WHAT: The Society of Professional Journalists’ Digital Media Committee is proud to present an evening of exploration into the much talked about topic of “hyperlocal journalism.”

To give you an idea of the topics that will be discussed, here are a few questions that the panelists will be asked:

• How do you make money selling local news?
• What is a day in the life of a Patch reporter like? What about the editor(s)?
• What content on Patch sites is being consumed the most?
• What, if any, multimedia skill sets is Patch looking for when they hire reporters?

The end of the evening will be Q&A with questions from the audience. Questions via Twitter and e-mail are encouraged for those individuals who cannot attend in person. Send your questions to spj_dmc@yahoo.com or use the hashtag #spjpatch

#spjpatch

WHO: 4 staff from Patch (we will update this information with specific names as it becomes available)

WHERE: Illinois Technology Association
200 South Wacker Drive
15th floor
Chicago, IL 60606

WHEN: 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.

LIMITED SPACE: The Illinois Technology Association has generously donated the space for our event. However, seating is limited to the first 125 attendees to sign up. Tickets are FREE! Please bring your ticket with a valid form of ID in order to be admitted into the building.

Get your tickets now -

http://hyperlocalnews.eventbrite.com

WHO SHOULD ATTEND: Journalist, citizen journalists, hackers, programmers, professors

What is PATCH? (in their own words):

“We’re a community-specific news and information platform dedicated to providing comprehensive and trusted local coverage for individual towns and communities.” Read more…

Plagiarism is an ugly word.  Have you ever wondered if you are a victim of web content theft? 

A few months ago, I happen to get on a new internet news site where contributors get paid by the click on their story.  I also happen to discover that a story posted by a babysitter-turn-news contributor actually was written by a reporter friend of mine who works for a major newspaper.

The woman who copied and pasted parts of my friend’s story did not credit him.  Sure she only took parts of his story, but it was taken word for word.    Why the news site managers didn’t look into this; that’s another story.   Of course, I told my reporter friend, and he took care of the rest.

At a social networking conference, I learned about a site called Copyscape.  It’s a free plagiarism checker.  Simple to use and right now appears to be the only web tool out there targeting plagiarism.

How does it work? Just put the URL in the search box that you want to check for plagiarism and submit.

Copyscape does the search for free.  It even offers a banner that you can put on your own website that warns people that you use Copyscape for checking.

If you want more bells and whistles you have to pay for it, but that includes a service that is constantly looking for your work for plagiarism and alerts you.

Copyscape has had several favorable reviews by major publications and internet news sites.  http://www.copyscape.com/press.php

Rebecca Aguilar is a freelance multimedia reporter based in Dallas.  She has 29 years of experience and has numerous awards for her work, including several Emmy awards.  She’s also on the board of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.  Rebecca conducts reporting workshops around the country (Finding Sources and Stories, Networking, Live Shots, Getting the Best Interview, Writing to Video, and The Basics Of Multimedia.) She can be contacted at aguilar.thereporter@yahoo.com.

I was tempted to call this blog post “10 Ways To Pimp Yourself Online,” but I worried that such a vague label might attract an audience with entrepreneurial aspirations of a different sort, perhaps of the (gasp!) street corner variety.

Since this blog is geared toward the journalistically-inclined, I suppose “building your brand” is a more appropriate description. In any case, here are 10 tips on how to increase your visibility so you can sell your skills, talents, and services….

1. Defend your turf

Sign up for social networking sites and claim your name before anyone else does. Try to be consistent with your usernames. I try to use my real name whenever possible – I set my Twitter handle as @emilysweeney. On Facebook, however, I wasn’t so lucky….another Emily Sweeney beat me to the punch, so I couldn’t use that as my Facebook URL. Don’t let that happen to you!

2. Master your domain

Buy a domain name that you can use as a “home base” – a place where you can post clips and showcase your work. I registered my name –  www.emilysweeney.com -  and I use that URL for my online portfolio.

3. Join a gang

Follow the advice of media maven Dan Schawbel, (author of the Personal Branding Blog)  and form “a Twitter mastermind group.”

“As you may suspect, certain groups of people on Twitter constantly promote and retweet each other. Some of them are in what are called “mastermind groups” — groups of individuals who are committed to helping each other and sharing knowledge amongst themselves. They are communities of supportive colleagues who seek to mutually help each other become more successful.”

Read more about that, and Dan’s other helpful tips, in his excellent column:

How To Build Your Personal Brand on Twitter

4. Leave your mark

While it might be tempting to spray paint your Twitter handle on a subway train, please don’t. There’s no need to vandalize. There are plenty of other ways to promote yourself. For starters, you can add your website URL and Twitter handle to your email signature, your blog comments,  and the taglines of articles you write. You should also put this 411 on your business cards, and all of your social networking profiles. Make bumper stickers emblazoned with your URL.

