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	<title>forum4editors.com &#187; community</title>
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		<title>How to build a community around your publication</title>
		<link>http://forum4editors.com/2011/10/how-to-build-a-community-around-your-publication/</link>
		<comments>http://forum4editors.com/2011/10/how-to-build-a-community-around-your-publication/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Oct 2011 01:04:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>marek.miller</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Blog]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[community]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[engagement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[social media]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://forum4editors.com/?p=3514</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[From Twitter and Facebook, to crowdsourcing and gathering readers’ photos, to community events: newspapers now have abundant ways to interact with their readers online as well as face-to-face. How can editors best create communities around their publications, and how can they benefit most effectively from what these communities have to offer?
Great specialists from this sector [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://forum4editors.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/IMG_3360.jpg" rel="lightbox[3514]"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3515" src="http://forum4editors.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/IMG_3360-290x193.jpg" alt="" width="290" height="193" /></a>From Twitter and Facebook, to crowdsourcing and gathering readers’ photos, to community events: newspapers now have abundant ways to interact with their readers online as well as face-to-face. How can editors best create communities around their publications, and how can they benefit most effectively from what these communities have to offer?<span id="more-3514"></span></p>
<p>Great specialists from this sector spoke during the World Editors Forum in Vienna about their visions and their strategies of building communities around the publications they work with.</p>
<p><strong>Jim Brady</strong>, Head of Project Thunderdome at the Journal Register Company said that many news organisations don&#8217;t really understand what engagement is. It definitely is something more than pure system of comments under articles or one way communication in social media. True engagement means a conversation, on the very ground level between media organization and the readers.</p>
<p>In the new media ecosystem it&#8217;s publishers who need readers, not the other way around. He defines engagement as &#8220;a direct interaction with a member of the community that deepens the relationship between them&#8221; It can be done the way Journal Register does it, i.e. spending real time with the community, or opening the newsroom to them.</p>
<p>Jim Brady gave some excellent examples of building the engagement:</p>
<ul>
<li>Register Citizen opened the special newsroom cafe, where readers participate in planning the newspaper&#8217;s content</li>
<li>Community Media Lab &#8211; encouraging local bloggers to cooperate with the newspaper. Bloggers write their own blogs and the newspaper drives traffic to them. At the same time bloggers link to the newspaper, participate in writing articles, give topics for such.</li>
<li>Complete The Story project, where community helps find information for the articles. The newspaper treats readers as partners, asking them for help and real participation. This way newspaper becomes more relevant, what means more audience, more revenue, more journalists and in the end better journalism.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Anette Novak </strong>is the editor in chief of a hundred year old Swedish paper Norran. Even though her newspaper is relatively small, it has large presence both online and in town. She started building the engagement of the readers with the paper by creating a series of events of great importance to local community: multicultaral events, Chritsmas market, railroad acces campaign. To bring the newspaper closer to the readers she started a project called e-Editor. It allowed readers interact directly with journalists during their day work. Community&#8217;s engagement is very important for her, her readers are her contributors: online and in print. She even decided to change the old title of the newspaper to the one that was most commonly used by her readers. Norran won in the readers&#8217; vote.</p>
<p><strong>Mark Johnson</strong>, the Community Editor of &#8220;Economist&#8221; (UK) gave four practical recommendations on how to engage and build community on social media. He certainly was the right person to do so, as the idea of debate has always been close to &#8220;Economist&#8221;. Enough to mention the huge numbers of people following this brand in social media (850.000 fans on Facebook and 1,5 million followers on Twitter).</p>
