-- the post office was the first Internet. 90 percent of delivery was newspapers and 10 percent was mail. Debate was over cost -- major debate. Some founding fathers favored free, others like Madison said at cost. Debate about information. Compromise was second class subsidized so that the people could be informed. Postal system was theargest employer in the government.

Lots of newspapers -- 25 Spanish language papers in New Orleans, 30 black newspapers in the north. If you could publish, you could get the government to delivery.

Then came the telegraph. Who owns? Privately owned was the decision. Morse wanted to sell his patents to the government. Small companies were bought up by Western Union. Then they made a deal with The Associated Press for reduced rates. Never to criticize the company was the deal with member newspapers.

Last half of 19th century, AP became the source of news.

Then radio came in early 1900s - thousands of people bought transmitters and began transmitting.

Legacy went to government Radio Act of 1929 and radio communications act. Networks got frequencies. 1949 supco ruled NBC to divest, that became ABC.

Tv was an extending of radio. But cable came along and strung wire intowns and cities. Wo companies -- time Warner and comcast control access to most homes in the country.

Telecommunication s act of 1996.

Then came the Internet, which merged allprevojs systems. Decisions made today in congress.

How do citizens remain in touch - centralized or not. If you don't understand that, you will be a victim of that.

All Americans dissatisfied, but people of color are furious.

History of black press, Latino, Asian American and native American press.

Novice IdAD, editor of la chronica, in Texas. Wrote about Mexican community in Texas. First latina to run a major newspaper in the US.

60s and 70s were the period of the integration of the media. Lots of names you know of color got a chance. And in an environment of lawsuits many orgs like NAHJ got their chance.

Daily News case settled in 80s. Bob Herbert got a job as columnist.

Raise these stories so they don't get forgotten.

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General Panel discussion

NYU Local Young Media Weekend

Panel of six people in New York media. Following is each panelists and highlights of their remarks:

Joe Coscarelli @joecoscarelli assistant editor at New York Magazine’s Daily Intel.

How does social operate in your day job? when you are coming from where I come from, political reporting, about speed and very fast. Shift to twitter was fast and organic. 2009, drained the life out of the bloogs been running in the course of a year. Felt the energy shift, the beast had gone away and had to go to Twitter, where it was. Different social media, in verticalized news space, Twitter is central conversation. Totally central to reporting, consume information and make sure get

Difference between me and the other folks, they are bosses, and I'm an underling. Twitter is invaluable to me. Look at it always, get ideas and news. I never enter a site through the fromt. I'm only brought sideways. Good ways to define your character. Crucisal to be likable. Lot that can write and report. Help to be a smart person. Refraining from writing things. 

TRAFFIC -- Chartbeat is the best and the worst part of the day. You would be ridiculous not to acknowledge where stuff is coming from. It is impossible to chase those things in any more than an abstract sense. To try and make one story based on something like that is not going to happen. Write something that you are sure is going to hit, not going to happen. Blogger, high in one minute, then feel bad. You are not your traffic.

I'm forced to wrte thousands and thousands of word a day. Gets you better. Now, mix, work in a communication. worked at smaller blogs, don' have the luxury and you are forced to churn, churn. Take the time to work on stuff actually care about.

Staff job is very hard. I took a staff job making slide shows. I was able to quit that because I had cobbled together enough freelance, $20 per post things, celebrity link roundup. Eventually your name is out there until you get a staff job. 

Amy O’Leary @amyoleary reporter for the New York Times

Native part of how I communicate. Completely stripped out any opinion. Web editor on the site for entry level production. if there are problems, lot of opinions of hot button issues can be an issue. So ingrained in how we work at the times. Now a place to source stories and check in and less to participate.

TRAFFIC -- integrating news desk, to design the mix on the home page every day. CHart beat is not the judge and jury but the court of appeals. Go back to the metrics to double-check.

I free lanced for three years. Helpful to have a marquis name, internship at This Amercian Life. Freelancing keep my hand in the game for the right staff job to come around. I am not cut to write 10 blogs a day. Did consulting work for CEOs, kept my hand in the game. 

I'm glad we are out multimedia bubble in 2010. Time when I would go to narrative journalism conference. Journalists would tug at me sleeves, amy save me, teach me how to do a podcast. we have progressed to the point where have now developed a more sophisticated decisions at when we make the investments. When earthquake and tsunami hit japan. before and after images. for a year before that. compare two images. Had this template lying around the newsroom. Put together a feature, that was truly a blockbuster for us. Copycatted by news ors around the world. Slide the cursor back and forth to see how phenomenal at the damage. Not to do tons of live video, or documentary that are time consuming and don't perform that well.