5. Get LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great resource to find people, and for people to find you. To make the most of LinkedIn, be sure to include all of your recent jobs and relevant experience in your profile.  Use descriptive keywords and post your Twitter account and website up there, too.  Select a personalized URL (See tip #1).  Once your profile is complete, start connecting with people you know and join some groups. Write recommendations for your colleagues, and participate in discussions.

6. Facebook

Facebook can be a great reporting tool – you can use it to find story ideas, background information and sources. It’s also another platform for you to present yourself and get more people to see your work. If you already have a personal Facebook account and profile, you might also consider creating a Facebook Fan Page.

7. Write, write, write

Raise your profile by contributing to media blogs and trade publications like Quill.

8. Tweet, tweet, tweet

Set up a Twitter account and snag your username (see tip #1). Use it to connect with colleagues and tweet links to your work and theirs.

9. Volunteer

Contact your local SPJ chapter and offer to help out. You could serve on a committee, lead a workshop,  mentor a young journalist, organize a panel discussion…It’s a win-win: you’ll be doing a good thing, and it helps raise your profile in the journalism world.

10.  Network

Last but not least, make sure you get out there and mingle your peers. Attend conferences and training seminars. Need ideas? A good place to start is JournalismTraining.org and our very own Digital Media Events calendar.

Emily Sweeney is a staff reporter at The Boston Globe. You can follow her on Twitter (@emilysweeney) and find her on LinkedIn among other places.

Creating and publishing interactive charts no longer requires expensive software.

Forget about building simple line graphs. Using Chartle.net you can create any number of visual charts to display your data online.

Here are a few examples of the types of charts you can make using Chartle.net:

Using Chartle.net does not require registration and is free.

Every chart you build can be published, shared and embedded on your website or blog.

Data for your chart can be entered manually or inputted using an excel spreadsheet via the ‘import’ feature.

You can also adjust the size of the chart you create to fit your site.

Before you publish your Chartle you’ll be asked to give it a

? Title

? Author

? Description

Click here to view an example of this interactive Chartle.net chart.

Need to make a modification to your chart? You can create a new chart using the data stored in a currently published chart.

Hilary Fosdal is the Interactive Content Manager for Barrington Broadcasting Group. She blogs at hilaryfosdal.com and tweets @hilaryfosdal.

UPDATE: (2/22/10) The company Page.ly offers a one-stop shop for self-hosting blog set-up. Leave the technical guesswork to them. Service is about $15 a month. They’ll get you blogging and will install all the SEO, plug-in, meta-tagging, social bookmarking gadgets for you.

UPDATE: (2/22/10) I came across this article, which has the steps for moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.org.

You don’t have to be a coding guru or Silicon Valley veteran to start blogging with some bells and whistles.

I started from scratch last year and my goals were simply to have a blog or site where I could post text, embed links, upload multimedia, and while I was at it, add some of those social media and bookmarking buttons to easily share my pages.

I don’t know much about metatagging or SEO, have no idea what FTP sites have to do with anything, and CSS is beyond me.

This blog post is about my recent experience with WordPress.com and GoDaddy — no special treatment for those companies, they are not paying me or anything, it’s just what I use and know. Do a Google search for “domain registration” and “web hosting” for other companies to work with. Typepad and Moveable Type are other blogging companies similar to WordPress. The key is finding a one-stop shop place to connect your domain and site to a host.

First, I secured several domain names with GoDaddy and then I opened a WordPress.com account, where I keep my online news directory InOtherNews.us. Through WordPress.com, I easily connected that domain to the blog. The instructions are clear and it can be done in a few clicks. WordPress.com hosts the blog.

After several months of getting familiar with WordPress.com functioning, I started noticing limitations, namely, customization. I wanted to “trick-out” my blog with widgets and plug-ins and play around with themes. I also wanted to add social media buttons to posts and sidebars. WordPress.com blogs allow for those, but the selection is relatively small.

So I went over to WordPress.org — note: it’s DOT ORG — which is the natural next step to custom blogging. With WP dot org, you have to find a host elsewhere, and once you do, there are thousands of site design themes to choose from and a plug-in for just about any function you would want to add to your blog.

And this brings me back to GoDaddy, where my domains are registered. GoDaddy offers site hosting packages, I chose the $6.99 a month Deluxe plan. The hosting can be used for myriad blogging and Website frameworks such as Joomla and Drupal.

Once the hosting service transaction is complete, follow the quick GoDaddy process for downloading a WordPress blog and connecting a domain to it. I did this and was soon playing around with sophisticated themes and browsing hundreds of plug-ins for my new site (and I mean new — it’s a work in progress) NewsRedux.us.