<p>Johnson&#8217;s four recommendations were:<br />
1. Invest time and energy in building social media engagement. Economist is present on 5 social media sites. The value of such action is simple &#8211; highly increased traffic (links from Twitter sum up to 10% of entire traffic on Economist.com).<br />
2. Follow new trends and new social media platforms &#8211; they bring new type of audience. Tumblr is one of the social media platforms Economist is using to reach readers who would never think of reaching for this weekly.<br />
3. Think beyond the article and make everything easy for the visitors. Leaving obstacles equals losing the reader.<br />
4. Be ambitious, don&#8217;t make content &#8220;lighter&#8221; or &#8220;dumber&#8221; for communities inside social media. Economist&#8217;s best community engagements were based on some serious discussions in social media. The more you ask from the community, the more you&#8217;ll get in return.</p>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Imagine that you launch your newspaper from scratch</title>
		<link>http://forum4editors.com/2008/10/imagine-that-you-launch-your-newspaper-from-scratch/</link>
		<comments>http://forum4editors.com/2008/10/imagine-that-you-launch-your-newspaper-from-scratch/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 08 Oct 2008 11:12:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>grzegorz.piechota</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Blog]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Case studies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[community]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[INMA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[internet]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Outlook 2009]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[user-generated-content]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://forum4editors.com/?p=1009</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Two editors from two generations were asked the same question: 79-years-old Francois Regis Hutin, CEO of Ouest-France, a regional daily newspaper in France, and Kevin Anderson, blogs editor at the UK nation-wide daily The Guardian, who is almost 50 years younger.
Interviews with Messieurs Hutin and Anderson were presented in Vienna last week at the INMA [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://forum4editors.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/community-journalism-hutin-anderson-001.jpg" rel="lightbox[1009]"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1010" title="Francois Hutin and Kevin Anderson: two editors of two generations focus on the same values" src="http://forum4editors.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/community-journalism-hutin-anderson-001-290x217.jpg" alt="Francois Hutin and Kevin Anderson: two editors of two generations focus on the same values" width="290" height="200" /></a>Two editors from two generations were asked the same question: 79-years-old <strong>Francois Regis Hutin</strong>, CEO of Ouest-France, a regional daily newspaper in France, and <strong>Kevin Anderson</strong>, blogs editor at the UK nation-wide daily The Guardian, who is almost 50 years younger.<span id="more-1009"></span></p>
<p>Interviews with Messieurs Hutin and Anderson were presented in Vienna last week at the <a title="Confererence website for the INMA Outlook 2009" href="http://www.inma.org/vienna/programmeENG.cfm" target="_self">INMA Outlook 2009: European conference</a> during a session titled &#8220;Newsmedia that is relevant to the society&#8221;.</p>
<p>The session was hosted by <strong>Grzegorz Piechota</strong> and <strong>Jerzy Wojcik</strong>, two editors of Poland&#8217;s <a title="Online edition of Gazeta Wyborcza (in Polish)" href="http://wyborcza.pl" target="_self">Gazeta Wyborcza</a> and this <a title="Learn more about people behind forum4editors.com" href="http://forum4editors.com/about/" target="_self">forum4editors.com</a>.</p>
<p>The answers they got from CEO of Ouest-France and Blogs Editor for the Guardian turned to be pretty similar:</p>
<ul>
<li>newspaper’s goal is to connect people,</li>
<li>they should focus on community,</li>
<li>journalism is a service for that community,</li>
<li>and editor serves as the moderator.</li>
</ul>
<p>&#8220;Messieurs Hutin and Anderson use different languages to name the same ideas. We cannot see any important difference between the concept of Ouest-France and the modern, high-tech&#8230; hip-hop&#8230; news websites mentioned by Kevin. Ladies and gentlemen, as you see: future of newspapers is a very old concept,&#8221; commented Piechota and Wojcik.</p>
<h3>Watch an interview with Francois R. Hutin</h3>
<p><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="425" height="350" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kcYYvp970Jg" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kcYYvp970Jg"></embed></object></p>
<p><em>(Video in French with English subtitles. Kindly brought to you by Olivier Bonsart of Ouest-France and INMA.)</em></p>
