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.

An aspiring writer trapped in a series of temporary secretarial jobs, Julie Powell had an epiphany as she approached her 30th birthday: To add some desperately needed zest to her life, she decided to blend a love of cooking with her passion for writing. In 2002, Powell challenged herself to tackle each recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking while following her husband’s prompt to launch a companion blog, The Julie/Julia Project.

In entries about her daily cooking experiences that revealed her spicy wit, Powell mixed in ingredients from her personal life, catching mainstream attention. After the blog ended in 2003, Powell published Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, (Little, Brown and Company, 2005). Last month, the mass-market paperback edition, Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously was distributed as a tie-in to the highly anticipated release of the film Julie & Julia by screenwriter Nora Ephron; Meryl Streep stars as Julia Child, Stanley Tucci as Paul Child, Amy Adams as Julie Powell and Chris Messina as Eric Powell.

During a week of back-to-back interviews surrounding the red-carpet “special screening” in Los Angeles (described on her current blog, What Could Happen?), Powell caught up with mediabistro.com before the movie’s nationwide release on August 7 to discuss how she conceived of and executed her blog and book, the influence her readership has on her writing career, and the recipe for building a personal blog brand.

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Take me back to hatching the idea for your first blog. Did you always have a love of cooking? Why did you find the prospect of a blog appealing?

Cooking had been a hobby of mine, especially at times when I was feeling unfulfilled, which was increasingly as I edged toward my 30th birthday. It was an outlet for me; it was something that I could call my own.

I was a frustrated writer. I majored in fiction writing in college and wanted to be a writer, and nothing was happening with that. I pretty much stopped writing by the time I was 29 and was feeling extraordinarily unfulfilled. So I had this midnight revelation that I would cook my way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which came out of talking about going to cooking school. But I didn’t have the money and didn’t think I wanted to be a chef or anything like that. I did want to learn how to cook well, and Mastering was obviously a great way to do that.

“I had no notion of what a blog could do and what the medium was really capable of at the time.”

I was trying to figure out — I wanted there to be a writing component, and Eric said, “Well, why don’t you start this blog, and blog [about your experience]?” I was literally irritated with him and was like, “What the hell are you talking about, and why are you throwing these words at me?” He explained about it, and I was dubious. But it did seem like a way to keep me honest and keep me writing about the project every day, which would maybe keep me doing the project. To me, it was very literally a journal that I kept online so that if my friends and family wanted to read it, they could.

I had no notion of what a blog could do and what the medium was really capable of at the time. I kind of chanced into it. I just was in the right place and time.

How was blogging different from other types of writing that you had done previously?
I was writing in this vacuum. I think this is one thing that blogging has changed irrevocably about the writing process. I’m sitting there in a vacuum and writing things, and I have no conception [of] if this is publishable. Is this any good? My husband says this is good, but what the hell does he know?

As a new writer — a fledgling one, an aspiring one — to have this forum in which the feedback was instantaneous, and there came [an] almost “call-in” response from readers; for me, as the writer of the blog, it was galvanizing. I never ever would have finished the project if I hadn’t had the readers there invested in what I was doing, encouraging me but also just wanting to know how it all ended. In that way, blogging was absolutely responsible for me developing my voice and becoming a working writer. I don’t know that I would have ever gotten to that place on my own.

When did you have a sense that the blog was gaining mainstream attention, and what chord do you think it struck that made it this incredible success?
It bears repeating over and over again: The fact that I started when I did, during the infancy of this medium, was part of my luck. It was a much smaller world out there. It was easier for people to find one another and to see what was going on and to take a survey of the “blogosphere” at the time. It’s the Big Bang Theory; it started from this little point, and it’s been expanding ever since. Now, there are millions and millions of blogs in uncharted waters. Back in the day, it was a comparatively small pond. So, in that way, I was very lucky.

But I do think people came to it. Two basic demographics, with some exceptions, found me and became invested in what I was doing. Women a generation or two older than me, who had already cooked through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, whose appreciation for Julia Child and what she has done during her career was already impressed upon them; they were Julia Child fans. And then there were the 29-year-old secretaries who were lost and didn’t know what they wanted to do with their lives and [were] discouraged. Those two [groups] came together in the forum of my blog.

“As a new writer, to have this forum in which the feedback was instantaneous… was galvanizing. I never ever would have finished the project if I hadn’t had the readers there invested in what I was doing.”

There was a story in The New York Times a few years ago about the Ramble in Central Park and the birders who would go out there and be birder watching. They would run into gay guys cruising for sex. They wound up, these two communities, popping up together. They made T-shirts that said, “I came for the anonymous gay sex, but I stayed for the bird watching.”

[Similarly, the blog] became this [community of] mostly women coming together with different perspectives, but a lot of the same concerns. Turning 30 was a concern to me, and what the rest of my life was going to hold. I was using food and Julia’s inspiration to work through that on a day-by-day basis. It resonated with people.

How did readers’ comments influence your process from Day One to Day 365? How did you adapt the blog as a result of the feedback?
I started on a pretty instant level because I thought I was writing for family and friends. I would write, “Here’s what I’m cooking.” And then I would have some side notes about what was happening in my life. People ended up being interested in the food, but really interested in the other stuff. Then, I realized that I had all these readers interested in the gory details of my daily life; that’s what they were following, and they wanted to learn more about that. “Tell me about how shitty you feel about your job, and tell me more about your pet snake,” [readers said]. By that time, this bar had been set in terms of intimacy, which was very important to the development of the tone of the blog.

