The Huffington Post’s Off the Bus reporting project set off a firestorm in journalism circles earlier this year when one of its correspondents broadcast the “bitter voter” comments Barack Obama made during a fundraiser that was closed to the press. Jay Rosen, the project’s mastermind, says that the correspondent, Mayhill Fowler, shouldn’t be condemned for transgressing against rules that were created in the pre-digital era. Instead, he says, she should be viewed as a harbinger of the new realities, including the fact that publishing capabilities have now been extended to anyone with access to the Internet. Media organizations should take note, he says, and adapt accordingly.

Off the Bus is one of several projects Rosen, a professor of journalism at NYU and author of PressThink, has initiated to explore ways professionals and amateurs can collaborate to produce journalism. The approach is inspired in part by the open source movement in software, in which masses of programmers collaborate to build new computer programs. In 2006, Rosen launched NewAssignment.net as a home for his real-world experiments. The first of those was Assignment Zero, a joint project with Wired.com to use crowdsourcing to cover the story of, well, crowdsourcing. Off the Bus is the second project. And the third, launched last year, is BeatBlogging.org, where reporters at 13 news organizations across the country are exploring how to use social networking to fortify their reporting.

Earlier this year, an article by Rosen appeared on Salon.com decrying the traditional media’s “on-the-bus” horserace approach to reporting presidential elections. It’s a practice, he says, that is easy and safe for journalists but does not usually provide the most useful information to voters. mediabistro.com caught up with Rosen to find out how he thinks Off the Bus is improving the quality of election reporting.

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What have you learned so far from the Off the Bus experiment?
One of the most important things we’ve done is in the name: the idea of getting off the bus and off the merry-go-round of “inside baseball” journalism and trying it from another place. When we have a report from, let’s say, someone who wanted to volunteer for the Obama campaign and assumed they were going to get a ticket to the Denver convention, and then they find out it’s not that simple, their account is about politics, it’s about the campaign, you could even say it’s revealing of the candidate, a little part of the candidate. But it’s not starting at all from being “on the bus.”

“Rather than following the campaign around, why not remain where you are and write and report where the campaign intersects with American life?”

The second thing we are trying to offer is a variety of perspectives that are “off the bus,” just by becoming a version of the Huffington Post, but specifically for the campaign, developing bloggers and voices who are coming from lots of different places. Because they are not professional journalists, they have other vantage points.

One of the images we started with was: Rather than following the campaign around, why not remain where you are in American life and write and report where the campaign intersects with American life? We’ve been fairly successful at doing that.

The third thing is that the events surrounding Mayhill Fowler showed some important things about the distribution of the press’s powers to more people.

Number four is we’re making slow but crucial progress on the whole challenge of distributed reporting, which is lots of people sharing the work of investigating something, or reporting on a big event, or compiling information. Continuing from my earlier project, Assignment Zero, we’re learning how to tackle that big, practical challenge of doing distributed reporting. It’s easy for me to write about it at PressThink and say, “We could have thousands of people on one story.” But the real work is in how you actually organize people to do that.

What’s wrong with reporting from the bus?
It’s trying to do something that is meager to begin with. It’s trying to tell us who’s going to win. We’re going to find out anyway. It’s unwilling to go outside that very limited idea for a sense of purpose. All this talent and intelligence and time and money that goes into campaign coverage — which is a lot, really good people are assigned to do it — it ends up almost poverty-stricken because of the limitations of the idea.

How else should they be reporting on the campaign?
In 1992, I was one of the people calling for the press to take more seriously the idea of a citizen’s agenda in election coverage. The Charlotte Observer did exactly that in 1992. They actually went out — and this was before the Web — to try to figure out: What do citizens say ought to be talked about as the issues in the campaign?

Earlier this year, Charlie Savage at the Boston Globe [asked the presidential candidates to fill out a detailed questionnaire on the limits of executive branch power]. This is an important issue — the expansion of executive power. We’ve got to get the candidates on the record about this. We have to push this. He had an agenda, which was: Let’s make this part of the agenda. He thought it was important, based on his reporting.

But [the mainstream press] won’t take up his idea, and this is what I wrote in my Salon article, because horserace coverage works for them, on all these different levels. It’s safe, known, easy, reproducible, transferable. It just solves their problem, which is: How do you immerse yourself in politics without becoming politically attached, without becoming political yourself? That’s actually hard to do. Horserace journalism solves your problem.

But aren’t readers interested in the horserace?
It’s true that people want to know who’s winning and why. And I agree. There’s definitely an audience to be served there. You have to do that. But that’s totally different than making this our idea and our identity and organizing the campaign around who’s going to win and how. That’s where I think the horserace press went wrong. Not in meeting audience demand for information. That’s good. But you can do that without making it your mission.

“It didn’t bother me that I was wrong about whether people would organize around candidates, because getting closer to what does motivate people is our goal.”

What has Off the Bus tried that hasn’t worked? And what have you learned from those failures?
When we started, I thought we’d be able to organize big teams of people who were interested in particular candidates to do journalism about those candidates. But it didn’t really work at all. People didn’t necessarily want to organize that way. Or we didn’t know necessarily how to engage them in it.

So you thought, ‘Whoever is interested in McCain, go in this room and figure out…’
Yeah, “the McCain corps.” We envisioned that the more popular candidates, or the candidates more likely to win, would probably have bigger groups. But it didn’t really work that way. This is not unusual in these types of projects.

My purpose as a college professor and a knowledge worker in new media is simply to learn by doing. Meaning, we don’t know how to organize thousands of people to provide an alternative to the “on the bus” campaign press. The best way is not to have a perfected model but just to start. And that’s Off the Bus: Let’s do it and learn from trying to do it.

So then you try to organize people around candidates, because “that’s what they’re excited about,” right? And it doesn’t work, fine, because you’ve learned something about your ideas and your assumptions and where they go wrong. In that sense, it’s fundamentally an academic project. But I like, when I can, to give my concepts a totally real-world test.

How long is this real-world test going to last?
We’re doing it for one election cycle. That’s our unit. We started it around the time the media got its own election year act together. We put ours together. They gave theirs a name. We gave ours a name, “Off the Bus.” And we run the base.

What sorts of results have you collected so far?
[Part of it is project director] Amanda Michel herself. We had to decide who should take on this project. The natural tendency would be to go with a political journalist and get them to do something “alternative.” Well the alternative to that is hiring somebody who knew how to organize people online. Believe me, there are no journalists who know how to do that. She was one of the few people I could find who had any experience in that, and she was interested in media and how to improve the news media.

Her own gaining mastery of it as we go along — that’s one of the biggest accomplishments. Some of the protocols and tools she’s developing, just to do her job, are among the most important learnings we have. What she’s learning, no one else is learning. That’s a home run right there. She herself is a home run — and somebody who’s going to add to journalism by bringing knowledge that is foreign to it but is necessary for its development.

“The [pool of] people who can record public speech has been extended past the press. That is what the new media revolution means. The tools of journalism have been distributed.”

How do you interpret the fact that people didn’t want to organize around candidates? What did you learn from that about what random Joes on the street are and are not willing to do, and what their motivations are for participating in crowdsourced journalism?
This is the heart of what I’m trying to figure out with this project. The first thing I ever learned from open source software was that you have to begin with what motivates people to participate. That’s the starting point for understanding your project. The design of your project has to obey the logic of motivation. The reason for that is pretty obvious, once you realize you are asking people to donate their time and their talent.

It didn’t bother me that I was wrong about whether people would organize around candidates, because getting closer to what does motivate people is our goal. As I observe this scene, what I’m finding is, through my project and others I’m watching just as closely, is there are different ways people come together to do distributed reporting work.

For example?
The first is represented by Josh Marshall [of TalkingPointsMemo.com]. When you have a charismatic and effective blogger who’s following stuff and develops a kind of miniature public around the story itself or around themes in his or her work. That’s what Marshall did during the U.S. attorneys scandal and many other things he’s done. It’s the story that draws people in. The user public is there for that story. And then something happens where distributed labor is really important and practical to do. So you can go to your public, and they’ll do it. And by “charismatic,” I don’t mean in their personality. I mean in their work. Their work is catalyzing of smart people who hang around and know a lot of things.

What Josh Marshall and company do is embedded in the “open news organization.” The way that organization works as a newsroom is that it starts every day not with its news budget but with inflow from readers, from sources, from people on the Internet, who are constantly emailing Josh and his people, or leaving comments, or doing blogs at community sites. But there’s an inflow from the mini-public. At headquarters, they’re filtering this inflow. They’re doing their own news aggregation around certain themes of reporting that they’re also developing in the old-fashioned journalistic way. That’s how the organization works. It’s in that context that they can occasionally say to readers, “Hey, go do this. Go look at these records. Go sift through these emails.”

What’s another model?
A really important story surfaces, so an organization simply appeals to the public for help, and it’s such an important story that it works. The example there would be what the News-Press in Fort Myers, Fla, did when it got wind of what felt like some corruption in a sewer authority down there. They didn’t really know what they were doing at the time, but they said to their readers, “Help us investigate.” And they gave what they knew so far. It was potentially something really important because it could affect other rate payers. There were lots of people who knew stuff about how sewer authorities worked who had retired to Florida. They volunteered their knowledge.

Any other models?
The third way is to develop a team of people who understand the idea of your project and then try to mold them into a team capable of distributed reporting. We’re getting there with Off the Bus. That’s what we’re trying to figure out how to do.

Separate from the “horserace” focus, what are the traditional media doing right this election season? And what are they missing the boat on?
Excellence in political journalism does go on. Peggy Noonan, as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, whose politics I don’t agree with, has, through doing good columns and being in touch, really added something to my understanding of the election. Just by bringing herself and her insights. There’s nothing new about it. There doesn’t have to be.

But in terms of organizing people in new ways to do better political coverage, not much has happened. MTV is organizing 50 semi-pro journalists to do election coverage for them. I went and talked to them. The first thing I told them is, “If what you do looks like the ‘on-the-bus’ press, that’s the only way you could fail, to reproduce what they do.”

Are any of the Off the Bus correspondents getting paid? And if not, is that a sustainable strategy over the long term?
I’m not presenting Off the Bus as a sustainable anything. The idea was to run the project through the elections. We weren’t trying to create something to go on. Our idea was just to try to operate as an open campaign bureau, meaning anyone can sign up.

So you’re just trying to figure out how the operations would work, not how you’d finance it.
No.

About Mayhill Fowler: How do you respond to the criticism that she was reporting comments (from the Obama fundraiser) that were made in a context that was presumed to be off the record, by virtue of the fact that the event was closed to the press?
The Obama campaign said, on the record, that the fundraiser was closed to the press but not off the record. It’s very important for journalists to understand what I just said. The Obama campaign said, not in a back channel way, but through a spokesman that the event was closed to the press but not off the record.

What did they mean by that?
They’re making a practical, realistic judgment that, at a fundraiser, someone was going to be recording it, and the chances of them posting it online were very good. To assume anything else would be folly.

Number two, they are saying that, in effect, the public record has been extended to remarks at fundraisers because the [pool of] people who can record public speech has been extended past the press to anyone at the event. That is what the new media revolution means. The tools of journalism have been distributed. The most important thing to understand about Mayhill Fowler is that she is simply representing that fact to the political press.

What does that mean?
There’s a new press situation, so we shouldn’t start with an old set of rules as the norm. Let’s just figure out what the rules should be for this new situation. Lots of people have blogs and Twitter accounts, not just would-be journalists. Let’s say you [are a regular person and you] have a blog. You go to a campaign event because you’re excited about a candidate. You happen to have a conversation with the candidate. You go home that night and log in to your blog and you say, “What happened to me today? I met the candidate.” Now, before you start writing, are you going to ask yourself, “Wait a minute. I can’t report any of this. I’m not the press.” It would never in a million years occur to that person. That is a new situation.

Mayhill Fowler is a figure who is simply in that situation. My thing, as someone trying to operate under new conditions and figure out new possibilities, [is that] I’m not going to condemn her right away because she violated rules that were created for a one-to-many world. And if one of those “on-the-bus” reporters went up to Mayhill Fowler as she exited the fundraiser and asked, “What did he say,” the reporter would be totally within the rules of “on-the-bus” journalism to interview her and [publish] that account.

As you watch the evolution of journalism, what is one question journalists, traditional or otherwise, should be asking themselves, that they don’t seem to be?
What is the knowledge and where is the emotion that I want to get into the campaign system, that I want to bring to it and to add to the campaign, including to the point of making the candidates talk about it. Or to put it another way: What are you trying to accomplish in ’08, besides cover the campaign?

I like what Charlie Savage did. He wanted to make the [issue of the] expansion of executive power part of this campaign through the journalism that he did in 2008.

So instead of letting the politicians set the agenda about what’s going to be talked about, you decide perhaps in collaboration with consulting your community what the issues should be and then force the candidates to respond to them?
Not exactly. They get to set their agenda. And you have an agenda of what you want to add to the campaign.

