Since September 29 to October 1 they will discuss the future of print, internet and mobile media as well as share their experience in how social, technological and market developments affect consumers and advertisers, and how to meet their expectations.

Among keynote speakers will be CEO of the publishing group Mecom David Montgomery (UK), publisher of the most-read newspaper in the world Dainik Jagran - Shailesh Gupta (India), vice-president of Gannett Digital Media Josh Resnik (USA), vice-president of Google for Southern & Eastern Europe, Middle East & Africa Carlo d’Asaro Biondo (USA), international content director of Microsoft Peter Bale (UK). Editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Adam Michnik will give opening remarks.

During this three-day meeting speeches will be given also by: representatives of The New York Times of the US, El Pais of Spain, Corriere della Sera of Italy, Segodnya of Ukraine, Aftonbladet of Sweden, L’Equipe of France, Independent of the South Africa, Montreal Gazette of Canada and news agency RIA Novosti of Russia.

Polish and Krakow media executives and reporters will attend as well. In addition to Adam Michnik their experience will share the editor of “Dziennik Polski” Piotr Legutko, vice-president of Polskapresse – publisher of “Polska Gazeta Krakowska” Grzegorz Haftarczyk, directors Artur Karda and Tomasz Krawczyk from Media Regionalne (the owner of mmkrakow.pl local news portal) and Jakub Krzych of Krakow, founder of an innovative internet ad network AdTaily.com, which is storming the UK market.

In total conference participants will present more than 100 different newspapers, websites, information services and media companies. They come from almost every country of Europe, as well as from Australia, South Africa, the United States, Canada, India and even Nepal.

Participating in the event will provide an opportunity to get to know Krakow, Malopolska region and Poland. Many of media executives will spend the weekend here after the conference.

Mayor of Krakow Jacek Majchrowski will host the welcome party at the Wielopolski Palace. Then participants will be able to visit the newest Krakow museum – built under the city’s mediaeval Market Square listed by UNESCO as the World Heritage Place.

Marek Nawara, Marshal of Malopolska region, will host the gala dinner in the Salt Mine of Wieliczka, the second oldest mine in the world and the second of the eight sites in Malopolska listed in the UNESCO registry.

Town Hall, the Marshal’s Office and Krakow media editors from „Dziennik Polski”, „Gazeta Krakowska”, „Gazeta Wyborcza Kraków”, Interia.pl and RMF FM jointly encouraged international media to arrive to Cracow and Malopolska. As a result INMA and OPA Europe for the first time organized its annual conference not in the West, but in the new European Union member state.

The cooperation with INMA brought international association as a partner of the recent museum’s conference in Cracow.

In order to create positive perception around the world during the conference breaks addtional information about the city and the region will be available at Town Hall and the Marshal’s Office’s stand at Park Inn Hotel. Companies like DTI, MatchWork, PaperView, Planeta Marketing will also present their technologies and merchandise.

Industry organizations – Polish Audit Bureau of Circulations (Zwi?zek Kontroli Dystrybucji Prasy) and Polish Readership Survey (Polskie Badania Czytelnictwa) – will present the Polish press. Along with Atex they are partners of the competition for innovative advertising campaigns in press. Winners will be announced during the conference.

Partner of the local media seminar – Media Regionalne – will establish multimedia newsroom, where journalists will cover the conference live in blogs, tweets and interviews on video.

U.S. Embassy in Warsaw also supports the conference.

Information about the organizers:

Newsmedia Marketing Association International – INMA was founded in 1930. This non-profit association promotes good practices and ideas among the news media publishers. World organization brings together over 5,000 members from over 80 countries. INMA headquarters located in Dallas (USA). The Association also has offices in Antwerp (Belgium) and New Delhi (India).

Online Publishers Association – OPA Europe was founded in 2003 and represents the interests of the leading web publishers across Europe. OPA’s headquarters is in Paris (France).

