Lunch & Learn: AllPrinceton: The Hyperlocal Media Experiment

At the Lunch ‘n Learn ses­sion on Wednes­day, March 9th, 2011, Donna Liu explained and demon­strated AllPrinceton.com, a “hyper­local mul­ti­me­dia exper­i­ment” of which she is the founder and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor. All­Prince­ton is not Liu’s first mul­ti­me­dia project. After she came to Prince­ton in 2002 as a Fer­ris Fel­low in jour­nal­ism, Liu founded the UChan­nel,  in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Woodrow Wil­son School of Pub­lic and Inter­na­tional Affairs. Before Prince­ton, Liu had a long career as a news pro­ducer and man­ager with CNN, where she launched CNN’s first pro­duc­tion cen­ter in Asia. She is an Emmy award win­ner for cov­er­age of the Tien­an­men protests in 1989. Liu opened her talk by describ­ing the his­tory and evo­lu­tion of the AllPrinceton.com project.

Overview and His­tory of AllPrinceton.com

Liu described her tran­si­tion from ana­log to dig­i­tal media dur­ing the devel­op­ment of the UChan­nel at Prince­ton. Now a dig­i­tal con­vert, she not only under­stands the ben­e­fits of  new media, but advo­cates it to oth­ers. Dur­ing the UChan­nel project, Liu described hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions with George McCol­lough, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Princeton’s com­mu­nity access TV sta­tion, about he future of news and broad­cast­ing, and what the tran­si­tion to dig­i­tal might mean for tra­di­tional news out­lets. Liu noted that she would have loved to exper­i­ment with a local news orga­ni­za­tion dur­ing that tran­si­tional period, but that there wasn’t enough time to spare among her other respon­si­bil­i­ties. When the UChan­nel was “unplugged,” and Donna com­pleted her appoint­ment at Prince­ton, she sud­denly found she had time and decided to begin a local news site that would focus on all top­ics relat­ing to Princeton.

Liu started AllPrinceton.com with essen­tially no cap­i­tal invest­ment and a shared space on a server. She began search­ing and exper­i­ment­ing with cap­tur­ing and post­ing infor­ma­tion that seemed to her to be miss­ing or elu­sive on other local news and civic web­sites. In order to cre­ate the All­Prince­ton site, she selected an open source con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem called Dru­pal espe­cially because there was a sup­port­ive com­mu­nity of devel­op­ers, and also because AllPrinceton’s fund­ing orga­ni­za­tion, The Knight Foun­da­tion, was a Dru­pal advo­cate as well as being a prime sup­porter in exper­i­men­ta­tion with news media. Since Liu con­sid­ers her­self more of a jour­nal­ist and orga­nizer than a tech­nol­o­gist, she chose a pre-configured Dru­pal theme that was already a favorite among other news orga­ni­za­tions using Dru­pal because it had a lot of news-centric fea­tures. As she showed the Lunch ‘n Learn audi­ence the new web­site for All­Prince­ton, she explained that the project was in “con­stant beta” and that the skele­tal frame­work would soon be filled with focused local con­tent, gath­ered with help from the com­mu­nity. She has wel­comed local res­i­dents to par­tic­i­pate in the All­Prince­ton exper­i­ment, and has begun to offer reg­u­lar work­shops to get the com­mu­nity involved and informed.

The AllPrinceton.com site

The AllPrinceton.com site is orga­nized into var­i­ous con­tent streams. There is orig­i­nal con­tent from All­Prince­ton writ­ers as well as related, aggre­gated con­tent from third party sources. The orig­i­nal con­tent is cre­ated by stu­dents and Prince­ton com­mu­nity mem­bers who are inter­ested in report­ing the town’s events and issues. In the cen­ter is Town Talk, a group blog where peo­ple write their own con­tent about events and issues. Liu described Town Talk as being akin to embed­ded jour­nal­ism, where peo­ple on the ground report on what they see in the area, and every­one is clearly iden­ti­fied and asso­ci­ated with their var­i­ous orga­ni­za­tions. A cal­en­dar, includ­ing arts, cul­tural and civic events, exists where com­mu­nity mem­bers might post.  A clas­si­fied sec­tion and direc­tory sec­tion allow peo­ple to exchange infor­ma­tion, though it is not yet as pop­u­lar as other areas on the site. (Liu plans to make these sec­tions more robust over the sum­mer.) The direc­tory, for exam­ple, might con­tain bio­graph­i­cal and con­tact infor­ma­tion for Princeton’s civic lead­ers, or other infor­ma­tion related to com­mu­nity governance.