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Four tips for running a distributed reporting project:

1. Hire an expert. Off The Bus could have hired a political journalist to run the project. Instead they hired someone with expertise in organizing people online.
2. Let go of the canon. Off The Bus threw out the book on what it means to cover a political campaign and instead are allowing their participants to write on a wide range of topics related to the election but not usually covered by the mainstream press.
3. Take risks. No one knows how to do this. You only learn what works — and what doesn’t — by trying something and seeing what happens.
4. Go with the flow. Figure out what motivates people in your community to get involved in communal reporting and organize your project around those motivations.

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E.B. Boyd is a San Francisco-based journalist. She blogs about the changes journalism is going through at The Future of News.

Like many college students, Porter Bayne, a longtime Republican and native Texan, had been active in campus politics. However, after graduating, he eschewed going into politics, instead starting Web companies in his home state of Texas and working for sites like Travelocity.com. Bayne remained a politics nut but found himself continually frustrated with what he perceived as the mainstream media‘s tendency to boil down speeches and platforms into 30-second sound bites. He wanted to use the Internet to help people recontextualize quotes and statements that had been taken out of context.

Along with several other core staffers, Bayne launched Ameritocracy.com in time for the 2008 election. One of those staffers is community director John Brooks. His job is to make sure that users come to the site and feel engaged. Brooks got his start in the community development world at Beliefnet.com, where he helped expand the production of user-generated content. Brooks talked to mediabistro.com about his goals for making Ameritocracy stand out from other user-driven content aggregator sites and how to keep its momentum going post-election.

How was Ameritocracy conceived? Describe the process of going from the initial idea to creating a site and hiring a staff.

The site began as the inkling of an idea by Porter [Bayne]. The earliest form of the concept — which [Bayne] described as “adding concise, hopefully-objective context to major campaign soundbites,” was a newsletter he wrote in 2004. The idea was to create a newsletter someone could [read] to get a more nuanced view of a topic than they were getting from the debates and speeches.

After getting some positive responses to the idea of the newsletter, Porter and [now creative director] Iris Chamberlain started thinking about how to build out a system that would let a lot more people cover a lot more campaigns and topics. After the process of figuring out how to raise some money and form a company, they started building the site in May 2008.

There are plenty of political news aggregator sites out there. Why did you want to create one that focused solely on quotes and statements?

The mainstream media these days is lazy. They rely on soundbites; stuff taken out of context. Our goal is to recontextualize what’s been taken out of context. On Ameritocracy, you can take a quote that’s been all over the media and blown out of proportion and recontextualize it to understand the actual truth of the statement.

In The New York Times Magazine, Virginia Heffernan referred to Ameritocracy as nonpartisan, but you count members of the Kennedy family as some of your staffers and supporters. Do you worry about being perceived as a liberal site?

That’s the great thing about the site — the content comes from readers, not from us. We can only put on the homepage what the site’s members have written or commented on or contextualized. So if you come to Ameritocracy and you think it has a liberal bias, the best thing to do is for you to start adding quotes and comments and contexts that you think represent your conservative viewpoints.

We also make a point to emphasize that Porter was always a Republican, was a member of College Republicans, and “reached across the aisle” in 2004 and voted for a Democrat. He still considers himself a Republican with some liberal viewpoints on some issues. But we’ve also reached out to groups from all over the political spectrum, from the RNC to Common Cause, and received enthusiastic responses regardless of political ideology.

“We’re empowering the commenters, but we’re also forcing them to be responsible, because in order to respond to a post, you need to cite a source. It’s not just a bunch of people crying ‘bullshit.'”

Of course you’re going to analyze quotes from Barack Obama and John McCain, since they were running for president. But how do you decide which pundits, columnists, and talking heads are worthy of review on your site? Who exactly determines this and what exactly are the criteria?

We try to stay as neutral as possible and let the community decide what matters. But we do try to promote as much activity as possible, and so by updating the homepage with, say, a claim that Obama made in a speech that’s making headlines any given afternoon, we know our users are going to respond.

But we place absolutely no limits on who our users can cite. It just so happens that Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin are on everybody’s minds right now, all the time. But a few weeks ago we featured a quote from Paris Hilton on the homepage. She said, “Nowadays, sound bites, not sound policy, determine our country’s course.” We liked that. And she was making political headlines for that anti-McCain ad. So it seemed perfectly appropriate.

Would you describe Ameritocracy as closer to social networking or citizen journalism? Why?

Not to cop-out and give you a non-answer, but it’s a perfect marriage of both. From the social networking standpoint, it’s sort of a more organized and structured approach to the sorts of relationships that have a habit of organically emerging when people post comments on blogs. Often they get to know each other. And we’re taking that aspect of user involvement — commenting — and making it kind of the focus of the site, rather than a peanut gallery. We’re empowering the commenters, but we’re also forcing them to be responsible, because in order to respond to a post, you need to cite a source. It’s structured; it’s not just a bunch of people crying “bullshit.”

Who does what on Ameritocracy’s staff?

There are six core employees — Iris and Porter founded the site together and still run it out of Seattle. Brian Finney, who is our systems engineer, and James Peterson, our CTO, are also based in Seattle. Bobby Kennedy and I are based in New York. Bobby has been on board from very early on and helped Porter launch the site. He serves as our outreach director. I serve as community director.

We also have an amazing pool of freelancers and interns who do superb work, and our team of advisers includes absolute luminaries like Esther Dyson, Mary McGrath, David R. Johnson, and Mike Dover. We have a great team. We’re very lucky.

Ameritocracy is currently in beta. When do you plan to transition out of beta, and describe how the site will differ in conjunction with this change?

Really, to be honest, there’s no deadline. Right now we’re enjoying new members signing up and giving feedback and telling us what they think about the site. Google is still in beta, if you hadn’t noticed. But speaking of which, we’re working on something new for early 2009 that takes what we’re doing and makes it easier for a lot more people to get to and use, and we’re really excited about it. Current users will be invited to the beta.

With whom is the site most popular, and will you continue drawing that user, while expanding to entice a broader group of users? What’s been the feedback trajectory for the site — did users ‘get’ it at first? Have opinions become increasingly positive or negative, and why do you think that is?

We don’t track a great deal of information about our members, but all signs indicate that we’re pretty evenly split down gender lines and that most of our members are probably in the 18-35 age range, people who were already Web-savvy to start with. Generally speaking, people seem smitten with the idea, but as with any new Web site with a new spin on established ideas, it doesn’t mean they jump at the chance to make it part of their morning routine. We hope they will. We think they should. And that’s sort of what we’re focused on right now: taking that enthusiasm and converting it into a fact of people’s Web life.

How will the site evolve after November’s election? How, specifically, do you intend to make it a destination, even after the campaign and all the dialogue surrounding it ends? What will you do to insulate Ameritocracy from dwindling interest and traffic?

Right now the election is the first thing on everybody’s mind, of course. But after the election people will go back to caring about issues. That’s why the site is organized around issues, not around candidates. If you cared about the environment before the election, you don’t stop caring about the environment after the election. That goes for abortion or gay marriage or any other issue you’re passionate about. People who are passionate about specific issues are people who we think will — and should — keep coming back to Ameritocracy. People who are unhappy with the mainstream media’s portrayal of issues and their shortcuts covering the news are people who will keep coming back to Ameritocracy.

Also, [the site] doesn’t necessarily have to be limited to just politics. If you’re a fan of, say, the Rachael Ray show, and you really want to set up a page on the site to check the authenticity of things said by Rachael Ray and the guests that appear on her show, there’s no real reason you can’t do that. As long as your goal is to parse out information, to hold relevant figures accountable for what they say, that’s what we’re there for. And it shouldn’t bore you. If Rachael Ray is relevant to you, go for it. You could set up a “Transparency in Recipes” issues page. I would love it more people did that.

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Five tips for starting — and sustaining — a user-generated site:

1. Let everybody in. The more people on the site, and the more groups you reach out to about joining and creating an online presence, the more diverse the conversation.
2. Be willing to change it up. Ameritocracy started out with a heavy political focus because it launched during the 2008 election season. But they knew they needed a game plan that would keep users engaged after the election was over.
3. Don’t expect immediate success. Ameritocracy is still in beta and doesn’t have a timeline for transitioning out of it. Instead, they’re letting their users’ responses and comments dictate how the site should evolve.
4. It’s okay to be controversial. Paris Hilton may not be a politician, but if you put a quote from her on the homepage of your Web site, people will have strong opinions about it.
5. Let users police each other. Although Ameritocracy does have community moderators, they count on users to provide backup and evidence for any claims they make on the site. And users don’t hesitate to correct or challenge each other if they disagree.

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Lilit Marcus is a freelance writer and the editor-in-chief of SaveTheAssistants.com.

Armed with more than 20 years of experience in marketing, writing and graphic design — and raised in New York state’s Adirondack Mountains by a family who were locavores long before there was an actual term for eating local foods — Tracey Ryder co-founded Communities, Inc. with life and business partner Carole Topalian in 2002. Six years later, the company boasts 50 member publications with more in the works, as well as plans to expand into television and product development. She is also a graduate of the professional chefs training program at the Epicurean Cooking School in Los Angeles and is currently involved in writing and recipe development for the forthcoming book Edible Nation: Local Heroes from America’s Sustainable Farm and Food Scene (March 2010, John Wiley & Sons.)

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You have a background in communications. What were you doing before just before you founded the Edible Communities group?

I owned a company called Elements with Edible Communities co-founder, Carole Topalian. Elements was a graphic design firm that served tourism, agriculture and culinary clients. We created corporate identities, Web sites, ad campaigns, annual reports, PR and marketing programs, did location and studio photography — you name it. During the 11 years we ran Elements, we also designed several publications for our clients, which is what really led us to want to create magazines of our own.

It’s not easy to start a single magazine. What made you decide to start a publishing group based on what appears to be a traditional franchise model? Where did the seed that started this empire come from?

Fortunately for us, most of our experience was on the creative side of publishing magazines before we started Edible Communities, so we took it on as a completely creative endeavor at first. We loved the process of creating beautiful designs and compelling editorial calendars and of merging Carole’s stunning photographs on the page with great language. And even though the work we did on our clients’ magazines had given us a solid understanding of what it means to be an advertising-supported publication and of how important distribution is, we most certainly were not fluent in all the practices of mainstream publishing.

Edible Communities is anything but a traditional franchise model. In fact, we’re pretty outside the box when it comes to how we function as an organization. For example, we never use the word “franchisee” to describe those who have purchased license agreements to publish magazines under our brand; instead, they are “members” of our company. We run the company democratically and each person has a vote in how things are done. Additionally, we allow a lot of freedom for each of our publishers to create magazines that really speak to their own particular community. Other than the overall look of the magazines (which needs to be consistent for brand recognition), they are in complete control over their content. We believe this is one of the strongest features of our magazines — they literally have their own “flavor,” one that is unique to the community in which they are published, and our readers really appreciate that.

The seed that got all of this started came from our personal histories. Carole is Armenian and comes from a large extended family that shares a vibrant culinary history. I was raised by generations of farmers in upstate New York who were fierce locavores long before the word ever existed. I lost my father to a sudden heart attack in November of 2001 and decided to change the direction of my life from working for dozens of corporate clients to focusing on work that I found to be meaningful and rewarding — Edible grew directly out of that decision. We launched the first magazine, Edible Ojai, in April of 2002 and began spreading the Edible Communities concept across the US and Canada in the spring of 2004. Since then, we’ve doubled the number of titles we publish every year.

What about timing? The Edible Communities publications came along in 2002, a few years ahead of the locavore trend, when both foodies and ordinary consumers were just starting to become aware of the benefits of eating locally, both from an environmental and a nutritional standpoint. How much was luck and how much was seeing the early edge of a trend?
Edible Ojai started in April of 2002, we signed our first license agreement (for Edible Cape Cod) in May of 2004 and then grew to 50 titles in the U.S. and Canada by mid-2008. I think there are healthy doses of luck and timing involved whenever a company is successful right out of the gate. We certainly had some of both, however, we were also very aware of food security and affordability issues — as well as the explosive growth in the numbers of people shopping at farmers markets — and felt there was a need to fill in terms of publishing information about the local foods movement.

“One-off titles don’t enjoy any of the advantages we have in terms of track record, credibility and strength of brand.”

If I told you today I wanted to start “Edible Fill-In-The-Blank,” where do we go from here? What would I need in terms of both financing and skills? How long does the process take?

It’s a fairly uncomplicated process that generally takes about six months from the time we hear from someone who wants to do an Edible magazine until their first issue hits newsstands. The cost right now is $95,000. Of that, $35,000 is due when they sign their contract and fulfills the down payment requirement. The balance is financed by Edible Communities for five years at a low interest rate.

First, we determine if the area in which someone wants to publish is available. Our license agreements only allow for one magazine in any given Edible territory and each territory is determined on a case-by-case basis. We also ask everyone to sign a non-disclosure agreement early on so that we can share proprietary information. Then we draft their contract, have them sign it, and begin the launch process. During the launch process, we build their Web site, create their media kit and other collateral materials. We train them on how to do ad sales, run their business, do distribution and team them up with a production person who will do the actual layout of their magazine. We help with the development of their editorial calendar and other items. Each publisher receives a checklist from us that contains a list of everything they need to do from the time they sign their contract until their first issue gets distributed, and that list is monitored by one of our staffers.