At that point, I made a choice. I could have said, “Oh, wait. This really isn’t a public forum, and I’m going to stick to the cooking and not talk about the rest of the stuff.” But instead, I saw from comments and people really getting involved in the personal aspect of the story that this is where the heart of it is in how the food is intersecting with this particular life at this particular time. That’s what people are coming back for. That’s what creates the suspense. If it was just recipe 228, and this happened and this happened… Setting it in the context of my life in a very unvarnished, warts-and-all portrait of the way my life was going was what was drawing people in. If I started a blog now, I don’t think I could be quite that “warts and all”; I wouldn’t have developed, what I think is now pretty essential to my voice as a writer, which is that honesty and self-awareness — maybe to the point of laceration now and again — is important.

At your Q&A session at Borders in Philadelphia, you described your husband’s discomfort watching his character in the film. What do you think, at this point, about personal writing for public consumption?
I’ve gotten very used to people just assuming that they know me, and [that] they know everything about me. I almost take it for granted now. Where it becomes a trickier thing and an ethical consideration — one that you have to be very aware of — is when it comes not to you. Put yourself out there as much as you want, but when you’re dealing with your friends and your family, that becomes a much more delicate issue. And you have to respect these people and the center of it. Eric knows that I write about personal things, and he’s extraordinarily patient with that. But I can’t abuse that [patience]. So every time I write about him now — and that’s something that I become more and more conscious of as I move forward and continue to be a writer who mines my personal life for subject matter — it has to be done with respect. If I’m veering into mopey-ness or vengeance or any of those sort of lesser emotions, that’s when you have to say, “Wait, let’s stop.”

It’s more important to be fair to other people than it is to be fair to yourself.

“The writing always has to be at the center. If it’s good, and if you’re passionate and you stick to it — I’m not promising anyone a Nora Ephron, but that’s the surest way, to keep the focus on the craft.”

Can you offer some advice to other writers who are interested in following a similar path from a blog to a book and movie?
Obviously, I didn’t start the blog in 2002 and say, “And then, Nora Ephron is going to make a movie.” I feel a little guilty when I’m asked this question because it was such a different world, such a simpler world, when I began. It was like cave painting as opposed to 21st-century installation video art.

The only thing useful to say is that inevitably the way blogs are now, they’re tools. No matter how passionate [you are about] the subject matter that you choose for your blog — it is very useful, [but] it’s almost impossible to see a blog as being an end in itself. Certainly, some people do. But if you see yourself as a writer, blogging is a way to get yourself out there. It’s a way to address the things you want to write about in a way that people can access it. And that’s great.

But I think you always have to keep your eyes on the prize in terms of writing about the things you are passionate about, writing about the subject matter that you really love. If you get too concerned with branding and getting the links and making sure that enough people know me — getting away from writing about what you want to write about as well and clearly and evocatively as you can — you might publish a book that way, but you won’t turn into a writer. The writing always has to be at the center. If it’s good, and if you’re passionate and you stick to it — I’m not promising anyone a Nora Ephron, but that’s the surest way, to keep the focus on the craft.

Five tips for developing a personal blog and taking it public:

1. Use blogs to develop your voice and become a working writer. “Blogging was absolutely responsible for me developing my voice and becoming a working writer. I don’t know that I would have ever gotten to that place on my own.”
2. Identify a blog’s appeal, and build on content that keeps readers involved. “I saw from comments and people really getting involved in the personal aspect of the story that this is where the heart of it is — in how the food is intersecting with this particular life at this particular time. That’s what people are coming back for. That’s what creates the suspense.”
3. Be acutely aware of ethical considerations in personal writing, and keep your motives and emotions in check. “Put yourself out there as much as you want, but when you’re dealing with your friends and your family, that becomes a much more delicate issue. As I move forward and continue to be a writer who mines my personal life for subject matter — it has to be done with respect. If I’m veering into mopey-ness or vengeance or any of those sort of lesser emotions, that’s when you have to say, ‘Wait, let’s stop.'”
4. View blogs as tools to address subjects of interest and a way to become a public writer. “It’s almost impossible to see a blog as being an end in itself; certainly, some people do. But if you see yourself as a writer, blogging is a way to get yourself out there. It’s a way to address the things you want to write about in a way that people can access it.”
5. Remain focused on the craft of writing. “Keep your eyes on the prize in terms of writing about the things you are passionate about, writing about the subject matter that you really love. If you get too concerned with branding and getting the links and making sure that enough people know me — getting away from writing about what you want to write about as well and clearly and evocatively as you can — you might publish a book that way, but you won’t turn into a writer. The writing always has to be at the center.”

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Andrea K. Hammer, founder and director of Artsphoria: Visual Word Artistry, specializes in arts and business writing.

Picture a best-selling personal finance writer. Chances are, you won’t imagine a 26-year-old who hates frugality tips and advises readers on “how to negotiate like an Indian.” Ramit Sethi has built a huge following on his blog, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, through brutally practical advice that advocates smart long-term planning over penny pinching. Since creating the blog in 2004, Sethi has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and BusinessWeek, and on NPR, ABC News, and the CBS Early Show. His book I Will Teach You To Be Rich, a six-week program for automating your money and your life, has hit both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-seller lists.