<p><strong>forum4editors: Fundamentally, what is a reason to publish Ouest-France? Why there is the newspaper?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Francois Regis Hutin: </strong>This is a great question. One can make a newspaper for money. It is not prohibited. But one can also make a newspaper to inform and to connect people. To be a link in the society.</p>
<p><strong>On the first page of your newspaper, one can see words: Justice et Liberte. What do they mean?</strong></p>
<p>These words are inscribed into the newspaper&#8217;s nameplate and fill newspaper&#8217;s blood. Since the Liberation, justice and liberty were &#8211; for us &#8211; inseparable values. We cannot imagine justice and equality without liberty. Those who wanted justice without liberty&#8230; We know how it ends. With goulags. Everywhere on the planet.</p>
<p>So we want justice and equality within the liberty. In the same way, one cannot imagine liberty without justice. Everybody knows the excess it can lead to. It can lead to exploitation of people, to contempt. Liberty without justice &#8211; that&#8217;s for sure inequality and mitigation of people. That&#8217;s why we want liberty and justice.</p>
<p>You ask: why have not we inscribed ”brotherhood”. We think that when one speaks about justice and liberty, there is brotherhood already. The brotherhood unites us.</p>
<p><strong>Why should a journalist write for Ouest-France? At the same time, why should a reader read him?</strong></p>
<p>I think that a journalist, worth of its profession&#8217;s name, who would write for Ouest-France, would like to serve. To help people. The newspaper has no goal in itself.</p>
<p>The newspaper is a tool to help others. And I think that in general a journalist who writes for a newspaper, especially for Ouest-France, is aware of the service he is asked to provide. This service is really to help a person to join the community, but also to help the community to understand needs of people that compose it. It all goes together. In this process, the newspaper is the mediator.</p>
<p><strong>Imagine that Ouest-France does not exist. Would you risk your and your family&#8217;s money? Would you manage to convince them that it should be launched?</strong></p>
<p>It&#8217;s just impossible to imagine that Ouest-France does not exist. Impossible! And even if it disappears, the empty space would be so huge, that it wouldn&#8217;t stay empty for a long time. It would be filled very quickly. So, if Ouest-France hadn&#8217;t exist, we would come to fill the empty space and we would make Ouest-France.</p>
<p><strong>If you had to start from scratch, what would the newspaper look like? Would it be any different from the today&#8217;s Ouest-France?</strong></p>
<p>Maybe different in its form, format, rythm and internal organisation. But certainly not different in its ideals. Otherwise, it would not be worth to make the effort.</p>
<h3>Watch an interview with Kevin Anderson</h3>
<p><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="425" height="350" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/UOgG8oVmJmk" /><embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/UOgG8oVmJmk"></embed></object></p>
<p><em>(Video in English. Only web addresses mentioned are subtitled. Video shot on Skype by Kevin Anderson.)</em></p>
<p><strong>forum4editors: Imagine that The Guardian does not exist. If you had to launch it from scratch, what would it be? A website?</strong></p>
<p><strong>Kevin Anderson:</strong> I’ll start with two models that I have seen in the United States and then I’ll go to Singapore.</p>
<p>So two of the models I think are very exciting are <a title="Learn more about Bluffton Today" href="http://BlufftonToday.com" target="_self">BlufftonToday.com</a> and the other one is <a title="Learn more about My Missourian" href="http://MyMissourian.com" target="_self">MyMissourian.com</a>. And these are very small sites and very geographic specific areas. <strong>Bluffton</strong> is a small community, retired community in South Carolina. <strong>MyMissourian</strong> is done in Columbian Missouri and it is a part of a professional journalism program at the University of Columbia.</p>
<p>What both of these sites share is that they are actually multi-platform and what I mean by that is they still have a print component, but instead of the newspaper being the primary focus it is in fact a web-to-print product. So the content is produced for the site and for the newspaper, but the primary focus in absolutely on the web. And furthermore it is a hybrid product meaning that there is a mix of a community-generated content and a staff-created content which I think is incredibly important.</p>
<p>If you have something significantly different to offer them then that is your unique selling proposition and unfortunately I think there is a certain lack of awareness or possibly even honesty that news is not necessarily an unique selling proposition anymore. And it is not providing the type of experience that people really crave. So I think that news is important, it is important part of the strategy and I would be really careful to say that a new news site would not have news, but what I am saying is that it is just a part of a compelling offer these days. I think, really, especially for geographically focused sites, community is what is going to be a differentiating factor.</p>
