Newsgarden powers Stanford journalism project

Posted: April 7th, 2010 | Author: Serra Media | Filed under: Building audience, Innovative thinking | No Comments »

By Jay Huerbin

Last fall, Stanford University launched a hyperlocal news site called Silicon Valley Pulse. With the help of Serra Media, the Newsgarden became part of Stanford’s graduate program for journalism — a department that isn’t afraid to test the latest advancements in new media.

“Stanford’s journalism program, while small — there are 16 students this year — prizes experimentation, innovation and new ideas,” Drake Martinet said about the new site, the Pulse. “The Pulse is just one of our many ongoing experiments with emerging tools.”

Martinet, a masters journalism student at Stanford and one of the leaders for the Pulse, teamed up with Stanford professor Ann Grimes and Serra Media co-founder Mark Briggs to get the site under way.

An independent project by Stanford graduate students, the Pulse has found success by teaming up with local newspapers at times. With little marketing, the majority of the site’s traffic, Martinet said, comes from whenever the Pulse is mentioned and linked in different newspaper sites and local blogs.

In December, graduate student Kathryn Roethel ran a story about a Make-A-Wish child and his trip to Disneyland on the Newsgarden.

“The [San Francisco Chronicle] wanted to run it, but we deiced to put it on the Pulse and have them link over to us,” Martinet said about Roethel’s story. “We had a significant image gallery with the story that was attached to the article and we were able to have more control at the Pulse.”

When the story ran, the Pulse saw nearly 3,000 unique page views and 5,000 visitors.

Martinet said that traffic to the site depends entirely on the content and how often content is updated. He noted that some days might only see a dozen visitors while fluctuating with a story, like Roethel’s, that was linked from the Chronicle.

Still, with no promotion and advertising, the Pulse is thought of as a positive.

“I would consider it a success in that we have been learning a great deal about the dynamics of our program and a blog,” Martinet said. “The site itself has served as a great repository for our work online and is a robust enough platform to handle the episodically heavy traffic.”

As for the most significant problem, it’s more clerical than anything.

“The only persistent glitch is mostly human error,” Martinet said. “When we incorrectly geotag a story, the Google map defaults the story’s location to 0.00, 0.00. So, I’ve had to spend a bit of time relocating stories back to Silicon Valley from west Africa.”

But just because hyperlocal news is in the moment now, Martinet doesn’t believe this is the future of journalism.

“I think that the future of news and journalism will need to have a location component, but the key to news is relevance and context,” he said. “What we are trying to deliver with hyperlocal is really more accurately described as hyper relevant, where physical geography is being used as a measure of relevance to the reader.”

So while the Pulse and hyperlocal news sites, like Serra Media’s Newsgardens, are off to a good start, Martinet doesn’t think what happens next will be easily defined.

“Newsgarden is a great experience,” he said. “[The future of journalism] is super complicated stuff that will be in a state of flux from now until forever.”

Jay Huerbin, a journalism major at the University of Pittsburgh, is interning this semester at Serra Media. You can read more from Jay on his blog and follow him at @jayhuerbin.

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