I may blog sometime later about lessons learned from my time here as the senior community host and now managing editor, but today I want to share that I am soon going to be moving to a new job.

In a couple weeks I will join The Poynter Institute — analyzing, writing and teaching about mobile and social media in the new news system.

The staff of Poynter Online are filling Poynter.org with outstanding coverage of the news industry, and I’m excited to contribute to that in some of the most exciting and fast-evolving branches of technology. I’ll also be involved in training programs at the institute and consulting for individual companies who are looking to take their social, mobile or community engagement approaches to a higher level.

The big goal of my new position at Poynter is “thought leadership” for the mobile and social news industry — bringing analysis to the big issues and developments and helping anyone who’s interested figure out what it means and what to do about it. However, I don’t expect to do this by shouting from a mountaintop.

I’ll be carrying forward the things I learned at TBD about the power of community engagement and involving users in the entire content cycle. Thought leadership isn’t really leadership if no one’s following you, so I hope you’ll all come along with me to help explore and discuss. My door is always open at jeff(at)jeffsonderman.com, on Twitter @jeffsonderman, or my relatively new Facebook page.

I want to hear from you about what you’re doing in the mobile or social space, or what you want a news provider to do for you. What do you think is being done well? What are the biggest questions that need attention?

UPDATE: For those of you I’ve gotten to know here in D.C., yes I will be staying in the area and working from here. Also, thanks to Steve Buttry for his very kind words about my move.

It doesn’t have to. The Storify site doesn’t yet give you options to customize the look of a widget. But with a few quick tweaks to the CSS of your site, you can make the Storify widget look less like a widget and more like an organic piece of your site.

Below are the before and after examples of how I modified its appearance to fit into my own site. You can use the same framework, substituting whatever fonts and colors are appropriate for your site.

Notice the major differences are the fonts and colors consistent with the rest of the site, and the removal of the widget’s header and borders.

Original Storify look

New Storify look

This paragraph is written in my WordPress blog, but notice how it flows seamlessly into the following one, which is actually the beginning of the Storify widget.

How to do it

Now that you’ve seen what you can do, here is how I did it using CSS. The following lines, substituting your own font/color styles, should be added to a new section in your stylesheet. Note that in several cases you must use the “!important” declaration on the styles because you need to override inline styles that the widget script prints by default.

Hide the entire Storify header

#sfywdgt_header {
display:none!important;
}

Align Storify body text flush with the left margin of the widget. By default it is indented 20px from the border.

#sfywdgt_body {
margin-left:-20px;
}

Remove borders, changes font and font size and background color of Storify body area.

#sfywdgt_body, #sfywdgt_body li, span.sfy_text, .sfy_description {
border:none !important;
font-family: “Helvetica Neue”,Helvetica,Arial,default!important;
background: #FCFCFC!important;
}

Changes color and behavior of links in the Storify body area. Match this to whatever your links look like in normal body text.

#sfywdgt_body a {
color:#000;
text-decoration:underline!important;
}
#sfywdgt_body a:hover {
color:#333;
}

Removes border from Storify footer area. Also increases “Powered by Storify” font size (this last one is just my taste — I felt like they deserve a slightly more prominent credit line since I’m hiding the header and a lot of the other distinctive features).

.sfywdgt_footer {
border:none!important;
background: #FCFCFC!important;
font-size:10pt!important;
}

Depending on how comfortable you are with CSS editing, you can do more advanced customizations. The key things to know are that the widget script creates three main HTML divs — the header (#sfywdgt_header) the body (#sfywdgt_body) and the footer (.sfywdgt_footer). You can modify or hide any of those by playing with the CSS.

Feel free to share links to examples of your own customizations or tips in the comments.

Online retailer Amazon, which leases spare web server capacity to third parties, booted WikiLeaks from its servers. The company cited a violation of its terms of service. However, it was generally understood to be a response to political pressure from U.S. senators. After that WikiLeaks moved to a French web hosting company, and the French are now looking to ban it.

Open-source data visualization program Tableau Public removed WikiLeaks-published visualizations from its site, citing political pressure. The Library of Congress even blocked access to WikiLeaks from its public computers, classifying it as a “malicious” site, which it clearly is not. Then PayPal, owned by eBay Inc., froze WikiLeaks’ account and blocked donations.

Reporters Without Borders condemned such moves as “the first time we have seen an attempt at the international community level to censor a website dedicated to the principle of transparency.”