<p>And when I say community, I want also to draw a strong distinction. If you look at one of these community sites&#8230; Clyde Bentley who started MyMissourian&#8230; Let me just give you an example&#8230;  as a professional journalist and Clyde has an amazing history as a professional journalist before he became an academic&#8230; he’s got a new sense and they assumed&#8230; this was not during this elections, but actually in the mid-term elections two years ago&#8230; they assumed that everybody was going to talk about politics. No. They had talked about pets, religion and the weather. That’s what their community was obsessed about. And their staff did planning about politics, elections and things like that. But you have this complementary fit between the agenda and things that professional journalists were most interested in and things that the community was most interested in. And that is not necessarily a bad thing, but I think it is something that journalists have to get comfortable for.</p>
<p>The other project I want to talk about is called <a title="Learn more about Singapore's Straits Times" href="http://www.stomp.com.sg" target="_self">www.stomp.com.sg</a>. Singapore’s <strong>Straits Times</strong> &#8212; online, mobile and print. It is absolutely exciting project. When I say mobile and online &#8212; they take submissions from people all over Singapore via SMS, MMS, e-mail, and most of these submissions are via e-mail. Videos &#8212; they’ve got their own staff. Blogs &#8212; they talk about things like food and entertainment and some light cultural issues. It’s been a huge success, absolutely it is a world-winning site. It has attracted the demographic that was not reading a paper. Again, they are exposed to Straits Times’ journalism, but the focus is much more on the community. It is a great site, something really worth to look at.</p>
<p>And in all of these projects community is the center of proposition, there is a strong focus on community building and building that critical mass, and there is also a multi-platform strategy. It is not that print is dead. It is not that the new media is now going to be able to bring in all the revenue to replace some declining revenues on the print side. It is intelligent, focused, multi-platform strategy that plays to the strengths both in content and also economically in each platform.<br />
If you want to think about how to develop a news site from scratch, there are actually some good templates to base it on.</p>
<h3>Learn more about Mr. Hutin and Ouest-France</h3>
<p><a title="Online edition of Ouest-France (in French)" href="http://www.ouest-france.fr/" target="_self">Ouest-France</a>, a regional newspaper in Western France, is the best selling daily in this country. Their circulation is nearly 800 thousand copies. It is twice as much as the nation-wide Le Monde is selling.</p>
<p><a href="http://forum4editors.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/ouest-france-history002.jpg" rel="lightbox[1009]"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-1013" style="float:none;" title="History of Ouest-France: 1899 and Emmanuel Desgrees du Lou" src="http://forum4editors.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/ouest-france-history002-290x217.jpg" alt="History of Ouest-France: 1899 and Emmanuel Desgrees du Lou" width="290" height="217" /></a></p>
<p>The paper has been launched in 1899 as L’Ouest-Eclair by Mr. Hutin’s grandfather &#8212; <strong>Emmanuel Desgrees du Lou</strong> &#8212; and it quickly became one of the main French dailies.</p>
<p>The grandfather died in the 30s, but during the World War II his son and Mr. Hutin’s father refused to collaborate with Nazis and left the company.</p>
<p><a href="http://forum4editors.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/ouest-france-history003.jpg" rel="lightbox[1009]"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-1014" style="float:none;" title="History of Ouest-France: 1944 and Paul Desgrees Hutin" src="http://forum4editors.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/ouest-france-history003-290x217.jpg" alt="History of Ouest-France: 1944 and Paul Desgrees Hutin" width="290" height="217" /></a></p>
<p>Mr. Hutin’s father &#8212; <strong>Paul Desgrees Hutin</strong> &#8212; returned to France in 1944 together with general de Gaulle and relaunched the paper as Ouest-France.</p>
<p>The paper has been always ahead of its times. It has developed citizen journalism long before the Internet made this concept famous. They invited readers to contribute with stories about their communities, villages and towns. Until today Ouest-France has over twenty six hundred citizen correspondents who help the editorial staff of five hundreds to prepare its daily 40 local editions.</p>