Ben Smith @buzzfeedben editor in chief of Buzzfeed.

Favors speed and accuracy and judgement. The easiest way is to break news to get RTs. There is a huge political conversation.

TRAFFIC -- my first job was summer intern at Jewish Forward. WHen they were asked they said, two jews and the rig two jews.

It's changing, huge shift from search to social. Google is not our top or second driver, increasingly for news org. People are searching for things they are looking for. they share things that are new to them. Don't necessarily share a breaking news story. certain set of tricks to get traffic. Miseleanind headlines, SEO tricks. Nobody is going to share those, because they feel like they have been tricked.

The value of original content is reported. That is shifting. 

Text is more efficient way of communicating words than a camera. People like to share pictures and print, largely because they are at work. Makes it hard to share video. There is a lot of video that is not great. Tons of resources into putting video that nobody watches. 

Elizabeth Spiers @espiers editor of The New York Observer.

I didn't fully appreciate until I got this job. Only 10 percent of time, agency people, project management. In and out of meetings, this is how normal people. You all are consuming exponentially more information that I do. I used to look at everything in RSS, I would click refresh all day. I'm not in front of my computer enough to do that. If something is breaking or happening, I'm going to look at it on Twitter. Rare when I get 20 minutes to look at something. There are ways to use it to promote stories, enhance your personal brand. Has replaced RSS readers for most peopel

Traffic -- look at data and assemble entail. You have to listen, can't let that dictate everything. No easy answer, always a gray area. There is almost a dopamine high when get something as small as a RT. They almost get the same dopamine high as publishing an entire book. Want people to react to your stories. Sometimes it get completely taken out.

12 posts a day, seven times a week. High volume blogger at a time. Nick would do 10 posts a day. High volume blogging, first time experience professional burnout. Blogging seven days a week. Getting up on Saturday or Sunday and write.  Things cut back to five days a week, when weekend traffic didn't matter. Nobody is going to die if Gwaker doesn't post for five hours. At observer, minimum of four posts a day, to me it seems insanely low. If you are breaking news, counts for more. Synthesis piece worth more. All posts are not created equal, it's the quality of the content.

On thing that is underrated, synthesis piece, explainers, Slate does fantastic. THere is an art form to really good aggregation, smart aggregation. Want to get the important facts and a smart take on it.

Keep a eye on the contract. Had an insanely high word rate on the contract. Non-competeed out of writing for almost anyone else. 16 columnist for a place that didn't have room for 16. Freelance career, pay really close attention. Non competes can kill you.

Multimedia is long term the Observers growth strategy. We make the most money off our print publication. Real estate trade, commercial observer, brings in 2m in revenue, costs a quarter of a million to produce. Makes money mostly on print.

Digital is imminently scalable. Do a web site no ceiling on readership. for print how many copies are we printing an delivering. We do well in print. if we don't scale digitally, I don't know where we will be in 15 years. Hired their first pure digital sales person about the time I came in. Wasn't a priorty. if we are going to grow, you can't ignore it. I came in and saw that and almost panicked. Where does this put us in five or 10 years.

You can't skim a video. They want to put bumper ads before or after video. I was running Deal Breaker, 92 percent male, median age 26. Weirdly I do well with that kind of crowd. MSFT came to us, don't care about the content, we want to put this with video. I'm was being a little subversive. Can't put someone in front of  a green screen. Want to be able to hunt for it. 

Jake Dobkin @jakedobkin publisher and co-founder of Gothamist.

Give you some advice: Never talk about yourself if you can avoid it, sounds egotistical, don't talk about work, everyone you insult you will have to work with someone in the future. Never complain and never explain. More substantial, find someplace else for it. Be mean, don't. 

Traffic -- Need to get ads out, perishable inventory. Look at chartbeat and other analytics. You can create a writers who only care about chartbeat. want to get traffic and pay attention, give writers the chance to get creative and interesting things.

Been doing gothmist for 10 years. The trick is to be interested in what you are doing. as long as you have that passion, you won't burn out. Pacing, used to require 10 posts a day, because Gawker was requiring that. Then a year ago, went down to 8 posts a day. Requiring everyone to do the same amount is counterproductive. for everyone past a certain point there were diminishing returns. I did scatter plots. Suspended the guidelines. At or above the median for the month.