That morning Wroclaw, the fourth largest city in Poland, became a stronghold. Defenders were not soldiers, nor fire-fighters. They were people like us armed with their mobile phones.

• Michal: “Kozanow district is fighting. 9 lorries with soldiers, 4 diggers, hundreds of people try to make the river embankment higher.”
• Marta: “They told us to evacuate the sick and old. We are so worried and now we’ve run out of sand.”
• Pawel: “Is there anybody from Piesza street? I can’t contact my grandparents. What’s up there?”
• Kajetan: “I am back from Kozanow. Working all night. Neighbors brought us strawberries.”
• Gosia: “I can’t help you as I am in France now, but I am following you and wish good luck!”
• Kiepas: “Fog over the city. Temperature: 13 degrees. Humidity: 93 per cent. No rain at the moment.”
• Kasia: “In Kozanow water is pouring through the embankment.”
• Magda: “What’s the source of this information? Put here only checked info. Don’t repeat any media bullshit.”
• Ziomek: “Confirmed: water really broke the embankment. Kozanow in panic!”.

That morning — on May 22, 2010 – I was not there. I followed all this fight with the river on the Internet blog wroclawzwyboru.blox.pl.
Its editor, 29-year-old Pawel Andrzejczuk, a small company owner, estimated he cooperated with some 300 contributors who fed his blog with over 3000 news items and uploaded 4 GB of photos and videos.
One amateur video captured the river breaking the embankment in Kozanow district of Wroclaw. One could see the crowd running away and hear them swearing to God.

The floods and media: from 1997 to 2010

Watching streets under water I could not stop thinking about another flood that had hit the city in 1997. That time I was a young reporter at a local newsroom of my newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
Our editorial office was under water as well as the offices of the other three local newspapers. In the early days of the flood I lost my car driving through the water, so I could only sail across the city to collect information.
Fixed line phones were down. Mobile phones were big like handbags and very rare. Internet was still a toy for geeks.
The flood of 2010 was so different. It affected much smaller part of Wroclaw, destroyed many less houses and brought no casualties. But it was a bigger news event, as professional journalists were joined by amateurs who dared to provide independent 24-hour live news coverage on the Internet.
Everybody’s got a mobile phone with a camera now. Becoming an “accidental reporter” is just one click away.
Pawel’s blog directly competed with all the TV news channels, radio newscasts and newspaper portals. In just 5 days it attracted 157,000 unique users in a city of 630,000 inhabitants. It’s about one third of what our established local news portal of Gazeta for Wroclaw is attracting monthly.
50 per cent of users found Pawel’s blog when googling for “flood in Wroclaw” and similar keywords. They chose a link to an amateur news site instead of official sources, or professional media.
Official sources were in disgrace as it was a mayor who kept repeating Kozanow was safe. Professional media — a bit slower than a real-time web, more confident of the official version, cautious of the unconfirmed amateurs’ accounts — turned down some audiences.
An amateur news feed had also its flaws. Reading it I had to cut through the jungle of revealing witness-accounts and simple rumors, but at the same time I felt as a reader that I participated in something big. Such a rare feeling in our individualistic world of “Me”.
Pawel might not be a professional news editor, but over last 5 years he has built online a strong community: over 560 websites link to his blog, his Facebook profile got more than 2,600 fans and become almost as popular as our local Gazeta’s one. It all paid off during the flood.
Finally, Dan Gillmor’s “We the Media” manifesto reached its point in my part of the world.

So, how does it feel to be challenged by own readers?