<p><a href="http://forum4editors.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/ouest-france-history004.jpg" rel="lightbox[1009]"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-1016" style="float:none;" title="History of Ouest-France: 2008 and Francois R. Hutin" src="http://forum4editors.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/ouest-france-history004-290x217.jpg" alt="History of Ouest-France: 2008 and Francois R. Hutin" width="290" height="217" /></a></p>
<p>When Grzegorz Piechota and Jerzy Wojcik met Mr. Hutin some two years ago, he told them an amazing story. Every new employee at Ouest-France &#8212; whether journalist or not &#8212; had to start his job with a meeting with Mr. Hutin. The CEO of this huge company was ready to devote several hours to explain what this newspaper really is for.</p>
<h3>More about Mr. Anderson and his journey to discover the new world</h3>
<p>Armed with a laptop and a mobile phone with built-in GPS and a photo camera, <strong>Kevin Anderson</strong>, is travelling across the United States to understand presidential elections and start a debate.</p>
<p>Kevin is driving 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.</p>
<p>His long journey proves that online journalism is not about sitting at the office and googling for facts.</p>
<p>Kevin is going to do an old-fashioned reporting &#8211; meeting real people and talking to them &#8211; but he will use all the gadgets of the new media - <a title="Learn what is Twitter" href="http://www.twitter.com/">Twitter</a>, <a title="Learn what is Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com/" target="_self">Flickr</a>, <a title="Learn what is Dopplr" href="http://www.dopplr.com/" target="_self">Dopplr</a>, <a title="Learn what is Twibble" href="http://www.twibble.com/" target="_self">Twibble</a>,<a title="Learn what is TwitPic" href="http://www.twitpic.com/" target="_self">TwitPic</a>, <a title="You really don't know what is YouTube?" href="http://www.youtube.com/" target="_self">YouTube,</a> <a title="Learn what is Fire Eagle" href="http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/" target="_self">Fire Eagle</a> and others.</p>
<p>You can follow his trip at the Guardian&#8217;s <a title="The Guardian's US election trip website" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/uselectiontrip" target="_self">US election trip website</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://forum4editors.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/guardian-uk-elections-trip005.jpg" rel="lightbox[1009]"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-1018" style="float:none;" title="The Guardian online: UK elections trip website" src="http://forum4editors.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/guardian-uk-elections-trip005-290x217.jpg" alt="The Guardian online: UK elections trip website" width="290" height="217" /></a></p>
<p>What is also unique &#8211; he thinks as much about a story he wants to report, as about the community of readers he wants to engage with this story. </p>
<p>“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 explained in a <a title="forum4editors.com: US Odyssey of the Guardian’s blogger" href="http://forum4editors.com/2008/09/us-odyssey-of-the-guardians-blogger/" target="_self">recent interview with forum4editors.com</a>.</p>
<p>It will not be Kevin’s first journey like this &#8211; he made similar trips for <a title="General website of the BBC" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/" target="_self">the BBC</a>, UK public broadcaster, in 2000 and 2004. He has been an online journalist since 1996 and worked in the US and UK. He writes a blog called <a title="Strange Attractor: a blog by Suw Charman-Anderson and Kevin Anderson" href="http://strange.corante.com/" target="_self">“Strange attractor”</a> with his wife <strong>Suw</strong>.</p>
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		</item>
		<item>
		<title>US Odyssey of the Guardian&#8217;s blogger</title>
		<link>http://forum4editors.com/2008/09/us-odyssey-of-the-guardians-blogger/</link>
		<comments>http://forum4editors.com/2008/09/us-odyssey-of-the-guardians-blogger/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:48:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>grzegorz.piechota</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Blog]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blog]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Case studies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[community]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[democracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[editor]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ideas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[innovation]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://forum4editors.com/?p=644</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Armed with a laptop and a mobile phone with built-in GPS and a photo camera, Kevin Anderson, the Blogs Editor for the UK Guardian newspaper goes to the United States to understand presidential elections and start a debate.
