Snapshots from the Edge:
CopyCamp Brings Community Offline and Into the Newsroom
By
Beth Lawton
At a time when newspapers are trying to connect with their readers through article comments, social networks and other Web 2.0 tools, The San Jose Mercury News took a step in the opposite direction.
“Nothing beats just sitting across the table from someone else and having a conversation,” said Mercury News business reporter and columnist Chris O’Brien.
In late June, the newspaper hosted the first CopyCamp, an “unconference” with readers. The unconference is a gathering where the agenda and discussions are determined entirely by those who show up. Frequently, attendees determine the schedule through The Open Grid method – essentially, posting topics and discussion locations on pieces of paper or on a whiteboard at the event.
David Cohn, a 2008 Knight News Challenge grantee, approached O’Brien with the idea for CopyCamp last year. At that point, O’Brien was part of the Mercury News Rethink project, one of the central themes of which was reassessing how the newspaper relates and interacts with its community.
Although the Rethink project ended before CopyCamp, the idea “struck us as a fascinating way to explore a different kind of relationship with our audience,” O’Brien said.
“Nothing beats just sitting across the table from someone else and having a conversation.”
Chris O’Brien
The ‘Unconference’ Model
Last year, Cohn and a friend attended a PodCamp, an unconference for podcasters, and thought of holding a similar event centered on journalism with a news organization as the host. The event would be called CopyCamp. Later in the year, at a Journalism That Matters session, Cohn met O’Brien, who brought the idea back to San Jose and shared it with Matt Mansfield (who helped organize the event but is no longer with the newspaper).
“I had always really pictured having to sell it to a news organization, but they got it right away,” Cohn said. “They understood the benefit of it, and it was really just a matter of logistics instead of convincing people of its value.”
Cohn’s idea for CopyCamp flowed, indirectly, from tech pioneer Tim O’Reilly’s “Friend’s of O’Reilly” parties, called FooCamp. Though he may not have hosted the first unconference ever, O’Reilly’s events were very influential in the tech community.
A splinter group of former FooCamp attendees, reportedly irritated at not being invited to one of O’Reilly’s shindigs, created their own series of events called BarCamp. (“Bar” stands for nothing; it is the second half of the slang term fubar* and a play on “Foo”.) There are now BarCamp events, all technology focused, across the globe. Dates are set for BarCamps in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America this summer.
Since BarCamp started in late 2005, other groups have used the unconference model to generate discussions and activity, for example RootsCamp for grassroots activists and PodCamp for podcasters. Public wikis help people organize the events, and attendees are frequently encouraged to start, and later continue, their discussions online, even though meeting in person is one of the most important components.
In the journalism world, one of the more popular unconferences is the Journalism That Matters series where O’Brien and Cohn met. JTM uses a process called Open Space Technology, which includes a set of principles that support the unconference ideals.
The principles, according to Stephen Silha, who helps moderate JTM events with Peggy Holman, are: Whoever comes are the right people; whatever happens is the only thing that could have; when it starts is the right time; when it’s over, it’s over.
“While it is tough to predict the specific forms that outcomes will take, it is possible and in fact critical to success to get very clear about the intended purpose of the gathering,” Holman said. “That is what gives it focus and purpose.”
In addition, Silha said, JTM events follow the “Law of Two Feet,” which helps attendees get the most out of their experience. The law is “that if you're neither contributing nor getting value where you are, use your two feet and go somewhere else. It also says to stand on your two feet to express what's important to you.”
Organizing and Preparing
Hosting an unconference-style event such as CopyCamp ironically requires a significant amount of preparation. “Don’t just put up the wiki and assume people are going to come,” Cohn said.
“Doing outreach is like getting your hands dirty, and you have to get your hands dirty,” he continued.
One of the challenges of any unconference is arriving without preconceived notions of how the event will unfold; those who have gone to a BarCamp or another unconference are at an advantage because they have a first-hand understanding of the principle of openness.
“We didn’t go into it hoping to have a thing in hand when we came out the other end,” O’Brien said. “Our goal was very fundamental: to bring people in and have this conversation with the community and see what happened.”
But not having an end-goal made it difficult to attract attendees. O’Brien noted that people who aren’t familiar with the unconference format, but whom the newspaper wanted to draw in, wanted to know what they would get out of it. “The challenge of the unconference is that you can’t answer that question going into it because it’s intentionally open-ended.”
Giving attendees a general topic to discuss helped a lot. The newspaper chose to host CopyCamp with a focus on race and demographics, a subject core to the newspaper’s mission. O’Brien recruited reporters in San Jose whose beats focused on diversity and demographics, and asked each reporter to personally invite people to attend – a technique that can be more effective than broadcast e-mails. The invitees included local leaders, local business owners and community members the reporters had met in the course of reporting a story.
Including a group of Mercury News staffers, who attended as volunteers and did not get paid for their time, 38 people attended the unconference.
The event ran from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The Mercury News ordered breakfast and lunch for the attendees.
‘The Potential to be Derailed’
Even without specific goals in place and a set agenda, unconferences do have the potential to be “derailed.” Cohn said the attendees of any CopyCamp naturally will be people who are passionate about newspapers. In that situation, Cohn said, it’s easy for attendees to be critical of the newspaper, and it’s easy for the newspaper staffers to get defensive.
O’Brien agreed the risk is there for attendees to “get stuck in that conversation that doesn’t help you change anything.”
But that didn’t happen – much to the credit of the San Jose Mercury News staff, “who kept an open ear, who were very relaxed and were very receptive,” Cohn said.
Moderating the event was not easy, Cohn and O’Brien both noted. “Moderating these things is a skill and an art; it’s something you learn over time,” Cohn said.
O’Brien said he now wishes he had said something about the derailment risk in the start and validate attendees’ concerns about the newspaper’s coverage. After lunch, O’Brien focused more on moving the conversation forward.
In addition, Cohn and O’Brien focused on constantly moving the discussion forward through active listening and by asking attendees how the newspaper could improve. “And that was actually the most constructive part,” Cohn said.
Still, it might have helped to have a moderator who was more experienced or who moderates events professionally.
Moving Forward
The Mercury News staffers did take away a few ideas from the event, but the newspaper hasn’t made any formal changes or commitments to date.
“I definitely think it was a success because in the end, not only did people in the newsroom meet people in the community, but people in the community met other people in the community,” Cohn said.
Cohn said he has informally talked to journalists in San Francisco about doing another CopyCamp, but an event has not been scheduled.
“Just try it. You have nothing to lose and potentially everything to learn,” O’Brien said.
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