With November finally upon us, the Business/Revenue team is nearing the completion of the first draft of our “cookbook,” the “how to” guide that we hope will change the way local news publishers approach making money.

This coming week, in putting together the final components, we are conducting second-round interviews with local advertisers in the Evanston market to learn more about what forms of advertising they value most. As we will recommend in our final version of the “cookbook,” knowing the market you’re operating in requires multiple levels of research and interviews by itself. Prior to this batch of interactions with Evanston businesses, we conducted a brief survey with a focused group of local business to learn about how they measure success when it comes to advertising. This time we are exploring which forms of adverting (online banner ads, print ads, direct mailing, outdoor, etc.) they value most.

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As we reached the midpoint of our quarter this week we began taking steps to organize the final stretch of the project. It feels like our December presentation is quite a ways off, but with the Thanksgiving holiday approaching and the time we’ll need in the final days of class to prepare and finalize the report and presentation, we’ve realized that we only have about three or four weeks left to develop, test, and research our product.

This means that starting today, we’ll be taking a more structured approach to coordinating our different teams’ work by assigning schedules and deadlines on a master calendar. Until now, we’ve done well with informal deadlines and meetings, but as 0ur individual team schedules have been getting busier, it seems that it’s becoming more difficult for each group to feel that they have a good sense of what other teams are doing. We particularly felt that having our tech team’s timeline of deliverables up on the master calendar would help everyone feel more informed about their  progress, even on those days where their coding work takes them to Medill’s Loop newsroom instead of our normal Evanston classroom. Read more »

For definitely as long as I can remember, and certainly for years long before, journalists have been carrying the weight of delivering timely, comprehensive, well-reported news to local communities. The evolving news ecosystem changes that expectation.

Now community members can play a huge role in helping report and even writing the news, which takes a huge load off the back of journalists who may be spread too thin in their communities.

Legitimate sites are starting to sprout up that are helping to ease the reporting process. OpenFile is a new site that allows community members to open a file and describe a topic of concern. OpenFile then assigns a reporter to the subject and the story gets written–everyone ends up happy. As OpenFile puts it, “We see the news as a discussion, not a monologue. And listening is only half of the conversation.” Read more »

For almost two months, Jessica Rudis has been patrolling the streets — and events — of Evanston. She’s recently been named the editor of Evanston Patch, a community news site that’s linked into what will soon be a national media network.

An AOL Corp. product, Patch is one of the few media entities that this year has been growing. AOL’s corporate site now boasts that it has hundreds of local websites.

So we took a few minutes this week to ask Rudis about her coverage goals, interaction with Evanstonians and relationship with AOL.

Local Fourth: Could you give me the background on Evanston Patch — when did it start and how did you get involved?

Jessica Rudis: Evanston Patch launched on Sept. 3, but I’ve been working at Patch since late June. Before our sites launch each editor spends a few weeks building a large directory of every business and organization in town. I personally got involved with Patch because I had been living on the east coast for a while, but I wanted to move back to the Chicago area and was keeping an eye on new journalism opportunities out here. I love hyperlocal journalism and I had heard a lot of great things about Patch, so I was thrilled when I got the job.

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Usability testing can yield insights into concrete problems, like a poorly explained feature or a misplaced link, but it can also highlight the perennial questions that news organizations and audiences alike are struggling with online.

This week, our tests revealed that users are as aware of the problems fundamental to online commenting as publishers are. As we tested a model that would allow community members and journalists to interact over important topics through a question-and-answer format, our test group repeatedly brought up the desire for an experience that would make this different from a standard comment thread. Testers said that they didn’t want a “bathroom wall,” or a space where facts risked becoming muddled with random opinions. This has helped us focus our short-term goals on addressing issues of moderation and attribution in our design.

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