All of this brings into clear focus a contradiction of the web — a public thing with private owners. It is best described by Ethan Zuckerman, who told CJR:

What’s really hard about this is that we perceive the web to be a public space, a place where you should be able to go and set up your soapbox and say whatever you want to say to the world. The truth is, the web is almost entirely privately held. So what happens here is that we have a normative understanding that we should treat this like public space—that you should have rights to speak, that no one should constrain your rights—but then you discover that, basically, you’re holding a political rally in a shopping mall. This is commercial speech, controlled by commercial rules.

In the late 20th century, the consolidation of major media outlets into the hands of a few major corporations was an issue of great concern and debate. Its importance diminished significantly in the 21st century as online services democratized media production and conversation and displaced the central role of mainstream news media in controlling information flow.

Now, however, we all must realize that these online services are also controlled by corporations with commercial and political interests. Just as GE, Disney, News Corp., Viacom and the like posed a threat to an open marketplace of ideas in mass media, the new corporate lords of the web can pose a threat to online freedoms that have been taken for granted.

eBay Inc. has contributed $3.4 million to federal political committees and spent $13.2 million on lobbying since 1997. Amazon.com has contributed at least $500,000 to federal candidates since 2003, according to OpenSecrets.org. Beyond those involved in WikiLeaks censorship so far, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Go Daddy (to pick a few) spend millions lobbying in Washington. So when someone like Sen. Joe Lieberman calls to complain about something they’re hosting, they listen.

This is why encoding principles such as net neutrality and an Internet Bill of Rights into national and international law is so important. Commercial and political interests will always find it beneficial to suppress some things from being said or published online — and as the WikiLeaks experience has shown, they are currently able do so without due process or subject to appeal.

* A footnote: I anticipate counterarguments that claim this is an exceptional case because it concerns classified documents, obtained illegally, arguably (though not at all proven to be) damaging to U.S. diplomacy. Even so, it does not follow that the end of removing them justifies the means of corporate and political censorship without due process. Beware that any effort to claim censorship authority always seeks first to use the public’s natural abhorrence of  outlier cases (racism, hate speech, child pornography) to justify giving authority to censor in all cases. The sensitivity of these leaked documents is not the issue — it is the now-demonstrated ease with which political and corporate interests may collude to try to expel something they dislike from the Internet.

(hat tip to Greg Linch who supervised the livestreaming effort from the conference)

Starting from scratch – TBD.com

First came the razor-sharp focus on politics. Now Allbritton Communications, the folks behind Politico, turns its high beam on local news. Jim Brady, Allbritton’s president for digital strategies, and key staff walk us through the genesis, launch — and growing pains — of this much-watched news site in Washington, D.C.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:

• Jim Brady, TBD
• Erik Wemple, TBD
• Mandy Jenkins, TBD
• Steve Buttry, TBD
• Laura McGann, Nieman Journalism Lab

Rethinking online commenting

With so much negativity and spam in comment sections, how are newsrooms tweaking their engagement policies? Should people be made to give their real names? Should discussions be moderated? How do we elevate the discussion without stifling it? What are we gaining with comment sections, Facebook and other platforms? Led by NPR’s ombudsman, this lively debate will help you navigate these tectonic shifts in the conversation around news.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:

• Alicia Shepard, NPR
• Andrew Noyes, Facebook
• Adam Clark Estes, Huffington Post

Content sharing through APIs

(Note: Starts around 7:40) More and more newsrooms are opening their vaults and sharing their content. What can you do with other organizations’ content? Should your newsroom be thinking about creating its own APIs, too? Experts explore the operations, business models and more.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:

• Tim Carlson, USA Today
• Daniel Jacobson, NPR
• Delyn Simons, Mashery
• Daniel Choi, developer

Tools for Crisis Reporting

Citizen, niche and traditional media are using social media and other tools to collaborate on covering international conflicts and disasters. This has made reporting from global hot spots more effective than ever. Learn what these panelists from around the world find work best.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:

• Solana Larsen, Global Voices Online
• Mark Frohardt, Internews
• Robert Soden, Development Seed
• Robert Baker, Konpa Group (Ushahidi Haiti)

A conversation with AOL’s Tim Armstrong and NPR’s Vivian Schiller.