The one-stop shopping at GoDaddy removed a lot of anxiety and frustration with getting my new self-hosted blog on the internet.

And if you get stuck, there’s always the 24/7 tech support phone number.

NetWorked committee member Jessica Durkin is a former old-school print reporter going new-school. Jessica is the founder and editor of InOtherNews.us, a directory of online, independent news sites around the country. She is based in Scranton, PA, and is a regional director for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Cross posted at the SPJ Works blog.

Anyone who listens to NPR more than once in a blue moon probably remembers the catchy plugs for sponsors such as the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which has granted millions to public broadcasting (and others) to support journalism “ … in the digital age.”

Click image for Knight Foundation report

Similarly, journalists and industry followers even mildly interested in digital media trends are likely familiar with the Knight Foundation’s popular Knight News Challenge, a five-year, $25 million initiative that annually seeks innovation submissions from journalism and information technology entrepreneurs.

Continuing its quest to research and fund digital-age projects supportive of quality journalism, Knight commissioned a study from Arabella Philanthropic Investment Advisors on 29 “media, information and communication contests.” Of course, the News Challenge is included in the analysis.

Some highlights:                           

-Knight currently gives away the most annually, with $5 million, though Google will soon supersede that with its $10 million Project 10¹⁰⁰.

-The amount of submissions per contest ranges from a few dozen to over 12,000.

-Sponsors and funders come from all sectors, including government, non-profit, education, and for-profit. The sector that sponsors the most contests (not surprisingly) is foundations, followed by for-profit technology companies.

But the analysis is not a competition among groups vying for the title “best funder.” Rather, the report highlights (very concisely, in my opinion) the various funding opportunities for those interested in sharing information on constantly changing digital platforms.

Plus, it’s not all journalism. Many of the projects and programs highlighted are for the more technical-minded: application developers and telecommunications gurus.

But there’s a general theme: Sharing information – either through published/broadcast news reports or over social media networks – is a critical component in the Internet age. Whether journalism entrepreneurs or computer science whizzes seek the money is moot. The point is that there’s a lot being done to spur and spread information-sharing technology. And there’s plenty of room for more players, both funders and seekers.

Scott Leadingham is editor of SPJ’s Quill magazine and spends way too much time on Twitter (@scottleadingham) following industry news.

I am in Seattle today attending Day 1 of the Journalism That Matters event: “Re-Imagining News & Community in the Pacific Northwest,” which runs from today through Sunday.

Twitter hashtag: #jtmpnw, and I’m @jessdrkn.

This “un-conference” intends to explore new relationships between journalism and communities. This event is unlike traditional events or conferences with line-ups of experts telling attendess what they are doing — this is about attendees talking to each other.

I am hosting a table for my website on hyperlocal and community news start-ups, InOtherNews.us, and for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, of which I’m a director.

Seattle and the Northwest has become a hotbed of community/hyperlocal startup activity.  Some participants at this event are:

• Seattle City Club
• The B-Town Blog (from Burien)
• The Salish Sea Network
• The Tyee
• West Seattle Blog
• Xconomy
• YES! Magazine

Other event attendees setting up their tables alonside me in the commons area are:

• Asian American Journalists Association
• Cascadia Times
• Common Language Project
• Countywide Community Forums
• Department of Commnications, University of Washington
• Instivate
• KBCS-FM
• Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in Democracy
• KUOW Public Insight Network
• LocalHealthGuide/Seattle
• Master of Communication in Digital Media, U of W
• Media Island International
• Natural Oregon
• News 21
• Pedro De Valdivia — an artist who uses trash or discarded items for his Modern-Ecoism work
• Reclaim the Media
• Seattle Times
• Sustainable Seattle
• Washington Coalition for Open Government
• Washington News Council

Jessica Durkin is the founder of http:InOtherNews.us, a site that tracks independent community, local and regional news start-ups. She is interested in entrepreneurial journalism and the new paradigm. She is the mid-atlantic director (Region 3) of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Entrepreneurial journalism has taken off at a rapid clip, or so it seems — all the evidence thus far is anecdotal. Grants are assisting non-profit start-ups, self-funded endeavors are staying in the game, and colleges and universities with journalism programs have turned their attention to a new news curriculum.

Six months ago I started tracking new news sites that focus on independent news creation. I founded InOtherNews.us, to monitor activity “beyond legacy media.”

I have 50 start-ups listed on my site so far and here is a selection of stand-outs. Some were started this year. I chose them for their uniqueness, consistency,  efficacy, and overall commitment to entrepreneurial journalism for the public interest.

Metropolis: Philadelphia-based news and opinion site. Launched in November. Edited and mostly run by a veteran news reporter, who last worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Metropolis, like other start-ups, relies on contributors. Although it is in its early stages, it is ambitious in its coverage. Opinion columns by the editor draw on deep knowledge and nuance of the city. Good community forum space.