It’s a very turnkey business that requires little or no previous publishing experience. It does help if someone has been in business before or if they have done sales of some kind, but we spend the entire first year training them on every aspect of the business. We have a 100 percent success rate, to date, so the training works.

For someone thinking about starting their own local food publication, what are the benefits of being under the Edible Communities umbrella as opposed to being on their own?

One of the best aspects of the company is that we have a lively inter-company listserv that is active 24/7. Each member has access to the listserv and can ask their peers anything they want. Since we now have some very experienced Edible publishers on board (who also happen to be incredibly collaborative and generous with their time), they answer a lot of questions and offer a lot of help to new publishers. It’s literally a community of likeminded people who are running the same businesses without competing with one another, so it works great.

The other huge benefit is that we have a widely-recognized, high-quality brand with 50 successful titles that all produce compelling and interesting hyper-local content for the readers in their communities. One-off titles don’t enjoy any of the advantages we have in terms of track record, credibility and strength of brand.

How many publications are under the Edible Communities group right now, and how many do think there will be?

There are 50 now (with five more contracts pending) and we add, on average, about 10 to 15 per year. We now have inquiries from outside North America and expect to be in Europe, the Pacific Rim, and South America within the next year or two.

How sustainable is that kind of volume? How many local food magazines do we really need?

We believe that every community has an abundance of food stories worth telling, and therefore, we think every community needs its own local food magazine.

What do you consider a success? There have to be publications under the Edible Communities banner that are doing better than others. Which are they, and what do you think accounts for that success? What are the challenges for those that could do better?

We consider our magazines a success when they achieve the goals of their publishers. For example, most of our publishers are very entrepreneurial and are in this to make money as well as to support a mission and a movement they believe in, so we want those publishers to achieve their financial goals as quickly as possible. Others are in this for more philanthropic reasons and they publish their magazines in a completely mission-driven way that allows them to donate much of their time and revenue back into their community. It’s difficult to say if one is doing better than another since many of their personal goals for their magazines are different. One of the hallmarks of success for us is whether or not a magazine really fits the spirit of the community it is representing, and in that respect, we have some wonderful successes. There is no way that an Edible Brooklyn, Edible Iowa River Valley, Edible Santa Fe, etc. could represent any other community than the one they do. A lot of this success belongs to our publishers themselves, who work hard to support and honor the authentic culinary heritage of their communities, while at the same time, they grow and manage profitable magazines without compromising quality.

What’s the distribution model for the publications? Are they all on a subscription basis or do some have free distribution?

They all have free distribution within their communities (through advertisers, farmers markets and other food-related businesses, events, etc.) and all are also available by subscription.

With the 50-plus publications out there, plus their accompanying Web sites, that’s a lot of content for publications with a relatively small staff. What kind of opportunities does that present for freelancers? How much common content is made available/accessible to local editors?

You’re right; we do have a small staff, which is why our magazines rely heavily on freelancers. And since almost all of the content for each magazine and Web site is created locally, and is not dictated by us at headquarters, our magazines utilize well over 1,000 freelancers each year. All a freelancer has to do is contact the publisher of the Edible magazine where they live and pitch a story to them.

“We want to add a more dynamic Web function to our sites, but we believe that print is here to stay and that it’s not as endangered as many people would like us to think it is.”

There’s a consistent quality to the visual appeal of these publications. How is that possible since they’re being developed by individuals/teams scattered across the continent?

In each of our contracts there is a guideline for standards, which all the magazines have to comply with. However, the standards we require contractually are minimal compared to what a more traditional franchise would require. I believe we have a consistently high quality across the board because we have some incredibly talented people creating magazines. Each of our members truly desires to make their magazine the best it can possibly be, and with the support they get from within the membership of our company and from the talent pool in each of their communities, they are able to do that. Plus, Carole Topalian (co-founder of Edible Communities) travels to each and every one of our communities to take pictures for them when they launch. By the time she leaves, the magazines have anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 images in their archive which they can use in the magazine and on their Web site. The stunning visual quality of her photographs is a big part of what holds the quality thread together for us.

Are there more editions in the works for the near future?

Yes, we have Edible Dallas & Fort Worth coming on board, as well as Edible Piedmont (North Carolina) and Edible Kansas City, as well as editions in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio and California.

All of the publications have Web components. How does online media play into the Edible Communities group?

Yes, all of the magazines do have supporting Web sites and we also have a main site and a blog. Our aggregate traffic for all the sites is huge and this is the area we intend to expand on the most in 2009. Right now, we’re working on a Web 2.0 build-out that will include an online advertising component and user-generated content, as well as a recipe index, events database and several directory functions.

Why launch new print publications when so many outlets are moving online and a lot of new media is online-only?

We don’t believe that print is dead at all — especially print that contains hyper-local content. Plus, our readers continually tell us how much they love the look and feel of the magazines and that they read them cover-to-cover. They also save each issue they receive and some readers have extensive collections of our magazines, which they return to over and over again. We want to add a more dynamic Web function to our sites, but we believe that print is here to stay and that it’s not as endangered as many people would like us to think it is.

Do you worry about over-saturation, especially with ad dollars hard to come by for major mainstream magazines, now that the economy is suffering? Have you ever rejected an editor/investor because you thought they’d be cutting into another’s territory?

We don’t worry about over-saturation at all since each of our territories are clearly defined and protected by our contracts. So within Edible Communities, that is not an issue. In terms of the overall trouble in our economy, we realize we’ll experience some slowing just as all businesses are right now but feel that our readers and advertisers believe in the power of a community-based magazine to help their local community thrive, regardless of what’s happening on a national level. Another aspect of Edible Communities is that we take very little money out of the local communities we publish in. Ninety-five percent of the revenue generated by ad sales stays in the local communities, which means it’s worth a lot more to the people who live there.

The advantage our magazines have over the large mainstream national publications is that we have access to some very loyal and dedicated readers. We are regional publications that have a national reach, thanks to the network we have created, and that’s what sets us apart from the more traditional mainstream pubs. When national advertisers approach us, they are looking to connect with regional markets, and that’s something the national mags have trouble doing.

What is the reader demographic, how much does it vary from location to location, and how do you determine ad rates (or even an ad rate formula) in so many different markets?

We create the ad rate sheets on a community-by-community basis. We look at what other publications already exist and what their rates are. We look at the demographic and then we assess what we feel the market will bear. Overall, we say our readers are “concerned, connected and savvy.” Eighty-five percent of them are college educated, own their own homes and are working professionals. The average annual household income ranges from place to place, as you would expect.

What do you see as competition for the Edible publications? Is it national culinary pubs or local newspapers, etc?

There really are not any “apples to apples” direct comparisons to us in terms of competitors. Sadly, local newspapers are disappearing faster than the rain forests and the national culinary pubs have rounded their heels to advertisers so much that readers don’t believe in them the same way they used to. All of our magazines are at least 51 percent editorial. We are still very content-driven and although we know we can’t exist without advertisers, we sell ads to those who are most appropriate for our content and we don’t let them dictate what we write about.

What’s in the works in the near and long term, book project-wise?

We have a contract right now for a series of three books and expect to do more in the future. Our first book, Edible Communities: Local Heroes from America’s Sustainable Farm and Food Scene, is a coffee table book full of stories about the food heroes within our communities, along with gorgeous photos and delicious recipes. The second two books are regional guidebooks to local foods.

Where do you see the Edible Communities in five years?

Right now, we are in the process of prioritizing our opportunities to decide what will come next. In addition to the Web 2.0 build-out, we are looking at starting a nonprofit arm of the company, called the Edible Institute, which would do education and community outreach as well as have a curriculum for food journalists, a farm-based learning program and a chefs-in-residence program to develop, for example, seasonal recipes. We have also been approached by several producers about doing a weekly show that brings the format of our magazines to life on TV and have been asked to develop a line of merchandise, so I would imagine several of these possibilities will exist under our brand in the next five years.

How to grow an international publishing empire from just one magazine:

1. Find a niche that’s underserved — and focus your efforts on it. Being the first to meet the needs of a particular demographic or special interest audience is an open opportunity to own the category.
2. Leverage what you know and what you’ve achieved. Build on the knowledge gained, and audience and credibility earned by seeking out spinoff opportunities. A successful publication has a ready-made audience for books or a TV show — and a loyal-consumer-base-in-waiting for products.
3. Know when to lose control — literally. As your publication grows beyond your hands-on direction, do whatever it takes to attract smart people who love what they do, train them well, give them the information and resources they need, allow them to learn from each other, then trust them to bring their best to the job at hand.
4. Know the different between a fad and a trend — and keep your eyes on the latter. Being in the right place at the right time in publishing takes a little bit of luck and a lot of knowing what new ideas and issues are going to take root and be important to significant numbers of readers. Stay aware.
5. Trust your gut and live your dreams. It sounds cliché but if an event in your life or just general discontent is tempting you to take a career leap of faith, prepare as best you can, then make the jump. Life (and work) shouldn’t be about what-ifs.

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By Joy Parks.

Victoria Strauss is the founder of the Web site Writer Beware, an interactive hub of information for new writers about literary scams, fake publishers, proprietary writing contests, and other pitfalls in the publishing industry. She runs Writer Beware as a volunteer from her Massachusetts home, along with two other writers who she met through her work with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. She is the author of seven fantasy novels, mostly recently The Burning Land and The Awakened City.

Strauss compiles and investigates complaints of shady literary agents and vanity publishers so new writers know not to get involved with them, and sometimes she helps police investigations of fraudulent business. We spoke with Strauss and found out what it takes to advocate and get to the bottom of real-life publishing world miscreants and mysteries for new writers.

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You are involved in protecting and advocating for new writers on Writer Beware and also through your board position with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. How did this become such an interest for you?

People often ask me if I ever got scammed. I never did. I’ve had a relatively good experience with agents and publishers. However, when I first went online in the mid-90s, I found all these forums and message boards about being scammed by charging agents and vanity publishers. Back then there was almost no information about this ugly underbelly of publishing, and I was fascinated because I didn’t know of this experience. I heard that the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America were looking for a volunteer to do a section of the Web site to warn about this kind of thing, and because I was interested and knew something, I volunteered, which was how Writer Beware was born.

Define Writer Beware, and describe the process of how you took it from idea to actuality.

There is a public and a private aspect to Writer Beware. The public face is the Web site and the blog; the Web site has general warnings about common scams and problems that writers can encounter, with sections about literary agents, independent editors, various kinds of publishing, copyright, contests, and really just about every area where scams or schemes might occur. The Web site doesn’t just have warnings but also items about disreputable practice. The blog enables us to focus on specific scams and schemes, and also issues of interest to writers. For example, I just blogged about the common myth that writers have to give back their advance if they don’t sell enough copies to earn it out. Right now, I’m getting a lot of questions about a particular literary contest. The blog lets us be much more specific and timely.

The private or behind-the-scene face of Writer Beware is all the documentation we do when we put the warnings out. We built this into a very expensive database. So when we provide a warning, writers can be sure that it can be documented. We’ve cooperated with law enforcement on a number of cases; they have a tough time understanding exactly what is fraudulent.

What do you do to keep Writer Beware going on a day-to-day basis? Describe a typical day.

Writer Beware is a free advice service where writers can email us with questions or complaints or concerns. We get between five and 15 emails a day. As we become more well-known, people post our email addresses at various places. We also read industry publications and newsletters (like Publishers Lunch) that come in daily. I do a blog post at least once a week. If we get requests from the authorities for information, naturally we help with that. Sometimes it’s just maybe an hour a day, but other times it becomes like a part-time job. It’s 100 percent volunteer: we don’t get paid, and we don’t accept donations.

Describe Writer Beware’s traffic and readership over time. What exactly did you do to bring attention and traffic to the site, and what else has contributed to its growth?

The Web site and blog get between 300 and 500 visits each a day, although it’s less on weekends. It’s totally word-of-mouth. It’s a snowball thing — people tell each other about it. Since we’ve started blogging, our blog posts get picked up by the media and other bloggers. People in the publishing industry know about us and recommend us.

“If someone wants to start a Web site, they should know that people are ready to take the word of someone who seems authoritative. Establish your credentials right from the start.”

How does your work against literary scams correspond with your writing and your novels? Has the site helped drive your book sales or your literary career in any way? Has Writer Beware helped build a brand for you as an author, or is it the other way around?

No — as far as I can tell, it has not. It really is two different worlds. As a novelist, I write fantasy, for the adult market and for the young adult market. They don’t dovetail as far as I can tell.

How can other media professionals who see a need within the media community create a project similar to Writer Beware? Do you have any advice on how to get started? If they want to participate in Writer Beware itself, what would you recommend?

I would say now that blogging is probably a better way to establish yourself. You could have a blog and connect it to a Web site. It’s easy for anyone to set up a blog.

If someone wants to start a Web site, they should know that people are ready to take the word of someone who seems authoritative, even if they’re not. An important thing to do is establish your credentials right from the start. Make it clear why you are qualified to do what you do. Also important, you have to be yourself. I think you should do it as yourself and make it clear how and why you are qualified to do what you do.

How can writers parlay their efforts advocating for other writers into freelance assignments?

