“With the anticipated transition of the operation and maintenance of the city’s parks taking place on December 31^st, we want to make sure that we have complete information on any group that periodically uses a city parks facility for any type of function,” said Mayor Byron W. Brown. “We have information from Erie County on the usage of parks facilities, but we just want to be certain that everyone is accounted for prior to the transfer of the parks back to the city.”

To provide this information, it is requested that these groups coordinate with their appropriate designated point of contact to relay necessary information to Mayor Brown’s Call & Resolution Center at 311. Operators will be available to process your information from Monday, November 23 through Friday, December 4, 2009.

The panel included:

• Jim Willse (Star-Ledger)
• Jim Schachter (NY Times)
• Jennifer Carroll (Gannett)
• Goli Sheikholeslami (Washington Post)
• Jim Brady (Politico)
• John Paton (ImpreMedia)

The small problem I had with the panel was that the fine folks above already get it. It would of been great to talk to Margaret Sullivan from the Buffalo News,  Jeff Woodard from WGRZ, or Joseph Schlaerth from WIVB. Regardless, I opened my yap anyways because it was a great opportunity to discuss some of the problems we face with mainstream media in smaller markets and how we can better engage editors and decision makers who don’t see the value sites like ours have to offer them. Apparently I wasn’t alone as the topic sort of consumed the end of the discussion.

I told the story of WIVB and our “Love Knows No Boundaries Video” that appeared as seen below on WIVB.com.

What’s wrong with this you may ask? Well, instead of embedding our youtube video which is what normal people do, Channel 4 had the balls to screen capture our youtube page and throw a 15 second video ad in front of our content. After we quitely bitched about it to them privately, they added a link to the Youtube video at the bottom of the page, but to this day has still not updated the page to include a proper embedding of the video.

Because it was a video we did for a fundraiser and not for our self promotion, we never made a big public deal about it.  (AND I AM STILL NOT!!!) But it serves as a great example of how small and medium sized media outlets tend to treat us bloggers and CJ’s as “bad step children” instead of realizing that they need us as much as we need them.

As Jarvis commented:

But importantly, I did see a shift in the balance of power yesterday. The big media guys on this reverse panel made it crystal clear that they not only respect but need the work of the bloggers/citizens/little-media-guys/whatever you choose to call them. The big guys acknowledged openly that they are shrinking and can no longer even pretend that they can do it all themselves.

For their part, the bloggers also made it clear that they respect and thus want attention – promotion and credit – from the big guys.

Group hug.

If the big guys from the Washington Post, New York Times, Politico and Gannett realize it, why can’t the smaller market gatekeepers realize it as well?

Maybe its because, as one of the previous panelists said:

“The editor may be a generation away from irrelevance.”

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis and everyone from CUNY for doing this and hopefully we can continue to share best practices and other success stories on a continueous basis. What a great, refreshing informative and  invigorating day!

Over the next few weeks we will be adding some great tools into the WNY community to make it easuer for you to get involved in your communities.

A tool we added back to the front page of our site after a few month hiatus is SeeClickFix. It’s easy:

• SeeClickFix encourages residents to become citizens by participating in taking care of and improving their neighborhoods. We allow anyone to:
• See – see a non-emergency issue in your neighborhood
• Click – open a ticket describing the issue and what can be done to resolve it
• Fix – publicly report the issue to everyone for resolution

Zones have already been built to notify public officials about problems that are posted on the interactive map, and over the next few days, the entire WNY community and all local municipalities will be tied into this innovative way to alert our public officials about non emergency, quality of life issues that need to be fixed around WNY.

Even better, SeeClickFix is now in Iphone app form, making it even easier for us iphoners to record problems in our neighborhoods:

Give it a try, embed the map on your site,  let’s all do our part to Make WNY an even better place to live, work and raise our families.

I have to say I’m very excited about this.

Since 2004, WNYMedia has grown tremendously in terms of regular visitors, reader interaction, and community acceptance, but as far as the financial side goes, yeah, not so much.

It doesn’t make sense right? How can a group of people who have 10-12k customers coming through its wide open doors everyday, not make enough money to sustain a business?

As pathetic as that sounds, we are not alone. Citizen journalism and other hyperlocal sites have popped up all around country and all  have the same systematic problem, “how do you fund journalism in a digital world”?

Since our inception many sites, newspapers (they are actually making a podcast comeback!!) and magazines have already come and gone right before our eyes and yet we are all still here. There is definitely something to be said that these 86 (that’s how many registered authors we have as of today) people are here everyday posting videos, writing stories, pissing people off and generally contributing to important discussions about our community.

Over the years, we have greatly limited our growth and potential as a news website many times over by taking on video and other social media projects to pay the bills.  It’s been profitable and has kept the lights on, but it has greatly limited the time that we can focus solely on what we want to the most, covering important news and information for the Western New York Community.