Not so bad, as we have brought it in a way upon ourselves.
My newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza was founded in 1989 by anti-communist opposition to bring independent journalism to the country and support underground Solidarity’s bid for the first partly free elections in Poland.
Today Gazeta is the best read quality newspaper here with an average paid circulation of 347,000 and 4,2 mln readers reached in total every week in print. Our online portal Gazeta.pl, the fourth largest website here after Google, a Polish clone of Facebook and a TV-owned portal, attracts 11,8 mln users in a month. It’s 66% of all 17,8 mln Polish Internet users (Poland has 38 mln inhabitants in total.)
Gazeta’s publisher, Agora, is one of the most successful media groups in Central and Eastern Europe. Its offer includes magazines, books, record and movie productions, cinemas, radio stations and out-of-home advertising.
21 years later Gazeta still believes its mission is broader than just delivering honest news. Since its launch it has been a voice of “modern Poland” — supported democratic reforms, joining NATO and the European Union. It has been helping to build an open society by providing platforms for debates and inspiring people concerned with a common good.

Embracing new media

We have embraced new media as they make our efforts easier and more effective.
Our online boards (Forum.Gazeta.pl) let people discuss over 5,900 different topics ranging from politics to education and health-care to hobbies and over years our users shared there over 113 mln posts and 2 mln photos.
Our blogging platform (Blox.pl) became the biggest in Poland as it hosts over 184,000 individual blogs. Pawel’s blog on the flood in Wroclaw is one of them. When water broke embankments of that city, it became the best read blog on the platform. So in fact we have been sharing all his traffic successes.
We’ve been even ready to share some revenues! Pawel’s blog is a member of our online advertising network (AdTaily.com). This network helps to turn visitors of blogs and niche sites into advertisers and provides funding to independent voices in the society. Until today it has attracted in Poland over 13,000 amateur and professional online publishers.
(Recently, AdTaily.com was named by CNBC as one of the Europe’s 25 most creative companies. If you want to learn more, please come and listen to their story at the INMA/OPA Europe Newsmedia Conference in Kraków, Poland, on September 29-October 1, 2010.)

This post is a chapter of an article I wrote for the upcoming report on the future of journalism to be published by the International Press Institute in September 2010.

Eight weeks ago we have launched the School of Photography Masters at Gazeta. All the readers have become its students and the best photo reporters have been telling them how to take better photos, sharing their tips and tricks.

Readers have got eight different tasks and have been submitting photos to Gazeta’s website. Gazeta’s photo editors have been reviewing their works and making comments on the school’s internet blog.

Readers’ engagement has been tremendous. We have collected in total 141,665 photos. They have been submitted by 25 thousand individuals. Most of the school’s students are aged 15-30.

The best photos are published on Monday, Sept. 22nd, 2008, in a printed edition of Gazeta’s feature supplement “Duzy Format” (Large Format). The best citizen reporters are awarded with professional Nikon D60 photo cameras (the main sponsor for this school is Nikon).

Here are some pages featuring the best photos submitted by readers (the front page of the supplement and the first two-page spread of the results):

Introduction to the photo school

Piotr Wojcik, a photo desk editor at Gazeta, officially opened the school on July 18th:

“During the next eight weeks eight great photo reporters will tell you how to take photos, how to look through camera’s lens to see more. We invite you to this unique school of watching and discovering the world that surrounds us.

Our masters of photography covered main political and sports events. Portrayed actors, writers, philosophers, wars and the beauty of nature. They got many prestigious awards. Today every reader and photo amateur can use their experience.

In the next eight weeks we will learn a story behind their best photos. We will learn how to embolden people to make them show in front of the camera their most interesting sides. We will learn how to make light show and not hide what we want. How to make an unique photo on the beach, in the garden, during lazy holidays and even at boring aunt’s birthday.”

Gazeta’s eight masters of photography were Krzysztof Miller, Kuba Atys, Adam Kozak, Adam Wajrak, Piotr Wojcik himself, Anna Bedynska, Jerzy Gumowski and Michal Mutor.

On the school’s first day they told stories behind the photos they are most proud of:

Lessons with masters

Articles related to the school were published on Fridays and Mondays in the printed edition of Gazeta. They were edited by Lukasz Ramlau, an editor working at Gazeta’s “Duzy Format” supplement.