Aggregation is an important part of strategy. I read almost everything that Buzzfeed shares. Etan story on Friday probably the most trafficked story of Friday. Aggregation, staying on top of what is going on, is important. A great aggregator is an art form, like haiku. Someone who is bad at it, is pathetic. 

Dana Goldstein @danagoldstein contributor to The Nation, Slate, and The Daily Beast

Don't every say anything bad on Twitter. I was an early adopter of Twitter, during the primaries last presidential election. Over the course, Twitter came an important. I'm an opinion writer, not a concern to keep a objective stance on my account. People first exposed to my work on Twitter, may come to blog, or other place where I write.

For me, five posts a day not too much. Demo primary and general election, part of three people. I went to party conventions, on the ground in Iowa. Was so exhausted I was physically ill. SO grateful o have the opportunity to cover it. In awe of the folks who go out eveyr four years. The passion was the policy not the day-to-day. I do about three posts a week on person blog. In addition to colums and long reported features. I need to have menu of different lengths and deadlines working for. Responding to breaking news with five to seven post. It is a good thing to try that, it can accelerate you faster than anything. First two jobs will look a lot like that. 

Policy writer, that can help me apply to some grants that support what I do.  I miss having colleagues and i miss going to an office every day. Chit chat about the weather, don't know how much you miss it. I didn't expect in my 20s to have this amount of flexibility. I have established relations with a lot of place and I have to mak a lot of phone calls to get paid.

Recently, two editors got ahold of me, they were brainstorming ideas. I ddi a lot of research, the better part of a workweek. At the end they used a tiny portion. They paid a nice per word rate, but it was a very small part of what I did for this.  Don't be afraid to advocate for yourself. Ask for money owed. Negotiate on the front end. At any phase of your career, you desire to get paid for your work.

Following is a quick overview of the data panel presenters at the Young Media Weekend, sponsored by NYULocal on Saturday, April 21, 2012 in New York.

Introduction by Zoe Schlanger @zoeschlanger

Told the history of the site, which began in 2008 as an alternative to student newspaper. Now the NYULocal has staff of 55, sells its own ads and makes a slight profit.

Andrei Scheinkman @ascheink  Interactive News Editor at The Huffington Post begins by talking about the work he did formerly at The New York Times.  The Guantanamo Docket first began as a list, then added documents.  Started about five years ago. Wikileaks was the third trove of documents, which included dossiers.

Data projects, live by themselves, trying to explore ways to have better links between stories and data projects. Links in the stories led to the database, allowed the readers to click in and dive deeper. Added static graphics to the print paper. 

Info had existed online, but didn't have a URL. Other newspapers websites started using our database and giving their readers access to the information. Power of permalinks.

Interactive database of advertising of 2008 presidential election. 

Erik Hinton @erikhinton  Interactive News Developer, NYTimes

Poll Tracker

Polls were never meant to be statistically analyzed -- never intended to be aggregated like this, and generalizations made out of it. Difficult to enter the polls, no spreadsheet. PDFs make it difficult to use the information. Have a person that enters the data.

Build software and make it easier: How do you get your employees working with the data. Spend a quarter of my time making it easier for people to work with the data. Data journalism is not just sexy data manipulating, but forms as well.

Data journalist hazing ritual -- can we graph some election results -- 2010 election results took three months of time -- artistic strategy of how to convey it interesting. Not only a programmer's job, but an editorial job and make the information true. 

Didn't do this in flash -- in browser technology -- how do you make them work, how do you make them fast. The Times does some crazy stuff to optimize their stuff. Hacking things to make them work in an unpretty way. Needed a front page image. 2 million hits, not a ton for a site like The Times, but a ton for TPM. Screen shots in browser.  

How do you test apps -- buy a subscription and ask for a refund.  Data journalism, how do you explain these things. To us, duh, red means a Republican victory, not to demean the readers but you have to do a lot of hand holder.

Al Shaw @A_S  News Applications Developer at ProPublica

Demo-ed PAC Track from ProPubica

After Citizens United Supco ruling. Rule to report what they spent within 24 hours, first time in an interval smaller than a month.

Each of the PAC supporting a candidate passively -- former campaign aides or managers running them.

NYTimes has a campaign finance API that spits out the results every time they are made.  

Apps have leads, just like stories. 

Projects. propublica.org/

Chrys Wu @MacDiva co-organizer of Hacks/Hackers NYC

Not in a newsroom, can I do this stuff anyway? HacksHackers. Twice a year, have a hackathon. Making stuff is better. 

Eyebeam Art and Tech together to do the great urban hack. 80 people came, starting Saturday and ending on Sunday.