I’m sure there are ways. If you are willing to network, once you’ve amassed enough material on your blog, you could self-publish a book and sell it from the blog. We actually sometimes consider doing that — compiling the best posts from the Writer Beware blog. We just run into the problem that the information is really time-sensitive. A year from now, much of the information would be outdated. The upside of a blog is that it changes constantly. If I were really dynamic about networking, I could definitely be parlaying that into article assignments. I’ve written for Writers Digest and a couple of other places. My personal choice is to concentrate on fiction; I don’t see myself as a freelance writer. I’m sure that if I network more, I could do more. The process of establishing expertise is quite a long one — we’ve been doing it for more than 10 years.

The reason to do something like this is not to turn this into a paying career. If you’re going to do it right, you have to do it for the right reasons, to help people. Otherwise, why would you devote a huge amount of uncompensated time in the hopes of getting assignments in two years? The only reason to do something like this is if you feel really passionate about the issue.

Any other advice or guidance you’d want to give writers in terms of their own rights, or helping them protect those of others?

I think that everything depends on a foundation of knowledge. I think writers need to be educated. They need to spend some time researching the publishing industry before they jump into it. If they would do that one thing, we’d have a lot less to do at Writer Beware. Many writers don’t know that they can do research on the industry or ought to do it. When they start to send out their books, it might not seem like such a big deal if an agent asks for $200 up front or if a publisher says, “You need to invest your career and pay us $10,000.” The way writers can help one another is to be informed. There is a huge amount of misinformation on writers’ Web sites and messages boards about the way things work, so speak up when something isn’t correct, and be a smart and informed writer!

Tips for starting a Web site on a specific topic or skill set:

1. Start a blog, or some other way to present updates and new content. This attracts new readers and gives a reason for current readers to keep coming back. It can help your Web site get recognized by the media and get recommended to potential new visitors.
2. Make sure your online persona is who you really are in person. If you want to start a media Web site, do it as yourself: then you can also be open about your credentials and have people really trust you.
3. Make yourself known in the media sphere you want to cover — it pays off! Victoria Strauss is content with her fiction career and writes occasionally for Writers’ Digest, but she is confident that if she networked at her full-potential, she could definitely be getting steady freelance work because of Writer Beware.
4. Don’t do it just for the money. According to Strauss, it takes years to develop rapport and recognition, so it most likely wouldn’t be worth your time to start an informative Web site just for the money. You have to love — or at least be fascinated by — what subject you work around, too!

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Liz Funk is a New York-based freelance writer. Her first book, Supergirls Speak Out: Inside the Secret Crisis of Overachieving Girls, will be published by Simon and Schuster in March 2009.

Charles Sennott has had a long career in journalism, working as a reporter and editor at the Bergen Record, the New York Daily News, and for the past 15 years as a reporter, Middle East bureau chief and Europe bureau chief at The Boston Globe. A former Neiman Fellow at Harvard University, Sennott left the Globe earlier this year to launch GlobalPost, a U.S.-based international news site. Sennott serves as executive editor and vice president alongside co-founder and CEO Philip Balboni. Since the site launched on January 12, GlobalPost has signed the New York Daily News and Star-Ledger as syndication clients. Sennott spoke with mediabistro.com about why he left the Globe, the importance of foreign news and his goals for his new enterprise.

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Earlier this year, you left The Boston Globe after a number of years working abroad and on special projects here in the U.S. What spurred you to leave?

I’ve been a reporter who had what I like to call one of the last great rides in newspaper journalism. I worked for a small regional newspaper, the Bergen Record. I got across the river to the big city to work for the New York Daily News and rose to become a city editor. I covered the first Gulf War for the Daily News. I covered the World Trade Center bombing, which took me all over the world. After I left the Daily News, I went to The Boston Globe knowing that if I worked hard as an investigative and special projects reporter, I’d have a shot at being a foreign correspondent. I worked for two years as a special projects reporter and then they said we want you to go over and replace Ethan [Bronner, now with The New York Times] in Jerusalem.

The Boston Globe once had ambitions that would allow it to have seven foreign bureaus and a foreign editor, and I was really proud to be part of that. It’s my hometown newspaper. It’s the paper where I wanted to work my whole life, and where I really believed that I would.

When I came back from living abroad for 10 years as a foreign correspondent, I came back to a newsroom that was devastated by the economy of newspapers. It was changed, and it was changing its mission. The Boston Globe cut all of its seven foreign bureaus, no longer has a foreign editor, and is no longer really in the business of covering the world, which is my passion.

How did you and Philip Balboni end up working together on GlobalPost?

I began to cook up an idea in my basement of a not for profit organization that would be a boutique agency of foreign correspondents. I was able to get a line on a little bit of institutional funding as a not for profit, but I’m not a businessman and I was definitely hitting a wall. Right when I was pondering, “What am I going to do?” Phil Balboni, who is our CEO, got in touch with me.

We had both assembled boards of advisers, and we had overlap on those boards. We ended up getting in touch. We knew each other because Phil is an institution in Boston; he knew my work, and I had been on New England Cable News, where he was CEO and founder. Phil said, “Look, I hear you’re doing this,” and showed me a business plan that he had put together. It was very well thought-out, but I felt like it needed more depth. We, in essence, merged these two different visions — mine about really deep reporting, and his more about reporting with breadth, having a lot of correspondents. He heard out a reporter who’s not a businessperson, and he allowed me to try to figure out how to put a budget together that worked within his.

“Newspapers are shrinking both in size and ambition.”

What is the business model for the Web site? How do you intend to grow or at least continue what GlobalPost is doing?

The business model is to recognize that if you look across the media landscape in America, it is barren in terms of international news. There are definitely hilltops of excellence — The New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post — but in general there are very limited options for someone who wants to know about the world in terms of a place where they can go to do that. We wanted to become a place where you could have that, specifically for an American audience. Out of that need came an idea to start a Web-based news organization that would be unencumbered by legacy media. We would be able to start a new kind of news organization that would have a different cost structure, and it would allow us to build a very stealth team of correspondents. This is sort of a super-stringer model as it was often called, people who have a fixed payment every month for a set number of stories with a long-term agreement.

Our Web site intends to cover a lot of the issues we face as a country that are very global in nature, the economic crisis being the most yawning, obvious one we can see right now, but also climate change, global health, energy, etc. We came up three revenue models. And when I say we, I should really say Phil. This is his business plan. The first is advertising. The second is a syndication model. We are looking at newspapers that have abandoned or significantly cut back their foreign coverage. We offer a really attractive and affordable option to have interesting engaging content for their readership that we can provide both for their paper and their Web site at a very modest sum, and we have an incredible discounted rate for the first year. We’re hoping to get 50 papers that will be part of our network of syndication. The third model is that we are a destination site. We’re free. We want to build a community, to have that community come to us for information and not have any barrier to that.

We also are developing a membership model for what we call an inner circle of premium content. We would stream live interviews with newsmakers: We may invite the deputy interior minister, for example, of a country in turmoil and really troubleshoot them in a way that may not make for the greatest story, but would be a very interesting interview if you had interests abroad, whether economic or idealistic. We want to have this available so that you can get a much deeper grounding of a place. We also want to offer country profiles and different products for premium content that make up an attractive package for people who become members. We also just want to ask people, “Become a member and support the idea that great journalism needs to be self-sustaining.” This is a way to really vote for that and get a very good value at the same time. Beyond the paid part of that premium content, there’s an avenue to get access to that premium content where we’re developing a sort of point system. We’re coming up with a sort of schedule that will allow us to award, for free, people who have been very loyal to our site that same premium content — so it doesn’t just become news for rich people, but it becomes news for people who really care about the world and need to know. If that means you pay for that subscription or membership, that’s fine, or show us your commitment and we will create a point system for you.

In addition to diminished foreign news coverage, for various reasons, many American newspapers are now ending their relationship with the Associated Press. By syndicating articles, does GlobalPost aim to fill that void?

We can never replace the AP and we don’t intend to, nor do we have any pretension that we could try. We want to write differently than the AP. We want to find stories that are narrative and strong — we want to tell great stories, not simply deliver information. The AP has developed a reputation for excellence among its reporters for getting info right, for being there when it counts, for being a very reliable news source, but they have not earned their reputation as a place with extremely interesting writing. They’ve never had that tradition. We want to be a place where we really find an American voice for storytelling in the world. What I mean by an American voice is not jingoistic or nationalistic. I’m talking about an appreciation for a yearning in America to reach out to the world.

You attended journalism school, and you’ve taught and lectured at a few schools over the past couple years. When students ask you for advice on whether they should pursue work as a foreign correspondent, what do you tell them about what opportunities exist, and how might they set themselves up to take advantage of those?

I used to come from Iraq or Afghanistan and say, this is a great calling. You should do this. Being a reporter puts you on the front line of history. It’s really important work. We need good young people. Starting about two years ago, I couldn’t even look them in the eye, because there were so few opportunities. They don’t have a prayer of having the sort of ride that I had in newspapers, where you can rise up and get to a position where you’re in a sweet spot, like being based abroad full time. That was an extraordinary opportunity that The Boston Globe gave to me, but those opportunities are for the most part over. The idea that you could have some of the interesting positions I had along the way like a national correspondent or a special projects correspondent — those are over. Newspapers are shrinking both in size and ambition.

Now that I’ve started this new news organization and now that we have brethren like Politico and ProPublica, there is this stirring of hope. There are these new news organizations that are going to be multimedia, Web-based, multiple platforms. It’s going to require a new kind of journalism. We want great storytellers, great writers, but if you happen to also be a sufficient or even talented photographer, that’s great because you can learn FinalCut Pro and mix some multimedia packages for us. We also are interested in great storytellers who are photographers who might want to try their hand at writing. That doesn’t mean we want everyone to do everything. We want people to go to their strengths and go to excellence. When you talk to young journalism students like that, whether they’re a photographer or a writer or a producer, you can see their eyes light up because they get it. They know that they can find new ways of storytelling across platforms. They’re dying for the chance. It’s very easy to go talk to schools now, and I am flooded with applications or requests for business cards. I encourage people to come to us because we want correspondents all over the world. We want young people. We also want experienced people in the field. We want to create a community of both veteran correspondents who really know what they’re doing and young people looking for their first opportunity. I think everyone has a lot to learn from each other.

At what rate do you intend to add locations and correspondents?

Beyond the 70 correspondents in 53 countries, we hope to ramp up over time, but we’re not assigning numbers to that. We want to be in more countries, but I think more precisely we want to be more deep in big countries, like China, India, Brazil, Indonesia. We want to add staff where we think there are great stories that aren’t told often enough to an American audience.

“We’re just this little lifeboat, and we know this is tremendous talent we’re picking up. We can’t give them full-time jobs, but we can become a very important piece of a freelance portfolio for them.”

In your opinion, which outlets cover foreign news well? Are there any from which you draw inspiration for GlobalPost?
The Economist is an incredible organization with a very successful model, but one where voice is intentionally industrialized. There are no bylines on anything in The Economist. It’s an approach that has a very important place and I respect the organization a lot, but we want to do it very differently.

The BBC is the greatest news gathering organization in the world. I had an opportunity when I was based in London to do a lot of work with the BBC. I learned best practices just by observing how truly convergent the BBC is, in terms of print, radio, audio and video coming together in one Web site where you can really understand the world. I also hugely admire the BBC and have a lot of good friends who are correspondents there. I will point out that these two examples are British. I’m someone who loved living in London, I love the culture of the United Kingdom, but I am tired of getting my news with a British accent. I would like to have an American sensibility of storytelling.

I remember a story I did — I thought I was losing my mind, but I swore I heard a Boston accent through Arabic one day in the West Bank. I said to the guy for the hell of it, “Where are you from?” and he said, “Somerville, Massachusetts.” This falafel shop that he owned where all these young guys throwing stones at the Israeli army would go to get sandwiches, he’d often give them to them for free. I had an attitude about this — this guy is so irresponsible as to be encouraging these young teenagers to go out and throw rocks at a tank and get shot at. But once I stood there with my taxicab Arabic (I had a very good translator, a colleague who I worked with really closely), we found out that what he was telling them was [that] this methodology of throwing rocks doesn’t work, and if you want to stand up for Palestine and your rights you should do that, but find new ways to do it. He was a really interesting and positive voice with young people in the community. That kind of texture, of hearing a Boston accent through Arabic and knowing that this guy is a Bruins fan who came to the West Bank to start a falafel chain and took on the role of teaching young Palestinian kids some of the things he learned in America — I don’t read those stories in The Economist, and I don’t really see those stories on the BBC. I hope to have a group of writers, photographers, and videographers who are out there in the world looking for narratives that help us as Americans connect to the world.

What do you think are the essential qualities of a good foreign correspondent, and where did you acquire those skills in your career?

I think the greatest foreign correspondents have covered cops. When you cover cops, you are forced to go behind official information and get into a neighborhood and see for yourself whether that official information has any bearing on reality. [You] use your wits and resources, your pluck and courage or whatever skill set you have, to talk to people and hear their story out. [You] try to piece it together on your own from the street, and weave that understanding with the more official understanding that you’ve gotten from police headquarters or the prosecutor. In that weave comes a mix of storytelling, street-level reporting and official documentation. That raw skill set of covering cops, I think, sets you up to be a foreign correspondent. It also instills in you — almost into your DNA — a sense of skepticism of all sides, and you are served very well by that in the field as a foreign correspondent.