We caught up with Sethi to discuss how to blog your way to success, what freelancers should budget for, and why skipping lattes won’t make you rich.

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What motivated you to start your blog, I Will Teach You To Be Rich?
I came from a middle-class family, so I had to apply for a lot of scholarships to get into college. The first scholarship check I got was for $2,000; I invested it in the stock market and lost half. I started to figure out how money worked, and taught my friends at Stanford. When I told them about a course I developed they said, “That’s awesome,” but for a year and a half, nobody came. I realized that college students were lazy and nobody wanted to go to a course on personal finance because it would make us feel bad about ourselves. So I decided to start a blog so people could read it in the comfort of their dorm rooms. After six months, it started to take off.

What differentiates you from the other personal finance blogs?
I don’t talk about pinching pennies. I don’t tell you not to spend money on lattes. I don’t talk about keeping budgets. None of that advice has worked, and I’m brutally realistic. If you have everyone on TV telling you not to spend money on lattes, and yet everyone does, clearly something’s not working. I Will Teach You To Be Rich is about spending extravagantly on things you love, but cutting costs mercilessly on things you don’t. The blog realizes that not everyone wants to be personal finance experts. If I tell you to keep a budget, you’ll keep it up for two weeks. The whole point of the blog is to automate your life as much as possible with money, reduce your number of choices, and to live a rich life, whatever that means to you.

“I hounded a lot of different bloggers and started spreading the word. After six months, I got covered in The Wall Street Journal, which led to one of the biggest traffic jumps in one day, from close to zero to 9,000 unique readers.”

When you were starting out, what was the biggest hurdle you had to overcome?
The number one hurdle was writing consistently and writing stuff that people really care about. It’s easy to write about the top 10 ways to do blah, but that stuff has no shelf life. Nobody remembers it after two days. The second part is telling people about [the blog]. A lot of people think, ‘If you write it, they will come,’ and sit back. That’s not true. You have to go out and tell people about it yourself.

How long did it take you to gain a big audience?
After the first six months. You can go back and look at the archives; there were very few comments. I hounded a lot of different bloggers and started spreading the word. After six months, I got covered in The Wall Street Journal, which led to one of the biggest traffic jumps in one day, from close to zero to 9,000 unique readers.

What is your take on personal branding? Do you consciously brand yourself, or does it naturally come through in your writing?
If you have a strong voice, it comes through naturally. A lot of blogs are often very similar to each other. The ones with the strong voice and a lot of luck seem to get more exposure. For me, the personal brand, whatever that may be, comes naturally. I have very strong opinions on psychology, automation, and blogging. And at some point, you have to be strategic about your personal brand. For example, I’m not a frugality blogger. I’ve been very clear about that, because there are other bloggers who do it better. But I am someone who writes about entrepreneurship and earning more; if that’s interesting to you, then my blog may be a good choice.

Did you consciously reach out to other similar blogs when you were starting out?
Yes, and I still do. For example, I just wrote a post on weddings. Most posts on weddings these days tell you to have a small simple wedding, like how to have a $200 wedding for 500 people. In my opinion that doesn’t work. When it’s our wedding day, we all want the biggest and the best. Let’s just acknowledge it and be realistic, and here’s how to work with a big wedding. The idea was somewhat provocative. The key step was reaching out to wedding bloggers; the article caught on, and the wedding audience clicked through to my blog and started reading other posts.

“I built user groups and a pre-launch book community that would talk about the book amongst themselves. I tried to transition the conversation from ‘Ramit to readers’ to ‘readers to readers.'”

Let’s talk about your new book. What will readers get from the book that they can’t get from your blog?
At least 80 percent of the content is new. I didn’t want it to be a blog-to-book. On any given day on my blog, you could read about taxes, real estate, entrepreneurship, or freelancing. That’s nice, but not very structured. The book is a six-week structured program on getting rich, including optimizing your credit cards, setting up bank accounts, automating your money, and investing it. If you’re wondering what you should do with your money, by the end of the book you will know vastly more than your friends.

How did you successfully market your book and turn it into first an Amazon best-seller, then a New York Times best-seller?
Most of the marketing was done before I ever started writing the book. The marketing was getting together a community of people interested in personal finance, and people who value I Will Teach You To Be Rich and don’t think of it as just another blog. I survey my readers a lot to figure out what they want. Most of the work was done over the past four years. I built user groups and a pre-launch book community that would talk about the book amongst themselves. I tried to transition the conversation from “Ramit to readers” to “readers to readers.”

How important is it for bloggers and writers to devote time to Twitter for promoting themselves?
I post on Twitter (@ramit) four to five times a day, but I’m not sure it’s a good use of time for business or promotional reasons. It’s fun, but click-throughs are dramatically lower on Twitter than on my email list or blog. I have over 7,000 followers on Twitter, and it’s one of the least important aspects in my portfolio.

