At openDemocracy.net , we’ve been in the role of “primary producer” of high quality international news analysis and commentary ,always looking for the perspective of the critical insider to any issue. We want to find the way to sustainably produce high-end analysis in the networked journalism world.

we run a mixed amateur/pro model, with a professional editorial staff and contributors who are academics or activists.

There has always been rich conversation on Martha’s Vineyard. Town meetings, community television, two weekly papers and a regional planning commission keep Vineyarders actively in touch with the many factors effecting the quality of life here. For the 18,000 or so year-rounders there is a continuous and often visceral examination of what it means to live in a place where so many others want to be. The influx of people intensifies the conversation, creates focus. It drives land and housing prices up. It has a direct impact on market basket prices. But the conversation is not just about the cost of living. As in other communities it centers on the quality of healthcare, on local food production, energy, waste and recycling, among other things. Yes, life is good here in this informed community, but it is also threatened.

The Vineyard Voice will launch on September 1st as a “monthly”. The first “issue” is on affordable housing, so we will be landing directly into the middle of a real pain point for islanders. The issue will publish work from local videographers, audio interviews, key documents outlining the forces and factors shaping housing on the island and reflections from islanders in blogs and images. All of the published material can be commented on, interacted with and will be the catalyst for deeper ongoing conversation. As the conversation deepens, community member insights will be selected by the editorial staff and by community editors as lead stories themselves. Our strategy is to focus the conversation, then draw from the community. Through it we will have a fresh, monthly issue to shape the discussion and continuous community involvement to draw on for live, meaningful content.

There’s so much more to the way The Vineyard Voice works to pull content together and present it in a clear and well designed format. We’ll also help people market their things and services and build organic groups. It all is very exciting.

The Vineyard Voice hopes to help islanders take a step toward true people-created insight by lowering the threshold of participation, so that each of us can more easily engage in to a rich exchange of issues and ideas — a rich, meaningful conversation.

We in Fort Myers have had some big successes and thundering failures with networked journalism, and we’d like to both share and learn as a part of this group.

We can talk about two major successes. First, we here locallyk had a $100 million-plus Halliburton contract for city services that was laced with corruption, graft and negligence. Through a bold use of crowdsourcing, major changes have been forced, officials have resigned and local homeowners have gotten thousands of dollars back in their pockets. Citizens truly drove the investigation and affected results. Second, we have Team Watchdog, our latest experiment in “semi-pro” journalsim that brings 20 retired experts (FBI agent, judge, CPA, engineer, DOD intelligence officer, etc.) into our reporting ranks to joing our “pro” staff in holding government accountable.

In both of these cases, and in many others we have experimented with, we learned many lessons on what NOT to do, what doesn’t work, etc. We want to share those as well.

Finally, I’d say that we ought to be at the table for one overriding reason: We have the latitude and fortitude to try stuff. Our publisher is behind all the networked journalism experimentation we can come up with. So if we have the chance to listen and learn to all the other smart people you’ll have there, we have the luxury of knowing we can execute any good idea we hear about pretty much on a dime. And we think putting any idea into the field for testint has enormous up-side.

Anyway, please consider us. We’ll look forward to how you fill the group out.

Mackenzie Warren
Managing editor/Information distribution
The News-Press | http://www.news-press.com
Fort Myers, Fla.

I have a friend who is a Geologist and I keep telling him to start a blog, because the day we have an earthquake he should have authority over anyone who is just blogging - my heart goes out…..

Congrats again
Cheers
Robert Duncan

A tool we have been working with that is completely under the radar imo is Campsite from http://www.campware.org. It is an open source CMS that allows not only for distributed content but basically a complete architecture to setup a distributed authored news site. There are a whole bunch of features but imo when you get to have a conversation about the paradigm shift in journalism it is nice to give some examples of where the open source development community (in this case the international community) is helping with technology.

Keep up the great work!

I think that an example of networked journalism that is showing promise is the Nuts & Bolts (http://marketplace.publicradio.org/features/nutsandbolts/) series about entrepreneurship on American Public Media’s Marketplace Morning Report. Through the hard work of Public Insight Analysts (http://americanpublicmedia.publicradio.org/publicinsightjournalism/) like Joellen Easton (http://marketplace.publicradio.org/about/cast_crew/easton.html), Marketplace has turned listeners into sources. So far, the series has featured some interesting stories about small business owning listeners who found themselves as bosses, failures, and those who are too successful to know what to do next. It is a series that is about, for, and — in a way — by the listeners.

I’m working on a startup that’s tangentially connected to networked journalism - ‘networked punditry’ might be a more accurate description. Once we complete development and testing, however, I think our platform could be useful within the news arena.

When covering topics where there is a high degree of interest from the public and a large number of potential contributors, and a high level of disagreement regarding the essential facts of the story and the best way to present them, there needs to be a way to aggregate the community’s opinions. That’s where we fit in. You can follow our progress on our blog at http://www.mixedink.com/blog.

In the mean time, I look forward to hearing more about (and maybe even participating in) this exciting project.