The greatest foreign correspondents are the ones who live in the country about which they write, and those who speak the language. I was only able to do that when I worked in Spanish-speaking countries. I tried hard on Arabic, but I couldn’t get it. I regret that. I think you need that. It’s something I’m not giving up on and am working on.

Great foreign correspondents want to tell a story to the friends and family they have back home. When I wrote for The Boston Globe, I never needed a reader survey to know who the readers were. They were my cousins, my friends, the guys I grew up with, my wife’s family, the people I knew my whole life. I knew who I was talking to. When you think that way as a foreign correspondent, you produce compelling stories that grab people. That really is what we want to create in our organization, and actually to be more precise, to draw upon from a very experienced set of mid-career journalists who are already out there in the world. We’re just this little lifeboat that’s trying to pick them up, and we know this is tremendous talent we’re picking up. We’re aware that we can’t give them full-time jobs, but we can become a very important piece of a freelance portfolio for them.

What made you decide you wanted to be a journalist?

My brother, Rick Sennott, was a photographer for the Boston Herald. When I was 17, he had this job on the night shift doing sports, and I used to run film for him. I couldn’t believe that he was getting paid to be courtside to watch Larry Bird. I remember specifically one night, the city editor, this grizzly old guy, opened up a Red Cross medical kit on the wall, and there’s a bottle of vodka inside. He says, “Hey kid, you want a drink?” I swear I knew at that moment, I’m doing this job, this is me. A chance to be courtside on life. At 17, that was Larry Bird for me. At 25, that was New York City and crime. At 35, that was Israel-Palestine. At 40, it was Sept. 11, Iraq, Afghanistan. And at 46, where I am now, I feel like I had an incredible ride. Now I want to share what I know with other correspondents in the field who I want to have that courtside seat.

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Tips for starting an online media business:

1. Identify an under-served niche to target. “The business model is to recognize first of all that if you look across the media landscape in America, it is barren in terms of international news,” says Sennott.
2. Utilize your contacts. “I would pull together many of my friends and colleagues from the field… I knew these people, and I knew that they were in the same position I was in.”
3. Know your limitations. “I’m not a businessman.”
4. Be flexible and open to different ideas. “We, in essence, merged these two different visions — mine about really deep reporting, and his more about reporting with breadth.”
5. Develop a business plan that relies upon multiple revenue streams.

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Alex Dueben is a freelance writer living just outside New York City.

In less than 12 months, author, speaker, entrepreneur and social media expert Peter Shankman has cultivated a 500 member community into 50,000-plus members by connecting reporters with sources. Help a Reporter Out, better known as HARO, is a free service which sends emails three times each day to people who have registered on HelpAReporter.com.

Shankman is also the founder and CEO of The Geek Factory, Inc., a boutique marketing and PR firm, and the founder of AirTroductions, the world’s first social network for business travelers. He sold the network six months prior to launching HARO and now focuses on speaking about social media and managing HARO, where ‘everyone’s an expert at something.’

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When and how did you first come up with the idea for Help a Reporter Out?
It’s a fun story. Let’s see… I’ve been running a PR firm since 1998, and I was always talking to reporters. I became friends with them, and I know a lot of people. I talk, I don’t shut up — that’s what I do — and people would say, “Peter, you know everyone. I’m doing a story on this, who do you know who does that?” I would always be like, “Oh, call this person, call that person.” It got to be a bit much to the point where reporters would call me… The one that broke the camel’s back was this: “I’m doing a story on Nigerian farming, and I was told that you would know someone who knew something about Africa and geo soil.” I’m looking at the phone and thinking, “Yeah, that’s how I organize all my friends.” I figured rather than finding someone each time, why couldn’t I just send out a Facebook post and start a group to let everyone know?

What kind of work were you doing as you conceived of HARO, and how did you juggle that work with the launch of the site?
I was doing PR and social media for a handful of companies, including Harrah’s Hotels — various giant companies, small companies. I don’t sleep much.

Describe the process of taking HARO from the idea stage to actuality — what were the steps you took, and what did you find yourself spending more time on?
I had a couple hundred friends at the time on Facebook, and I thought, ‘If I can help a reporter out, I will, and you can get some free press for yourself.’ It turns out that was November 2007. Originally my goal was to keep it on Facebook, but [the group] got to 500 to 600 members. When it was on Facebook, I just ran queries every once in a while, once every two to three days. I moved it from Facebook and onto a new server.

The HARO Web site is nothing more than just something to sign up [for the service]. When you go on the Web site, you just enter your email address to get the emails and that’s it. In the beginning, most of my initial time was spent on formatting the queries in a way that was best suited for the members.

“I’ve created some sort of digital crack. God forbid you’re a publicist — the one day you decide to delete my email without reading it is the one day The New York Times is in there asking about the industry you’re in.”

What was your approach in marketing/spreading word of HARO? Who did you consider likely users of the site, and how exactly did you apprise them of it?
I haven’t done a thing; it’s been entirely viral. It’s not what I did. I have reporters. You’re a reporter, and you’re looking for someone who knows about how stuffed animals are made. I may be a financier who’s never dealt with stuffed animals in my life, and I may be dating a cute 24-year-old blonde who works in a stuffed animal store. By forwarding that email to her and making her famous, it looks good for me, I look like a hero; it looks good for her, she’s famous. Somebody asks how she did that, and she says, “I joined HARO.” Then they say, “Oh cool, I should join that!” Done.

What kind of growth has HARO experienced since its launch? What has been its rate of expansion?

I built a quick little Web site and launched it March 20, 2008 and about 100 or so of the members from Facebook moved over immediately. On June 20th, we broke 10,000 members, on August 20th, we broke 25,000 — and advertisers came on board in July. Now we’re over 50,000 members, we are sold out of advertising until mid-April — that’s three ads each day [as of mid-January]. It is my full-time job.

How does today’s HARO site differ from your original conception of it? Did anything have to be significantly adjusted along the way? What aspect of developing the site was your greatest challenge, and why?
I think the difference that I have now is that when I launched HARO, my goal was to create something that all PR people could use for free. Within a month, I realized that I was setting my goals way too small, and it’s really about everyone in the world is an expert at something. Why wouldn’t you want to be on this?

I like making a big community, and it’s just so cool. I’ve mentioned people; I went out to drinks with my friend Lisa who has a band. I mentioned her band and that they’re on MySpace and sound pretty good. She called me up the next day and said, “Oh my God!” That’s the greatest thing in the world for me. With that though comes a very big responsibility: I need to be very, very aware of what I’m saying. I’ve turned down ads, as well. Despite the money, there are ads I won’t post. For instance, someone wanted to advertise something having to do with fur. Not my thing. I try to keep it very non-fight-y.

Which entities would you consider competition to HARO, and what does HARO offer that they don’t? How does HARO offer users more than, say, Profnet?
I don’t really believe there is much competition. Obviously there’s a paid service out there, but I’m not targeting their people. All of the people who belong to their service also belong to mine. I’m targeting the 200 million people out there who would never pay for their service.

One of the beautiful things about HARO, unlike the other service[s] out there, I actually let you forward the queries to a friend. If you see something that doesn’t fit you but fits a friend, you’re going to send it to a friend. When I teach social media, I say that you can’t make anything viral, but you can make something good. That’s what I’d like to think I’ve done: I’ve made something that people want to forward because they really like HARO and they want to do it.

You launched HARO on March 20, 2008 — what did it take to successfully execute during this time of recession within the media industry?
I created something that’s free. It’s pretty hard to compete with free, and the immediacy is also there. Free is simple, free makes life easy.

What are the challenges in daily operations of the site? Describe a typical day.
Answering a lot of questions from people. When you send emails three times a day, you have 50,000 friends. These people tend to ask questions like, “Where are the queries?” and “How do I answer them?” It turns out they’re only looking at the index and not actually scrolling down. I’m a big fan of the auto text feature on the Blackberry, which you can [use to] write something once and you can just type in one word.

There is no such thing as a typical day. Each day is different. Today I’m doing this from New York, next week I’ll be doing this from Tokyo. The day after that I’ll be doing this from who the hell knows where.

How does HARO make its money? Is it profitable, and if so, at what point did that occur? Do you anticipate changing the business model going forward? If so, when and how?
I never planned on monetizing it. I was doing it deliberately in the very beginning just to make friends. Advertisers started calling me and saying, “Hey, we want to hire you.” There’s an advertisement at the top of each email. The first ad came in July, and by the third ad it was profitable. Now it is extremely profitable. I keep thinking I am going to have to develop business one day, but that has yet to happen.

What role/responsibilities do Meagan [Walker, Shankman’s personal assistant] and Michael [Griffin, HARO editor] serve?
Meagan’s my personal assistant. I realized I needed to hire Meagan when I was invited to speak in Singapore about a year ago. I booked my ticket three months in advance and was totally excited, all ready to go. I get to the airport and show my ticket, and they say, “Sir, you booked a ticket to Shanghai.” I was thinking could I rent a car when I arrived, and he said, “Sir, they’re not close.” That was a $4,000 mistake and knew I needed an assistant at that point. It was right when HARO was first starting.

Michael came on board because [with] my travel schedule, [it] was not possible to be on the ground every day for HARO. I needed some help with that. He specifically focuses on all of the emails, works with reporters on deadline. When I’m on a plane and not in front of my computer, he handles the urgent queries, things like that.

What are the ways you envision drawing new users to HARO? Describe the marketing and promotion you anticipate doing in the future to keep growing its user base.
At this point, it’s still very much word of mouth. It seems to be going great. Everyone seems quite happy with the current arrangement. We’re averaging about 400 to 800 new members per day depending on the day. Today we were mentioned in the Financial Times and we have over 800 new members already today.

How did you create the HARO culture — was this part of the original business plan and if not, how did it emerge?
It was entirely organic, there was no business plan whatsoever.

I have created a community. I really have fostered this sense of community. The major airlines site send out their mass emails with sales and have a one percent open rate. My open rate is over 90 percent. I like to think I say good things with my little paragraph rant in the beginning, I think it’s funny. I’ve created some sort of digital crack. God forbid you’re a publicist — the one day you decide to delete my email without reading it is the one day The New York Times is in there asking about the industry you’re in.

I’m creating a brand that is Help a Reporter and a brand that is me. The beauty of that is anyone can use it and anyone can be my friend and follow me and do whatever they want. I don’t turn people away in that regard so if you have something to add and if HARO helps you, great, come join the family. The rules are very simple: play nice to each other.

I am the biggest believer there is no reason that everybody can’t be a little bit nicer to everyone else. I’ve worked to create something to facilitate that. I’ve always been of the opinion that people should just be nicer to each other. There’s enough crap out there in the world that if you could do something nice, why wouldn’t you? I enjoy being nice and being able to foster that sense of growth and helping people connect.

Issuing three emails each day with reporters’ requests for specific sources seems like it would be pretty time-consuming. What’s the advantage of communicating in this volume even as you’re striving to develop the business? How does this reflect the ethos you sought to instill in the company?
I chose three times a day because I figured that’s a smart kind of way to get everyone there. Just formatting the HAROs, at the beginning I got 40 to 50 queries a day that I’d have to write three times a day, and now I have an editor to do that.

The advantage to the reporter is that it’s interrupted. It’s coming into your inbox, you have to read it. People always ask why I don’t make an RSS feed. Reporters don’t want to read queries on your time. You have to get to their time because when they’re on deadline, that’s when they need the information.

HARO is really easy. It’s not hard to do. I’m fortunate that I have reporters who trust me. Everyone says, “Oh why can’t somebody else do this?” The reason nobody else can do this is because thousands of reporters who have used me in the past and know I’m not out there to screw them to get reporters. They trust me. I believe in good karma, I don’t believe in screwing anyone. Just trying to be a decent person. I try to make everyone smile three times a day and, by the way, provide some really cool help.

What’s next for HARO? Is there another phase/purpose to serve as it grows beyond emails and various conference calls?
I’m always looking at ways to improve it. If needs demand more stuff from people then I will add more things. I certainly don’t think we need to create a brand new system. This works really well. This is old school form email. It doesn’t get easier than that. We are going to have more conference calls, maybe once a month, maybe once every other month. The major services out there charge $300 for a call. I charge 50 bucks. I don’t think it should have to be a fortune. I think if we could help people for 50 dollars, then it’s totally, totally worth it.

Have there been any aspects of HARO that have surprised you?
I’m amazed at how high my personal recognition has gone. I show up in towns that I mention in my emails, and people produce happy hours for me. It’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.

How has it filled a niche for the people who use it? What does it offer that didn’t exist previously?
It fills a niche of being able to connect journalists on deadline with sources who can answer their questions. It’s a good idea. One of those things where there’s no good reason not to join. There are 242 million people in the country, all of whom are an expert on something. Why wouldn’t they join?

People can’t necessarily afford the cost of the other service or might not see the reason for it. Hey, $2,500 for a year for an email that may help them once or twice a year if you’re not an agency? Here it is, you’re free. It’s an email three times a day. You read it, you’re done. Then it’s: “I got onto ABC Nightly News. Oh my God, you’re the greatest person ever. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” I live for that. That’s so freaking cool.