What do you think of the media being suddenly fixated with this idea of “recession chic,” that it’s suddenly hip to save money?
I think it’s completely ridiculous. This happens every time there is an economic change. The media seizes on it and makes it the idea du jour. There are two kinds of people right now: One kind will only read the media and think they should cut down on spending, but when times get better, they’ll go out they’ll start spending more again. They’re followers and will do whatever everything else is doing. The others are people who see that things are tough, try to find a system to optimize their money, make sure they’re not overpaying, and even find ways to earn more. When times get better, they’ll earn more and realize they can spend money on whatever they want, whether it’s investing or buying expensive jeans.

Everywhere I go on my book tour, the media is very interested in talking about people who’ve lost their jobs. That’s a reasonable concern, but 90 percent of people still have their jobs. They wonder, “I have a paycheck, but where should it be going? Are there ways to cut back without giving up the things I love?” But [reporters] I’ve spoken with on national TV, regional TV, and newspapers don’t want to talk about that. You have to decide if you want to panic with everyone else or be constructive about spending money.

We all know that newspapers and magazines are in turmoil and few jobs are secure. Do you have any tips for media folks, especially freelancers, on the best way to manage their money?
If you have an irregular income, some months making $3,000 and other months making $200, what do you do? The goal is to figure out what you need to live on at minimum, including rent, eating out, gifts, insurance, everything. Factor that in. If it’s $2,000, then for the next six months, take everything that you make over $2,000 and put it into a savings account. What you want to work toward is four to six months of emergency funds. Then you invest or save the extra money you make. Right now, because times are so volatile, you don’t want to have no money if your freelance work dries up.

What’s next for you?
One project I’m working on is on health insurance for freelancers and entrepreneurs — tactical steps for getting health insurance that actually works. The other is how to earn your first thousand dollars as a freelancer. And it’s going to be pretty expensive [to produce]. It’ll include interviews, videos, case studies, which will all be on I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

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Four tips for becoming a widely-read blogger

1.Write content people really care about. Forget about Adsense and checking stats until you have good content in a topic you’re passionate about.
2. Offer to guest post. Find high-traffic bloggers you admire and write for free. Good work will lead to high traffic for your blog.
3. Spread the word. Whether it’s content on your own blog or guest blog posts, let other relevant bloggers know.
4. Get readers to stick around. If someone comes to your site or reads your guest article, have a way for them to leave a comment or subscribe, becoming long-term readers.

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

Suzanne Kantra knows gadgets. After spending 16 years writing about technology at Popular Science and another three as the tech editor at Martha Stewart Omnimedia, Kantra says she’s tried a lot of cell phones, tons of food processors and too many laptops to count. Which is why, she says, she’s good at her new job.

In fall 2008, she teamed up with Toby Grumet Segal, another editor with a tech background, and Josh Kirschner, who has the finance background to make sure a new project could get off the ground, to develop Techlicious.com, the tech site specifically for women.

The self-funded venture launched June 9 with its debut batch of tips and how to’s, buyers guides and reviews, and aggregated “fab sites” for techies on the Web. Fresh from the launch, mediabistro.com caught up with Kantra to hear her insights on why women need their own tech source and what it takes to see a project realized.

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What is it about the tech community that intimidates women, or makes technology less approachable for them?

I think that anybody wants to have technology made easier for them. No question. But you need to apply it to their everyday lives. Can dads take photos of their kids? Absolutely. But statistics show that women are the memory keepers. And our site is not about pink. Can a guy go on and get great information? Absolutely. It’s sort of like reading a cooking magazine — do men not like great recipes? Of course they do, but it’s sort of been a traditional women’s role.

It’s also about creating an environment. You look at Gizmodo, and it tends to be snarky, fast-paced, and not made for the unfamiliar. It’s implied that you can just learn the basics on your own, on the side. It’s very hard-core, as opposed to saying, ‘We don’t always have to use all the acronyms, and we can reach women at a lot of different levels.’

Where did the idea come from? What made you want to start a whole new project?
I had been working part-time while I was at Martha Stewart [Living Omnimedia], and then worked from home when I was on maternity leave there. I realized that I really liked the autonomy and flexibility of working from home.

But I didn’t want to stop working, or to give up tech. Previously, I had worked at Popular Science for 16 years. When I went to Martha Stewart, I had the tech background that allowed me to take the service approach, to write about how readers can use technology to make their lives easier, and to live better, more beautiful lives.

But tech wasn’t the most integral part of that company. So when I left Martha, I thought it would be great to work from home to create something where tech was the big focus. I love technology, and I enjoy connecting with people and helping them with tech questions and recommendations. Here we’ve tried to create something that was dedicated to tech from a woman’s service perspective.

“Techlicious is not about disposable content. We’re creating a foundation of resources and information that people can come back to.”

So that service background really informed Techlicious.

Absolutely. From a content perspective, we’re looking at delivering actionable items. We’re focusing on doing shorter, tip-based things, and presenting it in a way that people feel they can actually do that. We have short video tutorials, for example, one on how to convert your photos to an email-friendly size and format.

You see that it’s easy and we give you a little checklist on how to do it. We also try to be aware of the fact that people are using different platforms and operating systems. So by having combinations of those things, it makes people feel that they can do it.

What kind of products do you cover?

If it runs on a battery or plugs into an outlet, we’re interested! That means kids electronic toys, kitchen appliances, outdoor gardening, cameras and laptops, and GPS systems.