Each lesson at this in-paper school consisted of three elements:

1. An interview with a master about his practice and tips he can share with readers.

Examples: how to learn about a person to make a good portrait? How to be parient enough to take a good photo of wild animals? How to avoid typical photos from holidays and how to show nudity without porn-style shots?

All the interviews were conducted by Magdalena Grzebalkowska, one of Gazeta’s best feature writers.

Her interviews were accompanied by showcases of masters’ works and stories behind their photos.

2. A story about a master of Gazeta’s masters. We were publishing works of the best photographers in the world that inspired Gazeta’s photo reporters and editors.

These galleries became main photo features of our Monday supplement “Duzy Format”.

3. Practical advice how to take better photos.

Examples: how to make a good portrait? How to take photos of kids? How to look at a landscape?

These practical tips were often presented in a simple Does-and-Don’ts way:

Tips and tricks section quickly started to use readers’ photos as examples:

Home works for readers

This unique guide to photography was accompanied by a contest for readers. We asked them to take and submit photos on eight topics:

• Love. Readers had to illustrate a poem written by K.J. Galczynski.
• Poland in color. The most colorful places, people and things around us.
• Scarecrows. What place in your city would not you show to any tourist?
• Disappearing world. House with a grass-made roof, wooden bridge, wild landscape…
• Meetings. People you met in your journey.
• Moves. Holiday sports activities: football, chess, swimming, bike riding.
• The strong man. In your family, in your city, in your building… Somebody whom you respect and admire.
• Paradise. Places and moments that you have been happy at.

To submit photos and enter the contest readers simply had to log in to our web portal or to the photo sharing site PhotoBlog.pl that cooperates with Gazeta:

Below is an example of the photo submitted by a reader. Other readers could make comments and often did. So the school’s students cooperated like in a real school.

Gazeta’s photo editors were browsing all the submitted photos and making comments on some of them on their official blog.

In-paper promotion

Gazeta used many formats of in-paper ads to invite readers to start learning at our school. Here are some examples:

What’s next?

We were thinking about this photo school as about an interactive feature for holiday season. But as readers liked it very much and we got over 140,000 thousand photos, we changed our plans and decided to extend the lessons and provide new services online and in print.

On Monday, Sept. 21st, we also launch a video school in association with TVN, a commercial Polish TV channel, and Lipton, a tea brand of Unilever.

Our video master is Slawomir Idziak, one of the best Polish cinematographers working in Hollywood, who was nominated for an Oscar award for “Black Hawk Down” (2001) and directed a photography also for “Proof of life” (2000), “King Arthur” (2004) and “Harry Potter and the Order of Phoenix” (2007).

Mr. Idziak will teach readers how to shoot videos with a mobile phone!

The lessons by Mr. Idziak will be accompanied by a competition. The winners will get 3,000 euros and watch their movies presented on a big screen at the OffCamera independent movie festival in Cracow in early October.

Kevin will drive 6400 kilometres (4000 miles) to learn what is guiding American voters’ decisions, to explain their concerns and hopes to the Guardian’s readers and the rest of the world while also bringing voices from around the world to Americans.

His long journey proves that online journalism is not about sitting at the office and googling for facts. Kevin is going to do an old-fashioned reporting – meeting real people and talking to them – but he will use all the gadgets of the new media – Twitter, Flickr, Dopplr, Twibble, TwitPic, YouTube, Fire Eagle and others.

What is also unique – he thinks as much about a story he wants to report, as about the community of readers he wants to engage with this story. 

“I dream of bringing together people from around the world to have a conversation about the US elections, and in 2008, that’s possible with some very inexpensive technology. It all starts with the assumption that this is journalism, that bringing together people from around the world to discuss current events is a powerful new journalistic tool,” he explains in an interview with forum4editors.com’s Grzegorz Piechota. 

Kevin agreed to share  with us an exciting story of his past adventures and plans for the new one.

forum4editors.com: Tell me about your journey. What do you want to learn in the United States – as a journalist who plans to cover the elections and as a journalist who is so excited about new technologies?