Roach map -- bedbugs are only self-reported, no agency that checks for it. Discovered that DOH checks for roaches every single week, verifiable and is reported by local government and is checked frequently. Bought the URL. Map is autogenerated every week. Made a website that explains the project. Done in less than 48 hours. 25-30 hours. You can get the map e-mailed to you every week. Every week post this graphic.

Cloropeth map

http://googleearthdesign.blogspot.com/2009/01/geocommons-for-cloropeth-map-creation.html

Who's My Landlord in Village Voice

12 people got together at the hack. Built an initial version. Who is my landlord wiki, code is available on GitHub, a social network for coders. Try it with your address. Take a look and see who the landlord. 

Created this thing very useful, then make it even better to submit to big apps challenge. 

Data journalism includes trade publications. Chronicle for Higher Education. Recently doing data visualization.

Adults with College Degrees in the US by County

Faculty Salary Survey

Forbes, John Brunner

http://blogs.forbes.com/jonbruner/

A lot in data journalism blog about how they do their work. If you want to learn, and don't have it in a class. Googling around for this. 

Links and tutorials and links and presentations.

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Want a job, check NewsNerdJobs.com

On Feb. 14, 2012, Social Media News NY (http://facebook.com/smnny) will celebrate its eighth-month anniversary! 

SMNNY started in June 2011 as a modest collaboration between two friends. After a month, the collaboration ended -- other priorities came to play -- and I stood at one of life's crossroads, wondering if and how to go forward and just what could one person do on their own?

Then, I remembered the point of social media that I teach: It's not about me, it's about you and it's about we.

I am, and always have been, a journalist. There is no story that I can't write, no interview I can't get, no issue that I won't cover. It's arrogant, but I'm a positive thinker, an optimist and a striver. So, I opted to go it alone and to call on every single ounce of creativity, cleverness and innovation that I could to make this work.

I wanted to get a 1,000 "Likes" by September. They, my friends, are harder to get than I thought. I like to say that I work for "Likes" and I scheme to go into the subway with a poster board, jingling a cup of change and ask for Likes. 

But, Likes are not the end of the story. It's about engagement, a measure we in social media talk about but have yet to quantify and formulate. 

Social Media News NY is the focus in my professional life as a journalist, educator and an entrepreneur. It's where I walk the walk, not talk the talk. It's about taking the last 17 years of work as a digital journalist and putting it into play in the real world, with bootstraps to build a community of trust with credibility and value-added information.

I watched as the "likes" started to build, I studied Facebook's analytics pages, I counted Likes and I liked comments and I went to events, sometimes as many as five in a week, and posted photograph albums and quick videos and built a livestream library and blogged and tweeted and worked until 3 a.m. pretty much every day in addition to taking other responsibilities and pursuing opportunities.

I innovate

On Tuesday night, Feb. 14, 2012, Valentine's Day, Social Media News NY (http://facebook.com/smnny) is hosting a panel discussion on women and leadership in social media at the New York Institute of Technology (16 W. 61st Street, 11th floor), starting at 5 p.m. until 8 p.m.

The panel will feature five panelists who are New York's top emerging social media professionals:

• Amy Vernon @amyvernon, Vice President of Strategy, Hasai, Inc 
• Nora Walsh @patchworkcompass, Director of Public Relations, The Pierre, A Taj Hotel
• Gemma Craven @gemsie, Executive Vice President, New York Group Director, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence
• Laura Mignott @lmigno, Co-founder/President, DigitalFlashNYC
• Linda Bernstein @wordwhacker, Writer and Educator

These amazing individuals have been super connectors on the Social Media News NY community and have been mentors as well as friends as I have worked on creating a platform for New York's emerging community of social media professionals. I seed it with my journalism, my video, my reporting, my gut feeling for reporting, leveraging technology and new tools to expand beyond the reach of an 18-hour day and I look forward to their comments and insights.

On Tuesday, we take a new step forward in the creation of the journalism of tomorrow, today, by convening this panel: "She Shall Lead: Helping Women Take a Leadership Role in Social Media." http://socialmediaweek.org/event/?event_id=1858

I'm not sure, but I don't think there is anything like this on the Social Media Week agenda. In December, I went to the Social Media Week board meeting and heard a presentation by Facebook about their hacking process, which is how they have formalized creativity and marketing in their organization.

The SMW board meeting took the attendees through a process, a workshop, for hacking and challenged us to be inspired for Social Media Week. I spoke with Michelle Welsch of Crowdcentric, the organization that organizes SMW and was encouraged.