Kevin will drive 6400 kilometres (4000 miles) to learn what is guiding American voters&#8217; decisions, to explain their [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://forum4editors.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/kevin-anderson-us-election.jpg" rel="lightbox[644]"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-646" title="Kevin Anderson, the Blogs Editor for the Guardian, UK" src="http://forum4editors.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/kevin-anderson-us-election.jpg" alt="Kevin Anderson, the Blogs Editor for the Guardian, UK" width="290" height="200" /></a>Armed with a laptop and a mobile phone with built-in GPS and a photo camera, <strong>Kevin Anderson</strong>, the Blogs Editor for the UK Guardian newspaper goes to the United States to understand presidential elections and start a debate.<span id="more-644"></span></p>
<p>Kevin will drive 6400 kilometres (4000 miles) to learn what is guiding American voters&#8217; decisions, to explain their concerns and hopes to <a title="Website of the UK Guardian newspaper" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/" target="_self">the Guardian</a>&#8217;s readers and the rest of the world while also bringing voices from around the world to Americans.</p>
<p>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 &#8211; meeting real people and talking to them &#8211; but he will use all the gadgets of the new media &#8211; <a title="Learn what is Twitter" href="http://www.twitter.com">Twitter</a>, <a title="Learn what is Flickr" href="http://www.flickr.com" target="_self">Flickr</a>, <a title="Learn what is Dopplr" href="http://www.dopplr.com" target="_self">Dopplr</a>, <a title="Learn what is Twibble" href="http://www.twibble.com" target="_self">Twibble</a>, <a title="Learn what is TwitPic" href="http://www.twitpic.com" target="_self">TwitPic</a>, <a title="You really don't know what is YouTube?" href="http://www.youtube.com" target="_self">YouTube,</a> <a title="Learn what is Fire Eagle" href="http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/" target="_self">Fire Eagle</a> and others.</p>
<p>What is also unique &#8211; he thinks as much about a story he wants to report, as about the community of readers he wants to engage with this story. </p>
<p>&#8220;I dream of bringing together people from around the world to have a conversation about the US elections, and in 2008, that&#8217;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,&#8221; he explains in an interview with <a title="About forum4editors.com" href="http://forum4editors.com/about/" target="_self">forum4editors.com</a>&#8217;s Grzegorz Piechota. </p>
<div>It will not be Kevin&#8217;s first journey like this &#8211; he made similar trips for <a title="General website of the BBC" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk" target="_self">the BBC</a>, UK public broadcaster, in 2000 and 2004. He has been an online journalist since 1996 and worked in the US and UK. He writes a blog called <a title="Strange Attractor: a blog by Suw Charman-Anderson and Kevin Anderson" href="http://strange.corante.com/" target="_self">&#8220;Strange attractor&#8221;</a> with his wife Suw.</div>
<p>Kevin agreed to share  with us an exciting story of his past adventures and plans for the new one.</p>
<p><strong>forum4editors.com: Tell me about your journey. What do you want to learn in the United States &#8211; as a journalist who plans to cover the elections and as a journalist who is so excited about new technologies?<br />
</strong></p>
<p>Kevin Anderson: As a journalist, it&#8217;s valuable to get out and talk to real people. I&#8217;ve lived in capital cities for the last 10 years &#8211; Washington and now London. I&#8217;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&#8217;s lives. Outside or capital cities, few people make their living in politics so it&#8217;s much more peripheral. Politicos in capital cities think that this means people aren&#8217;t engaged. That&#8217;s not true. Politics is people&#8217;s job security, the price they pay for petrol and whether their children have good, safe schools. It&#8217;s at once more concrete while also being more distant. I want to know what is guiding American voters&#8217; decisions when they cast their vote. </p>
<p>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&#8217;s a rare opportunity. </p>
<p>I&#8217;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.</p>
<p>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&#8217;t have the ability to take people&#8217;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&#8217;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. </p>
