NewsCloud's Community Starter Blog

Minnesota Public Radio Launches Economic Beat Reporting Site on the NewsCloud platform

This guest post is written by Minnesota Public Radio's public insight journalist Paul Tosto:

    When Minnesota Public Radio News launched the MinnEcon blog  two years ago, we wanted to capture the everyday stories of Minnesotans living through the Great Recession. We had good success finding stories via our Public Insight Network. But early on it was clear the old blog format didn’t fit our ambitions.

    We wanted to create a networked hub of beat reporting, a site that didn’t just tell readers to leave a comment at the bottom of a post but invited them to ask and answer questions, easily share anything that interested them about the economy and create or jump in to discussions. We started working with NewsCloud last fall to build that site using its open source platform.

    The result: A remade MinnEcon that integrates social media, public insight and MPR News reporting -- from radio stories to news shows to all the stuff we do already online.

    The site went up officially a couple of weeks ago. Soon, we'll reach out to the thousands of Minnesotas in the MPR News network who’ve responded in the past to our queries about the economy and connect them to the site.

    With MinnEcon, we're building something with the NewsCloud open source platform that could become a standard beat reporting tool: A flexible app that's easy to set up and configure to specific beats, easy to run and connected to Facebook, the world's largest social network.

    It can easily be maintained by a beat reporter and editor. That's one of the real beauties of this project. There’s enormous potential to reproduce the model for any beat and any reporter, no matter the size of the news organization.

The NewsCloud open source Facebook community platform is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Anyone can download the code for free. Follow us @newscloud.

Sneak Preview of NewsCloud 2011 - 2012 Roadmap: Simplicity & Affordability

Update: Here's our grant announcement NewsCloud to make Facebook-connected communities easy.

I wanted to give folks a quick preview of our planned roadmap for NewsCloud's open source Facebook community platform. Primarily, we'll focus on making running the NewsCloud platform simpler and more affordable to make it more accessible to a variety of news organizations, community groups and individuals.

There are two key areas of focus, initially:

1) Making the open source code base easier to install, set up and manage.

2) Making the open source code base installable on hosting environments that are more economical such as the Amazon AWS MicroInstance which is free for one year.

We're currently finishing up some design improvements to the current platform and expect to have a third stable release available in April. We expect the initial simplicity and affordability initiative improvements to start rolling out in June and July, 2011.

Ruby on Rails developers can install our current stable or daily code from Github today. Share your thoughts and questions. 

We'll provide more information in the coming months. Follow us @newscloud to keep up with the latest updates.

Social Media Ideas for Indian Country

The Potlatch Fund is the first community foundation to apply for a Knight Foundation Information Needs Community Challenge Grant to build a NewsCloud site uniting it's Northwest regional Native American communities:

The platform will leverage a variety of NewsCloud’s features to help Native American communities connect, engage and share information with each other online, in ways that aren’t possible today. Some of these features include: dissemination of foundation, grantee and local news, peer to peer news sharing, blogging, image and video galleries, discussion forums, resource directories, classifieds and lending library, idea gathering and question and answers. The Facebook authentication used by NewsCloud allows community members to interact with their real names and faces, building connection in deeper ways than other web technologies. This was one of the findings in the Knight-funded research on the Hot Dish climate change project.

If you're interested in learning more about how to use NewsCloud for your community foundation or its grantees, read our post How Community Foundations Can Create Local Online Hubs with NewsCloud.

Many Ways to Add Content to Your NewsCloud Community Site

Part of the series on NewsCloud's Philosophy of Online Community Building and Social Media.

Our partners always ask about the ways they can add content to their NewsCloud site and specifically, what can be automated. We've built a number of options for populating your community site with content as easily as possible.

The Pros and Cons of Automation

A lot of our mainstream media partners want to automate importing content into their community site. While this can reduce the need for staff time and involvement, it can also reduce the quality, focus and appearance of content on the site.

Readers can tell when a site only includes content from an automated engine. The headlines aren't well chosen, the images often don't work well and there isn't as much focus of the editorial voice.

Since NewsCloud makes it so easy to post selected content manually (it only takes a few minutes a day), we often ask why an organization wants to put the effort into launching a community site if it has so little staff time to dedicate to it?