Then, I went back to the Social Media New NY community and asked. Who I asked was easy to decide, the wise leaders of the community are these amazing women you see here at the panel.

In looking at the statistics for SMNNY, I have found that this community is 60 percent women and that knowledge, and my presence covering events have shown me this: Women are underrepresented as leaders in social media. They are a majority of users on most platforms yet we see panels and panels that are mostly men and that doesn't represent the truth of social media, and it makes me mad.

So, I designed this panel and this unique experience where the attendees, virtual and IRL, will have a chance to collaborate and at the end, we will share some action points for women to consider as they make 2012 the year where women step into a rightful place as social media leaders.

This is an ambitious project. We are grateful for the support of the New York Institute of Technology, which has generously allowed us to use their space and has given us their support to make the in-person experience.

And, we are delighted to be partnering with Watchitoo, an early-stage New York company that enables rich virtual conversations to happen. They are providing us the help we need to connect IRL and the virtual for a rich and interactive experience that I feel will be unique, and will offer a model for the future as we combine the rapidly evolving world of social media and in-person events to ignite new collaborations and change in society. 

I am very proud to be part of this and now turn to you, the folks here and at the other end of a monitor to say, let's get this thing started.

Nora Walsh, PR director for the Pierre, will be speaking at "She Shall
Lead: Helping Women Take a Leadership Role in Social Media" panel
discussion organized by Mo Krochmal and Social Media News NY
(http://facebook.com/smnny) on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2012 at New York
Institute of Technology auditorium (16 W. 61st Street, 11th Floor)

I started using Storify in October of 2011 and have recorded some 114 curations since then. I wonder if anyone else is that prolific on the service?

I asked on Twitter but didn't receive a response by the time I had posted, so I will add later, if I get one.

I was a very early adopter of the Storify tool and service, hearing about it at the Online News Association Conference of 2010. 

In 2011, I used the tool to create over 100 stories. I try to budget my time in 2-hour increments for Storifications -- sometimes I get done quicker and sometimes I don't, but you can pretty much say that I spent at least 200 hours in 2011 on Storify. In that time, my most read article was 870 views, and the least read had six views. In total, I generated 12,593 views from my Storify efforts.

Spending 200 hours on Storify hardly qualifies me as an expert, but I've gotten very familiar with the platform and believe that it is a tool that belongs in a journalist's tool kit and should be included in a higher education journalism curriculum.

The best thing about Storify, I believe, is that it allows you to really document the state of now around any social-media happening and to do it in a multimedia fashion. The search tools are top shelf and it compells an editor's steady hand at judgement, and it is easy to do. In fact, it is so easy to do that one can get carried away and share everything. But, that's not the point of Storify. The point is to use your editorial powers to pick the best.

My standards for editing a Storify curation are: truth, attribution, links. I click off RT's when I search, looking for the original providers of a shared nugget. I also edit in reverse chronological order, going to the bottom of a search and working backwards. The published version starts with the oldest first, moving to the newest.

I concentrate on events, such as conferences or meetups. Hugely popular events require that I edit with a heavier hand, and I often use the conference agenda to help me cover each session or panel with at least one tweet. Storify works best with Twitter as that is the source of the freshest real-time information.

About Storify

Storify is a storytelling platform that makes it easy to collect social-media sharing and curate it into easy-to-read form and rapidly share it.

The San Francisco-based service launched in September, 2010, co-founded by Xavier Danman and former AP journalist Burt Herman, with a superb team of engineers including Connor Petzold, Kyle Buza, Adrian Bravo, Vincent Battaglia plus Jeff Elder, marketing director.

You can read more about Storify in this Dec. 30, 2011 Poynter Institute post by Jeff Sonderman
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/157639/three-trends-from-2011-that-will-reshape-digital-news-in-2012/  

How I Use It

I use Storify to create reference materials for conferences that I may not be able to attend as well as maintain a weekly look at the sharing surrounding #SocialTV. In 2011, I curated a Storify article each week on what people were talking about in SocialTV. This helped me engage and identify some of the thought leaders in this emerging field. The first editions were highly read, but the numbers seemed to dwindle as the year went on. 

But, Storify is not just about getting page views. It is a great tool for connecting with others around a subject and for adding new followers and fans.

When you complete a Storify, you can send a tweet out to promote the article, as well as tweets to let those you have quoted know that they have been quoted. The Storify tool adds a link, but it also lets you edit that link. So, I use it to point to Social Media News NY with the hopes of attracting more fans and followers to the page.

