Bay Area New Media

When we ran into Scribd CTO Jared Friedman at the Commonwealth Club panel on the future of books last week, he told us his company wants to increase tenfold the number of books published every year.

It seems an audacious stance for a two-and-a-half year old company founded by three guys who were tangling with term papers not all that long ago. Scribd launched in March 2007 as a kind of YouTube for documents: a place where people can upload and comment on printed matter of any kind. Friedman and his fellow cofounder Trip Adler stumbled on the idea after listening to the frustrations of Adler's father, a Stanford neurosurgeon, bemoaning the fact it takes two years to get a paper published in a scientific journal.

Turns out they might be on to something. Tens of millions of documents have been uploaded to the site so far. Several authors who first published on Scribd are finding deals with traditional publishers, while others are skipping the publishing industry altogether and simply selling their work on Scribd instead. And the company, which received seed funding from tech incubator Y Combinator, has already hit the magical "P" milestone: It's been profitable since the second quarter of this year.

Plus, given the fact that Friedman is following in the footsteps of two other famous tech entrepreneurs (Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates) by dropping out of Harvard (or, as Friedman puts it, taking an "extended leave"), Scribd may very well be the next up-and-comer turning an established industry on its head.

So we asked Friedman to tell us more.

You said Scribd wants to increase the number of books published every year from 300,000 to 3 million. What does that mean?

Our thesis is that the limiting factor in the number of books that are published per year is not the amount of content that people are able to write and it's not the amount of content that people are able to read. Rather it's a structural limitation of the publishing industry itself.... We think that if we can cast off the artificial limitations that are imposed by the way the economics of the publishing industry currently work, we could potentially dramatically increase the amount of work that is published.

What this means for professional writers, after the jump.

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Fortune's Brainstorm Tech blog has a nice little write up of SOMA-based Sugar Inc., parent company of the PopSugar family of blogs.

The three-and-a-half year old company, which is set to become profitable this quarter, is notable for several reasons, writes Adam Lashinsky, including for the way it makes money.

Rather than relying solely on advertising, Sugar has set up a system where it gets commissions on from retailers when their readers go shopping.

"Sugar is a nascent success and an example of what magazines may become," Lashinsky says. "It doesn't provide an answer to the question of what will become of long-form journalism, because it chose a segment that wasn't exactly bubbling over with ponderous feature stories to begin with. All the same, that something is working in publishing these days, and that's at least some hopeful news."

Oakland Local, the new non-profit community news Web site that launched exactly a month ago, is doing so well that founder Susan Mernit says she's accelerating their plan to implement advertising.

Mernit told BayNewser that, according to her original plan, she didn't expect to be able to run ads until the spring, because she didn't think the site would be attracting 10,000 unique visitors per month—the magic number when sites can think about selling ads—until then.

Instead, according to Google Analytics, the site hit 9,720 uniques since its launch on October 19—and not just from Oakland, but from San Francisco, Piedmont, and Pleasanton as well.

"I think we're offering something that doesn't exist in Oakland or in the Bay Area, which is a really diverse, progressive site that is open to community news and multiple perspectives," Mernit said. "We can't provide the range of police coverage that the Oakland Tribune and sfgate cover because we don't have that kind of newsroom, but we're doing a lot more with food access issues and environment issues which are very important in this area."

San Francisco-based citizen journalism startup Allvoices is expanding its focus to build a global newtwork of professional reporters to add depth to the stories initiated by citizen contributors.

The site, which is similar to Global Voices Online and Ground Report, receives about four million monthly visitors. It has about 200,000 contributors from about 180 countries and territories. Its new program, "Provoices," seeks to augment those contributions.

"One of the great benefits of citizen reporting is that the contributors are often at the right place at the right time," says Lynda Gorov, the former Boston Globe Los Angeles bureau chief who's heading up Provoices. "It's instant access to the front lines of breaking news. But [citizen contributors] don't typically go hunting for news, make dozens of phone calls or dig into court, government or other records to confirm their stories."

"I can see the professional journalists following up stories uncovered by their citizen counterparts, and can see those contributors helping the pros by publishing photos, quotes or stories that enhance their stories," says Gorov, who has reported from Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and throughout the United States.

Allvoices says it will select a limited number of professional contributors in key cities and on key beats. It will pay them up to $250 a story, with potential bonuses for high-traffic pieces.

The Webby Awards, monitoring Internet excellence since 1996, has named the 10 most influential Internet moments of the decade. Not so shockingly, eight of them have Bay Area roots.

Among them:

Nielsen Online has come out with its August rankings for Internet news sites, and in at least this regard, Yahoo's move away from search is paying off.

Traffic for the Sunnyvale-based company topped the Web sites of traditional news stalwarts like The New York Times (which finished fifth), as well as news-site networks, like those from CNN, MSNBC and AOL (which finished second, third and fourth in the rankings, respectively).