Knowing what you know now, would you change anything about how you launched/conceived of HARO if you were to do it all over again?
I never would have hired Meagan (laughs). I’m just kidding, she’s standing right next to me. She just gave me a look. I love this. I’m having a field day with it. I think it’s working really well.

What’s been the most valuable lesson in developing this service?

You’re never going to please every single person every single time. There are always people who are going to bitch about something. I’ve gotten very good about saying, “I’ll refund your money.” They’ll say, “You’re sending me too many emails.” Gee, I’m sorry buddy. You can go and pay $4,000 to use the other service and they’ll customize what you get. I’m sorry it’s free and not totally what you wanted.

Tips to use social media to drive a new online community:
1. Use Twitter. “It’s phenomenal and allows you to use it for urgency.”
2. Have a Facebook fan page — but not just an idle one. “A fan page has to be interactive so people actually post on the wall.”
3. Utilize pictures. “I’m a huge believer of seeing pictures and getting pictures online that you can’t get anywhere else and sharing them with the world. The key is to find that middle ground between boredom and excitement. A governmental group got me behind the lines at the plane crash.” [After the U.S. Airways plane crash in the Hudson River, Peter posted a close-up photo on his blog.] “People want to see that, that’s interesting to people. That’s not wasting their time.”
4. Brevity and transparency. “Say it quick and be honest.”
5. Relevance. “Have something worth saying. Brevity, transparency and relevancy are my three keys. Just because the technology exists doesn’t mean you have to use it.”

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Vicki Salemi is a freelance writer based in New York City. Her work appears on AOL, Yahoo, CNBC European Business and SheKnows.com.

The corner druggist, surrounded by candy, toilet paper and soda, has a story to tell. So does the man who has been cutting hair at the Port Authority Bus Terminal for 36 years. Even a 72-year-old accountant has a tale. Sarah Kramer has been unearthing stories of ordinary people that would otherwise be unnoticed for radio and film for more than 10 years. When she was hired at The New York Times as a multimedia and audio producer, she brought her decade’s worth of documentary-style storytelling skills. Along with fellow Times multimedia producer, Alexis Mainland, Kramer developed One in 8 Million: The Web-driven segment combines audio and photography, and a print component runs in the Metro Section of the paper. Each week, the project zeroes in on a single character living in New York City and serves up a slice of life.

Before coming to the Times, Kramer was the senior producer at StoryCorps, a Peabody Award-winning audio program that records conversations between loved ones. NPR’s Morning Edition features these stories weekly. She has also worked as a field producer and associate producer for HBO and PBS.

mediabistro.com caught up with Kramer to discuss the intricacies of reporting oral history through interactive multimedia, the project’s collaboration process, and her projections for Web content delivery.

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How did your experience in radio lead you to this project?

I was at StoryCorps. My whole background has been in documentary storytelling, whether it’s film or radio. Then I helped to launch StoryCorps, and I was there for the next four years. [StoryCorps] very much comes out of the documentary tradition, but is based on people telling their own stories. What’s unique about it is it’s a conversation between loved ones, so it’s one person asking somebody else questions and listening to them tell stories and thoughts that maybe a regular interviewer/journalist couldn’t access in the same way. It’s partly about that dynamic, and it’s certainly about the idea that everyone has a story to tell. I think that it was working with the stories for a number of years and also being a native New Yorker and being very in love with New York that made me want to do something in the same spirit, but also bring something different. I was collaborating with Lexi Mainland, who is my colleague. We leaped on this together — she was coming from having worked at WGBH and so she had a similar sensibilities, some different sensibilities. We ultimately thought of a basic idea, which is not new to us, which is an age-old idea — where it’s just telling stories of ordinary people. What we wanted to do with this, which we as The New York Times were uniquely positioned to do, was we had the ability to tell audio stories, we have amazing photographers, we had the ability to blend those and do it in-house. We had the city at our feet and the ability to make a really beautiful design for the whole thing.

Where did this idea come from? How did you approach The New York Times with this project?

Well, I was working here. We’re both full-time employees and part of the multimedia department. Lexi is a Web producer embedded at the Metro desk. Part of her job was to do multimedia that goes along with print stories, and she was seeing a need for multimedia that could be done unattached. I was working pretty closely with the Metro desk, and one of the things I’ve been charged with along with colleagues, is we both do a lot of Web-only projects, and we also do a lot of training around the newsroom. I had been charged with improving the audio content on the Web. So Lexi and I came together and decided we wanted to think about a Web-only project that included audio, that was multimedia. We initially had a whole bunch of ideas, then we pitched a bunch of ideas and then honed a couple of them. Ultimately it turned into this. I think the managers — both on print, on the Metro desk and within the Web — were pretty quick to buy into it and see the same possibility for it. It took a long time to develop and a lot of iterations and memos and thinking about it, but everybody was pretty enthusiastic about it from the get-go.

“It just evolved as it went along. It feels exactly like what I wanted, but it’s not necessarily what I thought it would be months earlier.”

You were working with the multimedia aspects before this project came into being. What were you doing?

My job here is as a multimedia producer at the multimedia desk; I both produce a lot of audio slideshows, a lot of audio photo narratives. I report in audio; I edit it. And also, [I do] a lot of training in the newsroom to help other people become better at audio, so whether voicing or scriptwriting or editing them on a piece — it’s a whole slew of things.

Did you have to make any compromises to your idea, or were you able to fully realize your project?

There were ultimately a lot of people involved in it, so it became a culmination of everybody’s ideas. And one of the things that it set out to do that it has done successfully was to span the newsroom, to bring in people from different departments, to teach people different things, to be used as a training ground to a certain degree. So, it definitely realized that and that was a portion of our goal. At one point, we were thinking of having the characters linked to each other, so it could be like synaptic leaps between them, and they would somehow know each other so person would lead you to the next person. At one point that got done away with because it seemed way more unwieldy and unnecessary that way. It just evolved as it went along. I think everybody was on the same page once it launched, and, I think, [so was] everybody’s thinking involved prior to that period. It feels exactly like what I wanted, but it’s not necessarily what I thought it would be months earlier.

You were speaking about your team members — how large is the group of people you work with? What do they each do?

There are about 10 producers, included in that, Lexi and I both produce pieces. Then there are (Lexi and I included in this, as well) five people acting in the role of editor, and that spans both the print desk and Web editors. Tom Jackson, a multimedia producer, conceived of and designed the interface. There’s one photographer for the series, that’s Todd Heisler. And then there is our photo editor, Meaghan Looram, who helped conceive the photo side along with Todd, who figures out the sequence for each one of the pieces. So that’s the core group, but we get ideas from people all around the newsroom, we have gotten ideas from readers, so there’s a lot of other people thinking about it.

Have you taken any of the suggestions you get from readers?

Some of them we definitely called and pursued in terms of following up, but we haven’t actually done one for whatever reason. But we’re constantly culling through them, and we’re constantly passing them along, and I’m sure we’re going to hit on something. Some people have led us to other people, like we’ll speak to somebody whom somebody recommended, and ultimately they’ll end up knowing someone who makes more sense.

How do you typically find your subjects?

We do all the reporting methods that are typical in a sense, like we both have a road map of people we’re looking for, as well as a ton of serendipity and spontaneity involved in it. Say we wanted to find a teenage mom for one of our characters: For that, we went through a bunch of organizations [and] spoke to a bunch of girls until the producer struck up a relationship with someone who felt comfortable doing it, [who] was a good speaker. So something like that: just the normal leads one would use in reporting. There is one that hasn’t run yet, but one of the producers met [the subject] on the subway. They were stuck in Queens, and they started chatting, and then they ended up going to get a beer, but all in his mind he was thinking, “Huh, I wonder if this would be a good story.” Probably everyone I know is on the lookout and sends me ideas. Because it’s so wide-open, I think it’s fun to think about, so a lot of people are sending a lot of ideas. It just happens in a variety of ways, but our challenge is to balance it out and keep it geographically diverse and ethnically diverse, professionally diverse and socioeconomically diverse. So that’s partly where our road map comes in.

How do you think One in 8 Million as a Web-driven endeavor represents the next phase at the Times? Do you see more segments becoming Web-focused?

I think the Web will continue to grow and evolve in terms of the material it has on it and the ambitiousness of the projects we undertake. So I don’t know if there will be more Web-only material so much that what is on the Web will continue to grow and become more ambitious.

Why did you choose to pair sound and images versus a video montage?

You know, video was never really on the table. We, from the start, had just been thinking about audio married to photo. For who was conceiving of it, that was our skill set. The idea that we wanted [was for] these to be stories that were sort of meditative and quiet — and photography would allow for a lot of different images that could just be of the person. We didn’t just want a straight-on video shoot for each person.

Is that why you shoot exclusively in black and white?

That was another stylistic decision we made. Early on we wanted something that would keep the series feeling consistent and beautiful, and that was the way all of us envisioned it: black and white.

“It puts a huge onus on a person to just say, ‘Tell me your story.’ We’re letting people talk, but we’re also steering it in the directions that we’re interested in.”

Most of the segments are about two to three minutes in length. Do you ever feel like there are times when someone has a story that doesn’t fit into that time frame? What do you do?

This is something I learned from StoryCorps: that it’s hard to sustain the voice, a single voice, for a long period of time. Whereas if you have ambient sound or scenes, obviously there’s a lot more freedom. Many stories can be collapsed, like [the segment on the] baby deliverer. The interviewee told that in 45 minutes, and we chiseled it down to two and a half minutes. The whole 45 minutes are incredibly interesting to listen to in a different context, so I think you can often break down the story. Something like that was really challenging: It was a big challenge to edit that down and keep it totally accurate, and keep the spirit of the longer piece and keep to the essence of it. With all of our subjects, we’re not only thinking of, ‘Is the person a good talker?’ — we’re thinking, ‘What are the photographs for this?’ If somebody’s remembering something from the past and they’re no longer there, there’s certain ones that just aren’t going to be rich photographically and this really is a project of both, so we’re thinking about both elements in that. Similarly, we’re thinking, ‘Is this something that will be conveyed? Will we be using audio in this particular format to its best?’ That’s what we’re looking to do.

When you interview your subjects, do you have questions that you ask them, or do you just let them tell their stories straight?

No, we’re asking them questions. Everybody who goes to do an interview has done a lot of research, not necessarily on the person, but a lot of research to get to the person. So they’ve pre-interviewed a bunch of people, they’ve pre-interviewed this actual person, and then they’ve pitched various people to their editor. Their editor said, “Yes, this one sounds good. Go for it.” And then they’ll conceive of the questions off of the pre-interview that they want to ask — and, like any reporter, they’re asking a lot of follow-up questions. It puts a huge onus on a person to just say, “Tell me your story.” People like to be asked questions and then be able to respond. We’re letting people talk, but we’re also steering it in the directions that we’re interested in.

Do you interview your subjects in their homes?

Yeah, not necessarily always in their homes, but always in an environment that’s theirs. Both because of the idea, ‘Who knows what’s going to happen while you’re there?’ and also that’s where they’re comfortable and you automatically get information about them by being in their environment.

Do you have one session of taking the audio? How does the photographer cover the person?

Unlike a lot of what happens on the Web at the Times, we actually have a luxury in that we record the audio, we do a rough edit so that the story is loosely in place, and then the photographer, Todd, listens to the story and goes out and shoots the photography. In many ways, I think that that’s made it married very nicely together, whereas other times we have here photos that have been shot [and] we have audio that’s been recorded, but they’ve been done simultaneously, so sometimes it makes for a different process.

How long does the photographer usually have to follow the subject?

He usually goes twice, to two different locations that comprise this person’s life. It’s probably a day of work, in total work, but it often falls over more than a day.

Since you’re focusing on city characters, how do you feel the demise of the standalone City section changes the role of One in 8 Million?

I think the print paper will embody what the City section was, and there are other ways to still have that presence in the paper. That’s something that they’ll figure out. I think One in 8 fits well into Metro and also fit well into City, when City was around. Both of them are stories of the city, so One in 8 continues to fit in and continues to do that, but doesn’t become more important.

You were speaking a little bit about your experience at StoryCorps. Did you take other skills that you had learned there and apply them here? Is there anything else that comes to mind?

Well, I had been working in stories before StoryCorps: I had been working in documentary film for seven years, so part of it was I definitely applied my knowledge of story from all my experience. But I learned most of what I know about audio from StoryCorps — that’s how I got hired here to a large degree, so I’m definitely using that. I think coming here was the natural next step for me, or coming to a job like this was the natural next step. So, yeah, it’s absolutely built on everything I learned there.

Do you ever see this project expanding nationwide, say, One in 300 Million?

That would not be a decision for me to make, but no, we’re seeing this as a year-long project revolving around the city. I think the reality of this is it’s just one project we’ll do, and this has opened the door to do a whole series of other projects. I’m sure there will be another project that builds on this project.

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Four tips for becoming a multimedia producer:

1. Have as many skills as possible — audio, video, flash, writing — but have an expertise. No one is going to be able to do all of them equally well.
2. Be able to think out of the box and expand the dimensions of storytelling.
3.Be a good collaborator.
4. Have a good sense of story and experience reporting and producing a range of stories.

