We’re getting 2012 underway with our second Meetup dedicated to Aging Out of Foster Care, it’s going to be a bright year and an incredible project!  We’re excited to tell everyone the scoop on moving forward; we’ve good news about opportunities to work with Seattle’s inspiring and proactive Mockingbird Society, plus planning our next steps setting Aging Out of Foster Care into action.  We’re in awe of all the progress we’ve seen come from the New York chapter and bolstered by our already gaining support in Seattle.

When: Monday, January 23, 2012, 7:00 PM
Where: Susan’s House, 1843 41st Ave E, Seattle, WA

Amanda will share the results of an amazing late December meeting with the executive Director of Mockingbird Society, our possible 1 and only partner for this project!

I hope to see everyone Monday evening at 7pm and to continue the fantastic discussion we started last go-around.  Please complete the application on the SG Local website and check out the Mockingbird Society, they’re an impressive bunch!

Light fare and beverages will be provided by our lovely hosts, please be sure to RSVP to the Meetup so we can plan some munchies for you!

Thanks all and see you Monday!
Steph and Amanda

“Drocolate” of in-this-economy.com wanted to ask me (Amanda Koster) a few questions about SxSW.

Drocolate: Why should I attend your core conversation at SXSW?

A.Koster: Compare the velocity of media and society’s response of Huricane Katrina vs. the Haiti Earthquake. Also, listen to: http://salaamgarage.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/AmandaKoster_podcast_sxsw2010.mp3

Drocolate: What makes you the right person to be conducting this conversation?

A.Koster: I’m an outsider. I’m not from the tech arena. When I presented at Gnomedex in 2008, I did not have an iPhone or Twitter account. Facebook did not make much sense to me. I thought FB was innovative online dating. Since then I have been able to harness storytelling, social media and passion all for social change. If I can do that, anyone can.  The passion to tell a story is the jet fuel behind citizen journalism. And it has been passion, not assignments, that got me here right now. I’ve been working as a photojournalist, writer, author for about 15 years though it has been my personal projects, again not assignments, that propelled my career and life beyond where I ever thought it could go.

Citizen journalism is more powerful than I could have ever been imagined and it is growing. Because we believe in these things it makes Amanda Rose of Twestival and I the perfect people to lead this conversation.

Drocolate: What advice would you give to aspiring citizen journalists (other than attending your convo at SXSW, of course)?

A.Koster: Your personal stories and perspectives are more valuable than ever. Make GOOD content and get it out to a relevant audience. And, there’s more to it than that:

Have a plan. SalaamGarage builds relationships/projects/plans with NGOs far in advance. We do not advocate what I call ‘drive-by-shootings’  (just showing up, shooting photos, then jet).

Be authentic. We want intimacy. I think people are tired of the slick, heavily produced story. We see through it. With the wildfire of social media and intentionally constructed social communities, impersonal, glossy stories delivered by a generic, safe personality is rapidly loosing ground.

Be relevant. Not worth telling a story about t-shirts to a dog trainer. Even if it’s the most compelling t-shirt story ever. Be relevant and focused.
Know your audience. Tell them a story 1) you care about and 2)they want to hear.

Care. There are ‘hot’ stories to tell, but you outta care about it. I travel all over the world all the time with SalaamGarage and as an free-lance journalist. There are stories that resonate with me, and other that just don’t. The advantage of being a citizen journalist is that you get to choose your story, verses being assigned something that is not dear to you.

DO SOMETHING with it. Share. Everyone is sitting on a novel, but if a tree falls in the woods….. I’ll leave it at that.

I am very passionate about this and have a lot more (not big on advice) ideas around this topic, though, this is the topic of our conversation so come join the conversation.

Drocolate: Where is your dream location to take a citizen journalism project? Antarctica? Atlantis? Detroit? Where?’

A.Koster: The White House

Eduardo said, “the woman I interviewed is Santosh Kanwar, she’s 26 with 4 little ones – Anshuman, Radha, Deepika, and Abnishiek. She touched me as deeply as it gets when she answered my question ‘what has been the biggest change for you since you joined the women’s self-help group?’ She said that she had finally learned the first names of all the women in her village. Up until then they only knew each other as so and so’s wife. Step one on the path to independence – identity.”