Yahoo's 43,469,000 unique users represented a 7 percent increase over last August.

Google clocked in at No. 9, with almost 13,500,000 unique users, a year-over-year increase of 11 percent.

MediaNews Group, which owns numerous Bay Area newspapers (including the Contra Costa Times, the Oakland Tribune and the San Jose Mercury News) as part of its national operations, ranked 17th, one spot ahead of the San Francisco Chronicle's parent company, Hearst Newspapers. They were the only two newspaper sites other than the Times to make the top 30. (The Wall Street Journal is located on a different Nielsen list, which tracks business and financial sites.)

Yahoo! News -- 43,469,000 -- 7%
CNN Digital Network -- 38,024,000 -- (-2%)
MSNBC Digital Network -- 36,450,000 -- (-30%)
AOL News -- 26,309,000 -- 14%
NYTimes.com -- 17,183,000 -- (-13%)

Fox News Digital Network -- 16,999,000 --- 22%
Tribune Newspapers -- 15,801,000 -- (-10%)
ABCNEWS Digital Network -- 13,873,000 -- 4%
Google News -- 13,442,000 -- 11%
Gannett Newspapers/Newspaper Division -- 12,981,000 -- (-10%)

McClatchy Newspaper Network -- 12,454,000 -- 17%
washingtonpost.com -- 11,681,000 -- 4%
CBS News Digital Network -- 10,278,000 -- 9%
Advance Internet -- 9,808,000 -- 24%
USATODAY.com -- 9,787,000 -- (-6%)

Daily News Online Edition -- 8,573,000 -- 90%
MediaNews Group Newspapers -- 8,316,000 -- 11%
Hearst Newspapers Digital -- 8,013,000 -- (-5%)
TheHuffingtonPost.com -- 7,768,000 -- 52%
WorldNow -- 7,671,000 -- (-4%)

Examiner.com -- 7,569,000 -- 342%
The Slate Group Websites -- 6,837,000 -- 37%
BBC -- 6,767,000 -- 28%
Topix -- 5,617,000 -- (-21%)
NBC Local Media -- 5,427,000 -- N/A

Cox Newspapers -- 5,373,000 -- 9%
Boston.com -- 4,981,000 -- 11%
New York Post Holdings -- 4,843,000 -- 46%
Gannett Broadcasting -- 4,753,000 -- (-8%)
MailOnline -- 4,630,000 -- (-4%)

Quirky fiction, esoteric interviews, and indie short films? Yup, there's an app for that too.

McSweeney's has gone iPhone.

$5.99 for six months gets you a subscription to Small Chair, "a weekly sampler from all branches of the McSweeney's family"—the otherwise hard copy-only McSweeney's (a quarterly) and Believer (a monthly), as well as Wolphin, the subscription service that sends out DVDs of short films on a quarterly basis.

Contributors on deck include: Spike Jonze, Wells Tower, Chris Ware, and Jonathan Ames.

Why McSweeney's says this isn't a betrayal of print, after the jump.

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Who says those newfangled, citizen-journalisming, experimental, bloggy-type news sites aren't going to be able to deliver as good civic journalism as the newspapers of yore?

Take a look at what just happened because of the Public Press, the fledgling Bay Area news site that's been watchdogging the San Francisco city budget.

In good old fashioned beat-reporting style, reporter Lizzy Tomei and videographer Monica Jensen produced a series of reports focusing on how the budget cuts affected services for the city's elderly and mentally ill.

All good civic reporting is measured by impact, right? So take a look at this note the Public Press recently received:

Dear Lizzy,

Thank you for your work in covering the struggles of Southeast Mission Geriatrics. Thanks to your reports this clinic has stayed open.

Maybe there's hope for the future of journalism after all.

Judd Apatow writes jokes about you for the fictional stand-up characters in his new movie, featuring Seth Rogen and Adam Sandler -- as he did for Craigslist's Craig Newmark.

Funny People Exclusive Clip

comScore released its June figures for Internet traffic, and six of the top 10 were Bay Area-based companies. Google and its properties led the pack with 156 million unique visitors, with Yahoo's sites not far behind, with 154 million.

Palo Alto-based Facebook ranked sixth, with 77 million, and Oakland's Ask Network logged 73 million, good for seventh place. In eighth was San Jose-based eBay, which totaled 71 million, while the sites of the Wikimedia Foundation, headquartered in San Francisco, rounded out the top 10, with 60 million unique users.

Apple and craigslist.com were ranked 11th and 16th respectively.

And making its first appearance on the list, with just over 20 million unique users for the month, was San Francisco-based Twitter -- a 20-fold increase over its numbers a year ago.

"Twitter has clearly been able to generate wide interest and cultivate a substantial following in a very short period of time," said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix, on the WebProNews site. "If this momentum persists, then we will continue to see Twitter climb higher and higher in this ranking in the coming months."