(Interview begins at 11:00)
A conversation with Vivian Schiller, NPR, and Tim Armstrong, AOL, moderated by Kara Swisher, All Things Digital.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:

• Tim Armstrong, AOL
• Vivian Schiller, NPR
• Kara Swisher, All Things Digital

DocumentCloud’s first year

(Note: Two video segments for this one. First one starts at about 7:00) DocumentCloud.org has impacted news stories big and small by making primary source materials easier to scour, annotate and share. A look at how the open-source project is solving journalistic and technological hurdles.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:

• Jeremy Ashkenas, DocumentCloud
• Brian Boyer, Chicago Tribune
• Aron Pilhofer, The New York Times

The next ‘revolution’ for Web design

Note: This one got some pretty bad reviews and I don’t recommend it, but it’s here anyway.
Two of the most prominent newspaper/magazine/website designers of our day discuss the state of news web design, where it’s headed, how it needs to improve, and how open web standards will further change (and complicate) matters.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:

• Roger Black, Roger Black Studio
• Filipe Fortes, Treesaver

Coders are from Mars, designers are from Venus

More than any other medium, the Web fuses together creative and technical processes. Learn strategies to inspire your right brain while exercising your left brain.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:

• Tyson Evans, The New York Times
• David Wright, NPR

Go niche

Crackberry. Deadspin. The latest wave of media websites have one thing in common: they cover one topic, but do it hardcore. Hear innovators from niche sites across the country discuss what’s working, what’s not — and bring your own experiences to the discussion.

Speaker/Artist(s) Info:

• Andrew Geiger, SB Nation
• Jonathan Kealing, LJWorld.com, Lawrence Journal-World, 6News
• Matt Thompson, Project Argo, National Public Radio

The New Investigative Journalism Ecosystem

(Note: Video begins around 8:00) The number of global nonprofit reporting organizations has exploded — from three in 1990 to more than 30 today. Most have been created in the past three years. Panelists share which organizations are collaborating, which projects draw eyeballs and where this phenomenon is heading.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:

• Charles Lewis, Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University
• Lorie Hearn, Watchdog Institute in San Diego
• Kevin Davis, Investigative News Network
• Raney Aronson-Rath, Frontline

Forging Pro-Am Partnerships

(Note: Two parts to this video) With newsrooms cutting staff and journalism schools booming, it was bound to happen – the news industry is collaborating with academe for content in brave new ways. The panel explores how the partnerships work and whether the model applies to your newsroom.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:

• Joe Bergantino, New England Center for Investigative Reporting
• Rich Jones, New York University, Arthur L. Carter Journalism Initiative
• Josh Meyer, National Security Journalism Initiative, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University

Not available from Friday’s sessions:
Social media storytelling
Law & Order: Special Digital Unit
What’s next for traffic and search?

Saturday’s sessions:

A Wikileaks download

(Note: Panel starts around 6:00) The boundaries of digital journalism were Topic A on July 25, when a little-known Wikileaks released a 92,000-page dump of classified documents relating to the U.S. involvement of the war in Afghanistan. WNYC’s Brooke Gladstone leads the panel in examining what this could mean for journalism and the role of the Internet in news and information.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:
Brooke Gladstone, On the Media
Gavin MacFadyen, Centre for Investigative Journalism
Jim Michaels, USA TODAY
Clothilde Le Coz, Reporters Without Borders

Creating killer apps with public data

As the government unloads more data — on everything from the stimulus, taxes and spending to the safety of child car seats — developers, designers and journalists have developed show-stopping ways to make the numbers more accessible. See demos, hear cases studies, and learn the secrets of scraping data.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:
Bill Allison, Sunlight Foundation
Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation

Rewiring the ivory tower

(Note: 2 video segments for this one.) Revamping journalism curriculum is a tricky tightrope walk, balancing digital skills, academics and computer science. How do accrediting standards and the arms race for shorter degrees set the boundaries for the new journalism degree? Panelists share what is being lost and what is being gained.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:

• David Johnson, American University
• Emily Bell, Columbia University
• Rich Gordon, Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University
• Mindy McAdams, University of Florida

Android, iPad and Beyond

The web is increasingly moving from the desktop to the palm of your hand. Learn the best practices for creating content for mobile and touch devices.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:
Jamie Pallot, Conde Nast Digital
Jim Spencer, Newsy
Liesel Kipp, Thomson Reuters
John-Henry Barac, Barac Consulting

News apps: Showcase and strategy

In this rapid-fire session, four speakers show the journalistic and technical highlights from some recent news apps, providing insights into the lessons they’ve learned the hard way so you don’t have to.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:
Katharine Jarmul, USA TODAY
Matt Waite, St. Petersburg Times
Richard Pope, ScraperWiki.com
Aine McGuire, ScraperWiki.com

Don’t call it UGC

Professional-level input from a sea of amateurs? Community editorial requires finesse, hard work and a lot of respect for your submitters. Get expert advice on how to encourage high-quality content from a staff of strangers.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:
Laura Brunow Miner, Pictory
Alexis Madrigal, Longshot Magazine
Sarah Rich, Longshot Magazine
Robin Sloan, Twitter