While there are others out there who have created Storify posts that attract thousands of views, I'm happiest using the tool to share knowledge on an event that may not be covered in this fashion and as a reference for later. My favorite Storify for 2011 is coverage of the Virtual Edge summit in Las Vegas in January. The information shared was of such high value that I was inspired to do further curation and share that alongside of quoted tweets and status updates.

Events and Storify work well together in creating community. Events should encourage people to share on their social networks, and then have someone curate the information using the Storify tool to honor the sharing and to create educational content that will feed community. This is something that can be done after the conference.

However, due to Twitter API limitations, and depending on the volume of sharing coming from an event, you should do the curation rather quickly, or you will end up reaching the chronological limits.

I try to add shared images, Facebook updates, and YouTube videos for some posts, but have noticed that real-time video sharing from conferences is a real opportunity for enhancing an event and providing unique content. I call this "video quotes" and you can click over to my YouTube channel (http://youtube.com/mmkrochmal) to see these.

Mo Krochmal Storify Scoreboard for 2011

@storify = 100 curations for 12,593 views

1. 1. Gamification Summit 2011, Jan. 20, 2011
   870 views, 43 quotes
   
2. 2. #TVGoesSocial Summit June 23, 2011 #SocialTV
   520 views, 90 quotes
   
3. 3. Social TV Headlines June 12, 2011
   455 views, 9 quotes
   

20 Storify curations with #socialTV for 1,600 views

12,593 views

• 5 articles in single digits for views
• 79 in double digits for views
• 28 in triple digits for views

Hanging my Head

Friday Afternoon #AEJMC Roundup (Aug. 12, 2011)
6 views, 55 people quoted

Most useful article

Distance Curation of Virtual Edge Summit (Las Vegas) 01/11
141 views, 61 quotes

Blog post with additional information

http://krochmal.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/are-virtual-events-the-next-big-thing-for-brands-virtual-events-hub/

Reflection

Social-media tools hit the web every day and I try my best to keep on top of what's new and what's good. My approach is two-fold -- I find and test constantly, but I also think about what I want to do and collect and create by searching for tools that will let me create a solution. Sometimes, it is a one-time tool, other times it is a dashboard. I try to share my knowledge broadly.

For 2012, I would like Storify to have been analytics tools, specifically around how Storify posts are shared. Doing this analysis was really painful. Storify has added individual analytics for each post and you can view mine on my profile page --

What is hard to measure is the ripples that a Storify creation makes -- is it shared with others' networks and how many tweets are sent back to the author after a new one is published.

Additionally, there should be a social element in a Storify build, one that lets people comment and engage.

Will I use it as much this year? I don't know. I have a regular schedule for using Storify and that's on Sunday afternoons, when I turn to the SocialTV conversation and create a weekly report. Over the last month, I stopped including top stories in my treatment and launched a separate report, using Delicious Decks to create a log of top stories for TV news. My first storify included both and had over 500 views. But, I think that is the novelty of the field and the product.

Some of the Storify collections I do are purely a learning experience -- I check out conferences that I would like to attend, but can't, and I dive deep to learn.

For me, Storify is an educational tool, and one that allows me to share my learning and interests with others.

I will definitely continue to curate SocialTV sharing on a weekly basis and select conferences where I can add value. Additionally, I am offering Storify services around live events, a valuable tool for creating a community that continues well after a event's final keynote.

I hope you will join me.

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Iphone video of dramatic scene from "Tin Cup." Grab the 3 wood. Grip it, and rip it!

---

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult -- Seneca 

Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are the products of editing, rather than authorship -- George Wald, Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 1975

***

Last week, I decided to devote the final days of 2011 to think and to do as much as possible for my baby, Social Media News NY.

Basically, I'ma single dad, trying to raise up this beautifully rambunctious daughter who is learning how to connect to world, and honor others and be a gainful and responsible member of society.

Social Media News NY began as a partnership in the late spring, but circumstances changed and it became a singular operation and the focus of my professional life and the highlight of a year focused on social media and innovative and entrepreneurial journalism.

This last week of 2011, I made it my mission to share my deep enthusiasm and passion, learn as much as I can, reflect, connect and discover in a journey that will culminate on New Year's Eve as my virtual #hackathon will close.

Although I am well connected to social networks, this has a personal journey, perched in front a computer only going out for a couple of meetings and food.

Background

One of the most meaningful experiences in my life was the three years that I was a professor of digital journalism, a singular honor and an incredible opportunity.

I left that path in 2010, unsure of the future in an economy in shambles.

