The OMMA editors call it a subjective editorial judgment on their part, but they also add this about the factors that went into their ranking system:

“We consider prestige, share of voice, content quality, overall design and UX, innovation and, well, importance.”

Makes sense to us.

And here’s part of what they had to say about Publish2:

“Using Publish2, publishers can create their own news wires and distribute content directly to the print edition of any newspaper (provided it’s also a member of the Exchange). Publish2 expedites the process by handling the logistics of file transfers, graphics and tailored story formatting. It can also automatically import syndicated digital content to the print editions of newspapers. The network is scalable, meaning that publishers can create networks with as many members as they like – from hyper-local content clubs with just a few members to consortia that are national in scale.”

Check out the full list, and you’ll see we’re in good company.

Who’s #1? The New York Times. And at #40, just below us on the list? Oprah.

Ready to get started? Log in now at Publish2.com and search for newswires that suit your news organization’s needs.

Want to syndicate your own content, or share it with partner newspapers in your state and across the country? Create your first newswire and give your subscribers and partners permission to subscribe to it today.

New to Publish2? Register now. Publish2 News Exchange is the easiest way to share and distribute content for print and Web publishing.

Sometimes all you need is a few Tweets, a bunch of links, and some like-minded pioneers.

That’s how a quiet revolution began in Washington state Wednesday. Four journalists spontaneously launched one of the first experiments in collaborative (or networked) link journalism to cover a major local story.

But it gets better. Those four journalists weren’t in the same newsroom. In fact, they all work for different media companies. And here’s the best part: Some of them have never even met in person.

“The whole thing came together on Twitter yesterday morning,” Elaine Helm, new media editor at the Herald in Everett, said in an email Thursday.

The story was crazy rain in western Washington: evacuations, flooded and closed highways, avalanches, a breached levee, the whole deal. Elaine (@ehelm on Twitter), put a call out for local Twitterers to adopt a common hashtag for flooding coverage. Paul Balcerak (@paulbalcerak), assistant editor of dynamic media for Sound Publishing, suggested #waflood, which they agreed on and posted for their Twitter followers to see.

As Paul described it in an email, Brianne Pruitt (@briannepruitt, Wenatchee World web editor) and Angela Dice (@adice, Kitsap Sun web editor) picked up on the hashtag, “and it snowballed.”

That would have been innovation enough, but Paul went a step further: He saved links to flood coverage through Publish2, tagging each with “waflood,” and posted on Twitter that he was doing so. Soon Elaine, Angela, and Brianne were also adding links to Publish2 with a “waflood” tag.

They then put Publish2 widgets on their news organizations’ sites that displayed the links they were collaboratively gathering, greatly expanding their sites’ coverage of the flooding.

Here’s the Herald’s link roundup (which is also linked on the Herald’s homepage);

Kitsap Sun’s (inset in a story at left, linked on the homepage at right, and on this full page of links);

Wenatchee World’s (see inset box at left);

and the one at Sound Publishing’s pnwlocalnews.com (see “Washington state flooding” at the bottom).

Voila — instant collaborative link newswire!

The collaborative spirit of journalism’s future

This collaboration is remarkable in all kinds of ways.

First, you can tell by the Twitter timestamps how quickly everything came together. Second, with a link newswire fed by multiple news organizations, there’s a danger that everyone might add only their own stories to the mix. But this group added outside sources as well (including the News Tribune, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Seattle Times, Yakima Herald-Republic, the Daily Record, and more). Third, all four independently and instantly “got” what the others were doing, which shows how much the ideas of collaboration and link journalism (and even the term itself) have spread.

Lastly, did I mention the four journalists work for different media companies? The Herald is owned by the Washington Post Co., Kitsap Sun by Scripps, Sound Publishing by Black Press (of Victoria, B.C.), and Wenatchee World is independent/family-owned. Paul hasn’t met Angela or Brianne in person, and has met Elaine briefly once. Yet none of that was an obstacle.

I asked Angela in an email whether she knew the others in non-Twitter life. Here’s her wonderful answer:

I used to work with Elaine at the Sun and talk to her regularly, and she’s one of the reasons I joined Twitter. While I’d never done any project with Brianne before, she had made it a point to visit other papers around the region and introduce herself when she became the Wenatchee World web editor, which is how I started following her on Twitter. I met Seth Long [Sound Publishing's new media director] on Twitter, which is how I met Paul, neither of whom I’ve met in person. They both, however, work with a former co-worker and friend of mine. It’s a small, small online journalism world in Western Washington.

