We'll vastly improve and expand small-town journalism online and we'll learn a lot about how community and news come together. Community in a small town is a very real thing, as opposed to many of the ephemeral communities we find online. By socially networking the news of a small town, I believe we can learn more about how social networks and news interact than we could in a large market. We would flip Web news development on its head, at least for a little while. Innovation on the Web is being driven by places like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and to some extent that's understandable. But with the complexity and volume of their publications, they can't tear up their existing workflow and rethink their entire infrastructure without at least some idea of how it might work, if at all. For a small-town weekly, the number of stories published in an edition wouldn't fill one section of most midsized metro dailies. The workflow is manageable and is handled by a small enough number of people that changing it wouldn't be the bureaucratic nightmare that it would be at a major newspaper. By proving it can work and work well in a small town, we open the possibilities for larger news operations.
How will you be able to measure whether or not your project has really made a difference?
I'm a linear thinker and like empirical measures. I think the measurements here are simple: pageviews, time on site, users and sites. The pageview counts and the amount of time spent on the site are measurements of how much people are using the site. They're standard measures industrywide. If they go up, that's good. They go down, bad. The number of registered users for each site will also tell us how people are reacting to the content management system in their communities. It takes an act of trust for people to surrender information to a Web site. If people register, then that's a sign that the site is something people want to participate in. A secondary measurement is the number of small-town newspapers who use the software. For small-town newspapers with limited IT resources and little profit motive to go online, no Web site or the same token Web site is easy. If they're convinced to go with Louretta - convinced to abandoning the status quo - that's a success.
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge
What unmet need does your proposal answer?
I see two unmet needs: There is little in the way of world-class online platforms for small newspapers, certainly not that offer a full spectrum news/social network/database platform in one application. To make an easily extensible open source news/social network platform would by itself be a public service. Adding in public records database applications would take it beyond anything available publicly or commercially. The second unmet need is that very few newspaper.coms have turned their sites into social networks. There's very little research into how to make it work from technical standpoint, from a workflow standpoint and from a user experience standpoint. This is an opportunity to help the entire news business determine if this is a path it wants to follow, if it can succeed, how to adapt existing workflows to new demands, how to structure the content from a technical standpoint, how to design the application and a million other questions I haven't foreseen. One thing that truly bothers me about a lot of the writing you find online about the future of news is that it comes from people who are writing in a vacuum. There's too much talking and not enough doing. This would present an excellent opportunity to do it and see what we learn.
Total cost of project, including all sources of funding
What specific, unique opportunity do you see that will make this project more successful than others trying to fill that general
Most news sites online now - large and small - have been charitably described as a giant ball of mud: an accumulation of materials loosely held together to take some semblance of shape. My own employer's site at one point was created by 23 different Javascript programs that added bits and pieces of functionality. Many sites, when adding applications or functionality, far too often take a third-party application and bolt it onto a page. Or they wind up having to go completely outside their production systems to a different system altogether because the systems they chose to put news online won't adapt or support new applications. Several efforts I've seen aimed at socially networking the news take this same tack - develop an application outside the main CMS and bolt it onto the site or create an entirely separate site away from the main URL. Louretta will take the opposite approach - news, social networking and databases will be in a site's DNA. There won't be external calls or separate servers or different URLs. A news organization will use one site, one set of servers, one set of technologies. No vendors. No outside support. And it will be designed from the start to run on an absolute minimum of staff members, who only have to learn one system.
Expected amount of time to complete project (in whole years):
How will people learn about what you are doing?
There are two audiences I will need to reach at different times. Immediately on the project's launch, I'll register the domain and set up www.lourettaproject.com. The base site will serve as a vehicle to market the CMS to newspaper publishers and interested users, including information about what Louretta does and what is needed to run it. To help market the CMS, I'll work with the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky and a few targeted state press associations to alert small-town newspaper publishers that Louretta exists once we near the end of development. Also, I'll seek help from my alma mater, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, which works with many small-town publishers throughout Nebraska. At developer.lourettaproject.com, I'll host the code, project management wiki, developer's blog and other documentation. To market the developer site, I would use a combination of means. First, I would announce it on the Django users group e-mail list, a large active list of people who are using the framework I'll use to develop Louretta. I'll also post it on my own site, which has a small following of people who are in news - online and print - and are technically advanced. And I'll also use my own social network, friends who know Django who love a good challenge.
Do you have any other funding or investment? We’re interested in knowing who else is interested in your project.
I have none. The Knight News Challenge is where this idea started and I have not sought other funding. I'm not opposed to it, but I'm also not convinced it's needed.
Are you working with anyone else to complete this project? If so, please give names and what they would do?
As of now, no. However, after posting my idea and linking to my open Knight News Challenge application on my personal blog (www.mattwaite.com), I received several e-mails from people offering to help out. If Louretta is funded, I intend to create some means by which volunteer coders can take part. I will need also design help. I've built design costs into my funding request and have some interest from a handful of designers. But at this point, I am the only one officially on board to develop Louretta.
Who else is working in this area? How does your work fit into the larger context of work in this area?
There are several commercial content management systems aimed at small newspapers, but they are limited and could be described as shovelware - taking print content and shoveling it online. Drupal, an open-source publishing system, has attracted a number of newspaper users and is the closest analog to Louretta. Like Louretta will, Drupal offers an open-source content management system, a templating system for rapid design, user customization and a developer base writing extensions, or modules, to the system. However, Drupal does not enable the ability to socially network news content and customization is difficult. From what I have been told by Drupal users, building modules to track elected officials and Little League scores could be done, but it's not easy and requires more IT resources than most small newspapers have. And, while Drupal's developer base is large, relatively few of them are developing applications specifically for news sites. Louretta, from its birth, will be designed only for news sites.
What do you guarantee will happen if you complete the activities in this proposal?
Because there is so little research on how readers will respond to a socially networked news site, there's little I can guarantee in that regard. I'm not a small-town newspaper publisher, so I can't guarantee how they'll react to Louretta. I can only guarantee what I can control. I'm very proud of the fact that I come from a small town, and that my family still lives there. If I complete the activities in this proposal, I guarantee that Louretta will be a product that will reflect that pride in where I'm from. My childhood love of Little League baseball will be poured into making something that makes Little League players and parents in the town proud. My love of small-town life will guide me to create something that connects people to each other and to the institutions of their town. And my love of the news business will drive me to create a product that keeps small-town journalism vibrant and sustainable in the online future.