<p>The other major change in the last four years is just what&#8217;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&#8217;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&#8217;ll be using Twitter for its ease of use and also again to involve people in a broader network. We&#8217;ll be using GPS to geo-tag almost every piece of contact we create. We&#8217;ll be publishing photos on Flickr and mapping them on Google Maps so that people get a sense of where we&#8217;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. </p>
<p><strong>Where do you go and when? What is the plan for the trip? </strong></p>
<p>We&#8217;re still putting the final touches on the itinerary, and we&#8217;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 <a title="Official website of US presidential candidate John McCain" href="http://www.johnmccain.com/" target="_self">John McCain</a>&#8217;s home state of Arizona, across New Mexico and up to Colorado. We&#8217;ll then travel across Kansas, Missouri before heading north to Chicago, Illinois, the home town of <a title="Official website of the US presidential candidate Barack Obama" href="http://www.barackobama.com/" target="_self">Barack Obama</a>. We&#8217;ll drop down through Indiana before hitting the crucial battle ground state of Ohio. We&#8217;ll stop in Pennsylvania and West Virginia before ending our trip in Washington DC where we&#8217;ll make trips to neighbouring states Virginia and Maryland. </p>
<p>We&#8217;ll see a huge range of the United States, but the fact that we&#8217;ll only see 14 states reinforces how large the US is.  We&#8217;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&#8217;ll see the corn fields of the Midwest (where I&#8217;m from) and cross the Appalachian Mountains. We&#8217;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. </p>
<p><strong>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?</strong></p>
<p>The Guardian Films team have been working for months on the logistical details for the filming, and we&#8217;ve all been jointly working on the editorial details. For months, as part of my work with the Guardian&#8217;s US news blog, <a title="The Guardian blog: Deadline USA" href="http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/usa" target="_self">Deadline USA</a>, and as part of that, I&#8217;ve been reading voraciously from a wide range of news sites and blogs as well as following politically oriented Twitter and YouTube users. I&#8217;ve been adding the stories and blog posts I read to <a title="Bookmarks of the Guardian America" href="http://delicious.com/GuardianAmerica" target="_self">the Guardian America del.icio.us</a> account as both a feature of our site and a resource for myself and other staff members. </p>
<p>I&#8217;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&#8217;ll be juggling hours of driving each day and also the the job of journalism. One thing that we&#8217;re doing on this trip is focusing on geo-tagging all of the content. To the greatest extent possible, we&#8217;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.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve been testing a <a title="Product page of Nokia N82" href="http://www.nseries.com/products/n82/#l=products,n82" target="_self">Nokia N82</a> 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 <a title="Learn what is GisTeq and PhotoTracker" href="http://www.gisteq.com/" target="_self">GisTeq PhotoTracker</a> and a <a title="Nikon D70 specifications and review" href="http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/specs/Nikon/nikon_d70.asp" target="_self">Nikon D70</a> 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&#8217;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. </p>
<p>I&#8217;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. </p>
<p>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&#8217;ll see pictures from across the United States showing the varied people and landscape.</p>
<p><strong>What troubles do you consider that make you hard to fall asleep? </strong></p>
<p>I assume that the technology will not always work as advertised. That&#8217;s the nature of technology. </p>
<p>What keeps me up at night is building the community, the conversation around the trip. I&#8217;m already reaching out to people using my personal blog and through Twitter and Flickr. We&#8217;ll launch the blog on the Guardian site after the Republican Convention ends, but we&#8217;re not waiting for people to come to us. I&#8217;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&#8217;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. </p>
<p><strong>And when you finally get asleep, what are you dreaming about? What kind of story would you love to tell during your Odyssey?</strong></p>
<p>I&#8217;m dreaming that I will be able to pull together this distributed conversation. This is the third US election that I&#8217;ve done a project like this, and I&#8217;ve learned that you have to start reaching out to people early.</p>