As 2011 comes to an end, I know a few things about me: I am a journalist and I'm an educator.Those two words describe my core ethics and values. I honor the truth, seek to share it and to help my fellow human beings to be the very best that they want to be and can be.

Social Media News NY is unlike any other journalism enterprise out there. It is a work in progress and likely will never reach a point where it is staid.

Each day, each week, each month is uncharted territory and I'm sailing with only my internal compass as a guide.

My formative experience as a journalist was working in small community newspapers in North Carolina, covering sports. Sports journalism, to me, is a window onto the human condition. Sports is a lucrative business, but also a reflection of some of humanity's best -- and worst -- traits. I am not a fan. A journalist shouldn't be, but I admire the Yankees as an organization, as well as the NY Giants and the Dallas Cowboys and the Mavericks and San Diego. I love a great play or a moment when an athlete shows us what the body and mind together can do.

As a sports journalist, I looked for the friction, the drama, to quickly create a narrative. When the game is done, and the fans are leaving, the sports journalist's job is to poke and prod, analyze and share a little window into a game that is evanescent and disappears into the fog of time all too quickly. I've covered literally hundreds of football games, countless basketball games as well as every other athletic endeavor.

About 10 years into my career, I felt that computers were really changing the way I was working and I could see the future. So, I gave up my job and went after a master's degree at Columbia University, moving from Washington, NC, to New York City, leaving a job of responsibility and honor for a great unknown. Gave up owning a house, and cars to follow a winding path that leads here, to the end of 2011, and looking out into a yawning maw with only that inner compass pointing the way.

The realities of economic life are pressing. Can Social Media News NY be an enterprise? That is the question that I must ask, and respond as honestly as I can. I can't let my passion and vision cloud my mind. I belive that it can, and that I have to step up and "ask the ask."

Last night, I watched the 1996 film, "Tin Cup," with Kevin Costner. It's the story about a hugely talented golf professional mired in the badlands of Texas, who gets the opportunity to go on the biggest tournament in the game, the US Open. At the end, he has a choice of playing it easy, or playing it to the heart. <Spoiler Alert>He doesn't take the drop, but plays it through.

I used my iPhone to capture the moment as it played on my TV on Thursday night. I hope the owners of the movie will forgive me using a small segment of this film for educational purposes. I, like Tin Cup, am hitting on the 18th tee, shooting over water to a slippery green.

I don't go into 2012 with a blueprint, but I do have a mission and it is one about revenues. I believe in the vision of SMNNY -- it is, at first, a community around the news that I can gather and the really wise people I can find.

I can not do everything, but I can do a lot, leveraging tools, helping others shine and telling stories that others are not telling. And, my hope is that people will feel it important enough as a platform that they will share their events and analysis, on our wall, content that they host and post elsewhere. We don't want to host the content, we want to be a hub of a community and support it.

We cover New York's emerging community of social media professionals. We are business oriented, and human. We have shared many different types of content and still can not predict how something will do. We judge by shares, likes, retweets and comments and find that the 90-9-1 rule applies to this. We want to change those numbers and seek increased conversation.

We think there is a need for real-time community social journalism finding credible information, illuminating people and growing and connecting.

Popular Feature

One of the most successful features on SMNNY over the past 6 months has been photo albums from events. These have attracted likes and viewers. They are quick and easy to produce. My inner journalist hates that each and every one is not tagged with name, age and job. But, we hope that the pictures will attract people to the page and the content, and that they will tag their own and like the content and come back for the conversation. We need to get cards printed that give all the information and hand it out.

We also need a large branded silk scarf for setting easy step-and-repeats! We shoot a lot of photographs at events -- almost nightly -- and quickly share them on Facebook as an event album. Each tries to get group photos (Facebook poses), a sense of the space, the edibles offered, any information and slides that were shared. Each is story told in images. Sometimes we write individual captions, but with upwards of 100 photos that make the editor's cut, it's hard to do.

We also do "video quotes" from the audience at a panel discussion or a speech. We monitor a presentation, listening to the speech and anticipate a great quote or informative sentence or two and share that as rapidly as possible. Often it is by pulling the card out of a camera and uploading it. We would like to do that on our mobile, but it really takes battery life.

We propose to increase our mobile usage with the goal of being as close to 100 percent mobile as we can be. We don't think we will be completely mobile as a desktop is still the best way we know to produce our favorite kinds of content. We leverage tools. I was a former tech journalist for CMP Media, covering IT and the rise of the Internet and electronic commerce.There, I learned how to find and new tools. As a professor, I sat at the leading edge of the journalism tools space and selected and tested tools rapidly, then integrated them into the classroom and my journalism curriculum to rapidly teach students the basics of multimedia digital reporting in 15 weeks.