Other con­tent on the site is aggre­gated using curated feeds from estab­lished news sources such as The Prince­ton Packet. The aggre­gated con­tent exists as a teaser, con­sist­ing only of the first few lines of a story, a frag­ment linked to the entire arti­cle on the orig­i­nal site. Prince­ton Com­mu­nity TV offers a media feed, so that the site also includes links to audio and video con­tent about Princeton.

A search for “Prince­ton” pop­u­lates a twit­ter feed on the site, and as a result, the feed offers not only tweets about Prince­ton town­ship, Prince­ton bor­ough and Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity,  but occa­sion­ally picks up a “Prince­ton” ref­er­ence that is unre­lated to the com­mu­nity. Liu described the acci­den­tal inclu­sion in the feed of lively tweets that referred to an up and com­ing hiphop prodigy named ‘Prince­ton’ (results which Liu was mostly able to fil­ter from the feed). Liu intends to con­tinue apply­ing feed fil­ters so that future  twit­ter con­tent can become more reli­ably focused on actual Princeton-specific tweets. Liu’s goal is to make the twit­ter feed pro­vide a vibrant and imme­di­ate source of infor­ma­tion — as a point of com­par­i­son, she described the kind of immediately-aware feeds that we’ve seen occur spon­ta­neously  dur­ing nat­ural cat­a­stro­phes such as the recent earth­quake in Japan.

Liu iden­ti­fied such timely and spe­cific infor­ma­tion as a local news gap, one that All­Prince­ton might be able to fill. For instance, although there are alerts and institution-specific alerts of snow and wind emer­gen­cies, per­haps there is cur­rently no cen­tral­ized online pres­ence for such alerts in the com­mu­nity. If sim­ple tools could be made avail­able to let the com­mu­nity self-report emerg­ing sit­u­a­tions or out­ages, All­Prince­ton could move from sim­ply being use­ful to being truly essen­tial ser­vice. Liu described a recent meet­ing dur­ing which the pro­posed school bud­get was dis­cussed. After an exten­sive search, Liu con­cluded that the specifics of the bud­get weren’t described any­where in the local web­sites asso­ci­ated with the school board. Infor­ma­tion about the bud­get did not exist on the web until a stu­dent reporter from All­Prince­ton went to the meet­ing, got a paper copy of the pro­posed bud­get, scanned it and posted it on the site. “Pub­lic infor­ma­tion does not nec­es­sar­ily mean acces­si­ble infor­ma­tion,” Liu explained, “unless there are media chan­nels to make it available.”

Tech­nolo­gies, peo­ple and Ideas

Liu cited exam­ples of other tech­nol­ogy lead­ers and pop­u­lar web based tools that have helped to inspire her work on All­Prince­ton.  One such tool is Steve Johnson’s Outside.in which takes infor­ma­tion feeds from a spe­cific zip code and pulls them together into a cohe­sive col­lec­tion of local updates. (Liu also men­tioned that Johnson’s site was pur­chased by AOL for $10M&n
bsp; the day before her talk.) John­son con­tin­ues to improve the algo­rithm that col­lects the data to feed the site. But even John­son has come to admit that algo­rithms are not enough, and that the infor­ma­tion gath­ered by machine has to be sup­ple­mented by human report­ing, a kind of “hybrid” con­cept that is cen­tral to Liu’s visions for the future of AllPrinceton.com.

Liu also quoted Jeff Jarvis, a guru of dig­i­tal news and media, as hav­ing said “Do what you do best, and link to the rest”–which Liu sees as a sound phi­los­o­phy, and is the ratio­nale for bring­ing aggre­gated con­tent from other estab­lished sources to the All­Prince­ton site. George McCol­lough, the direc­tor of Princeton’s Com­mu­nity Tele­vi­sion and Dig­i­tal Media Cen­ter, remarked Liu, gives peo­ple the tools and knowl­edge  to cre­ate their own media–and then broad­casts the results. Liu sees McCollough’s sta­tion as a model for what AllPrinceton.com might pro­vide for Princeton’s online community.