<p>I dream of bringing together people from around the world to have a conversation about the US elections, and in 2008, that&#8217;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. </p>
<p>I also dream of getting people involved in talking about the issues not just the &#8216;horse race&#8217; of which candidate is ahead. I&#8217;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&#8217;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. </p>
<p><strong>Tell me, please, about your past journeys. Where did you go and when? What did you do there?</strong></p>
<p>This is really an extension of what I did in 2000 and 2004 for the BBC. In 2000, we called it the <a title="BBC: the Election Challenge" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/americas/2000/us_elections/election_news/default.stm" target="_self">Election Challenge,</a> and was it challenging!</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>The webcasting gear developed a fault en route to Texas so I had to call an engineer in London and perform &#8217;surgery&#8217; 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, &#8220;We&#8217;re feeding video to London.&#8221; The amazed worker said: &#8220;No shit?!&#8221; He was very helpful in keeping people from walking in front of the dish and interrupting the transmission. </p>
<p>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 &#8216;third parties&#8217; in US politics. Then we rushed to the airport to catch a flight to Chicago. We interviewed suburban &#8217;soccer moms&#8217;, a key demographic in that election. </p>
<p>In 2004, the road trip built on what we did in 2000. We didn&#8217;t focus on video. Webcasting seemed so 2000. Now it was <a title="BBC: Weblog from the US elections road trip" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3642400.stm" target="_self">blogging</a>.</p>
<p>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&#8217;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&#8217;ll probably do the same this time around.</p>
<p>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&#8217;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. </p>
<p>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&#8217;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. </p>
<p><strong>Tell me about a person who inspired you to these journeys?</strong></p>
<p>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 <a title="The news website of the BBC" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/" target="_self">the BBC News website</a>, asked me to blog initially for the US political conventions four years ago. </p>
<p>The BBC had been doing its <a title="BBC: Talking Point for the audience" href="http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/default.stm" target="_self">Talking Point programme</a> 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 <a title="The news website of the BBC" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/" target="_self">BBCNews.com</a> 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. </p>
<p><strong>Was it hard to convince you to go?</strong></p>
<p>It was easy. I was excited to try something new, and I really believe in the basic premise of the trip that it&#8217;s important to involve the audience. </p>
<p><strong>What were your concerns at that time?</strong></p>
<p>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&#8217;m glad that we can do so much in the field this time. </p>
<p><strong>What did you learn about America during all those journeys? </strong></p>
<p>I was reminded just how big the US is. It&#8217;s a huge place.</p>
<p>And there is this famous quote in American politics by former speaker of the House of Representatives &#8216;<a title="Wikipedia on Thomas O'Neill" href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_O%27Neill" target="_self">Tip&#8217; O&#8217;Neill</a>: &#8220;All politics is local&#8221;. </p>
<p>It&#8217;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&#8217;t for most American voters.</p>
<p><strong>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?</strong></p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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&#8217;t something that I had planned on. </p>
<p>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&#8217;s one of the reasons why we&#8217;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. </p>
<p><strong>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?</strong></p>
<p>Don&#8217;t try to do too many things, not in terms of journalism, but in terms of new technology. Most of what I&#8217;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.</p>
<p><strong>Thank you very much and good luck.</strong></p>
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