Kevin Anderson: As a journalist, it’s valuable to get out and talk to real people. I’ve lived in capital cities for the last 10 years – Washington and now London. I’ve learned that people view politics very differently outside of capital cities. In capital cities, in the bubbles of Washington and Westminster, politics is the centre of everyone’s lives. Outside or capital cities, few people make their living in politics so it’s much more peripheral. Politicos in capital cities think that this means people aren’t engaged. That’s not true. Politics is people’s job security, the price they pay for petrol and whether their children have good, safe schools. It’s at once more concrete while also being more distant. I want to know what is guiding American voters’ decisions when they cast their vote. 

But my main role on this trip is to play the host in a global, networked conversation. This election, even more so than in 2000 or 2004, I can now connect not only with people I meet on the road, but I can also add the voices of people from all over the world. I can get an e-mail on my Blackberry or via Twitter on my mobile phone and put a question from half way around the world directly to an American voter. As an American who has been in London for all but a few months since the last election, I want to both explain the election to the rest of the world while also bringing voices from around the world to American voters. It’s a rare opportunity. 

I’ll be travelling with a Guardian Film team who will be producing several videos during the week and also longer pieces for television. Investigative reporter James Ridgeway and I will be doing rolling reports on a blog, via Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. But the main role of the blog is to host a conversation not only among American voters but people around the world who are curious about the US election.

In 2000, I travelled with a compact satellite dish and a mini-DV camera to webcast live from locations around the US, but we didn’t have the ability to take people’s questions as we were webcasting. We had to print them out. In 2004, I blogged, but the technology we used was relatively primitive, even when compared to real blogging technology  of the day. This time, I’ll be using high-speed wireless data technology, GPS and the latest mobile phone applications to constantly be in touch with people around the world as we tell stories using video, audio, text and pictures. We want to give our audience the sense of being on the trip with us and connect them with people across the United States. 

The other major change in the last four years is just what’s possible with free or low cost web services. It makes the journalism so much easier, while also freeing our content from our site, allowing us to sprinkle it all over the web to reach a much wider audience. We’ll be using YouTube to help augment our own video publishing platform because we need to take our content to where our audience is. We’ll be using Twitter for its ease of use and also again to involve people in a broader network. We’ll be using GPS to geo-tag almost every piece of contact we create. We’ll be publishing photos on Flickr and mapping them on Google Maps so that people get a sense of where we’re at.  Hopefully, our trip will become the centre of a networked conversation happening all over the world about the US elections and the critical issues involved. 

Where do you go and when? What is the plan for the trip? 

We’re still putting the final touches on the itinerary, and we’ve got to leave a little flexibility in terms of trying to catch up with the candidates occassionally along the way. But the journey will take us more than 6400 kilometres (4000 miles) and at least 14 states across the US. The trip kicks off 5 October in Los Angeles. We travel across California to Las Vegas Nevada, then down into John McCain’s home state of Arizona, across New Mexico and up to Colorado. We’ll then travel across Kansas, Missouri before heading north to Chicago, Illinois, the home town of Barack Obama. We’ll drop down through Indiana before hitting the crucial battle ground state of Ohio. We’ll stop in Pennsylvania and West Virginia before ending our trip in Washington DC where we’ll make trips to neighbouring states Virginia and Maryland. 

We’ll see a huge range of the United States, but the fact that we’ll only see 14 states reinforces how large the US is.  We’ll travel from the west coast through the desert Southwest up the Front Range of Rockies before travelling across Kansas in the Great Plains. We’ll see the corn fields of the Midwest (where I’m from) and cross the Appalachian Mountains. We’ll start the trip looking west over the Pacific and end up in the east looking out over the Chesapeake Bay that opens up into the Atlantic Ocean. 

How do you prepare yourself for this journey? I know from your blog that you are testing a new mobile etc., but could you tell me from A to Z what you really do?

