, Author at Sally Duros

Learning to talk: Sally Duros joins 435 Digital

[media-credit name=”435Digital Tribune Media” align=”aligncenter” width=”668″][/media-credit]Writing a blog about learning social media is like writing a blog about learning to talk.

Learning to talk starts with the sense of hearing and the ability to actively listen. By listening to the stream of sounds coming from our environment we start to understand and say words. Over time, we learn to put these words together into complete thoughts that we call sentences. Before too long, we string the sentences together and begin to tell the story of what is happening around us and how we experience it. We meet others and share our stories. This storytelling give-and-take is a lifelong reiterative conversation that forms our identity and self definition. Our ability to engage in this conversation deeply influences our path in the world.

Your business learns social media much like a baby learns to talk. First, you listen online to understand what your name, or brand, means to your customers. The sounds you hear might be pleasant — or not. Either way, what’s certain is your customers are conveying important information. It’s your choice whether or not to understand the sounds and fully engage in this reiterative conversation.

Nobody can decide for you. It’s a straight-forward challenge that smacks at the culture of your organization and the ongoing story that is the interplay of you, your products and your customers. It’s a challenge that asks you to understand how deeply you value customer service — really. The repercussions of your choice will be felt all along your value chain of competitors, collaborators, and suppliers.

To get started in this conversation, you need to understand the tools, tactics and strategies of the evolving social media toolbox so you can choose those that work best for you. But as important as learning the tools, is learning how to talk in the world of social media.

By taking on the 435Digital blog beat, I’ve accepted the challenge of helping us better understand tools like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and the nature of the conversation that accompanies them. As important, I’ll be discussing the cultural change and relational juice that is creating a new online economy based on trust and transparency. It’s exciting to peer around the edges of what “is” to see what is possible.

As to my philosophy, I agree with Gary Vaynerchuk, who says in his book “The Thank You Economy:”

For the record, I dislike the term social media. It is a misnomer that has caused a boatload of confusion. It has led managers, marketers, CEOs and CMOS to think that they can use social networking sites to spread their message the same way they use traditional media platforms like print, radio, television. or outdoor and expect similar results and returns. But what we call social media is not media, nor is it even a platform. It is a massive cultural shift that has profoundly affected the way society uses the greatest platform ever invented: the internet. Unfortunately, when the business world is thinking about marketing via social networking sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Daily Booth, it’s thinking about using social media, so that’s the term I’ll use.

This massive cultural shift is to the Knowledge Age from the Industrial Age. And I think Gary is right, there’s no such thing as a “media buy” in social media. Your online success is determined by the culture of your business and the timbre of conversations and relationships that emerge organically from who you are and what you say and do.

The same is true for me and my work on the 435 Digital blog. As we learn together, let me know how I am doing.

p.s. I love my little Twitter bird. I keep him with me always @SaDuros.

11 Shocking New Social Media Statistics in America(convinceandconvert.com)
Publishers mastering the art of online conversation(blockbyblock.us)
Why I’ll let my daughter shape her own digital identity(gigaom.com)

Success is when risk-taking self asks sensible self “Can we still be friends?”

Ringmaster David Cohn challenged us to a carnival of #fail. What follows is my total cop out.

In life and in entrepreneurship, I don’t believe in “failure,” “failing” or “fail.” I believe instead that we make mistakes. One minute, I am absolutely right and the next I discover I am absolutely wrong.

It is at these “ooops!” moments when the outlook becomes bleak and I see my project, my ambition, my plan as a failure. My life in entrepreneurship becomes a spectacular succession of risk-taking and disappointed aspirations beginning in awkward childhood, continuing through painful adolescence, blossoming in adulthood and now coming to fullness in middle age.

This is when I have to say “Stop!” Risk-taking self asks responsible self: “Can we still be friends?”

The essence of this lesson is contained completely in Todd Rungren’s brilliant and wise song.

LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa LaLaLa

We shake hands and make up. This friendship with myself means I will see the experience as a learning not a failure. To judge a life experience as a failure is to invite a mindworm into your life, one that will swell to monstrous proportions with every inevitable misstep and block your path forward. Banish the mindworm!