Santosh Kanwar photo by Eduardo Sciammarella

Santosh Kanwar photo by Eduardo Sciammarella

-Maggie Soladay, India 2009 trip producer

Princasting’s website declares: “Printcasting™ is a new local media ecosystem that lets everyone share in the work, and the rewards.” Miller explains that the way Printcasting works is; “Would-be publishers choose a name and template for their paper on the Printcasting Web site. Then they can fill it with articles they have uploaded to the site or search topic feeds, like food or travel, to find articles that others bloggers or newspapers have uploaded.”
Printcasting was started by Dan Pacheco of the The Bakersfield Californian, a local newspaper for all residents of Bakersfield, CA. The first Printcasting magazines were edited by Bakersfield locals and stories RSS fed from Bakotopia.com. While Printcasting’s focus was originally just on the 330,000 residents of Bakersfield. Now, says Dan Pacheco, “anyone can now use the site to create an automatically updating, printable PDF magazine.” The reason is thanks to the grant they received from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation via the Knight News Challenge. In the NYTimes story Claire Cain Miller reports that the “$837,000 grant from the Knight Foundation’s program to find digital models for local news, hopes to attract new readers and advertisers to print publications.”

The Bakersfield Californian is charging premium print rates for ads.
In a Business Week story The Online Experiments That Could Help Newspapers By Olga Kharif, Kharif reports that the magazine’s audience is young, hip, and hard to reach. Quoting Dan Pacheco “advertisers do pay full rates, the magazine even turns a profit.” She goes on to quote Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute who said; “newspapers had hoped that their Web sites would help them replace evaporating print revenue. But an online ad typically garners one-tenth of the revenue of a print ad.”

Despite evidence around the country of failing newsrooms and struggling journalists it seems this model could work. On the Digital Nirvana blog Adam Dewitz notes that “Pacheco said that early experiments in digital-print hybrid magazines in Bakersfield, such as Bakotopia.com and Bakotopia Magazine, show that there is money to be made in niche publications.”

Two Page VIews of a sample Printcasting Magazine’s page:

On this page visitors can: advertise in the next issue, contact the publisher, view previous editions, and subscribe to the magazine.

How To:
As a contributor you register your content, you make your words and pictures available for inclusion in other Printcasts on the site. And, if a magazine attracts advertising, you will receive a share of that revenue.
RSS feed off your blog is the easiest way to feed material to Printcasting.

Here is a link to turn the pages of a virtual copy of the Printcasting magazine.

Stay up on the latest from Printcasting
follow Printcasting on Twitter
Pachecod on Twitter Dan Pacheco is a product manager and former journalist who uses (and sometimes builds) social tools for public good.

-Maggie Soladay

The social networking and citizen journalism media explosion has provided plenty of avenues for participating in the creation of news.

How many times today have you updated you Twitter/blog/Facebook account?

The fact that I was late this morning because the F train was slow might not appear worthy of “breaking news” status; however, as news becomes more localized, personal accounts take on an increasingly important role.

Narrative journalism, or “new journalism”, utilizes personal, mundane details to create an intimate connection between the subject of the story and the reader. Think Studs Turkel. Or Gay Talese. Or Anne Hull. These journalists collect personal stories, spend enormous amounts of time in the field with their subjects, and ultimately provide their readers with a unique perspective and voice on larger, more complicated topics.

Maybe journalism school isn’t your thing, but you are interested in learning how to tell a compelling story. There are a few great graduate-level certificate programs that promote the documentary approach to storytelling and arm their students with skills in reporting, ethics, and production.

The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, in Portland, Maine offers an intensive semester program in documentary radio, writing, and photography. Students choose a story and spend their four months reporting and work-shopping their pieces with their peers. Graduates have gone on to work for NPR, National Geographic, and The Christian Science Monitor.

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University offers continuing education classes in fields of documentary photography, videography, and audio documentary, culminating in a Certificate in Documentary Arts. They also offer individual workshops in topics ranging from Oral History Fundamentals, Documentary Narrative, Audio Postcards, and Literacy through Photography.

If going back to school isn’t an option at the moment, pick up a copy of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. The quick-read is a compilation of essays and advice from some of the best nonfiction writers out there.

- Emily True is a graduate of the Salt Institute.
www.emilytrue.com