How refreshing is that? Forget walled gardens — this is the spirit of journalism’s future.

In some ways the networked linking process is an extension of how newsrooms collaborate with traditional wire services, but I think the Washington project is more than that. Papers using a traditional wire service aren’t really collaborating. They’re primarily trying to a) extend the reach of their stories, and b) get access to material they can’t afford to produce on their own.

The dynamic on display Wednesday, and the relationships Angela described in the quote above that allowed for this collaboration, seem more organic — a mental leap forward. They even emphasized the collaboration in the widget descriptions: Kitsap Sun’s says “Stories are chosen by news reporters and editors from Washington news organizations,” while the Herald’s says “Below are news stories that journalists around the state have selected to post using a service called Publish2.”

I asked Seth Long (@greenergrad) about a similar project he and Angela had worked on in December to round up links to snowstorm coverage. (For future Wikipedia articles on link journalism: To my knowledge, theirs was the first example of networked link journalism across media companies.)

He noted that “Her newspaper is a direct competitor with a group of our community weeklies.” In the old world, that would have made collaboration a non-starter. But today readers rightly come first. As Seth said, “My perspective is that our job is to serve our communities as best we can.”

Innovation that’s easy, popular, and cheap

The Washington link projects should serve as models for the entire news industry. They show that collaborative linking draws readers, is easy, and costs nothing more than time (and not even much of that).

Seth said the December snowstorm link roundup was on the homepage for three or four days — but it was the site’s most-trafficked story for the entire month. (This tracks with Knoxnews.com’s success with a popular football link roundup.)

Angela described some of the other benefits of collaborative linking:

I think it’s especially useful in situations like these, where events affect a large region. I can also see it being used as a way to track things like state government news, or any broad-reaching issue that your readers will be talking about.

Having a group of people adding the links just makes your job that much easier. As both a reader and a web editor, I can keep updated on what’s happening on a particular topic without opening and slogging through a dozen web sites.

This is the power of collaborative news networks. By forming a network, newsrooms can discover not just a greater volume of news, but a greater volume of relevant, high-quality news than one person, one newsroom, or one wire service could alone.

Compare the Washington group’s great waflood link roundup to a Google News search for “Washington flood” — I know which one I’d rather have as a resource if I lived in that area.

Doing this isn’t complicated. In an email, Brianne described the extent of her planning: “I follow the others on Twitter, and they had started a hashtag, #waflood, and then mentioned using the same tag for publish2 links.”

That’s it! Any group of news organizations can do this, even if they’re not Twitter-friends.

A good way to start is to set up a Publish2 newsgroup and invite other journalists (as Angela did with a Northwest News newsgroup in December). Collaboratively save links about a couple of non-breaking-news subjects to get a feel for it, and try publishing feeds of those links. Then when a big story breaks, it’s a simple matter of choosing a common tag and alerting everyone in the newsgroup.

Don’t get hung up on worries about sinking a lot of time or money into this. As Angela said, “There’s a perception that with some tools, it’s a lot of extra work, but — I’m specifically talking about the Publish2 model — when you realize how little time it really takes to bookmark a page you’re already reading, it’s a wonder you weren’t doing it before.”

As for money, when the technology is free all you need to invest in is smart journalists. Here’s what Paul had to say Wednesday:

I think it’s worth pointing out that everything we did today cost us $0.

That, too, is the spirit of journalism’s future. I can’t wait to see what this innovative crew cooks up next in that spirit — and who will be the first to follow their lead.

About two weeks ago, I emailed Jack Lail with the seed of what became the Publish2 Election News Network. We brainstormed by phone on Tuesday afternoon about using Publish2 to aggregated primary election news headlines from around Tennessee and around the web and publish them on Knoxnews.com. The primary was a week away at that point, but Jack said let’s do it.

Even before I could give Jack our javascript widget for publishing the headlines, that evening he emailed me a link to a mock-up page with the an RSS-to-HMTL conversion he created with a hacked Perl script. Wow.

He had also hatched a plan to get some bloggers in the Knoxville Blogger Network, which Knoxnews.com publishes, to pitch in with the journalists. In less than 8 hours, we had not only an experiment in news aggregation but a pro-am networked journalism experiment as well.

The next day, with the help of Knoxnews.com reporter and blogger Mike Silence, they rounded up a team and got them registered and set up on Publish2. Jack had a great instinct for keeping it simple enough for everyone to easily and quickly understand — he called it a “group link blog,” which is exactly what is was.