An intense focus on local news, a con­cept Liu refers to as hyper­local­ity, is, she says, sim­i­lar to a pen­du­lum swing­ing back from the overtly global con­cerns of mass media. Mass news media orga­ni­za­tions might be per­ceived on one hand as media mon­sters, absorb­ing and eclips­ing local media chan­nels. Local­ity is gain­ing in impor­tance, said Liu, espe­cially with regard to news. Media sources are regroup­ing around com­mu­ni­ties of inter­est and geo­graph­i­cal loca­tions. Liu decided to focus on the geo-location trend in design­ing AllPrinceton.com — in part because she loves the town, but also because Prince­ton, although small, is a place where many inter­est­ing things happen..

Liu spoke of the information-gathering tool Ushahidi as an exam­ple of the new trends in crowd-sourced report­ing. Ushahidi was orig­i­nally deployed in Kenya to help mon­i­tor elec­tions, The tool allows aver­age users to share infor­ma­tion and has been used in emer­gen­cies such as Haiti’s recent dis­as­ters, and the Wash­ing­ton snow­storm.  SeeClickFix.com (a pos­si­ble future addi­tion for All­Prince­ton) allows local res­i­dents to use smart­phones to take pic­tures of prob­lems, record  their geolo­ca­tion, and report details of what needs to be fixed. The infor­ma­tion is then posted to the SeeClick­Fix. site, and remains there until the prob­lem is resolved. Liu shared her own SeeClick­Fix view of Prince­ton after the wind storm we expe­ri­enced last spring. Liu, armed with her phone, took a walk around her own neigh­bor­hood and noted the loca­tion of sev­eral downed trees. If a sim­i­lar sys­tem was in place for Prince­ton, infor­ma­tion about the specifics of  weather, or other sorts of emer­gen­cies, could be shared more eas­ily through increased report­ing at the neigh­bor­hood level. How­ever, with­out the buy-in of the munic­i­pal ser­vices such report­ing would have lit­tle effect. If the com­mu­nity reports an issue and no one with the power to fix it is lis­ten­ing, such a site might actu­ally increase con­fu­sion and frustration.

Liu con­cluded her talk by cit­ing how two Prince­ton fac­ulty mem­bers as being influ­en­tial to her grow­ing inter­est in using online media as a pub­lic con­cern. An exam­ple of bottom-up report­ing can be found in Pro­fes­sor Matthew Salganik’s AllOurIdeas.org (itself the sub­ject of a recent Lunch ‘n Learn talk). AllOurIdeas is a col­lab­o­ra­tive tool where a group of peo­ple with a shared inter­est can pick a favorite when pre­sented with two ideas. The ideas pre­sented are posed in response to a shared ques­tion or prob­lem. Favored solu­tions rise to the top of the polls, and par­tic­i­pants are encour­aged to enter new ideas or solu­tions to the topic being dis­cussed.  Liu noted that Salganik’s polling tool is being used in New York City to decide upon the use of new pub­lic spaces. She would love to see this tool used to dis­cuss local issues, such as the ongo­ing talks about the con­sol­i­da­tion of Princeton’s Bor­ough and Town­ship. The sec­ond fac­ulty mem­ber who influ­enced Liu’s think­ing about new media was Pro­fes­sor Ed Fel­ten. Liu recalled a talk she attended a decade ago, where Fel­ten out­line a strik­ing descrip­tion of what he called “the Celes­tial Juke­box.”  This was a vision­ary future device that could be used to make phone calls, take pho­tos, watch and lis­ten to media, con­nect to the inter­net and more. Now that we all can have a “Celes­tial Juke­box, ” in our pocket in the form of a smart phone, what, asked Liu, can we do to make sense of the vast amount of infor­ma­tion that now flows from indi­vid­u­als to the inter­net? She recently asked  Fel­ten to con­sider that ques­tion. “Fil­ter­ing,” he replied, “is key.” Fil­ter­ing, curat­ing, and select­ing infor­ma­tion from the web can result in an incred­i­bly rich source of infor­ma­tion about a sin­gle topic.

For the AllPrinceton.com project, that topic of shared inter­est is Prince­ton itself, and Liu hopes that some cre­ative fil­ter­ing and chan­nel­ing through a com­mu­nity col­lec­tion of “celes­tial juke­boxes” might result in some­thing that can ben­e­fit and enlighten all  Prince­ton residents.

Want to get involved?

If you are inter­ested in work­ing with Donna Liu in devel­op­ing the AllPrinceton.com site, drop in on one of her reg­u­lar Fri­day work­shops from 10–12 at the  Prince­ton Pub­lic Library. Addi­tional, more advanced work­shops are sched­uled on an as-need basis at Prince­ton Com­mu­nity TV.

A pod­cast of Donna Liu’s talk can be heard here.