That said, NewsCloud has built support to automatically import a selected XML feed of content from your CMS with the proper headlines and images ... but few partners do the development work on their side to generate a special feed of featured stories for their NewsCloud community site.

We also offer some automated ways to speed importing of selected content without sacrificing your curated editorial voice.

Approaches for Distributing and Minimizing the Workload

It's often useful to have a group of staff involved in posting content to the site. If each staff member posts once a day or every other day, the site will have a fairly active curated voice. 

Another option is to recruit moderators (paid or volunteer). One of our partners used 40 bloggers. This can spread the workload around as well. However, it does reduce the amount of control you have over your editorial voice.

As your community grows, readers will post the majority of content and the site won't require as much leadership from your team. However, it's important to have a plan to populate your site with fresh content as you're trying to attract people to your new site.

Options for Manually Posting Content

1. Post a Story Wizard. You can visit the post a story wizard page and paste a URL for the news story you want to add. NewsCloud will look up the title, caption and images for the story (if available) and make it easy for you to complete your post.

2. Post a Story Bookmarklet. You can drag the post story bookmarklet to your browser bar and then when you visit a third party news site, like The New York Times, you can just click the bookmarklet button and NewsCloud will launch a popup pre-filled with URL, title, caption and any images (if available) to make it easy for you to submit the story.

3. Compose an Article Wizard. You can visit the compose an article page to compose a longer blog entry or article with our rich text editor. This is great for original work - and user generated blogs.

 

4. Quick posting stories from the Newswire page. If your site imports RSS feeds into the Newswire page (see below), then you can visit the Newswire page and manually click Quick Post or Publish to add a headline to your site. Quick post will automatically load the title, caption and images into your site (making its best guesses) while Publish will allow you to customize your story before you complete the post. 

Options for Automation

1. Importing RSS headlines and captions into the Newswire feed. NewsCloud allows you to choose any number of RSS feed to import headlines into the Newswire area.

There's often a lot of confusion between stories and newswires. NewsCloud essentially maintains two buckets of story content: stories & articles vs. newswire headlines. Readers can't Like, Comment on or Share Newswire headlines unless someone chooses to add it to the site as a full story. However, there are widgets for the home page to show the latest RSS headlines, which can help to keep your site content fresh.

2. Importing stories you share via Google Reader. If you (or several staff members or moderators) use Google Reader, you can import shared stories into your NewsCloud site. This allows you and your staff to browse Google Reader (on the Web or from a smartphone) and post stories to your NewsCloud site simply by sharing them. The downside to this automated approach is that it is not possible to edit headlines, captions or choose images before the stories are posted.

3. Importing every story from your RSS feed(s). NewsCloud can also import every RSS headline as a full story, using the best title, abstract and image that it finds. The problem with this approach is that you are essentially duplicating the content on your website and not providing a focused, curated editorial voice for your community site. Note: if you create a custom RSS feed of selected, curated stories - then this can be a decent option (you can also use option 4 below).

4. Importing every story from a custom XML feed. If your content management system (CMS) can generate a custom XML data feed with the headline, abstract and images that you want to load into your community site, NewsCloud can import this content as well. Again, this generally works best if you are selected a curated subset of stories for your community site rather than every single story on your existing website.

5. Importing videos from a YouTube channel into your video gallery. Our new gallery feature can import videos from your YouTube channel into your NewsCloud community site. 

In the future, we're planning to allow automated importing of news stories from a specified Twitter list. So, essentially, you can create a Twitter list of curated Twitterers and NewsCloud will filter out the news stories that they are tweeting or stories tweeted by multiple folks, and we'll post those to your community site, referencing the original Twitterers.

If you have more questions, please visit http://support.newscloud.com

Our work has been generously funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and is freely available for open source download. 

Read the previous post: How Community Foundations Can Create Local Online Hubs with NewsCloud.

How Community Foundations Can Create Local Online Hubs with NewsCloud

Part of the series on NewsCloud's Philosophy of Online Community Building and Social Media.

NewsCloud's open source platform is an ideal tool for community foundations wishing to help their communities and grantees become hosts of vibrant online communities. This post will present some resources and suggestions for approaching this kind of project.

Why Community Foundations Should Invest in Local Online Hubs

The Knight Commission recently released a must read report entitled Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action:

"Ensuring that every local community has at least one high-quality hub is one of 15 key recommendations made by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy."