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Paulina Reso is an editorial intern at mediabistro.com.

This American Life broke the mold on business reporting a year ago when it aired an hour-long documentary on the normally snooze-inducing (at least back then) topic of the housing crisis. “The Giant Pool of Money,” a collaboration between TAL producer Alex Blumberg and NPR business reporter Adam Davidson, became a podcast hit long after the broadcast was over, as tens of thousands of people downloaded it to sort out why banks loaned money to people with little or no income and why that strategy was now dragging down the wider economy.

The duo’s plain-talking, we-don’t-really-get-this-any-better-than-you-do style of reporting became the foundation for a new NPR unit: Planet Money, a team of seven reporters and editors (including Blumberg and Davidson), whose mission is to help regular folks understand the economic gobbledygook being spewed out by government officials, financial bigwigs, and (some) mainstream reporters.

Their accessible style isn’t their only novel take. The team is re-imagining how news should be delivered. Instead of limiting themselves to traditional radio broadcasts, Planet Money is experimenting with new ways of gathering and disseminating information. In addition to radio news segments, they do a thrice-weekly podcast (with over a million downloads every month); they post charts, graphs, and other extras to a blog; they contribute text-based stories to NPR.com; and they host a Facebook group and chat on Twitter, both of which have enabled them to build relationships with thousands of listeners — and sources — all around the world.

The approach is having results: The podcast is regularly in iTunes’ Top 10, Blumberg and Davidson recently walked away with a Polk Award, and “The Giant Pool of Money” won a Peabody. (And if that’s not enough, “The Giant Pool of Money” made such an impact that it even has its own Wikipedia page.)

mediabistro.com caught up with Planet Money editor Laura Conaway to learn how this scrappy team got people to start paying attention to business news again.

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Was it a surprise when Planet Money started appearing in iTunes’ Top 10?
The whole thing was a surprise. We just so happened to go public the Monday that the government stepped into the whole Fannie and Freddie thing. It was kind of like tiger by the tail. We started off thinking that we would build slowly, there would be a blog, and we’d do some radio stories, and there’d be a Twitter feed, and we’d do a podcast once a week. But within a week or so of starting, we were doing a podcast every day.

Six months later, you’re still at the top. Why do you think that is?
Planet Money has a mission to explain the economy and to take one little part, to home in on one small accounting rule, or the difference between preferred stock and tangible common equity, and to swim around inside of that and make sure we understand it — and make sure the audience understands it. And if they don’t understand it, we’ll be back on the blog the next day, doing it again. That niche just so happens to be a very powerful place to live.

There are other things about Planet Money that really take into account some of the emerging things we know about new media and old media. You can build a really cool community that lives in a silent medium, like a blog or Twitter, and use a podcast as a place for people to gather. Everybody hears the same thing, and then they go yak about it in the more “silent” media. That is part of what makes it feel so great.

“We put a lot of time into building relationships with the audience. If you want to document something like people being asked all over the country, and in different industries, to take furlough days and pay cuts, it really helps to know a couple hundred people all over the world.”

There are people who would look at what you’re doing and say it’s interesting, it’s good, but it’s not “news,” because you aren’t doing the breaking, “what happened today” roundup, the way a more traditional newscast would. How do you respond?
It would be a mistake to say there is no news-breaking that goes on here. The Planet Money podcast was the first media outlet to report that the original bailout allowed the government to make capital injections in banks — to buy shares of banks. We reported it, and our higher-ups were like, “Are you sure?”, and we’re like, “Yup” — because [we were] saying something that no one else was saying, because we knew something that nobody else knew.

Another example — and this draws on our community — back when IBM was doing its big layoffs, and they were doing them very quietly, they laid off several thousand people and offered any number of them jobs in emerging markets. In other words, [they were saying:] “You can’t work in the United States anymore, but here’s your job in China or India.” We were one of the very first places to report that, because the people in our community were telling us about it. We had original source material on it. We saw the internal memos to people inside the company from the chairman of IBM, saying “The company’s doing great,” [and then,] oops, next day, “Here’s your layoff.” We had some people saying, “We’ve just been offered a job in India.” We were one of the very first places to report that.

The third thing, and it’s a little bit fuzzier, but it’s kind of interesting, is that we were one of the very first places to report on people being asked to take wage cuts and furloughs. I just posted an item asking, “Has anybody seen this?” And lots of people were seeing it.

“[Twitter] can be the most powerful replacement for an RSS feed around. Log on, look at it, and in a few minutes, you see what you need to see about the world.”

Is there anything about the way you approach the news that enables you to break that kind of stuff that a more traditional news organization might not?
We put a lot of time into building relationships with the audience. If you want to document something like people being asked all over the country, and in different industries, to take furlough days and pay cuts, it really helps to know a couple hundred people all over the world. That’s not our only shoe leather, but it’s certainly some of it.

In the mainstream media, Twitter and blogs routinely get dismissed [to wit: Maureen Dowd’s recent column on Twitter]. What do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions about those tools?
One of the biggest misconceptions about Twitter is that it’s a time suck. Twitter is an enormous time saver. Especially if you really pay attention to which people you follow and set it up so that you’re seeing a collection of people who tell you what they’re reading — it can be the most powerful replacement for an RSS feed around. Log on, look at it, and in a few minutes, you see what you need to see about the world.

One of the old misconceptions about blogs is that they don’t do any original reporting. And then, inside mainstream media, when you want to start a blog, one of the things you tell your boss is that it’s going to have original reporting. Blogs do need original reporting. But original reporting is not necessarily the be-all, end-all of a blog. It’s not necessarily what makes a blog a wonderful, living rumpus room to be in.

More interesting to me is the emerging relationship between Twitter and blogs, and what you do with each. It feels like it’s kind of shifted, even in the last couple of months. Increasingly, I’ll toss an interesting headline up on Twitter, for my Twitter crowd, and then save the blog for something like a chart, a little bit more complicated thing, or a letter.

Before you joined Planet Money, you were at “The Bryant Park Project,” another NPR unit testing the waters of new media. What did you learn there?
One thing we learned was [the value of] the “open kitchen” effect. You know how when you go in a restaurant, and you can see the chef whipping the chicken around? Bryant Park had that, as a motivating force — the idea that you [the audience] can live here. There’s not some “us” behind the curtain and you on the other side. It was really an open kitchen.

Adam Davidson has talked about how there’s a “culture of authority” among reporters — business and otherwise — and how they don’t admit their own ignorance, and how he thinks the fact that Planet Money reporters do is part of their secret sauce.
It’s kind of like The Wizard of Oz: Everybody just assumed that whoever was pulling the levers of media had to stay behind the curtain and look really enormous. The second you stop doing that, you can see that the audience was fine with that. I try to tell myself all the time: “Don’t pretend you know.” It’s only when I try to pretend I know that an interview gets out of control, and I actually come out of there with nothing.

Based on what you’ve learned, what advice would you give to traditional news organizations?
Every media entity, whether it’s a newspaper or a magazine or a show, every one of these things has its own personality. As a result, every one of these things is going to live in a slightly different way in social media. It’s important to be real. Just be human. Be who and what you are. And it’s only doing this that you’re going to figure out where you’re supposed to be.

What’s one of the most surprising pieces of feedback you’ve had about the show?
Someone said that we had become America’s new “fireside chat.” That’s heavy. It’s cool to hear. It’s wonderful to hear. It’s terrifying to hear. It’s a lot to live up to.

Are there any particular fun or interesting podcasts you’d recommend?
“Bad Bank” [another hour-long documentary that aired on This American Life, now available as a podcast, which explains the collapse of the banking system].

And a segment from Planet Money 15, called “Delicious Cake Futures.” [Total podcast length: 27 min.] It was this guy called Joshua Bearman talking about how he couldn’t get into the snack-trading economy at school, so he started getting people to trade with him based on this imaginary amazing, fabulous cake his Mom was going to make. It also became a radio piece. It’s sort of fabulous and fun and different from anything else.

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E.B. Boyd is a San Francisco-based freelance journalist and editor of mediabistro.com’s BayNewser. She writes about the future of journalism at The Future of News and her Twitter handle is ebboyd_newsfut.

With eight years of travel blogging for sites such as BootsnAll, Written Road, and HotelChatter, Jen Leo knows that instant interaction fuels modern-day travel writing. Whether she’s writing a column for the LA Times‘ Daily Travel & Deals and Web Buzz blogs, or sending out the latest hotel deals through Twitter, Leo has focused her calling at one of the country’s leading papers. And she’s as comfortable with book-length works as she is with 140-word limits: along with online writing, she has edited or co-edited six books in the popular Sand in My Bra series, collections of humorous women’s travel writing for the publisher Travelers’ Tales. Below, Leo talks about turning an internship into a career, the financial uncertainties of blogging, and being engaged in social media as a journalist.

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Tell us about your background. When did you first feel a need to travel and write about your experiences?
Besides the time I tried to run away from home on my red tricycle when I was three or four, I first realized I liked being away from home at sleepover soccer camp when I was 12. All the other kids called their parents every night, and I didn’t realize that I hadn’t until my family told me when I got back. But the first time I feverishly ransacked a bookstore for travel books and maps dreaming of going to another country was when I was a senior in college, about to graduate and not wanting to go into the field I had studied — public relations.

As for writing — I started a diary when I was 12 and wrote bad love poetry through my teens. I distinctly remember times when I was 13 or 14 and I would actually feel physical urges to pick up a pen and write whatever I was thinking about.

“My romantic vision of Asian travel had taken me to something more along the lines of a crack house than an opium den.”

What places around the world have made the biggest impression on you as both a traveler and a writer?

The opium den in Northern Thailand is the first place that comes to mind. I was on a short three-day hill tribe trek outside of Chiang Mai. After dinner one evening, I saw some of the men in our group walk off one by one over to a hut the guides were sleeping in. When my friend came back, I asked him what was inside. He said that they were smoking opium. The notion of an opium den made me think of a room with big velvety pillows, sheer curtains that gently graced the floorboards, and antique pipes that were intricately carved and handed down from generation to generation. All I could think about was the story I’d be able to bring back. I told my friend I wanted to go in and asked him to set it up. I was about to set foot in a world of such exotic intoxication that my life and writing would be forever changed. When I got inside I saw two Thai men lying on the floor across from each other. They were on thin mats and the pipe was hardly an heirloom. Rather, it was a cut-up Coke can with a candle underneath it. My romantic vision of Asian travel had taken me to something more along the lines of a crack house than an opium den.

I was jolted out of my romantic notions of travel. I quickly learned that I’d better live the adventures as they came and figure out how to write about them afterward. It’s hard not to think about writing a story as something interesting is happening to you, but it’s better to live in the moment than to miss something unique because you’re over-thinking it.

You have said that your time working at Travelers’ Tales allowed you to meet many well-known writers. Which writers, whom you have or have not met in person, have been your biggest influences?

I’ve met the heavy hitters like Jan Morris, Simon Winchester, Bill Bryson and Pico Iyer — but the travel writer that means the most to me is Tim Cahill. I found his adventure travel writing in Outside magazine when I was living in Lake Tahoe. His story about winter camping beneath the Northern Lights is what got me started down this path, and I’ve been fortunate to meet him in person several times. I see Tim nearly every year at the Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers Conference in Marin. We had a great time laughing about how his books and magazine writing inspired me while we were in conversation together for an author event for one of the books that I edited, What Color is Your Jockstrap?.

At Travelers’ Tales, you edited women’s travel stories for the Sand in My Bra series. How did you get the idea to compile women’s travel stories with a humorous bent, and how did you find your contributors?

Travelers’ Tales, which specializes in nonfiction travel writing, did well with women’s travel writing through Marybeth Bond’s books like A Woman’s World. They also did well with their humor line edited by Doug Lansky that started with There’s No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled. I had worked for Travelers’ Tales for nearly five years before I took off to do some traveling of my own. When I got back, they felt that I was seasoned enough to take on a solo edit (and since publisher James O’Reilly thought I was funny) we thought we’d marry two of our successful lines.

Describe your transition from book editor to professional blogger. What compelled you to shift your career in this direction?

It happened rather organically: I started blogging in 2002 with my first blog, WrittenRoad. It was a journal of my entry into the travel writing world. I posted submission guidelines for other newbie travel writers like myself and gave the inside scoop to my literary life as I published articles, edited the Sand in My Bra series and went on book tours. A few years into it I started to get offers. The first paid blogging gig I received was to launch HotelChatter. Next I launched Las Vegas Logue for BootsnAll and a poker blog for Weblogs Inc., where I met Harold Check. Harold went on to be an editor at Six Apart. He brought me on to help him launch the Typepad Featured Blog. One of Six Apart’s marketing people moved on to work for MobiTV and asked me to write their corporate blog. And as this winding world of who you know works, former Lonely Planet guidebook author Andrew Nystrom asked me to launch the Los Angeles Times Travel Deal blog with him when we got hired by the LA Times to run the online travel section. So as you can see, it was just making good impressions with people, and then they turned to me when they needed help in this arena.