This page went up on Knoxnews.com on Wednesday, and we were off to the races. (Check out the subtitle: “Links to the best election news we can find” – can’t make the value proposition clearer or simpler than that.)

Elapsed time — about 48 hours.

Jack also wrote a piece about what they were doing, calling it a “ground breaking experiment.”

“Experiment” has not traditionally been part of the print publishing vocabulary, where the costs to try something and the costs of failure are great. But now, as Dave Cohn tirelessly points out, “Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it,” i.e. the costs of deciding whether to experiment — and missing opportunities — is actually greater than experimenting and failing.

So now that Jack is in the mode of experimenting with Publish2, he’s coming up with lot’s of ideas for quick and easy innovation. Yesterday, he emailed me this:

An example of a simple one-time use of the publish2 bookmarking system.

I wanted some blogger reactions to go with this story

http://knoxnews.com/news/2008/feb/09/parks-gun-ban-under-fire/

(Obviously, the nation’s most visited park, The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is a big news interest in our area.)

I searched around blogsearch.google.com and some other sources and bookmarked a few links with a “parkguns” tag and reformatted the rss feed with a modified version of the perl script I used for the election headlines.

Quickly, I had a “react” block of headlines I could add to the story.

Jack didn’t call a committee meeting to debate whether this might be a good idea — he just did it. And now he has a great example to show editors and reporters.

Leading by example is essential to rapid innovation — it’s so much more powerful to see what something actually looks like than to speculate on what it MIGHT look like. The images in this post and the links to live examples are far more useful than any of my exposition.

(Worth noting how Jack used Google blog search to find interesting items, added his own intelligence to Google’s raw data, then combined that with original content to create a destination page for this news story that no algorithm could beat.)

I saw a similar rapid turnaround last week from Tom Meagher, the city editor at the Herald News in New Jersey.

Yoni Greenbaum mentioned the Publish2 Election News Network to Tom on the Thursday before Super Tuesday. I followed up with Tom on Friday. On Monday, he wrote me back saying he and some other folks at Herald News had registered for Publish2 and wanted to get started.

The next morning, they had an election news headline feed up on their main site and also their election blog:

At one point on Tuesday, I saw Tom and another Herald News journalist had bookmarked some items without the tag that automatically places the bookmark in their headline feed. I pinged him with a reminder, and he wrote back:

Yeah, we bookmarked some things to share with the 2008 Election topic group that we didn’t need to tag for our feed.

That is, stuff we produced that we thought was cool and others in the ENN might be interested in.

Wow — that’s precisely one of the big advantages of the Publish2 network (vs. say a private Reddit) — the ability to share content across newsrooms, and get national distribution for local content through the editorial network. (More on that in another post — there’s a huge opportunity to reinvent the distribution of local content through a network of journalists and editors.)

But I didn’t tell Herald News to do this — by experimenting with the network, an innovative approach to distribution suddenly became evident. But they never would have discovered it if they hadn’t tried it. Without experimentation, there’s no discovery.

The same thing happened when I emailed Mark Briggs at Thenewstribune.com last Wednesday, three days before the Washington state caucus. On Thursday, Mark started getting journalists registered for Publish2, and that afternoon he got this page up:

Of course, Mark literally wrote the book on Journalism 2.0, but he sure does practice what he preaches.

Here’s what Mark wrote about the nascent effort:

Here’s a roundup of the best Washington election coverage that can be found on the web. It’s the product of a social bookmarking experiment where journalists from The News Tribune and other area newspapers collaborate with political bloggers and others to compile a reading list of coverage from all around the web.

All of the examples above are still works in progress — as Mark openly admits in his post — the aim is not to succeed overnight, but to decide overnight to start experimenting and learning.

Many news organizations still approach innovation based on planning and development cycles measured in months (or longer), when the time frame should be measured in days or weeks.

On the web, with cost of technology so low (or, in the case of Publish2, free), innovation can happen very fast and very cheap simply by TRYING.

The news business — and the journalism it supports — can no longer afford to wait for innovation to happen in due time. It needs to happen NOW.

Fortunately, there are plenty of innovators like Jack, Tom, and Mark leading the way, and the threshold for trying something new is getting lower everyday — even as the imperative to do so gets higher.

——

If you’re interested in being part of the Publish2 Election News Network — or using Publish2 for any other news aggregation experiment — email me at scott.karp at publish2 dot com. We’ll have you up and running in 48 hours. Or less.

(And you don’t need to be able to hack perl scripts like Jack — we’ve got a plug and play widget you can put on your site — we can even customize the formating for you.)

You can register for Publish2 here.