The Onion: Explaining over 250 years of news dominance

(Note: Two video segments for this one.) From the invention of advertorial content to the development of television news, find out how America’s Finest News Source has managed to stay ahead of the competition for the past several hundred years and continues to lead the way with over 4 million social media connections and top ranking mobile applications.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:

• Marc Lieberman, The Onion
• Baratunde Thurston, The Onion

How to host an ONA meetup

Want to hold an ONA meetup in your town or city? Already have, but want to learn how to do it better? Come and listen to ONADC divas Laura Cochran and Tiffany Shackelford talk about their successful events that not only showcase local talent but bring in sponsors.
Speaker/Artist(s) Info:
Laura Cochran, Gannett
Tiffany Shackelford, Phase2 Technology

Not available from Saturday’s sessions:
Seven deadly sins of data visualization
Ten tech trends in ’10
Lunch with the Knight News Challenge winners
Tips and tricks for shooting video with your DSLR
Turning bits into bucks

Malcolm Gladwell in 2008. Photo by Flickr user Pop!Tech

New Yorker writer and sociologish author Malcolm Gladwell has a new essay out in the New Yorker that seeks to draw a line in the sand between social networks and “real-life” relationships when it comes to producing significant social change.

My first reaction was, this reads like hyperbolically contrarian linkbait — in the vein of “X Is Dead” headlines sprawling the tech blogs today. Maybe that’s true. But I’d like to think he’s serious about this, and so I’d like to give the proper context to the world of networks and action that he frames.

First, let me stipulate that I think Gladwell is basically right about his descriptions of the different functions of weak-tie and strong-tie relationships. He’s right that weak-tie relationships that dominate a sprawling network structure are less likely to produce mass acts of risk-taking “in real life,” such as sit-ins. They are more likely to produce mass amounts of small, online-only participation such as donations or petitioning.

However, Gladwell stops his analysis at stage of strong-tie vs weak-tie, when really that is not the situation “in real life.” My quibbles:

1) The mass amounts of small participation that social networks can produce are not as worthless as Gladwell frames them. He flips Clay Shirky’s example of finding a lost cell phone, and notes that “The Facebook page of the Save Darfur Coalition has 1,282,339 members, who have donated an average of nine cents apiece.” That still adds up to $115,410.51 toward the Darfur cause that wouldn’t be there otherwise. Not to mention the less tangible raising of awareness.

2) Weak ties can grow into strong ties. Your 1,000 Facebook “friends” may not really all be friends, but many are acquaintances who you may never have met without Facebook, and with a few you may over time build a strong-tie relationship that does produce IRL action.

3) Online networks and IRL networks overlap. They aren’t entirely exclusive competing environments. Some portion of the people I connect with on Twitter and Facebook are relatives or good friends who I do have strong ties with and would take “real action” with for a good cause. These networks strengthen strong-ties while also building new weak-ties. They are not, as Gladwell would have you believe, a vast wasteland of weak-tie, pretend friends.

While he accuses innovators of tending to be “solipsists” who “want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model,” Gladwell is doing the same. He wants to make a point — a fair one — that weak-tie relationships produce different action than strong-tie relationships. But he stretches too far in not recognizing the contributions of weak-tie relationships and mass coordinated action via social networks is of some great value that is still growing and not yet fully measured, and it does not operate exclusive of or in opposition to real-life strong-tie relationships.

UPDATE at 3:08 p.m.: Check out this interview clip from January when Gladwell tells Katie Couric he’s not really interested in social media and doesn’t think he’ll write about it because other people know it better:

What newspapers are doing failing to do with their obituary business model should be frighteningly familiar to them by now.

Newspapers: I think it’s very predictable that someone is going to come in and “craigslist” your obit business. Hell, we could even put the obits on Craigslist itself today if Craig gave us a new category.

The point is that you’re charging for something that you have no cause to charge for. You didn’t write the obit, you didn’t add any value to it. All you ever had was the claim that you’re the only central place for information, so people should pay you whatever you ask. You’re charging for it because you used to be able to, and at some point over the years that metastasized into you feeling entitled to it. So entitled, that one of you has now decided to demand payment for access to them.

This simply doesn’t work any more. Online, anyone and everyone can get any information from anyone. Media who have charged for something offline, solely based on the fact they were the only distribution game in town, are now displaced. (If you need a case study, interview the people you laid off from your Classified Department in the past few years).

The smart course right now would be to make the obits free — both for placement and access. It’s not hard to see that within a few years, someone is going to buy http://obituari.es (that’s actually available — someone grab it and just tip me when you get rich) and set up a free service that captures most of the market.