This doesn’t mean I shove my less-than-successes under the rug, but it does mean that I accept them fully. Indeed, in private and with special friends, I honor my failures. This is part of entrepreneurship. It also answers my personal question: What is success?

I won’t bore you with a personal story because I believe that no matter what our material success, disappointment in ourselves is too often the human condition. And after long practice I have learned that self flagellation is the root of more disappointment. So although I might fail to change the world’s view so that it no longer condemns “failure,” I can at minimum adjust my own point of view to be friends with myself, and view my seemingly endless capacity to make monumental mistakes with compassion and acceptance.

“To err is human, to forgive divine,” said Alexander Pope. My goal is to extend this divinity of forgiveness to myself and others as much as I can day by day.

“Make no mistake, Let’s end quickly. But can we still be friends?”

The would-be entrepreneurs among us must nurture self love, because it is with passion and self confidence that we beat back the dark times and shake the feeling of being a total doofus. I know this from personal experience and from interviewing dozens of entrepreneurs about their failures and successes.

What I learned from these interviews is that the key to “failing” well is to understand when to quit. You’ve made a mistake, you’re digging a hole and it is getting deeper. Stop digging — now! Honor the work you’ve done and move on. It’s a new day and a new game.

“Fail” with grace. Be delicate with your fragile self. It’s not about being tough. It’s about being real.

“I try to live my life where I end up at a point where I have no regrets. So I try to choose the road that I have the most passion on because then you can never really blame yourself for making the wrong choices. You can always say you’re following your passion. “ Darren Aronofsky

Easy for Aronofsky to say – look at all his success. But look at all his wackiness too. His first movie, “Pi” was about Hasidic Jews, the Torah and the stock market. Sound like a blockbuster to you?

Life really is about following your passion, because life without passion is empty. But don’t kid yourself and think there is only one passion. There are many, as Silicon Valley’s Randy Komisar told me in an interview nearly a decade ago.

And one very important passion for everyone is family and friends.

“Grains of sand one by one, before you know it – all gone.”

Part of being friends with yourself is being there for your friends and family. With their welfare in mind, recheck your professional passion alignment regularly. The entrepreneurship direction that makes sense at 20 years old might not make sense at 30, 40, 50 and beyond.

To add some grist to the mill, and to fortify what might seem a specious argument, I’ve included a syllabus of sorts and some favorite teaching moments.

Yippie! Another failure!
If you are on the entrepreneurial path, I’d suggest visiting the website of my friend, Barry Moltz. Barry’s books and his website are a treasure of insights on entrepreneurship. I coached Barry through his first book and wrote the stories about start-ups in it. It’s safe to say that our work together on “You Need to be a Little Crazy,” was a humble breakthrough in discussing the reality of failure.

Kathryn Schulz is a Wrongologist, and she says:

1,200 years before Descartes said his famous thing about “I think therefore I am,” this guy, St. Augustine, sat down and wrote “Fallor ergo sum” — “I err therefore I am.” Augustine understood that our capacity to screw up, it’s not some kind of embarrassing defect in the human system, something we can eradicate or overcome. It’s totally fundamental to who we are. Because, unlike God, we don’t really know what’s going on out there. And unlike all of the other animals, we are obsessed with trying to figure it out. To me, this obsession is the source and root of all of our productivity and creativity.—Schulz from her TED talk “On being wrong” | Video on TED.com

And if you are feeling down, it’s always fun to cheer up with your friends, families and neighbors and don’t forget your online friends. I like to Twitter “You’ve gotta have heart” from the musical Damn Yankees when the Knight Foundation is pruning through its proposals and some are learning that their first volley at entrepreneurship didn’t make it. I especially like Peggy Lee’s version.

Here’s the original assignment from DigiDave.
What: A failure in your life (personal or professional) that has lessons. It must be your failure and you must take responsibility. But this will be a safe space to discuss our failings and what we can learn from them.
The Details
We talk about ‘failure’ a lot in the online journalism community. It can be a bit of a buzzword. “Let’s fail early and fail often” is a motto I personally have adopted. But the true value of failing is if we can share the lessons learned. We probably do this all the time without knowing it – but rather than try to condense our lessons into 140 characters, let’s create a safe space this month to discuss a failure that others can learn from.

The L3C from A to Z, June 6, 7 at NU’s Kellogg School, Levy Entrepreneurship Center

Americans for Community Development is hosting its first conference exploring the intricate financial and legal aspects of the L3C with true experts in the field. As Liaison for the Media Working Group for ACD, I’ll be hosting a conversation with others in the journalism field about the possibilities of an L3C newsroom. This is an everything you ever wanted to know about L3Cs, what they are and how they relate to 501(c)3s and the whole concept of social enterprise and sustainable social change.

The L3C (Low-profit Limited Liability Company) is a hot topic in the nonprofit sector that up until now has only received minimal attention at all the nonprofit conferences and meetings. It may change the way socially beneficial services are delivered. It may represent a whole new paradigm in private public partnerships. And it may finally bring substantial amounts of market rate investment dollars into the social sector.

Americans for Community Development and The Levy Entrepreneurship Center of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University have partnered along with Supporting Sponsor Council On Foundations to present the first conference devoted exclusively to the L3C.

Do you work in the charitable sector, an economic development agency, a foundation, a government agency, social finance,
healthcare? Are you interested in how we can do more with less from government, while rebuilding our infrastructure? Is social enterprise your thing? If any answer is yes, you need to be in Evanston, Illinois June 6th and 7th, 2011.

For additional information or questions
Karen Woods: (231) 578-0905
Janice Lang: (914) 248-8443

To register, visit the ACD website.

Live stream from National Conference for Media Reform, Boston

Watch live streaming video from freespeechtv at livestream.com

Work from the core

[This month’s Carnival of Journalism asks how organizations like the Knight Foundation and the Reynolds Journalism Institute can encourage innovation in journalism. My humble thoughts follow.]

Because journalism has been removed from its swaddling of newspaper advertising, we now have the opportunity to discover the essence of journalism and what it truly contributes to our society and to Democracy.

The tools of the digital age are revealing blind spots in our previous vision. What we face is the discovery that what many of us thought was journalism actually is not.

Helping us sort things out with their grants, programing and activism are you, the Knight Foundation and the Reynolds Journalism Institute.

At this key moment of change, I would urge you to crystallize your missions in your mindset so you can work from the core and jettison what is superfluous.

I’ve taken a stab at what this crystallization looks like. To me, you share a similar core: your mission is about social change that supports Democracy. You would prefer systemic social change, the kind that sticks and evolves. [View Knight’s mission. View RJI’s mission.]

Both of you see information and community as essential parts of an equation leading to social change that will strengthen Democracy.

But what happens when you uncouple journalism from its traditional role as the messenger that delivers information to the community and instead begin to see journalism as a catalyst, an agent that provokes or speeds change, among community?

And what happens when you uncouple journalism from the tangible hard media of newsprint and instead couple it with the intangible streams and flows of the digital sphere, including data movements and agile multimedia reporting?

Variables are unleashed and recombined in unforeseen ways. [In understanding what these variables might look like, consider the beat areas for the RJI Fellows, and the KDMC program categories.]

What arises out of this mixed-and-match chaos will continue to look very different from anything we have had before. As the entire online world struggles to find a sustainable revenue model — strange and alien revenue forms will undoubtedly appear.

So Knight and Reynolds, you must continue to do as you have been doing: track and map the relevant variables as they emerge. You must be nimble in collecting and vetting operational categories and ideas as they fly your way.

So how can you best operate to encourage inovation?

Map the principles of journalism as they emerge in new forms. Cease worrying about the appearance of journalism. Instead connect with the principles and see how they could play out.

Be open. Like a baby in its first months of life, be open to the stimulus that comes your way and divide it broadly into buckets of information, assigned along your principle map.

Look for bright spots of activity and life. Look to the edges of change because the configuration of what will work has not shown itself yet.

Thrive amid uncertainty. Look for leaders but understand the principle of social proof. Understand that promising ideas will emerge from the crowd, and within them might be a kernel for success but not necessarily the full plan.

Shatter the silos. Look to other domains of business, Web technology, economists, anthropologists, non-profits, government and communicators who have been building the online world for two decades now. Note the conferences and learning opportunities in the maturing online world and make them available to Journalist entrepreneurs. [That’s what I do as a service every day on my Twitter and Tumblr streams]

Don’t be wedded to your ideas. Hold them loosely — like a dove that has alighted on your hand — and let them go. If they have wings they will leverage on your behalf and bring many iterative returns and successes.

Be courageous. Stand out from the crowd of philanthropy. To the best of your ability while still being responsible, cast off the shackles of foundation-think that judges “safe” as being equivalent with “success.”

Support our entrepreneurs. One concrete possibility: Knight, Reynolds take the lead and join together with affinity foundation partners to create an entity dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship among journalists and their creations.

More than a decade ago when I first started reporting on entrepreneurship as an independent journalist [and learning to work for myself], I came across the Kauffman Foundation whose mission is:

To help individuals attain economic independence by advancing educational achievement and entrepreneurial success

It was after the dot-com bubble had burst in 1999 and before entrepreneurship was a field of study at business schools. It was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is today. I was helping entrepreneurs write books about their experiences and learning the ropes of the angel and venture capital worlds.

Today, Kauffman says it is looking for partners to leverage resources and capability.

Maybe you and Kauffman and others could talk about how to jointly create a home for training, experimentation and comradry for the emerging new class of Journalist entrepreneurs.

Web 2.0 keynotes steaming from SF

Watch live streaming video from Web 2.0 Expo on a .CO domain: http://w2tv.co

Unlock the digital economy, please? Thank you!

“Unlock the Digital Economy” is the theme for this year’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, the signature conference and tradeshow put on by O’Reilly Media and UBM TechWeb.

I spoke with Sarah Milstein of UBM TechWeb to get a sense of some of the highlights.

“The web is maturing,” Milstein said. “The business side is increasingly important and viable. We are interested in people who are figuring out how to exploit that.”

So who’s making money on the web and how are they doing it?

Zynga is. Milstein says that the creators of Farmville — whose branding says the company is connecting the world through games — is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars a year from games that include CityVille, TreasureIsle and Mafia Wars.

In an article published yesterday by the Chicago Sun-Times, colleague Sandra Guy says market experts value Zynga’s worth as high as $10 billion.

The games operate from a few simple concepts: You can play the game for free. But each game has its own internal economy, Milstein says. Buy a business, give a resource. Eventually, real money is exchanged.

I’m constitutionally unsuited to these games. I lack patience. Don’t buy me tulips, please, they’ll die from lack of watering. But I do see some synergy between the news world and games. Beyond interactive 3-D crossword puzzles and chess, games hint at a sophisticated landscape that could promise anonymity and new dimensionality in solving the problems of government or create exciting new ways to connect news streams with advertising bases in localities. The Knight Foundation sees this synergy too as it is investing considerable cash into several civic–based solutions with a game interface.

Zynga holds the title of most used Facebook application with 40 million active users. The company has reportedly spent $50 million on Facebook ads alone.

So here in Chicago when my SallyVille [within CityVille] visits friend Rogers Park – my virtual version of my home neighborhood. I can fantasize that someday Zynga will build a game that will allow Rogers Park online to mirror and nourish what is happening in the real economy and community of the neighborhood that is Rogers Park.

These games are a far cry from that robust and useful potential now, but the internet is developing in unforeseen ways – one can dream?

Another company posting some success that will be appearing at Web 2.0 Expo is LinkedIn.

On March 25, I and 999,999 other professionals received email correspondence from Linked In Founder Reid Hoffman thanking us for being early adopters in the first million. I was member 897312. Linked In now has 100 million members.

Hoffman’s scheduled to speak Thursday, March 31. For now, LinkedIn’s key to “Unlock the Digital Economy” is an IPO.

LinkedIn is the pin-striped, always chipper-faced network for folks looking to make business connections — whether for sales or job leads; it will seek $175 million in the public market.

Anthony Ha of VentureBeat did a break down of the company’s fundamentals in January.

How much money is LinkedIn making now? In the nine months ending on Sept. 30, LinkedIn says it made $1.85 million in profits on $161.4 million in revenue. In 2009, it lost $4.0 million on $120.1 million in revenue

Linked-In’s revenue comes from three kitties: user subscriptions, advertising sales and hiring solutions. Its Hiring Solutions services brought in 41% of total revenue. This revenue mix doesn’t sound much different from that of an online newsroom — Help Wanted ads anybody? [If this sounds like a genie that’s disappeared from the bottle, it might find its way back in.]

A good portion of the IPO cash will beef up LinkedIn’s field services in geographic locations, basically sales of its Hiring Solutions in various cities around the US and the globe. LinkedIn shares a problem with the emerging news business. The company has a robust online site, but to grow its successful business model it needs to expand its real world field work in sales. Internet based businesses have been struggling to effectively bridge the online-to-earth gap for a decade at least. It’s one of the reasons that reinvented newspaper brands and their paper distribution streams might be more valuable than some think.

Milstein says gaming companies are doing well if they can transition from desktop to mobile. She says other hot topics include group buying and new buying models, such as those offered by chicago-based Groupon.

There’s so much online news organizations can learn from the Web 2.0 world.Check out the website and if you’re in the Bay Area, the conference runs March 28 through March 31. If you can’t make it this year, you can view sessions later online on the Web 2.0 website on O’Reilly’s YouTube channel.

O’Reilly and UBM TechWeb have another show in the fall. Milstein says the Web 2.0 New York show is historically weighted more toward exploring digital innovation in the media, so you might just want to take out your calendar and ink in Oct. 10-13, Web 2.0 this fall in New York.

You can follow Web 2.0 on its blog, at Twitter hash #w2E or on its Facebook and LinkedIn pages.

Web 2.0 Expo happens March 28-31, 2011 at Moscone West in San Francisco, CA. Now in its fifth year, Web 2.0 Expo is for the builders of the next-generation web: designers, developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, and business strategists.

PRI-Makers open to choices, including L3Cs

“The jury is out,” as to whether new corporate forms like the L3C (low profit limited liability company) and the B-Corp certification will make it easier for social enterprises and foundations to work together, agreed foundation executives at a 2010 meeting of PRI-Makers in Chicago. But foundation executives also said they are open to having more choices. [see note about program related investments at end of this entry.]

Discussions of the L3C and other forms are emerging on the social enterprise landscape with rapidity these days. The Internet gives them viral energy but the question of how philanthropy responds during this adaptation phase is key to how effective these forms will be moving into the future.

“I am really interested in these forms of innovation,’” said Jeff Clarke, from Alaska’s Rasmuson Foundation. “The conversation we are having is ‘How do foundations adapt and test these new forms?’ There’s all kinds of activity happening in the capital markets — How do we participate and how do we influence?”

In a conversation about what PRI-Makers call “this alphabet soup” of new corporate forms a collective light bulb went off as to their usefulness. The following is an interview with Mary Anne Rodgers of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Rodgers moderated a session on new corporate forms at the PRI-Makers conference.

“We had a good discussion about the move to L3Cs and other kinds of corporate forms,” Rodgers said. “What we learned is that the growing interest in corporate forms addresses different needs that are perceived to make not just funding — but also receiving — PRIs easier.

“One of the challenges for a PRI is to establish the charitable purpose and establish that the principal purpose is not to make money but to achieve some other mission,“ she said.

“When you are giving to a 501(c)3 public charity, that test is pretty easy because by definition the organization is a charity and by definition they will not make much money,” she said. “But if you are giving to a for-profit organization, you need a harder test because it is expected the corporation is going to make money, yet you have to be sure the organization is really not just about making money.”

“The point of these different corporate forms is to somehow embed in the corporate structure a charitable purpose or a partially charitable benefit so that the test for foundation investment is easier to meet,” Rodgers said.

“The benefit to the organization is that the manager using that form [the L3C entrepreneur] would not be subject to criticism if in fact they were not maximizing profit but were instead maximizing the charitable benefit.”

“I think the jury is out,” Rodgers said. “These forms are new. They are being adopted at some states. Some states are taking different approaches. The jury is out as to how effective they will be but I think most people in the audience [of PRI-Makers] think the more choices the better. Some forms will work for potential recipients and for potential funders. Others will not .”

“These forms may well make it easier for people to come together and meet the fundamental tests of charitable investing,” she said.

“I think PRIs are things smaller foundations can do. Absolutely,” Rodgers said. “If you want to get started and you are not sure what to do, one terrific thing you can do is find your local community development organization and make an investment that supports community development [through a CDFI, community development financial institution.

“You get a federally insured investment,” Rodgers said. “That’s simple.”

PRI stands for program-related investment, which PRI-Makers define as a type of mission or social investment that foundations make in order to achieve their philanthropic goals. Like grants, PRIs are vehicles for making inexpensive capital available to organizations that are addressing social or environmental concerns. Unlike grants, PRIs are expected to be repaid, often with at least a modest rate of return. Once repaid, PRIs are reused for other charitable purposes.

NOTE: I received this comment from Robert Lang, head of Americans for Community Development. “The statement that PRIs are expected to be repaid is very wrong,” Lang says. “Although PRIs can be loans they may also be equity investments, loan guarantees, low cost leases and anything else that would classify as an investment in the commercial world. This is a common misconception even among some PRI Makers,” Lang says. “If PRIs are to repaid they must be used for a new PRI or grant within one year of receipt,” he says.

Welcome to the birth of journalism!

Carnival of Journalism 2: Take a moment to reflect on your unique skills and circumstances. Then answer: What specific things can you do to increase the number of news sources for a local community.

What specific things can I do to increase the number of news sources for a local community? I can continue to work toward establishing the L3C as a business model for news.

Two things are important to know about the L3C as a business structure for news: 1) it encourages long-term ownership of a news organization that puts journalism first; 2) it is designed to accept an investment from a foundation as seed money.

The starting point for my thought is the current economic and cultural disruption, from which will emerge new ways of doing business. Among these innovations will be branded social enterprise, patient money, slow money and renewed interest in investing in all things local. There’s a lot of cash out there circulating looking for some kind – any kind — of return. The L3C returns 5% or less, and it is designed as a vehicle for investments by foundations, local businesses, institutions and others such as private equity funds.

The ideal owners of an L3C newsroom will be satisfied with this financial return and be enthusiastic about the intangible return, the social benefit delivered by a robust local news stream. Of course, since the foundation provides only seed money, the L3C newsroom in its business plan will have to persuasively describe the full complement of revenue sources for news that everyone is struggling with.

My career spans years in newsrooms, government and the independent sector, so the idea of the L3C newsroom struck me immediately as being worth a shot. But when I spoke to a group of journalism students at DePaul University recently, I was surprised by how easily they grasped the main concept of the L3C social enterprise. They didn’t get everything but they got the gist of it. It was a treat to think how unencumbered they are by the past. My attempt to explain the act of fitting copy on a page the old way could have been a comedy act – with me waving my hands in the air and them watching in puzzled silence. But in the end – who cares? Out with the old and in with the new!

I was also struck by how little the students knew about different types of businesses, including nonprofits. But instructors like DePaul’s Mike Reilley are wise, and they are integrating business concepts into the curriculum. Reilley has assigned the students the task of brainstorming a path forward for transforming their class assignment, “The Red Line Project” into a newsroom with a sustainable revenue stream.

The Knight Foundation points out that the main source of journalism has always been private enterprise and that marketplace incentives have fueled original and verified reporting.

Steve Yelvington, noted thinker on revenue models for news, said at a University of Minnesota School of Journalism event on Economic Models for News: “The truth is that journalism has never had a business model of its own. It’s always been a useful component of some other business model.”

My position is that for the first time, journalism has the potential to be thrown from its “newspaper” nest and born to a higher expression as a crucible for civic life.

Welcome to the birth of journalism as a social enterprise!

The L3C social enterprise is the bulkhead in a growing marketplace, one that values social benefit as well as investment return. There are signs of this emerging marketplace everywhere. Take a look at this recent article in the Harvard Business Review, Shared Value.

Inspired by the Peoria Newspaper Guild and its investigation into the viability of an L3C for the Peoria Journal Star, I brought the idea to my former paper, the Chicago Sun-Times. It didn’t exactly resonant with the Newspaper Guild or the Sun-Times corporate ownership. To answer our Carnival of Journalism question: To help increase the number of news sources I could always knock on the door of the Sun-Times again.

Just as the economy is seeking a foothold to stem foreclosures, create jobs, feed people and improve our lives and communities in systemic and sustainable ways, journalism is now preparing to crawl, then toddle and start to walk on its own. The two can be coupled.

I believe we could we bring together street level metrics and journalism in a mutually supportive system and change the way our society measures wealth while also changing the way we pay for journalism. It’s a nice blue sky thought.

It’s possible some of this blue sky could be added to The Red Line Project as an L3C. I could see adding some community development bells ands whistles – an added plus for foundations that are looking for systemic fixes. Maybe that’s where I should put my effort to increase the number of news sources.

Or I could concentrate on the system of news blogs we have developing here in Chicago and evolving it into an L3C; the Red Line Project could be an arm of it.

Or perhaps I could pitch in at Village Soup, a local news site that is making money and likes the L3C model.

Currently, I know of only one newsroom established as an L3C that has seed money from a foundation and that is the Pt. Reyes Light in the Bay Area. They have the structure in place and the money to get started, but when I spoke with them last fall they were hitting some road bumps in their set up.

It’s been slower going than I would like getting this idea launched and off the ground. Despite limited personal resources I have attended conferences of the Social Enterprise Alliance, BALLE and the PRI-Makers [a group of 100 foundations who make PRIs for systemic change.] I have also attended the FTC hearings on the Future of News, CitiCamp Chicago [Gov2.0] and dozens of events in Chicago about the future of news, as well as numerous technology- and journalism-based events. Thanks to the generosity of the Reynolds Journalism Institute, I was able to attend Journalism that Matters- Detroit, where my systemic community development ideas first started to percolate. I am scheduled to attend the Web2.0 conference in March in San Francisco, as a journalist, where I will be reporting on the latest ideas in developing online revenue.

It’s been slow going because new ideas take time to integrate into the mainstream and there is always push back from existing power centers. The foundations I spoke with at the PRI Makers conference are open to the idea of the L3C and other new economic models for news, but they tend to move slowly and with caution. It’s understandable. In conversations, I found more foundation officers who were open than skeptical. In conjunction with this Carnival of Journalism piece, I am posting a statement from the PRI-Makers on L3Cs and other business models as a kind of sidebar.

One common criticism of the L3C is that it is unnecessary, that there are many ways in which a regular LLC- limited liability company, can be structured to achieve the same purpose. Although it is true that many LLCs have been established in conjunction with 501(c)3s for social benefit, they lack the branding power of the L3C – which some foundation executives see as valuable. As the volunteer convener of the L3C for Media working group at trade association Americans for Community Development, I respond as quickly and thoroughly as I can to questions directed my way. We are all learning together.

To appease the legal industry that has historically profited from PRIs as well as those who have other concerns, Americans for Community Development has drafted Federal legislation to streamline the L3C/PRI process at the federal level. If so moved, the community of journalism thought leaders could join ACD in supporting this legislation. That might give a considerable boost to birthing the future of news as a social enterprise and increasing the number of news sources for a local community.

There is much work to be done. I am confident that with the assistance of many partners, we can establish social enterprise newsrooms that will deliver every possible flavor of credible news for local communities.

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