SMNNY uses Storify, Scoop.it, YouTube, Posterous, Tumblr, PicsPlz, Qik and many, many other emerging tools to curate content.

We need to take a day or two to set up management systems on our iPhone and iPad so that even out of the office, we can continue to share meaningful links. We don't link to everything and the most status updates we have posted in one day is 20 with 12 or less being the ideal. We think of our Facebook Page as the hub of our activity.

Since we are a young publication, this was a great choice to use in terms of building an audience rapidly, as we sit on 692 Page "Likes" in 6 months and 2 weeks of operations. We look forward to reaching 1,000 "Likes".

Our Channels

Krochmal's Twitter account is our news wire, even though we own @SMNNY on Twitter.

When we set up our mobile management, the goal is to enable more frequent sharing on the @smnny account. We like to be the first to find and to share. That's what we think you can count on from us. If we have shared it, we have made a quick judgement that it is fresh, that we've at least glanced at the content, and have made a quick judgement on its veracity.

We try to add some context and attribution. YouTube. Krochmal's YouTube channel is our main distribution point for videos -- as well as the Facebook Page. We plan to focus on YouTube in the New Year from a programmatic point of view and plan a refit of our channel page. We will also integrate the individual YouTube videos we share with our new Livestream.com/SMNNY presence, built on the first day of the hackathon. Here we will be posting our new video programming and monetization program.

If your organization sponsors the professional account on a service, you will be the branded sponsor. Social Media News NY brought to you by . . . We want to be able to create a full day's worth of unique content and then a week's worth of content, leveraging the material we gather as part of our reporting and sharing it in many different ways.

We have fixed costs and limited time, so that any media we get should be maximized. We need to establish an e-mail list and give that list first priority on new content, sending it out ahead of our public sharing.

We create a lot of curated content and do original multimedia reporting. In 2012, we are going to create premium content, and offer research and analysis services. You will be able to hire us to do research and reporting on a per-hour basis on a quick turnaround basis. We will offer a discount on the rate if we can offer the content, at a later date, for premium consumption. Say, we do a report on the Borough President of Manhattan's social media presence for someone. We would like to offer that for broader consumption a month later.

We would like our community to commission our reporting, giving us topics to puruse, and even giving us a stipend to pursue it. We will contribute two hours a week to this community goal with the hopes of increasing that. We would like to earn at least a roundtrip subway fare, partial overhead, and a meal out of the deal and would like to set a mechanism for easily collecting payments of $1.

We know that jobs are hugely important and we would like to be a trusted partner in connecting those that need talent. We believe that Social Media News NY should be a great economic community hub, connecting buyers and sellers. We would like to be able to assemble virtual teams for projects and earn money to pay team shares for successfully completed projects. We need a payments platform and an electronic barter and projects marketplace. We need to come up with Amazon Turk wishlists and earn revenues from building curated collections of data.

This holiday season, we have curated and collected articles published about #mocial and social media predictions for 2012. We would like to mine that information, but haven't a workflow to make that happen.

Would love to have tools that help us do that rapidly and efficiently. Imagine a world cloud from the top prediction stories for 2012 -- what would bubble to the top? I'd like to see that. We need a better website.

Our SocialMediaNewsNY.com website right now is pretty much brochureware. We have a vision for the kind of site that we want, but don't have the wherewithall to build it. Maybe we can host a weekend hackathon to create the interface. Wonder if great food and drink would convince a crew to spend a January weekend building this.

We are really proud of the progress we have made with Social Media News NY. We say "we" and we mean we. While there is a very small team of daily players -- mostly "me" -- the community can be so much larger than that and can do things together that were just not possible before. I think we can create jobs, wealth and a greater knowledge and can do journalism in new ways. We look forward to our next scoop, which will likely be our first. We haven't practiced the kind of "shine light in dark places; comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" kind of journalism that we talk to our students about.

The first six months of SMNNY have been about learning how to efficiently do social media based multimedia reporting and build community and brand. The next six months must be about creating revenues, jobs and building the complexity of our journalism. We are at the 18th tee, looking into our bags. Will we reach for the 7 iron?

We thank Carmina Perez, Marilyn Zayfert and Karen Sieminski for their contributions as we started up and we thank you all for playing a big part in this experience. There are others to thank to. We are only just beginning.

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We may add more thinking to this later in the day. It is afterall a hackathon and we still have work left to do.