When you look at a product, you’re interested in how you, specifically, can use it. And the roles that women take on in their lives are different from men — mom, daughter, memory keeper. There are different roles that women take on. When you think about how tech is used by women, it makes sense that it would be different from how men use it.

Studies have shown that women are more impressed by functionality — they ask, what can it do for me? Men are more attracted to the flashy features — it’s not as much about solving a problem for them. Obviously they’re also attracted to things that work well, that are easy to use, but for women, that functionality is really more key.

“With Martha Stewart especially, I had a big brand behind me, and it was about representing the brand… Now I get to figure out what the brand stands with, and then act on that.”

What sites informed or inspired Techlicious?
I don’t think that there’s anyone doing women’s tech; we’re really doing something new here. Sites like iVillage, BabyCenter, Consumer Reports and Consumer Search all have a few features of our site, and we’ve looked at them extensively. There are some good Web sites out there, but we’re doing things differently.

We’re really a content portal, as opposed to a blog. Techlicious is not about disposable content. We’re creating a foundation of resources and information that people can come back to. We have a blog section, too, for things that are in the news and very immediate — the mandatory transition to digital television is one example. We put information on how to handle that issue on the blog; that wouldn’t be a main core for the site, because it’s such a here-and-now problem, so that’s what the blog is for.

What’s it like to move from established venues like Martha Stewart, Sirius Radio and Popular Science, to your own startup operation?
Before, with Martha Stewart especially, I had a big brand behind me, and it was about representing the brand, and delivering out what the brand promises. Now I get to figure out what the brand stands with, and then act on that. I don’t think that I could do this without my background — I do have connections in the industry. I’ve built a reputation as someone who gives good recommendations.

I have the background to be able to ask the questions that make sense and put it in context. And manufacturers are looking for the audience we reach. It’s about helping readers make smarter decisions so that they feel good about purchases. Techlicious benefits the consumer, because they’re satisfied with what they’ve bought. And especially with the economic climate we’re in, you want to feel good that you made the right choice and that you didn’t waste your money.

Can you describe the reader reaction to the site? Do you think Techlicious is making the bigger, older tech blogs nervous yet?
We haven’t made a big PR push yet, but we’re starting to build relationships. We’re trying to be very careful that we get everything right. When we put up a guide, it’s been well-researched. If you look at a lot of Web sites, they’ll do aggregations of professional reviews, but we want to give a fuller picture.

So we look at consumer reviews as well as professional ones, checking out how products performed from reviews on sites like Amazon. Or we’ll tell readers that it’s a new product, so you can’t expect there to be a consumer-reviewed history for it.

“I ask, ‘Did your husband pick out your phone for you? How about your camera?’ And the answer is always, ‘Oh, of course not.'”

You’ve been writing about technology for nearly 20 years. How has reporting on the subject changed?
I got into technology right out of college by starting as an editorial assistant at Popular Science. I had always been drawn to gadgets and technology, playing computer games and all that fun stuff. It was just something that I developed an interest in.

It’s changed a lot in the way that it’s been covered. Tech had been seen as a man’s domain for a long time. When I started, there weren’t a lot of women reporting on it, and it wasn’t covered in women’s magazines. I think people — men and women — do now understand that it’s a part of their everyday lives.

Sometimes, people say that they aren’t tech people, but then when they stop and think about the tools in their everyday life, they do make a lot of decisions on that. I ask, “Did your husband pick out your phone for you? How about your camera?” And the answer is always, “Oh, of course not.”

I need to educate people and say, ‘Look, you’re already doing this. So why not make the best decision possible?’ And there are more tech stories in women’s outlets than there used to be — some great stories that pop up in parenting magazines and so forth — but it’s very sporadic.

How important is product testing to Techlicious? What are you evaluating when reviewing a gadget?
We do experiential reviews for products. We don’t do lab testing — noise testing, speed testing, and all those lab things. We’re not out there to take the place of the hardcore review sites, like CNet.

As consumers who have used a lot of products, we know how to test gadgets. Our writers probably look at hundreds of cell phones every month! So we care about usability, interface, design in general, and what’s new about a product, and then we bring those features, which regular consumers might not even know are there, to light. Our reviewers do have that kind of background. Things like smile detection on a digital camera, for instance — we can tell you the basics and then apply them, explaining how it works and what our experience was when using it in tons of products.

What’s the oldest or most obsolete gadget you still have lying around? Have you acquired any bizarre products because of your job?
Unfortunately, I don’t hold on to stuff that isn’t useful to me. With the lack of space living in Manhattan, you can’t! But one thing I’ve had for years now is the MariVac vacuum marinator. You put your meat in there, screw on the top, put it on its back, and the vacuum mechanism sucks out the air and reduces the amount of time you need to marinate your meat. Instead taking a full day, I can do it in 10 minutes. We covered it in Popular Science when it first came out, and I still have it and use it.

Another thing I’ve kept is from back when Microsoft used to make kids toys. I have a little table with a round, interactive toy in the center, and buttons and a little music thing, and all three of my kids have now used it.

What’s on the horizon for Techlicious?
I like working from home, but I do miss the office sometimes. When I look long-term, hopefully this will grow into a nice big company. My dream is for us to have office space in the city that’s nearby, and then people can have that kind of fluidity where they can choose to come to the office, or not. They’re grownups and know they can do their jobs.

