If you dream it, we’ll build it…

For some time, a few things have bothered me concerning the need for innovation by community media organizations, so I’ve decided to do something about it.

I’m starting a monthly contest on this site to create innovative tools for community news groups. This involves not only receiving ideas from people who work in the industry, but also asking you to vote on other ideas. Each month, the idea that receives the most votes will be developed, free of charge, by our team at the news organization where I work. The idea will be built to a “proof of concept” phase, using the winner’s community news website to trial the tool.

Here’s an example of how this will work:

Let’s say you come with the winning idea to create a self-service COUPON WEBSITE for your local merchants. OK. We begin by getting the list of merchants you want to target. Next, we design the coupons and website for you, with the appropriate linkbacks to your home site.

Following the advice in your excellent idea, we create an RSS feed from the COUPON site into the CLASSIFIED section of your online publication.

And that’s not all. We also create an iPhone app to populate with the RSS feeds. Plus, we make a PDF version of the COUPON site that you can use in PRINT. Sky’s the limit, get the idea?

WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?

For four good reasons, all of which relate to the gripes I mentioned at the start of this post about innovation in community media organizations.

• The first is simple: to foster innovation in the news industry.
• The second is to demonstrate that the cost of innovation isn’t nearly as high as many people seem to think it is. I’ll post the budget for each winning project as an example.
• The third is frankly self-serving, and why not, we’re all in business here: all these great ideas that we develop for you also will create value for my news organization. In exchange for your idea, your organization gets the free tool. In building it for you, we enhance our own expertise. (Each idea will also be offered to other media organizations at cost.) 
• The fourth reason has to do with the misconception that fresh ideas always must be developed somewhere else, outside our industry, before we can feel “safe” about using such tools. That’s nonsense, and it’s destructive. Time to bring those ideas back inside the box.

WHY SHOULD YOU PARTICIPATE?

I can think of four good reasons for that, too.

• First, and most obvious, is that it will help your business, not only in terms of implementing your idea, but also for the good publicity of being a winner, and the potential to increase your traffic.
• Second, it’s risk-free. If you don’t have the personnel or the time to develop the idea yourself, this is like jobbing it out at no cost to you.
• Third, I hope this site will become a forum for new ideas. If community news organizations are to flourish amidst our online competition in its several forms, we need as many good ideas as we can get.
• Fourth, you’ll make valuable contacts. Especially if you comment on ideas and get a dialogue going, there’s no telling what else can arise of mutual benefit.

In a month, the winner will be posted on this site.

Send me your idea by commenting below.