Rust Wire: This regional endeavor focuses on the revitalization and rebirth of America’s Rust Belt — that area of the midwest and northeast from Michigan to Western New York. The site’s co-founders, both former reporters in Ohio, are passionate and knowledgeable about Rust Belt issues.

The Eastsider LA: Former Los Angeles Times reporter Jesus Sanchez started The EastSider LA to observe his own neighborhood, a steadily gentrifying area of Los Angeles. His site is a good example of solid neighborhood news reporting, especially in the shadow of LA Times downsizing and reduced coverage of the city. Jesus brings the nuts-and-bolts information residents need and want.

Woodstock CT Cafe: A great example of what a community can do with information, given an open forum and a desire for debate. This site has been around several years and serves seven small towns in “The Quiet Corner” (as it is known) of Northeast Connecticut. Anyone can post to the site, which is moderated with an seemingly invisible hand. Discussion usually centers around the school district that serves the towns. There is always pre- and post-local election forums.

Spot.us: This popular site has to be included in this list, for taking a creative approach to funding the news. Spot.us, which has been written about extensively in traditional media, works on a crowdfunding model, where the general public is asked to subsidize stories through individual donations.

The Digitel: A testament to the link economy. This Charleston, South Carolina site rounds up information from regional or national outlets, then picks the newsiest bits and links to them. They also have some original content. Lots of sections, lots of content. They put the human element in aggregation.

Philadelphia Neighborhoods and Intersections: The South Los Angeles Report: Two examples of university journalism programs working in new media. These sites are hyperlocal projects run by journalism programs at Temple University (Philadelphia Neighborhoods) and the University of Southern California (Intersections).

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Red Bank Green, one of many sites covering news and entertainment for a section of New Jersey. The site recently scooped traditional media on a story about Bruce Springsteen fans purchasing the house where Springsteen wrote “Born to Run.” (disclosure: I am acquainted with a reporter there)

Alamo City Times: This site provides a place for topics of discussion and activity around San Antonio, Texas. The site, which is primarily in English but features a section in Spanish, keeps its community engaged through a space for highly visible user-generated content. (disclosure: site founder Patricio Espinoza sits on the board of directors of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists with me)

Baltimore Brew: A site plugging along, covering basic community events, news and happenings around Baltimore, Maryland.

This list reflects general community news missions. There are many more start-ups worth noting, but they belong in a different category. The recent past has seen large-scale, non-profit start-ups such as the Texas Tribune, MinnPost, Voice of San Diego, St. Louis Beacon, and Crosscut. Those are all in a different league. Their news scope is state-wide or multi-state, their budgets and staffs larger than community news start-ups.

And check out Chris Wink’s roundup and evaluation of 24 hyperlocal sites he lists on his technology news blog Technically Philly.

SPJ Digital Media Committee member Jessica Durkin continues to track community or other independent, online news startups at http://inothernews.us. Jessica is based in Scranton, PA and is the Region 3 director for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She’s usually Twittering about hyperlocal and entrepreneurial journalism @jessdrkn.

When: January 21, 2010 from 6pm-8pm

Where: Google’s Chicago Office, 20 W. Kinzie St., 17th Floor, Chicago, IL 60610

Cost: FREE

SPJ’s Digital Media Committee Presents:

Google 101 for Journalists: Getting the Most from the Web

Every day, millions of people around the world use Google’s search engine to find what they’re looking for. Editors, journalists, producers, and others in the media have long known just how essential it is to be able to find and use information efficiently and effectively, and this Google 101 introduction demonstrates ways to work more efficiently and effectively on the web. Learn how to get the most from Search and other free tools from Google. Whether you’re in broadcast, print, or digital journalism, this session will introduce ways you can search smarter, keep better tabs on your beat, see what’s hot and what’s not, add a visual edge to your online content, and use Google on the go when you’re reporting in the field. Walk away with tips and tricks and an online resource — for Google Search, Hot Trends, Insights, Reader, News, Maps, and more.

Light refreshments will be provided.

Sign up now! It’s free! http://www.eventbrite.com/event/507511982

Watch snippets of opening remarks from Rupert Murdoch and Arianna Huffington during the first day of the Federal Trade Commission workshop titled ‘How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age.’

Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager of Google News explains during his 15 minute presentation at the FTC workshop how to prevent Google and search engines from indexing content on websites.

During the FTC workshop “How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” Steven Brill and Karen Dunlap share their thoughts on past and future business models for journalism.

Hilary Fosdal is the Interactive Content Manager for Barrington Broadcasting Group. She attended both days of the FTC workshop. You can read more of her work on Running for Food.

***

Below are selected photos from the workshop. To see the full photoset check out this link.

Photographer: Steve Fosdal