In the industry, people have been very supportive. It’s difficult when you don’t have the traffic yet, but we’re working on creating relationships with big companies who everybody’s heard of. We’ve been very happy with the reception in that regard.

For now, we’re waiting to get some feedback from consumers and concentrating on building more content. We launched with a good set of content, but it’s always going to cry out for more. There’s never enough on the Web.

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Five tips for launching a niche Web site:

1. Know your niche. Kantra’s been in the tech biz for almost 20 years, so she says it’s no coincidence that she recognized what the market was missing and knew how to fill in the gap.
2. Stay up to date — to the very second. “One thing I’ve found frustrating about researching products on the Web is that they tend to be very outdated,” Kantra says. “So much has happened since 2005 and 2006… models get replaced so frequently.” Tech writers have to stay current — and keep readers up to speed — to maintain their edge.
3.Work your contacts. Kantra met her co-founders and many of her writers because she’s worked with them, in some manner, before. When she was ready to launch Techlicious, they were there to join her.
4. Ditch the jargon. You’ll widen your readership if you don’t assume they all know acronyms, Kantra says. Not everyone knows what a GIF file is.

5. Feed the beast, healthfully. It’s a truism because it’s true: On the Web, content is king. But that doesn’t mean that quality has to be sacrificed for quantity, Kantra says.

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Megan Stride is editorial assistant at Portfolio Media’s Law360.

Jonah Sachs is co-founder and creative director of Free Range Studios, based in Washington, D.C. and Berkeley, Calif. Free Range Studios created the highly successful viral marketing campaign behind the Web-documentary “The Story of Stuff.” The 20-minute film takes a look at our wasteful production and consumption patterns, and examines the social and environmental impact it has on our lives. The documentary was written by Annie Leonard, who narrates the story in the foreground while stick-figure animation further illustrates the story-telling in the background. Since the Web documentary’s release in December 2007, it has been viewed more than 5 million times.

On March 9, 2010, The Story of Stuff book will be released. Sachs, who is also the creative force behind the critically-acclaimed Flash advocacy movie “The Meatrix,” gives mediabistro.com the inside scoop on how “The Story of Stuff’s” message spread like wildfire throughout the Internet.

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How did Free Range Studios earn its designation from Wired as a viral marketing leader?
Wired wrote an article in 2002 called “Watch our movie, join our cause,” and at the time we had produced a really successful string of movies for nonprofits. This was at a very early stage of social media where most people were just forwarding chain emails around. We used some simple flash animation techniques (that’s all people could download at the time on their 56k modems) to tell actual stories, instead of just sending out text. At the time that article was written, we had just developed a clean diamonds video ad for Amnesty International that got more than 750,00 views and made a real impact on Capitol Hill.

“Most of our stuff starts out unsexy. That’s why people hire us: to figure out the hook when it isn’t obviously there.”

For something to be viral or lend itself well to viral marketing, the content has to be compelling. As producers of “The Story of Stuff,” how did you build a viral strategy about something as potentially unsexy and complex as the subject of a “materials economy system”?

Most of our stuff starts out unsexy. That’s why people hire us: to figure out the hook when it isn’t obviously there. What’s more unsexy than gross factory farming? But we made a campaign against it totally fun with “The Meatrix.”

The idea is to bring things to a human scale: All systems ultimately impact people, one at a time. When you take big abstract concepts and turn them into stories about characters, people begin to listen with a different part of their brain.

Joseph Campbell says all cultures share a common myth or story, populated by characters that live in our subconscious from ancient times. For instance, people evolved to run from woolly mammoths, not carbon dioxide. So if you tell them about CO2 in the atmosphere, they freeze up. Create a character out of it or those who emit it, and they will start to engage. Then there’s humor, of course, which helps us not take ourselves too seriously and pushes our pleasure buttons. These are all gimmicks in a way, but they really work.

“The Web unlocks tremendous opportunity for people to share things they love, to become evangelists for messages they resonate with.”

Why was did your team choose to use stick-figure animation in the film?

[Writer] Annie [Leonard] came to us with a long whiteboard lecture that people were really digging. We wanted to keep that feeling but activate it. The idea was almost as if Annie was illustrating what she was saying [in] real-time.

Do you think “The Story of Stuff” message is best served by the Web-based video distribution model, rather than making a true documentary film out of it and taking it out on the festival circuit or pitching it to television?

The Web unlocks tremendous opportunity for people to share things they love, to become evangelists for messages they resonate with. Love it? Just push forward and tell the world. This piece was originally designed to “arm the choir” so to speak, to help harmonize the message for activists. The Web has this ability to let limitless spread happen. If we had just shown it live to our “target audience” we might have reached thousands. By unleashing the power of Web sharing, we reached millions.

It’s also interactive. There are so many links from the movie to activist groups, and we really wanted to drive traffic to those groups. You can’t do that offline as easily.

Lots of people try to make viral videos, how did this one take off? What was the strategy to promote it?

I think “Story of Stuff” took off because it was a message that people intuitively understood. It’s like someone was showing them the water we’ve been swimming in. It was supported by a large-scale analysis that they couldn’t have done themselves, but we’ve all suspected that something is terribly wrong with our consumer culture. We just don’t know how to talk about it.