Tell us about a typical day in your life as a travel blogger for the LA Times. How much time do you devote to research?
In a way, my whole life has become research. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m sitting on the phone calling travel industry folks to check facts for posts. Rather it means I’ve become a very big sponge to all things travel. Every morning I get up around 6:30 or 7 a.m. and check a variety of online sources for breaking travel news and inspiring travel deals. Google Trends, Twitter, USA Today and Guy Kawasaki’s news portal Alltop usually point me towards what’s hot when I wake up. Sometimes I start this process on my iPhone from bed, and other times I make a point of getting dressed and going to my desk. I also turn on CNN Headline news and start in on my email inbox scouring for travel news and leads for my morning roundup post.

After I get the morning roundup post done then I can take a breather and have breakfast, answer personal emails, hold my baby, take a shower, etc. Since my blogging job is part time, I bounce between the computer and other things throughout the day to write another post, administrate the back end of the blog, take phone walk-throughs of new travel Web sites and just try to stay on top of the news as it hits. I often take a long lunch and run errands in the middle of the day since I’ve started pretty early. The day usually ends around dinner, but I’m always back online before bed to moderate comments.

How often are you on the road these days?

I’ve been traveling a bit lately. Just domestic travel (New York, Charleston, S.C., San Francisco, L.A. and Las Vegas) to show off our new daughter to friends. She’s almost five months old and just took her sixth plane ride. But this is all for personal travel — I don’t get on the road hardly at all for work.

“You can build yourself as a quick source in a niche field if you participate regularly and selflessly on Twitter.”

We know that bloggers rarely become rich, but is it difficult to become at least financially stable? How did you deal with uncertainties working as a freelance writer and blogger?

I wouldn’t call myself a good example of a financially stable freelance writer. I got lucky and married a man who was financially stable. Before I met my husband, I lived a rather nomadic life and was okay with not having very much money or many things. Having said that, it’s much easier for a pro blogger to make a living these days. When I started blogging, there weren’t paid positions. When bloggers did start getting paid, $5 a post was a common amount. Corporate blogging pays much more, and I’ve gotten $75-$100 a post at times. A recent Wall Street Journal article, “America’s Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire,” listed bloggers getting $75-$250 per post. I’m sure that’s out there as I’ve experienced a taste of it, but I still know bloggers who get paid $10 and $25 per post.

The best advice I have for dealing with the financial uncertainties of being a freelance writer is not to expect your editors to pay you when they say they will. I’ve waited six months a couple of times for a check to come in. It’s easy to think you have money coming in when you’ve done the work, but the process of invoicing and actually getting paid can be a part-time job all of its own. If you need to take on a part-time (or full-time) job to run your life while you also write, do it and don’t feel bad about it. For job resources I like Journalism Jobs and the job board on Problogger. And of course you already know about mediabistro’s Freelance Marketplace.

In addition to travel writing, you have also developed a niche in writing about the world of professional poker. What are some similarities and differences between writing about a place and writing about a poker tournament?

I did write about poker for a couple of years, and was fortunate enough to keep my poker writing to the lifestyle side of things. I wrote poker player profiles for Woman Poker Player and had a gossip column in Bluff Magazine. One year, I blogged the World Series of Poker but had the freedom to write what I wanted. I left the chip counts to other more detail-oriented writers and tried to tell the backstory behind some of the players for the work I did.

You’re also actively involved in social media like Twitter (@jenleo) and even Tweeted during your pregnancy. Did you plan to give live updates during your delivery?

I love Twitter. I think it’s a fascinating medium. I did twitter the birth of our daughter as much as I could and twittered my wedding, too, in 2007. As it turned out, after a few days of inducing we couldn’t get to a full labor and had to deliver via Caesarian. Obviously I couldn’t Twitter from the operating table and was pretty drugged up afterwards.

Do you think it’s now necessary for journalists, editors, and other writers to be engaged in social media?

As necessary as invoicing, no. But I think it’s highly important to at least understand social media and the new role it’s taking in journalism to play in this game. It never feels good to not be able to participate in a conversation because you don’t know what the other person is talking about. These days, you better know about Twitter and Facebook if only because you sources might be referencing it. I also think it’s a good medium for newbies. You can build yourself as a quick source in a niche field if you participate regularly and selflessly on Twitter.

Besides the LA Times‘ blog, are there other blogs or Web sites you admire for their travel coverage?

I probably appreciate the work of the USA Today travel writers the most. From what I read, they seem to get travel news up the fastest on a consistent basis. Last year I talked to Ben Mutzabaugh who writes Today in the Sky. He told me he got up at 5 a.m. to write his column. I can’t compete with that. I like what Matt Gross does for The New York Times‘ Frugal Traveler. I respect Kevin May over in the UK who writes the Travolution blog and Sean O’Neil at Budget Travel‘s This Just In. We could actually talk travel blogs all day long, so I’ll just cut it short here.

Do you think the newspaper travel section will become obsolete in five to 10 years, as publications are either becoming online-only entities or shuttering completely?

That’s a tough question to answer because what I hope will happen and what I think will happen are two different things. I hope there are a few print travel sections alive in 10 years, but since I’m a betting girl, I wouldn’t put money on it. I think there’s a more important question here, and maybe you saw the discussion on TechCrunch: Brian Solis of TechCrunch sat down with Walt Mossberg, the tech columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and asked, “Are newspapers were worth saving?” Mossberg said, “It’s the wrong question to ask. The real question we should ask is if whether or not we can save good journalism.”

Since I’d rather have my Sunday coffee with a real newspaper in my hands, rather than a Kindle or being back at the computer on a day when I don’t have to work so hard, I truly hope the newspapers can find a way to stay above water.

After working for so many years in online media, do you think you’ll ever return to traditional book editing?

I prefer the pace of online media to traditional publishing. It suits my AADD. But I’ve only edited books and haven’t written one myself yet, so eventually I’ll get back to books or at least to write a book. My platform is strong, but I believe I can make it even stronger — which is what I’m doing now until I feel that undeniable urge to write a book. The problem is, I know too much about what you have to do to sell a book that it’s hard for me to think about writing a book without asking if it’s saleable first. Also, I want to really study which traditional publishers are making efforts to bridge the so-called “digital divide.” I’d want to write a book for a publisher that means well in this department and is open-minded enough to try a few new things. Then I could have the best of both worlds.

As a new parent, what are your views on exposing kids to travel and foreign, especially non-Western, cultures? Do you think it’s necessary or just beneficial for adults to travel widely with their kids?

I respect parents that open their children’s eyes to new cultures. That appreciation can start at home, but eventually they need to see for themselves through traveling. As my daughter grows, I hope I can introduce her to places I’ve loved, explore new countries for the first time together through her eyes, and eventually send her off to travel on her own. But that’s a long way off. Right now I’m just trying to figure out how we can fly smoothly and quietly to London this summer, and then manage to get good rest sleeping in the same room — considering my snoring just wrecked it for both of us on our recent weekender.

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Five tips for finding success as a travel blogger:
1. Become an avid reader. Read travel blogs and figure out what you like and don’t like. You’ll find it will help your style.
2. Surround yourself with other travel bloggers, whether that’s meeting up at travel writer or blogger conferences on online with groups like Travel Blog Exchange. Go to travel shows or sit in travel writing workshops and introduce yourself to the panelists afterward.
3. Participate in social media. Since the travel blogging world exists so much online, participate online. Comment on your favorite travel blogs and become a travel resource yourself via your own blog or Twitter.
4. Write frequently. Successful travel blogs have daily or at least regular content on every weekday. Don’t just do it when you feel like it. Deliver solid content on a consistent basis.
5. Become a niche source. If you’re building a career, be a source on a particular topic that other Web sites can point to. You’ll get more traction in the industry if you can provide something fresh and/or helpful rather than just talk about where you went for you summer vacation.

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Diana Kuan is a freelance writer who divides her time between China and the US. She often blogs on the road for AppetiteforChina.com.

In 2006, a corporate marketing consultant and passionate Star Trek fan named Anthony Pascale created TrekMovie.com “as a hobby” to track the production of J.J. Abrams’ newly announced film. Three years later, his site is the ‘Net’s biggest Trek news source, claiming millions of monthly hits. We spoke to Pascale, who serves as the site’s editor-in-chief, about catering to online niche audiences, meeting his sci-fi heroes, and the emotional tug of war between fandom and objectivity.

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What explains the instant success of TrekMovie.com?

When the movie was announced, there was a lot of confusion and very few facts. I knew some people in the industry and started breaking stories. Our first scoop was that the new movie would be the first adventure of James T. Kirk on the USS Enterprise. It wasn’t my original objective for the site to get this big, but it happened organically and the response has been very positive.

Do you feel accepted in the geek media community, or do they see you as a usurper?

Early on, when we were first getting scoops, Web sites like Ain’t It Cool News (AICN) — which is a great site — did feel like, “Who the hell are you and how the hell do you know this?” Now if we report something, sites like AICN and SCI FI Wire will link to us.

“I am a huge fan of their work, but I don’t want to be gushing all the time because then I couldn’t ask the hard questions.”

You have a very close relationship with J.J. Abrams’ team. Was there ever any conflict between your independence and their intense desire for secrecy?

I’ve met them but I’m not friends with them — I don’t get invited over to their houses for barbeques — but I have talked with them many times on a friendly basis. They see what we provide as a valuable service; I’m different from someone at Entertainment Weekly because I’m so focused on this one thing. I am a huge fan of their work, but I don’t want to be gushing all the time because then I couldn’t ask the hard questions. I liked the movie, but I wasn’t afraid to tell J.J. Abrams when I disagreed with one of his decisions.

When interviewing Star Trek celebrities, are you ever too excited as a fan to function as a journalist?

As a marketing consultant, I worked very closely with CEOs, very powerful men and women, so I’m used to dealing with A-list personalities. I’ve never been obsessed with celebrity, anyway. I don’t get that worked up about a movie director or a famous star. He’s doing a job, and I’m doing a job. Most of these people are so nice, any nervousness fades away immediately. There have been a few occasions when I freaked out, like at Comic-Con 2007 when I received an unexpected phone call from Leonard Nimoy [who plays Spock Prime in Star Trek].

Did it bother you to know the story long before seeing the movie?

Many fans wanted to see the movie fresh and unspoiled, but to do my job I could not have that experience; I had to go in knowing everything. When I finally did see the movie, it was like watching the film version of a book I had already read. Does that make it less enjoyable for me? I can’t answer that, but I had a great time and I loved it.

John Cho, the actor who plays Sulu, said that you might have landed him the role. How did that happen?

I met him at an event in 2006, a year before the role was cast, and asked if he would consider playing Sulu. He said, “Yeah, that sounds great,” and called his agent. That might have been the moment. It may be true, I don’t know. I would never want to take credit.

“We are taking some of our regular features and spinning them off into their own sites — taking the traffic we have and growing new markets.”

Do you expect a steady stream of news until the next movie is released, or will the hubbub die down? What do you have planned for the future?

It’s a big franchise like Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, so there are always things going on. The movie is a peak event, but every month there are comic books, DVDs, celebrity news, merchandise. Right now as we’re speaking, I’m getting emails about things going on.

In the meantime, we are taking some of our regular features and spinning them off into their own sites — taking the traffic we have and growing new markets. Hopefully I can replicate the business model with other niches and franchises.

Does covering Star Trek all the time make your fandom feel too much like a job, or could you talk about it forever?

There is certainly an element of fatigue. I had a birthday party and told everyone, “No Trek presents! No talking about it!” There are times when it becomes too much, but I love it, will continue to love it, and can always be reminded again of why I love it.

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Five tips for success as a genre entertainment blogger:

1. Excel when others phone it in. “The other Star Trek sites were not doing a good job of providing information,” says Pascale. “They had become link engines and didn’t bother creating news or talking to the actors and writers.” By creating so much original content, Pascale became the linkee, not the linker.

2. Find a balance between fandom and journalism. It’s fine to get excited, but your site should read like a respectable publication, not the rants and ravings of a hardcore geek. “The fans like to know that myself and others who write for the site are fans are like them,” Pascale says, “but we also have a certain level of professionalism.”

3. Accuracy is everything. Pascale counterintuitively “established” himself by “spending more time quashing rumors than reporting them,” while less credible sites spread unfounded gossip to score quick hits. “We never ran a rumor that turned out to be false,” Pascale says. “We have never been wrong, and that’s something to be proud of.”

4. Cover everything (relevant) under the sun. “We review and preview every Star Trek item: books, CDs, DVDs, T-shirts, keychains,” Pascale says. We will talk about anything. We will review the Star Trek Barbie dolls!” As long as your readers might find a story interesting, go for it. “All I ever think about is: What do the fans want to hear? What is interesting to the fans?”

5. All you have to do is ask. Star Trek fans envy TrekMovie.com’s access to the biggest names in science fiction, but Pascale didn’t know those stars at the beginning. “I wasn’t afraid to ask for interviews,” Pascale boasts. “All of my sources came from getting on the phone and calling. People now come to me; I used to go to them. [Actor] Chris Pine isn’t calling me up every day, but I do get plenty of publicists.” He urges aspiring bloggers to “be aggressive” in scouting sources… just don’t stalk them!

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Marty Beckerman is the author of Dumbocracy and Generation S.L.U.T. He has written for Playboy, Discover, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and many others.