This report is a great resource for understanding the role local online hubs in creating informed and engaged commnunities.

The report highlights three approaches often taken: 1) Hubs focused on community government information, 2) Community Connections: Local forums and Community E-mail Listserves and 3) Community News and Commentary. NewsCloud's platform excels at the latter and can also provide forums and help present directories to community and government resources. 

Consider looking at the Knight Foundation's Community Information Challenge as a possible funding source - see #7 below. Current challenge deadline is March 7th. The Community Information Challenge FAQ states: "Knight is looking for projects that help fill community information needs, foster community engagement and help residents participate in the creation and sharing of news and information." This exactly describes what you and your grantees can accomplish with the NewsCloud platform.

What is the NewsCloud Platform

NewsCloud's platform offers a variety of news and interactive community building features that are ideal for place-based (or topic-based) community building. These features are designed to transition organizations from a monolithic publishing model to a more social, peer to peer, user generated content approach. 

NewsCloud's features include: publishing news and audience story links from around the Web, reader blogging, crowdsourced question and answers for member peer-support, crowdsourced directories of resources e.g. government links or community hotspots, crowdsourced idea gathering, discussion forums, classifieds and lending library (for selling, sharing or giving away physical items such as books or household stuff), photo and video galleries and even a predictions game. All of these features are tightly integrated into Facebook and Twitter for viral sharing and easy access.

Sites as large as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and MPR News are experimenting with NewsCloud sites. You can see some examples of NewsCloud in action here.

The NewsCloud code is freely available for open source download since it's been largely funded by the generous support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. However, installing and managing a site requires moderate technical expertise and hosting expense (we plan to reduce these over the next year).

While the hosting and managing of the technology does requires some ongoing investment or technical expertise, the bulk of your investment should be made in community moderation, outreach and promotion.

Strategies for Launching Local Online Community Hubs

1) Ask your local grantees to collaborate on a community hub

Initially populating content for and promoting interactive community sites is the biggest challenge to getting these kinds of communities off the ground. If multiple grantee organizations are involved in a local community, it distributes the workload and diversifies the community from the beginning. It also is likely that they will each promote the site to different communities, enhancing your outreach and marketing effort.

Host a regular conference with moderators (weekly at first) to plan, coordinate and share learning from working with the community and the site technology. Collect feedback and requests for NewsCloud at its online support forum.

2) Consider funding one full time community moderator and grantee coordinator

Depending on the number of collaborative grantees, it may be helpful to have a dedicated staff member whose responsibility is to oversee the quality and management of the site.

3) Provide a marketing and promotions budget for the site

Sites without marketing don't grow. Period. Be sure to provide a moderate budget for raising awareness about your new hub in its first year(s).

4) Fund the hosting, technical management and support for the site

Consider this a basic infrastructure and capacity building investment to enable your grantees to collaborate on a a local online hub using the NewsCloud technology.  

If you work privately with NewsCloud, it generally costs about $10,000 - $12,000 to set up, train staff, design the skin and host a site for the first year. It's less in subsequent years. Since NewsCloud is open source - you can also hire your favorite local technical consultant to do this instead. 

5) Consider allocating funds for additional software development for special requests

Either working with the open source community or NewsCloud, provide some budget for requests and ideas from your grantees to be turned into reality. For example, maybe one community will want to build a plug-in to help local parents coordinate shared child care. Another might want a mobile platform (another item were hoping to build later this year).

6) Have Grantees Work Together Over Time to Experiment with Approaches for the Site Business Model and Its Sustainability

You won't fund this site forever, but it will take one to three years at least for a site to become self-sufficient. Encourage your grantees from the beginning to collaborate and brainstorm on approaches that might work. Local advertising, charging for classifieds, annual membership for readers, fundraising drives, etc.

7) Consider making an information needs application request to fund broader investment in your community site

Unfortunately, the current contest deadline is Monday, March 7th (but the form is simple - just four questions, so apply now). However, the contest runs regularly throughout the year.

Because the information challenge cycle takes about six months, it may not be as appropriate for launching your local hub as it would be for expanding and deepening your efforts e.g. outreach, unique feature development, experiments with approach and business model, etc.

Have some feedback on this post? Share it at our support discussion site.

Read the previous post: What is the Difference Between a Facebook Page and a NewsCloud Community Site?