Engage Your Audience, Your Employees and Your Customers for Free The Ben Franklin Project, announced in April by Chief Executive Officer John Paton, challenged the legacy newsgathering process and proprietary computer system model – while focusing on the company’s Digital First model. The websites and newspapers involved in the project were produced – from story assignment and advertising design through publication – utilizing free tools that are commonly available online. The employees were given 30 days to meet that challenge and they succeeded. Recently, all 18 of the company's dailies published their print editions and websites using only free tools available from the Internet.
"The Ben Franklin Project," Cooper said, "was conceived to rethink not only how we gather news but how we can free our industry from proprietary systems and software that stress our limited IT resources and drain our capital budgets. This program will provide the immediate steps you can take in your organization to begin this change as Journal Register conceived and tested this on a 30-day deadline. This can be done – in part or wholesale – on your schedule, using the systems you have, with no additional staff or expense." As part of this project, The News-Herald in Lake County, Ohio, and the Perkasie News-Herald in Perkasie, Pa., solicited story ideas and contributions through social media tools including Facebook and Twitter. Residents of Lake County shared their views on the county’s most dangerous roadway intersections and the newsroom staff compared those submissions with data from police reports. The audience, using Journal Register Company’s community portal partner SeeClickFix, also reported blighted properties – ranging from fields in need of mowing to a house that has been under construction for 10 years – that were included in newsroom reports. Residents in Perkasie submitted questions for local officials as part of reports on the local pay-as-you-throw trash system and the community’s electric supplier contract.
“This is a groundbreaking experiment for our company and our industry,” Paton said. “We have taught ourselves the power of open source journalism by involving our communities and we have showed the industry a way to a much more effective business model by bypassing costly legacy media proprietary systems and harnessing the power of the Web.” The Ben Franklin Project extended beyond crowdsourced journalism as advertising designers used free, web-based tools to design online and print advertisements and copy editors and designers utilized a free, online desktop publishing system. The tools used in the Ben Franklin Project included many submitted from project observers from across the U.S. and Canada, as well as Europe. “The Ben Franklin Project is not over," said Cooper. "Journal Register will continue to apply the lessons learned through open source reporting as part of our commitment to quality local journalism. The Company’s Digital First model provides ever-growing opportunities for community collaboration. In the spirit of the Ben Franklin Project, the company will continue to update the Ben Franklin project blog to provide a resource for the industry and allow others to experiment.” The SNPA Workshop for Smaller Newspapers – known for its emphasis on practical information and robust idea-sharing – begins at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 15, with a program on “The Role and the Future of Community Newspapers,” led by Port Charlotte (Fla.) Sun publisher David Dunn-Rankin. It concludes at noon on Friday, Sept. 17, with a segment led by industry consultant Mike Blinder called “What I Would Do on Monday if I Were Your Sales Manager.” It features idea-sharing/problem-sharing sessions that have been traditional highlights of this workshop. Other program topics include:
Space also is available at the meeting for six companies to demonstrate their innovative products and services. Participants who register before Aug. 24 will save $100. |