That won’t happen, because — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — newspapers won’t give up the currently large but eroding revenue stream to have a chance to capture the smaller but growing future revenue stream.

UPDATE: After first just putting this up to make it available, I’ve looked through it and have some thoughts.

This study is disappointing on a few levels. It’s not a study of citizen journalism and newspaper journalism. It’s a study of citizen journalism sites and newspaper sites. So that’s a bit limiting and doesn’t approach some more interesting issues of what kind of coverage they produce.

Also, the study asks the wrong question: “Can A citizen journalism site replace A newspaper site” (emphasis mine). Well that’s just not what’s happening in the real world, and not what we should be studying. The right question is, can an open, amateur system with endless capacity for growth and specialization, as a whole, replace or complement the one newspaper site in town.

For example, the study records whether each individual citizen site or blog was updated that day, and then notes that the newspaper site is updated every day. Well, fine. But take them as a whole, and you’ll see that of all the citizen sites and blogs, a lot of them are posting updates on any given day, and possibly in much larger volume, diversity and relevance than the one newspaper site.

The study identified only 86 newsish blogs and 53 citizen journalism sites in 46 markets. It studied 63 newspaper sites in those 46 markets. That ratio: 139 citizen sites to 63 newspaper sites, suggests the citizen sites are undercounted to begin with. Here in Washington, D.C., where we are building a network of citizen blogs to collaborate with our TBD.com news startup, there are several newspaper sites, but several hundred local blogs covering topics and communities. We have more than 90 signed up as partners. A proper study of 46 markets across the country should be looking at thousands of citizen sites, not 139.

Newspaper Research Journal Study

Our topic this week was “How to build engaged online communities,” specifically for news sites. Of course I picked this topic because my job is to work with a team of engagement wizards to build a web community around TBD.com, a news Washington, D.C., local news site launching this summer.

If you didn’t get to follow the chat on Twitter last night, or you came in late, here are the questions we discussed and some of my favorite tweets from each. I guarantee you can find at least one thing here you can take away as an action item or discussion point for your news organization.

Q1: Let’s start by agreeing on the terms: What does user engagement mean to you? What does an “engaged” online community look like?

We seemed to get down to an interesting divide over whether “engagement” is best measured by frequency of visit (loyalty) or depth of activity during a visit (participation). Here were a couple good arguments for participation-focused measurement:

Q2: Does your news org have an engagement editor, “community host” or someone similar? Define that position.

Q3: What are the best specific ways for a news site to engage users? How do you get users to become evangelists of your content?

Q4: Are there specific engagement techniques for mobile? How’s it different w/geolocation and touch interface?

Q5: What staff duties and resources does a news company need to invest in to make engagement possible?

Q6: What tools, guidelines & moderation tactics are most important for creating active comment sections?

Q7: When engaging groups of users to interact, such as chats or comments, should anonymity be banned? Discouraged? Or is it useful?

Q8: More on commenting: How do you engage at a level more sophisticated/constructive than flippant comments?

A big lesson seems to be: DO SOMETHING with the comments, don’t just let them sit there in isolation.

Q9: Show me the money: How does user engagement lead to revenue for the site owner?

Q10: Statement: To get strong engagement from users, you must give them control. Agree? Disagree? Why?

————————

* Bonus for reading all the way to the bottom: Check out 10 Rules for Increasing Community Engagement by Leah Betancourt on Mashable.

Now, I’m on record as not a fan of paywalls online (they’re often considered for the wrong reasons and with a lack of economic understanding). As bad as that is, micropayments are worse.

People who have been paying attention have learned that valuable websites are created through building a loyal community and creating a rewarding user experience. At least a paywall site lets you have a loyal (though small) community with potential for a bonded experience. Micropayments, however, turn the user into a henpecked customer constantly battling doubt and buyer’s remorse. They encourage the shallowest possible interaction with your site, only reading the one or two things you really want to pay for, then get the heck out of there.

So why is Google enabling this by developing an industry platform? It’s clear that Google wants to at least appear friendly to newspaper executives, many of whom in the U.S. and Europe have been denouncing the company as a parasite on their hides. So maybe Newspass is just another Fast Flip — a red herring that smells progressy but really advances nothing.

Or, here’s the crazy part, maybe Google is tricking the news publishers. Get them to install the “pay me” buttons they think are a great idea, so that millions of readers will dodge the pay demand and immediately leave the site to search Google for a free version of the story.

Maybe not. Maybe it’s just a bad idea.