The Guardian Films team have been working for months on the logistical details for the filming, and we’ve all been jointly working on the editorial details. For months, as part of my work with the Guardian’s US news blog, Deadline USA, and as part of that, I’ve been reading voraciously from a wide range of news sites and blogs as well as following politically oriented Twitter and YouTube users. I’ve been adding the stories and blog posts I read to the Guardian America del.icio.us account as both a feature of our site and a resource for myself and other staff members. 

I’ve also been testing equipment and web services for the trip so that there are as few surprises as possible on the road. I also know that we’ll be juggling hours of driving each day and also the the job of journalism. One thing that we’re doing on this trip is focusing on geo-tagging all of the content. To the greatest extent possible, we’ll add location data for every video, every picture, every blog post and every Twitter message. People following the trip will be able to see where we are at in near real time.

I’ve been testing a Nokia N82 with built-in GPS to automatically geo-tag my photos. I will in some instances upload the images directly and immediately from the phone. I will also be using a GisTeq PhotoTracker and a Nikon D70 to add geo-data to high quality images. The PhotoTracker comes with software that adds the geo-data to the image files and will upload them to Flickr or create Google Maps picture galleries.I’ve been testing Twibble, a great location aware Twitter client. I can also upload pictures directly to TwitPic to allow our Twitter followers to keep track of the trip. The trip has spurred internal development work that will allow us to add geo-data to content in the Guardian content management system. 

I’ll be using Twitter, Google Maps, Flickr and YouTube. I might also try to use Dopplr, a travel-based social network, and Fire Eagle, a Yahoo location-based service that should make it easier to update my location along the way. 

I think geographical information is important to this story. It will give people another way to navigate the story.  If will give people a sense of where the posts come from in the real world. You’ll see pictures from across the United States showing the varied people and landscape.

What troubles do you consider that make you hard to fall asleep? 

I assume that the technology will not always work as advertised. That’s the nature of technology. 

What keeps me up at night is building the community, the conversation around the trip. I’m already reaching out to people using my personal blog and through Twitter and Flickr. We’ll launch the blog on the Guardian site after the Republican Convention ends, but we’re not waiting for people to come to us. I’ve been reaching out to bloggers, vloggers and other people using social and citizen media for weeks now. In 2004, we still thought about creating a site or a blog, but four years later, you can’t expect people to come to your site. You have to go where they are and involve them. This is the only way to make the conversation as broad as possible. 

And when you finally get asleep, what are you dreaming about? What kind of story would you love to tell during your Odyssey?

I’m dreaming that I will be able to pull together this distributed conversation. This is the third US election that I’ve done a project like this, and I’ve learned that you have to start reaching out to people early.

I dream of bringing together people from around the world to have a conversation about the US elections, and in 2008, that’s possible with some very inexpensive technology. It all starts with the assumption that this is journalism, that bringing together people from around the world to discuss current events is a powerful new journalistic tool. 

I also dream of getting people involved in talking about the issues not just the ‘horse race’ of which candidate is ahead. I’ve seen how people do want to talk about issues, about the economy, healthcare, immigration and foreign policy. We have the possibility to show people the United States in an entirely new way as we travel and involve them in this trip. That’s exciting. We also have the possibility to help people around the world interact with average Americans. The kind of story that I want to tell is to help Americans tell their stories and let them explain their election and their choices to the rest of the world, while the rest of the world can talk to Americans about the impact of their election to the rest of the world. 

Tell me, please, about your past journeys. Where did you go and when? What did you do there?

This is really an extension of what I did in 2000 and 2004 for the BBC. In 2000, we called it the Election Challenge, and was it challenging!

