News Innovation BarCamp

This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains. — Bull Durham

BarCamp NewsInnovation brings the unconference model to the news business. Unconferences are free, adhoc gatherings, with an agenda driven by the participants.

UPDATE: Matt Neznanski (above), a reporter for the Corvallis Gazette-Times, led the discussion in Portland. Here are some photos of the Portland event and the Google News Group.

Three NewsInnovation BarCamps happen this weekend; BarCamp NewsInnovation Portland (Saturday), BarCamp NewsInnovation in Chicago (Saturday) and BarCamp NewsInnovation Miami (Sunday). The Portland event is being held near the RecentChangesCamp.

A national event, BarCamp NewsInnovation Philadelphia, is scheduled for April 25.

BarCamp NewsInnovation is a regional gathering, bringing together tech-savvy, open-minded individuals who embrace the chaos in the media industry.

Everyone may participate. They are looking for: journalism students, web developers, freelance journalists, local beat reporters, technologists, editors, entrepreneurs, journalism professors, and news consumers with ideas for the future of news.

Click Here to join the liveblog starting Saturday morning.

It’s Oregon’s 150th anniversary. I’d like to travel around my state this year, recording interesting stories. I’d live in a van for a month or two, and update this website from the road.

I was thinking about following the Cycle Oregon route. A clickable map would bring up stories and photos. For my fitness program I’m training at NWdocumentary.org.

A modern news platform might include the following:

Kindle and smartphone compatibility
Twitter Feeds
Flickr Feeds
Soundslides and audio
10×10 graphic interfaces
Skype roundtables
Live Maps with visual complexity

About half of National Public Radio’s mobile visitors (about 700,000 to 800,000 per month) use iPhones, writes American Journalism Review. NPR Mobile, on the iPhone, provides multimedia and audio slide shows, often utilizing the flash-based SoundSlides program. Soundslides, a rapid production tool for still image and audio web presentations, has a large forum of active users and hundreds of great productions. perhaps newspapers should hire an iPhone Adviser.

A Newspaper Association of America graph shows a decline in paid readership every year beginning in 1993 when the total was a little more than 62.5 million. That shrunk to about 53.2 million in 2006.

Total newspaper advertising revenues fell by $3 billion in the first six months of 2008 to $18.8 billion, the lowest level in a dozen years, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Ad revenue is four-fifths of a daily paper’s income.

UBS figures newspaper revenues will be down 12.2 percent when the final figures are in for 2008 and tumble another 17.6 percent in 2009. The print industry is undergoing a sea change, and companies are scrambling.

Nearly all American newspapers have far fewer journalists than they did a few years ago.
For the first half of 2008, online sales rose a modest $35 million, or 2.3%, to a bit less than $1.6 billion. But on-line ads are not nearly as profitable — or unique — as print advertising.

By the year 2020, print ad revenue will be about half what it is today, while online ad revenue will be more than 10 times what it is today, reports AJR. Moble platforms may be one direction, but currently only 21 percent of U.S. adult mobile phone owners use the mobile Internet, and only 7 percent do so at least once a week, according to Forester.

NewsInnovation founder Jason Kristufek (below), explains how BarCamp NewsInnovation works.

Conferences like BarCamp NewsInnovation make tool training available to anyone. A temp agency for journalists could be next. I believe the best is yet to come.