So the content was ripe to be picked up and run with, but it took the Free Range touch of making it more of a gift than a burden to see this heavy, potentially depressing information. We turned it into eye and ear candy with wacky illustrations and lots of subtle storytelling devices. Once we had what we thought was a great finished product, we reached out to all of our fans (about 125,000) and our friends in the blogosphere. That gave us the momentum we needed as a start, but viral hits are not really about promotion; it’s more like a natural blossoming that happens when the content is worthy of it.

How did you make the video easy to share, which is also key to viral marketing?

We did the usual tell-a-friend tools, created a non-interactive YouTube version for easy embedding and gave it a Creative Commons license so anyone could run with it. Everything on the Web is easy to share.

With viral videos, both amateur and professional, hitting the Web every day, what advice would you give media professionals so their Web-based videos are more than a hit-for-one-day wonder?

First of all, viral is not a strategy. If you set out with the hopes of something “going viral,” and do a million tricks to make it so, you’re likely to be disappointed. Create something that you think a smaller target audience will love. Focus on these people who you think are ready to hear your message and provide them something they wish they could have said themselves. Make it funny. Make a story out of it, with characters, plots and tension. Be respectful of their time. They are not your captive audience and can click off at any moment, so you have to delight them, not lecture them. If you can do this for a small core, they will begin to evangelize for you, opening their networks to the message. Now, if their friends and friends of their friends feel the same way, you get a viral hit.

The best projects are hits even if they don’t go viral. They ‘arm the choir’ with new ways to think about old issues and push the conversation forward by leaps and bounds.

“Creating an intentional, message-based viral video is like trying to make lightning strike. It strikes naturally on its own all of the time, but you can’t harness that. Making it strike where and when you want it to takes strategy and expertise.”

Do viral video-makers have to be controversial to be successful online?

No. That’s the mentality of old school media. Create a controversy and get on TV. Viral video makers just need to create something worthy of someone’s time and worthy of their address book. You can be more respectful of your audiences. You don’t need to be sensationalistic to get attention. I think fun, inspirational messages do better than controversy for the sake of controversy.

Do you need a large budget to create a viral video?

Let’s say “large” is tens of thousands of dollars, just to define terms. The answer, I think, is yes and no. Much of the most viral content out there is totally homegrown — moments captured on dad’s camcorder that catch fire or an unexpected mishap in everyday life. People actually are starting to prefer this kind of low-production value, honest-looking stuff. But these home video pieces don’t carry a message. Encoding a social message into a viral video takes a lot of thinking and the expertise of a great writing team. It also takes a great director and even for less fancy-looking stuff, a talented production team. Creating an intentional, message-based viral video is like trying to make lightning strike. It strikes naturally on its own all of the time, but you can’t harness that. Making it strike where and when you want it to takes strategy and expertise, and this often means spending more money.

“The Story of Stuff” is more than 20 minutes long, but most viral videos are shorter. How did you overcome that “length” hurdle?

We knew this message couldn’t be meaningfully delivered in five minutes, and because this was not meant to be a viral hit, we weren’t worried about making it longer. We figured that 10 years of peeling back the curtain that Annie had been doing was easily worth 20 minutes of someone’s attention, but not everybody’s. Well, it turned out lots of people felt the educational component was so strong that it was worth 20 minutes of their time. I get antsy watching anything on the computer after three minutes, but I think a lot of people sensed that there was something critical in the message and stayed tuned in. “The Meatrix” was designed to compete with things like “monkey sniffs own butt” on YouTube. But “Story of Stuff” wasn’t designed that way. It’s more of An Inconvenient Truth approach and, like All Gore’s PowerPoint presentation, it unexpectedly caught fire.

“The Story of Stuff” Web site obviously plays a strategic role in getting the film’s message across. How did you go about deciding how to design it so people could easily access the information they need to take action?

Full interactivity between Flash and video was emerging when we launched “The Story of Stuff.” So we did some fun experiments with putting the interactive components into the video itself. At any time you can click to stop the movie and find out which NGOs are working on the issues Annie is talking about. This innovative video approach got the attention of some of the tech geeks out there and that helped us expand into yet more circles.

What are the latest technologies or innovations available to viral video marketers these days?

I think you’ll see many more customized videos in which the viewer’s interests and personal information will be incorporated into the video itself. Look for something like this from Free Range this fall.

Interest in viral online marketing has yet to wane — will it ever? What comes after viral marketing?

Internet viral marketing is only beginning its run. It will no doubt evolve, but it will never lose its significance. Think of how blunt an instrument billboard advertising or a television ad is. Those are messages shouted out to everyone and their mother from sources that hold almost no trust in the mind of the receiver. The only virtue is that it reaches so many people that someone is bound to listen. Now look at an online viral message: It can be adapted, tweaked, commented on, mashed up and customized to suit any individual. It’s not shouted — it’s tactfully passed from friend to friend. And as long as people have been able to communicate, the most trusted source of information has been our own social networks. Online viral marketing doesn’t only have the potential to change advertising; I honestly believe it could be the technique we use to transform our society and create a sustainable future.

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Jennifer Pullinger is a Richmond, Va.-based writer and communications professional with more than 10 years of experience in marketing, media relations, and journalism.