BBC TV correspondent Tom Carver and I took an M4 portable satellite dish, a webcasting unit and a mini-DV camera to five locations across the United States in five days. From Monday through the following Saturday, we travelled 10,460 km (6500 miles). We asked the web site visitors what they wanted to know about the US elections. They were curious about voter apathy, especially among young voters, so we talked to university students in Miami. We had to balance the satellite dish off the balcony of a bar to get a signal. We then travelled to Austin to talk to people who had served in state government with George W Bush to get a sense of the then relatively unknown candidate. 

The webcasting gear developed a fault en route to Texas so I had to call an engineer in London and perform ’surgery’ on it in a car park outside of Austin. I finally brought it back to life with some coaching. I had the kit in pieces across the roof of the hire car and the dish on the boot of the car sending the video back to London from a DIY store car park. One of the store workers asked me what I was doing, and I said, “We’re feeding video to London.” The amazed worker said: “No shit?!” He was very helpful in keeping people from walking in front of the dish and interrupting the transmission. 

We missed a flight to San Francisco and then got delayed by the famous Bay area fog. We finally made it and drove across the bay to talk to an electronic voting expert. Little did we know the voting problems that would happen in that election. The next morning we interviewed supporters of the Green Party because visitors to the website wanted to know about so-called ‘third parties’ in US politics. Then we rushed to the airport to catch a flight to Chicago. We interviewed suburban ’soccer moms’, a key demographic in that election. 

In 2004, the road trip built on what we did in 2000. We didn’t focus on video. Webcasting seemed so 2000. Now it was blogging.

Again, all along the trip, we took questions from people. In 2000, mobile phone technology made it difficult for us to check our email on the road, but by this time, it was much easier.  The BBC didn’t actually have a blogging platform at the time so we just used our own content management system. Producers in London managed the comments and flagged up interesting questions from readers. I kept a running tally of miles and cups of coffee. I’ll probably do the same this time around.

We travelled to Detroit to talk about the economy and health care. We travelled to Colorado to meet with social conservative voters in Colorado Springs and liberal voters in Boulder, often called the People’s Republic of Boulder by locals who view it as radically left of most of the US. We returned to Texas talking not only to Republican supporters of George W Bush but also to Latino voters in San Antonio, a rising power in American politics. We stopped in Nashville Tennessee to talk to Iraq War veterans who had fallen through the cracks on their return home and become homeless. One final stop in Florida to cross that battleground state and try to tell which way it might go. Blogging is a natural way to cover these kinds of trips. 

It was clunky and difficult last time. I had to e-mail my posts back to London to be posted by a producer there. This time not only will I be able to update the blog myself but I’ll also be able to easily post status updates via Twitter and pictures via Twitter with a DSL-class mobile wireless card. That will be a game changer. 

Tell me about a person who inspired you to these journeys?

Nic Newman, who now helps build technology to support journalism at the BBC, had the idea for the road trip in 2000, and Steve Herrmann, who is now editor of the BBC News website, asked me to blog initially for the US political conventions four years ago. 

The BBC had been doing its Talking Point programme for years where it allowed people around the world to email, text or call in their questions to major world figures. Our trip in 2000 asked BBCNews.com visitors around the world to set the agenda. What did they want to know about the US elections? We then put their questions to the people we interviewed. 

Was it hard to convince you to go?

It was easy. I was excited to try something new, and I really believe in the basic premise of the trip that it’s important to involve the audience. 

What were your concerns at that time?

The first trip was just a mad dash across the US. We spent a lot of time in airports, and we were lucky only to miss one flight. The webcasting equipment was temperamental. Four years ago, it was a much slower pace. We had more time to work, but we had to rely on producers in London for a lot of the work. I’m glad that we can do so much in the field this time. 

What did you learn about America during all those journeys? 

I was reminded just how big the US is. It’s a huge place.

And there is this famous quote in American politics by former speaker of the House of Representatives ‘Tip’ O’Neill: “All politics is local”. 

It’s so true in the US. People think about very local issues when they are voting, and even in 2004, the war in Iraq might have been the foremost issue for our international audience, but it wasn’t for most American voters.