Most people agree that advertising revenue will not sustain a new model for journalism alone. There are  a ton of beta projects and experiments around trying to see what will work and what will not when it comes to funding local news in the future.

Whatever happens down the road, it’s clear that there will be a new ecosystem to fund journalism. It will be on a much smaller scale than past models like the Buffalo News or one of the local TV stations. It will probably look like a lot of things to a lot of people and include a balanced combination of  non-profit status, networks of sites, content collaboration, advertising, donations, community funded journalism, and probably some other aspects of business that we haven’t even realized yet.

How about government subsidized media? That’s right.

John Nichols of  “The Nation” spoke back in September about the future of Journalism on a panel discussion about that very topic.

I don’t really agree with what John said. First, his notion that digital is just a platform is grossly underestimated. It’s a platform like no other we have ever seen with endless potential.

Second, his comparison to pre-civil war newspapers being government funded probably worked back in the early to mid 1800’s, but in today’s tea bagging world of less government and state’s on the verge of bankruptcy, no one wants to fund anything with taxpayer money and I can’t see it happening.

Another model I am hoping to learn more about and one we are thinking about beta testing here is community funded journalism.  A great project called Spot.us is experimenting with this model out west. It is currently being tested in bigger metropolitan cities like San Fransisco and L.A. and has yet to be tried (to my knowledge) in smaller market cities like Buffalo.

The idea is journalists pitch a story, the community funds it and once you reach your pledge limit, the story is green lit to be completed in a certain amount of time.  What if that model was expanded to include not just investigative journalism pieces but everyday news stories, streaming events, meetings, etc… Could something like this work in a small, poverty stricken city like Buffalo?  I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts…

I can go on for days about this subject, and who knows maybe I’ll write more about it in the future, but if your interested in learning what we learn on Wednesday at CUNY, I’ll be tweeting and such I am sure. I’m told:

We’re expecting a great mix of people - hyperlocal bloggers, website owners, entrepreneurs, journalists, investors, publishers, technologists, media executives and more. We look forward to sharing experiences and best practices as we explore new business models for journalism. Most of the day’s events will be livestreamed and we’ll use the hashtag #newbiz.

It should make for an interesting day indeed.

You can have 1500 posts about political corruption, a lousy county sheriff, healthcare reform, sports, poverty, whatever… and a video of a women singing about siting on a toilet will trump ‘em every time.

It is kinda catchy though…

Remember the day after primary day? Collins staff used the official @eriecountyexec twitter account to electioneer on behalf of his handpicked candidates.  The tweets were taken down about as fast as we called him out on it and since then it has only been used for “official county business”.

A few weeks ago Erie County launched a new and improved website. On Collins’ page, he links to his “social media” profiles including twitter, youtube and facebook.

If it weren’t for the content on some of these profiles, there would be nothing wrong with it. But his youtube account , titled “collins4ourfuture” is the same name of the County Executives official campaign account and includes three videos paid for by that campaign and his political speech and appearence at last years Republican National Convention.

The facebook account is a bit suspicious since it is not a “fan page” or something that is publicly available to all. You have to be handpicked (See picture) to be included as a “friend” of the county executive.

I don’t think we’ll be added as a “friend” anytime soon, since most of his staff has already “de-friended” me over the past few months, but if any of you are fortunate enough to be in this exclusive facebook club, maybe you can tell us what kind of content is being shared with the taxpayers of Erie County on our dime?

There is nothing wrong with the County Executive’s office or any public official using social media tools to inform the public about “taxpayer funded business”, but this is not the way.

This is nothing but using a taxpayer funded website as a campaign tool by soon to be “career politican” Chris Collins and should be taken down immediately.

strange voting experience I just had. In a community room with people talking about props and candidates. New system seems to lose privacy

Apparently I wasn’t alone as Facebook, twitter and my mailbox was filled with concern s about the new process of casting your vote.

With the old voting machines, the process was easy and extremely private.  Once you walked into that voting booth, no one was talking  about who and what to vote for. And most important, no one could see who you voted for.

While it would be nice to have some sort of printout that ensures votes went to the right candidates, the problems I saw weren’t so much about the technology, but of the complete and utter lack of privacy that came with casting your vote. I sat down at a table with three people and I felt like I was in high school again, cheating off of my neighbor’s scan-tron sheet. The conversations in the room between spouses, neighbors, and poll workers could have a serious effect on how people vote and needs to be addressed.

I personally don’t care who sees my votes, after all, I’m pretty open about my endorsements and support for candidates I believe in.  But I can see how some people, especially older voters could be turned off by the notion that other people can see who and what they voted for.

I spoke with Republican Board of  Elections Commissioner Ralph Mohr about some of the problems they faced yesterday and what is going to be done to ensure that your privacy and confidentiality will be secure: