So how do you make money doing this?

Each time I have spoken about multimedia and citizen journalism to a room full of journalists, someone always asks the inevitable question – the one question I've never been able to answer: “So how do you make money doing this?”

My answer was this: “We don't.” Our paychecks were still paid for by advertising and subscription revenue from The Bakersfield Californian. We did not sell sponsorships for our Podcasts or video ads for the pre-roll in our video player. All content on Bakersfield.com is accessible for free. The newsroom didn't worry about how to make money, we just tried to grow our online audience by experimenting with new forms of storytelling. Wasn't it up to our advertising department to sell the Web site?

Journalists were learning new tricks without a business model to back them up. During the housing boom earlier this decade, as The Californian's budget got fat from real estate advertising, we spent money left and right on new equipment and training. We added new positions, like a fulltime videographer and a multimedia editor. But no company leaders were bridging the gap between the newsroom and advertising to come up with ways to sustain our new endeavors. Our video hits were growing exponentially, but our company didn't monetize them. Perhaps the newsroom could have done more to figure out how to make money, but we were operating with that ethical wall between us and advertising. As the multimedia editor, I was not encouraged to sell pre-roll ads. But if I realized it meant my paycheck, perhaps I would have sought sponsorships. The success of the newspaper falls on everyone's shoulders, from the people who deliver the product in the morning to those who put it to bed at night. Unfortunately, as far as I know, the advertising department never approached the newsroom to find out what we were doing on the Web and how they might be able to sell it to advertisers or sponsors.

Meanwhile, The Bakersfield Californian was not ignoring its future. It had big plans that did not include the newsroom whatsoever. The company formed a subsidiary called Mercado Nuevo (“new market” in Spanish) which would attempt to be what The Californian could not: An incubator of new ideas and new products, without the wall between editorial and advertising, and – more importantly – without the wall between product and audience. The Northwest Voice, under the leadership of our Vice President of Audience Mary Lou Fulton, was the first of these Web-first publications to be created with 100 percent community submitted content. It was followed by Bakotopia (a music and youth-oriented Web site and magazine), Mas (a Latino Web site and magazine), and The Southwest Voice (serving southwest Bakersfield - now merged with the northwest publication to be simply The Bakersfield Voice). Was this to be the “newsroom” of the future?

I remember the first time we in the newsroom heard about The Northwest Voice. Our northwest Bakersfield reporter was mad – was she going to get scooped by our own company? We were appalled that we were going to publish articles written by the public. They had no training. They were not professional journalists. What was our worth if we were just going to use community content? And why was the company sinking money and resources into this rag instead of the newsroom so we could do a better job of covering the northwest community ourselves?

At the time, I had just become the “online content editor” in the newsroom – the first newsroom Web position at The Californian (a position I pitched to our bosses and for which I wrote the job description). I immediately applied to attend the multimedia bootcamp at UC Berkeley put on by the Knight Digital Media Center. That was where I realized our reputation as a company preceded me. Mary Lou Fulton travels the world speaking about The Californian, its new products, and its citizen journalism efforts. As I introduced myself to people at the workshop, about every other person would say, “Bakersfield? Mary Lou Fulton? The Northwest Voice? You guys are doing awesome, groundbreaking things down there. Great to meet you.” I kept a professional attitude and my mouth shut, although I wanted to say, “The Voice? That rag? Putting professional journalists out of business?”

How ironic that two years later I would become the Contributions Editor at The Californian, doing exactly what The Voice had done, and evangelizing citizen journalism to the same group of multimedia bootcampers at Berkeley each time I returned as a guest speaker. And, of course, still answering that question about revenue. How do you make money doing this? We don't.

More to come ...

Drowning in Kool-Aid

It's not like I'm a dinosaur unwilling to change with the times. I have been one of the biggest Kool-Aid drinkers at The Bakersfield Californian, hands down. I helped man the Kool-Aid stand. Armed with my master's degree from UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, I helped bring that newsroom into the 21st century. As the first online editor in that newsroom, and then as multimedia editor, I helped launch blogs, podcasting, video, interactive Flash graphics, audio slideshows, and posting breaking news. I taught the entire reporting staff to record and edit audio and video. I taught them how to do voice-overs, write copy for our weekly news podcast, storyboard a video, and make themselves into human tripods by tucking their elbows while holding the point-and-shoot video cameras. The apex of our multimedia coverage was the Vincent Brothers trial, during which the Web team created a special section on our Web site with an interactive Flash graphic of the crime scene, major players, timeline and more. Our court reporter blogged the entire trial. Our staff of three videographers edited two to three videos each day from DVDs recorded by the video pool. It was a lot of work but well worth it, and I have to give a shout-out to then-Web Editor Davin McHenry for leading the whole project.

Then, when multimedia moved to our “visual department” (formerly known as the photo department), I took the gig as Contributions Editor. It was a step up, to management, with a higher salary and proof again that I was a proponent of the future of news. I believed that citizen journalists would not replace our skilled reporting staff, but augment our ability to cover news at the hyper-local level. Why waste our reporters' time when someone could write a moving and personal story about her grandmother's 100th birthday (with a little help from me, the editor). Citizen journalism gave our readers a voice in our products, offered the platform for that all-important two-way conversation between the newspaper and our audience, allowed us to print stories important to our readers that we just didn't have the staff to cover. For two years, I espoused the wonders of user-generated-content. There were some real successes in there, such as our 30th anniversary package of the giant dust storm of 1977 which blanketed Bakersfield and Arvin with a thick layer of dirt and tore down houses, trees and powerlines with the 60-mile per hour winds. A former meteorologist from Bakersfield wrote the mainbar and we got dozens of reader-submitted memories and photos that we ran with the A1 package. Our environment reporter was slammed at the time and grateful that we handled the story as a citizen journalism project.

Between the multimedia and contributions editor gigs, I was honored to receive the prestigious Publisher's Excellence Award from our publisher Ginger Moorhouse, who gave five such awards each year to employees who exemplified our superb customer service and work ethic. At that point, I was on top of my game and The Bakersfield Californian was a leader in our industry. As the first newspaper to create Web sites and niche publications with 100 percent citizen contributions, our company leaders and I were in high demand to speak at conferences and host international visitors. I can't count how many contingents toured our newsroom and peppered me with questions about our hyper-local projects, multimedia and Web successes. The Northwest Voice, Southwest Voice, (now merged as The Bakersfield Voice), Bakotopia, Mas Magazine, and Raising Bakersfield niche products served audiences in geographic, youth, Latino and parenting niche markets. We were set up to succeed even if the flagship product, The Bakersfield Californian, were to tank in readership and advertising.

So what happened? If we were so destined for greatness, why did we fall? More to come ...

Laid off from a newspaper -- again

Monday afternoon was very anti-climactic. I had taught my boss the ins and outs of my job that morning. I forwarded her all my contacts and stories in the can. I had already cleaned off my desk the Friday before. I spent the last two hours of my shift scanning the Web, catching up on blogs and changing site registrations to my personal e-mail instead of my work e-mail. Then, at 5:15, I stood up, said “Good bye, desk,” and walked out the door. There was no goodbye e-mail to co-workers. No applause as I walked out. No group luncheon or cake or speech or cards or funny photo signed by the staff. After watching people come and go in my nearly six years at The Bakersfield Californian, I went. Quietly. Knowing I'd be back in the morning only for my severance check.

At least I knew it was coming this time. I prepared myself emotionally. Last time I was laid off from a newspaper company, I had no clue beforehand. The tears flowed. At this point, if the list changed and I was not laid off this morning, I would be severely disappointed. With an 11 percent workforce reduction ready to go, I did not want to be one of the ones left behind in the rubble.

I came to the decision that I do not want to work in the newspaper world anymore back in December. I was on maternity leave and had a feeling my job was going to be eliminated while I was out. My gut instinct held true. Right before Christmas, The Bakersfield Californian executed a 10 percent reduction, eliminating my management position and farming out my three staff members to other departments. I agreed with their decision. For two years I had been the Contributions Editor, soliciting citizen journalism content from our readership, managing our online submission system and editing gems to run in the newspaper. My “staff” included our two news clerks and an assistant editor who led a lot of the staff blogging. We were a motley crew and only put together because our bosses didn't know what else to do with us. Luckily, I wasn't laid off at that point. Instead, I was offered to come back still as the Contributions Editor, only at the non-management level and for less pay. But a job was a job and I didn't want to spend my maternity leave searching for a new job instead of enjoying my time with my baby boy. So I decided they're going to have to escort me out the door of The Californian.

It's been three weeks since I returned from maternity leave and this morning I welcomed the escort service. Our executive editor offered me a part-time gig, but it was more economical for me to take the severance check and look for work full-time than to work part-time for a lower hourly wage and have less time to look for work. I thanked him Friday for the offer, but like on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” I'm going to have to walk away from the next question. God knows I don't know the answer and it seems the lifelines have been used up for newspapers. “It's been a good ride,” I told him.

More to come ...