lost in the weeds: grassroots media grows up

1.Lost In the Weeds? Grassroots Media Grows Up

2. Who am I?
Christopher Spencer: Born in El Dorado, lives in Fayetteville
A journalist since 1998: Worked for the El Dorado News Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas
Founder of WordCamp Fayetteville and president of the Creative Economy Action Group Inc. Communications chair of the Northwest Arkansas Society of Professional Journalists.
Publisher of Ozarks Unbound (June 2009), The Food File.com (April 2010) and Ballotbucks.org (April 2010)
700 to 1000 hits a day
3. Grassroots and Hyperlocal
Grassroots Media: Independent, typically small-scale journalism outfits run by someone with a professional media background or at least aspirations.
Contains advocacy journalists and citizen journalists who are untrained.
4. Grassroots and Hyperlocal
HyperlocalMedia:A term often ascribed to American Journalist Jeff Jarvis who runs BuzzMachine.
Hyperlocalencompasses Grassroots Media plus larger corporate efforts like Patch.com (more than 500 sites nationwide), Main Street Connect, Gannett.
5. State of Hyperlocals
Block By Block: Community News Summit 2011 This weekend! #bxb11
Local Grassroots Media: Ozarks Unbound, Fayetteville Flyer, Arkansas Blog (Arkansas Times), Argenta Times (defunct), The City Wire (Fort Smith), First Arkansas News, Monticello Live, Newport Independent, Washington County Observer
6. The Internet No. 3 with a bullet
Source: Pew Research Center
7. Low cost means lots of competitors
Less about flash and bang and more about endurance
Need to make viewing your site part of their daily routine.
Been in the game for more than two years and seen several sites emerge and flame out.
8. Ozarks Unbound
The idea was hatched in a bar like all great things.
So many experiments with content, so many failures
Two and a half years in, growth is steady and it produces several hundred dollars a month
9. Ozarks Unbound - Content
Announcements: Unedited, raw press releases.
Clipped Fresh: Curated aggregation. Cover what you do best, link to the rest. - Jarvis
Original Content: Opinion, News, Political Cartoons, Three contributing writers
10. My (Almost Free) Toolkit
11. My tools The Heavy Lifters
Server account - $19 a month with Fused Networks
100 Gigs bandwidth and 5 Gigs disk space.
Need a free ftp program (i.e. Filezilla)
WordPress (The central wheel)
An amazing Content Management System: Free and Priceless
36 active plugins right now making my site do what it does. All are free.
13. What is WordPress?
WordPressis web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog.
WordPress is used by over 14% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites.
Five minute installation
14. What are people using?
Source:
15. Who is using WordPress?
WordPress is used nationally by CNN, the U.S. Government, The New York Times, People Magazine,
Locally: Northwest Arkansas Newspapers, Ozarks Unbound, the Washington County Observer, the Fayetteville Flyer, Single Parent Scholarship Fund and numerous other businesses to manage their websites.
16. Examples of WordPress
17. WordCamp Fayetteville
18. WordCamp Fayetteville
The purpose of WordCamp Fayetteville is to teach people including small businesses, nonprofits, educators and journalists about the free open source WordPress software and other Internet-based innovation.
Year One = 100 people at the Town Center
Year Two = 200 people at the Reynolds Center
Open Office (Equivalent to Microsoft Word)
I write in WordPress but Open Office is great free software for word processing
Gimp (Equivalent to Adobe Photoshop)
Use it daily to process,retouch and remix images
Ethics on images Be sure you follow copyright on the images. Google images, istockphoto
Google Reader (Equivalent to AP Wire)
My personalized wire service. An area on my site dedicated to headlines from other sites, called Clipped Fresh
22. Secondary Tools - Occasionals
Audacity (Equivalent to Garage Band)
For audio remixing. Use it about once a month to remix interviews or sound I gather
Inkscape (Equivalent to Adobe Illustrator)
For vector-based graphics creating a square or other design
Scribus (Equivalent to Adobe Indesign)
For document layout, print layout
Cyberlink Director ($70)
For editing video. Do use this often, but only superficial features
26. Social tools Bring the Party
Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
Perfect for pushing out content headlines and interacting with readers, bringing new people to the site through organic searches
27. Actual Tools The Hardware
Still camera/video camera, voice recorder, tripod, iphone, press pass, business cards
28. Final Cost -$570 and hours of investment in your community
Price Tag
A laptop
$70 Cyberdirector
$200 Camera
$200 iphone
$40 Voice recorder
$15 Tripod
$10 Name with lanyard
$35 business cards
$570 - Total
29. The Revolution?
Time to give traditional media more competition.
Lets plot our media domination together
Any Questions?

lost in the weeds: grassroots media grows up

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