Daniel Bachhuber's weblog

David Wolman and Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) led the conversation for the last panel this afternoon.

Informational interviews are a key part of finding stories, David says. He consumes a lot of coffee, talks with people about what they’re working on, and then also asks about what else they’re working on. That secondary information can lead to interesting pieces down the road.

Marshall has a detailed workflow for tracking down stories in the tech sector. He’s been working for ReadWriteWeb for the last year and a half, and is responsible for two to three posts a day. Most of the time, stories are “interrupt-driven” or dependent on the news of the day. The whole staff logs into a single Fever account to share RSS reading responsibilities.

One source of feeds is pretty ingenious. A research assistant dug up people who first linked popular web services such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. on Delicious. He did so for a number of startups over the last couple of years and put all of that information on a spreadsheet. Based on this aggregate information, he was able to identify 15 or so people who regularly link upcoming web services before anyone else. Subscribing to these Delicious accounts has multiple stories a week about hot new startups.

Most of the ReadWriteWeb writers use Tweetdeck for Twitter. Marshall has the 4,000+ people he’s following organized into different categories, including NY Times, analysts, augmented reality, etc. The team has a Skype chat they keep open 24 hours for coordinating on stories. They use hashtags within the conversation to enable people to find information of a specific type (i.e. which stories need editing with #edit).

For tracking reactions to pieces he’s written, Marshall searches for conversations based on a specific URL with Friendfeed, based on the ReadWriteWeb domain in Digg, and recently favorited tweets.

Libby Tucker notes that the differences between David and Marshall’s reporting styles. David flies to Urbana, Illinois to interview a scientist, whereas Marshall notes that if he has to put his pants on, it’s a big day.

The lunch session at SPJ’s Building a Better Journalist conference today was YAPOTFON, or Yet Another Panel On The Future Of News. Conversation was facilitated by President-elect Hagit Limor (@hlimor).

DJ Wilson is the President and General Manager of the KGW Media Group in Portland. “More than ever, people are consuming media.” Part of it is the 24/7, anytime, anywhere demand from consumers. KGW is a content business that works to meet that demand.

Rita Hibbard (@rthibbard) is the executive director and editor of InvestigateWest, a reporting non-profit in Seattle started by ex-Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffers. The bad news is the sheer number of journalists that have been laid off; the number of credentialed reporters in Olympia, Washington has gone from 25 to 6. [Ed note 10/25: This may also be due to waning interest in covering government] “Readers and news consumers are starting to wake up to what’s being lost out there.” We’re not replacing the investigative troops, but figuring out new ways to get the job done. InvestigateWest is brand new; incorporated in May, website launched in July, and first story will be out next month. It’s a piece on the misuse of public lands. They generate original, high-level investigative content. The business model is to syndicate it to as many media partners as possible, not build up their website. The first grant InvestigateWest received was from the Bullitt Foundation, which hasn’t traditionally funded journalism.

“Collaboration is a big part of this new media ecosystem.” InvestigateWest is working with a number of media partners in ways that would not have happened five or ten years ago. “The era of one dominant media source in a community is over.” News will now be an ecosystem of many parts.

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A few co-conspirators and I want to hold a BarCamp on Sunday, October 25th, the day after the SPJ regional conference at the University of Oregon. For those who have never attended one, a BarCamp is an “ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment.” In short, if you think you have something to teach you can throw it in to the mix. If you’re there to learn, then you have a whole number of knowledgeable people as teachers for a variety of topics.

The topic for this BarCamp? Redefining J school. The news industry is going through epic change that most J schools are ill-equipped for. It’s time for a new style of learning. We brainstormed several possible sessions:

• What courses should you take to supplement your journalism career? What are good minors to a journalism degree?
• What do students want from professors? How can students take initiative and enhance classes?
• Crowdsourcing, and leveraging the knowledge of the community to put together a story
• Where’s the line between PR and journalism?
• Digital basics (blogging, Twitter, Google Alerts, etc.) and how those tools can be used
• How to get paid internships (i.e. kickstarting your career while still in college)
• Where’s the line between work and life when building your personal brand online?

Granted, I’ve done a lot of punditry in the last year talking about how J school is obsolete and needs to be completely reinvented. It’s time to translate grand ideas into action.

We’re planning to meet at 6:00 pm PT in the EMU Fishbowl, next Tuesday the 6th. Join our Google Group to stay in touch, or leave a note in the comments.

First session at WordCamp Portland this morning was “Speed Up WordPress” with Jason Grigs of Cloud Four. He jokingly argues that “we’ve remade the internet in our image and the image is obese.” Since 2003, web page size has tripled, number of objects has doubled, and we can partially blame it on WordPress. On the developer’s side, the expectation is that everyone is going to be on a fast connection, with broadband at home or at work.

Page load time, however, determines whether people will stay on your site and do what you want them to do. Speed and performance affect can change perceived quality and credibility of the website. “You can have a great brand and your site is really slow and people will think you’re crap online.” It’s critically important that your application maintains the user’s flow and focus. Amazon says they lose $1 million for every extra second in their shopping cart experience. There’s also an environmental impact for slow site. The number of data centers in the last four years has doubled, and has an energy consumption equivalent to five 1,000 megawatt power plants or the entire state of Mississippi.

In short, build a site that is optimized and doesn’t use more resources than it needs to. Be proactive about it.

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Arrived a few minutes late to Digital Journalism Camp, organized by Abraham Hyatt, and these are my notes from the first session about news entrepreneurship in Portland. Steve Woodward and Carolyn Duncan, of the Portland Ten, led the session.

Steve Woodward of Nozzl Media argues that the drop in newspaper revenue is a metrics problem. Newspapers need to work more with metrics and be able to prove their value such that they can reengage their advertisers. The tools for metrics in print are much less than the tools for metrics online.

Discussion about Perez Hilton. Carolyn Duncan asks “who the hell was this guy three years ago?” Chuckles from the audience as someone asks “who the hell is this guy now?” The same guy asking that question follows up with “if you want to be in this business, trust is the word. If you don’t have trust, you’re not going to make a dollar.”

Pete Forsyth on trust and citing sources on Wikipedia: “you want to have a clear, transparent editorial process.” The producer of the content has to adhere to a published set of standards that others can audit.

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Tomorrow morning will find me headed to Philadelphia for Saturday’s BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly. Needless to say, I’m super stoked for this opportunity. Not only will I be able to finally meet my boss, my new colleagues, and the rest of the CoPress team I haven’t met, but I’ll get to spend an entire day, and probably much of the weekend, discussing the future of journalism with some of the smartest news folk in the country. If my flight doesn’t get laid over in Atlanta, I’d like to spend my time taking about at least a couple of different things:

Designing a News Startup From Scratch in 60 Minutes

The goal would be to rapidly prototype what a news organization of the future might look like by walking the hypothetical startup from concept to a year after launch and covering things such as:

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