And what did you learn as a journalist and as a person? What turned to be the most difficult? And what was much easier than you thought before you had departed?

I am often reminded on these trips just how big the US is. Seriously, the biggest challenge for the first trip was the pace and the logistics. I bought my first Palm Pilot after that trip because it forced me to be better organised. It helped me manage my contacts and my calendar. It was a lesson that really improved my journalism, and it made me generally much more efficient. 

However, I still feel that travelling 10,640 in six days was too much. I felt like we saw more of American airports and than of the American people. We managed to cram a lot in those six days, but I felt like we were able to do more journalism in the 17 days we took the last time. 

The first trip the technology was also a much bigger challenge. Without much time to find a good position, we had to find a place where the satellite dish had a clear view of the sky. Fixing the webcasting kit in a car park wasn’t something that I had planned on. 

The last time it was easier than I had expected to get people engaged. I think part of that was because I was blogging in the summer at the conventions and had an opportunity to connect with people before the trip started. That’s one of the reasons why we’re starting the blog this time a month before we start the trip. It will take time and a lot of outreach to build a community around the trip. 

Could you please share some tips for people who would like to take a challenge like yours? What should they avoid? What should they remember?

Don’t try to do too many things, not in terms of journalism, but in terms of new technology. Most of what I’ll be doing, I either do on a daily basis or have tested quite a bit before I leave. Also, make sure that you spend as much time doing journalism as you do travelling.

Thank you very much and good luck.

The Times runs a regular feature online titled ”Talk to the Times” where its managers and editors answer to readers’ questions.

Here is an example:

Michael Worosz asks: As a loyal Times reader since well before your Web site became so robust, I have been pleased to see the migration of your content online. Given that subscription revenue is down, what business models are NYTimes.com relying on besides standard Internet banner and contextual advertising?

Ms. Schiller replies: The answer is somewhat complicated as Web advertising is constantly evolving. But let me try to break it down for you. Like most newspaper Web sites, our two largest categories of online revenue are display advertising (the banners, and other picture ads you see throughout the site) and classified advertising. Most local newspaper sites are heavily dependent on classified ads, at a ratio of about two to one. NYTimes.com is the opposite. Because we have a national reach and desirable audience, our display revenue is more than double the classified income. This positions us very favorably for current market conditions. Since display advertising continues to grow at a healthy rate (while some classified categories are declining), we’re on better financial footing than most newspapers sites.

We have a few other revenue streams as well. We sell text ads in partnership with Google. Those are the small lines of copy links you see on almost every page. We generate some income from crossword subscriptions, from e-commerce for sales of tickets, DVDs and books, and from our archive. We also license our archive to library services such as Proquest and LexisNexis. So that’s the architecture — what’s the strategy? To oversimplify a somewhat complicated smorgasbord of efforts, our strategy is twofold: scale and context.

First, scale. Here our goal is to scale our audience as much as possible to attract and retain advertisers who want to reach a large number of online readers. In this effort, we’ve been very successful. The NYTimes.com monthly audience is around 20 million unique users. We rank No. 5 behind only the big cable news sites and aggregators, like Yahoo and AOL — and light years ahead of other newspaper sites. But it’s not enough to just have a vast number of readers. The secret sauce for advertisers is the quality of the NYTimes.com audience — educated, informed, engaged and influential. Consider yourself flattered.

The second strategy appeals to the kind of advertisers who want to reach an audience in context. For example, some financial institutions or technology marketers want only to show their ads to business types, who are reading about business. Designers want to market to readers who are looking at our coverage of high-end fashion. That’s one of the reasons we launched TMagazine.com last year. And why we’re significantly expanding our business coverage with news sections, news reporters, editors, tools and data.

Beyond these two approaches, we are also constantly looking around corners to see how business models are evolving, and to try to stay ahead of it. We’re already considered a leader in creative new ad units. But given the speed of change in our industry, we are also in constant discussion with innovators and technology companies at the forefront of this very dynamic business.