What are your top five favorite albums, movies, or books of all-time? What about your top five favorite beers, things to have when zombies attack, or destructive world leaders?

Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial.com, has watched as his “Pick Your Five” application exploded in users on Facebook over the past several weeks. Since March, LivingSocial.com’s “Pick Your Five” feature has gone viral millions of times over, attracting up to 150,000 new users per hour and more than 6 million new users in its first week launch alone. The application allows you to pick any of your top five likes or dislikes and share them with your friends. Currently, the application has more than 17,700,000 monthly active users on Facebook.

O’Shaughnessy co-founded LivingSocial.com, a “social discovery and cataloging network,” with Val Aleksenko, Aaron Batalion, and Eddie Frederick in 2007. Before creating LivingSocial.com, he ran the product group at Revolution Health and worked at AOL in product development. He is a graduate of Georgetown University, and has been in Washington, D.C. ever since helping build consumer Web products.

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How is the LivingSocial.com application different from other favorites or list-sharing applications on Facebook?

LivingSocial makes it really easy and simple for you to share with your friends. It’s worked so well because the lists are so broad and creative, and our database is so comprehensive that users can literally find nearly anything that they’re looking for.

The “Pick Your Five” feature is now all over Facebook. The idea is so simple, but why is it just now being fully conceptualized and launched successfully by an application developer?

I think there are a few reasons that it really took off. First, the new Facebook “stream” really made it much easier for users to share things with their friends. Second, many people who have tried something similar were usually trying to cram too many features into their versions. We kept it simple and have had great success because of it.

How did the “Pick Your Five” application take off so quickly? Was there a lot of promotion?
No, it was all organic. People just wanted to share their lists with their friends, and it really just grew from there.

“To let users more freely express themselves, we let them add additional items to the database. Overall, we really leverage our user feedback to shape the product.”

How does the content, design, and layout of the “Pick Your Five” feature promote virality?
There are a couple of key points: First and foremost, the fact that people can select, order and publish their five from the same page has gone a long way toward keeping users in a mode where they want to publish. Second, the content itself is oftentimes something people took care in selecting, so they really want to show it off! Picking the five movies you’d watch over and over again is hard, so when you’ve decided, you want to show it off.

Why are “lists” — whether it’s LivingSocial.com’s application or the “Notes” that people write and tag — so popular on social networking sites like Facebook?
Social networking sites are really all about communication and sharing. The examples you mention have been going on in some shape or form for ages. People have written notes to each other for ages… or played the “Best five actors of the 1990s” (or similar) game in conversations for much longer than social networks have been around. [Social networks] are just a new medium to communicate and share through that didn’t previously exist; what was popular before works in this form of communication, as well.

What kind of user feedback are you receiving to the application, and how are you responding?
The biggest piece of user feedback we received was within the first few days of the launch of the application. We initially didn’t let users add items to our database, but it was impossible to keep up with all the requests. So, to let users more freely express themselves, we let them add additional items to the database. Overall, we really leverage our user feedback to shape the product. We have a team that processes through all feedback we receive so we can better shape our road map.

How can other developers optimize their applications for Facebook’s new site features?
The biggest things are: No. 1, make it easy for users to create or find something they want to share, and No. 2., give them the opportunity to publish that to the feed.

“It’s not always the case that, just because we’re friends, we care about the same news. If somebody can solve that problem, there is a pretty big opportunity.”

How has the LivingSocial.com application performed with the iPhone and other social networking sites like Bebo.com and MySpace?
We’ve really focused on Facebook and LivingSocial.com, so we are not a great barometer of other platforms.

Quizzes and applications come and go on Facebook, while the LivingSocial.com application has stuck around for several weeks now. To what do you attribute its relative staying power?
I think we’ve done a good job of bringing fresh and timely content to users. For example, we just had 100,000 people take a poll, “Who is to blame, Jon or Kate?” after the TLC show [Jon & Kate Plus 8] began to get so much press.

Can you predict the next big social networking application phenomenon?
I wish. If we could, we’d build it.

What do you want the next big social networking application phenomenon to be?
I don’t think anyone has cracked the nut on delivering relevant news. Twitter is great from a breaking news standpoint, but it has its limitations with regards to accuracy, and it doesn’t really give content specific to me. In the Facebook world, friends occasionally share news, but it’s not always the case that, just because we’re friends, we care about the same news. If somebody can solve that problem, there is a pretty big opportunity.

Where do you see LivingSocial.com in the next five years?
Well, I don’t necessarily see it as a dot-com. I think LivingSocial is a brand that lives across a variety of platforms, the dot-com site being one of them, but Facebook, the iPhone, or the next big things being other platforms. People will come to view us as the pre-eminent place to share and communicate around interests.

Five tips for creating viral social networking applications:
1. K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid).
2. A/B test your products like crazy — text, images, everything. It’s amazing how much you can move the needle.
3. Make something people will want to share with their friends. If people don’t want to communicate about what they’ve just interacted with, it will be very hard to be viral.
4. The subject matter matters. You don’t see a ton of viral apps about banking or healthcare.
5. If a user can interact with the application for more than two minutes and not have had an opportunity to create something to share, you’re probably in trouble.

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Jennifer Pullinger is a Richmond, Va.-based writer and communications professional with more than 10 years of experience in marketing, media relations, and journalism.