Thursday, January 12, 2012

After its first full year, NolaVie.com has partnership agreements with ten New Orleans cultural and arts groups, a discrete website and a page on The Times Picayune’s Nola.com.

And the newspaper in late 2011 has now agreed to reverse publish some of the stories appearing on NolaVie in its printed editions.

The arts groups provide money and content in exchange for increased visibility. For example, employees at Nola Art House Music contribute pieces about jazz to NolaVie. The two partnered to host a holiday jazz concert in December 2011 and teamed up to host another jazz performance in January 2012.

Other creative events NolaVie has dubbed “pop ups.”

For example, its Visual Arts popup in October 2011 featured photography and painting exhibits and one local’s installation piece. The event was held in conjunction with monthly art openings in the budding St. Claude arts neighborhood.

More than 200 people attended NolaVie’s “multimedia interdisciplinary pop-up” event. Held on a local float-making warehouse, the pop-up highlighted fashions by an up-and-coming designer, a NolaVie writer’s “poetry-to-go” and music by a popular DJ. NolaVie hosted the event on Nov. 11, 2011 and made the most of the unique calendar day, charging $11 and wrapping up at 11 p.m.

NolaVie’s creative writing competition held in March 2011 drew more than 150 entries, many from well-known authors and poets in the community. 

NolaVie, a New Media Women Entrepreneur awardee in 2010, has published more than 700 stories by some 100 writers and photographers since it launched in February 2011.  The interactive site focused on New Orleans’ quirky culture is able to maintain a prolific presence because it publishes at least two pieces a day by both professional and occasional writers, many of whom work pro bono.

NolaVie is covering topics including arts, literature, cultural institutions, events, music, food and other lifestyle issues. In doing these original pieces, they’ve created a cultural clearinghouse of sorts, highlighting organizations, visual and performing artists, writers, photographers and bloggers.

Monday, March 28, 2011

We’ve got it - and have been corralling writers like crazy since launching on Feb. 21. The most gratifying aspect of NolaVie is that so many people are jumping on board.

Contributors’ meetings these days range from 10 to 25 people, all excited about story ideas that capture the unique and lively culture and arts scene in New Orleans.

But let’s back up. Here’s the news in a more “legacy journalism” format.

In February, NolaVie went live, both at www.nolavie.com and at www.nola.com/nolavie, the latter as a part of partner Nola.com’s major New Orleans website. Banner home-page billing in week one, coupled with a story in the feature section of The Times-Picayune, drew first-time readers in the thousands. We were off to a grand start.

In the past month, we:

• Have posted from two to five original stories daily, ranging from a dawn session at the race track to profiles of local entrepreneurs to restaurant snapshots and a play monologue.
• Among our most popular stories to date: A regular column on senior living by the former Living Section editor of The Times-Picayune (a spry 75), a short story and photo gallery on Barkus, the Mardi Gras parade for dogs; a piece about a Rouse’s grocery store commercial that featured the St. Augustine Marching 100 high-school band; an interview with a sociologist about why Mardi Gras forms the social and economic base of the culture.
• Held our first event, a parade party at the Bridge Lounge, with Nola Brewing (free) beer and a sign-up sheet for our soon-to-come newsletter. (Pix of the event ran in the Times-Picayune Big Easy page)
• Held our second event, a film screening of a Les Blank movie about New Orleans, at a local art center called Fair Folks and a Goat.
• Covered New Orleans Entrepreneur Week in depth, an event that is attracting national attention in just its third year.
• Signed up two new founding partners, the New Orleans Opera Association and New Orleans Museum of Art (bringing the total to eight so far)
• Launched a Creative Writing Contest, soliciting fiction, short non-fiction and poetry about New Orleans; winners get cash prizes and their works will be read at an event in April at Octavia Books, a well-known local bookstore.

We have a dozen regular contributors, and many others who send in the occasional story. One gratifying bit of news on the content front: We invited people to submit stories, not knowing if they would or what we would get. We have received some very high-quality articles “out of the blue,” such as a recent recap of The Tennessee Williams Festival by a well-known local author. The experiment seems to be working.

Our major launch party, for partners, cultural leaders, politicians and the like, is scheduled for April 7. Jazz musicians from our jazz content partner, Nola Art House Music, will perform.

We have three (very talented) paid part-time employees: a director of content, an associate director of content and a liaison with the New Orleans entrepreneur community. Our two interns from Dartmouth returned to school for spring session (after setting up all our social networks, tweeting, taking video and pictures, reading and answering email and writing stories). Three new interns from Tulane University start with NolaVie today.

We hold weekly editorial meetings, and have continued to schedule breakfast and lunch meetings, coffees and executive meetings with all and sundry, such as the film and music departments at University of New Orleans, potential contributors, etc.

In short, things are hectic, busy, occasionally overwhelming, but definitely off to a good start.

The major challenge for us: Although we have a permanent link on the Nola.com home page, people have trouble finding us if we are not promoted more prominently there. So we are working to get more headline coverage on Nola.com.

We are also hoping to launch our first newsletter this week.

Our first goal is to establish our website with solid, literary content, and draw users. Next we will brainstorm monetizing and longterm goals.

Wish us luck and keep reading at nola.com/nolavie. Thanks!

Monday, February 21, 2011

We’re proud to announce that NolaVie, an arts and culture site in New Orleans, La., launches today.

Founders Sharon Litwin and Renee Peck, along with their team, worked tirelessly over the past several months to decide on contributors and flush out the details of a partnership with NOLA.com, the online site of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

From Peck’s welcome post:

NolaVie, we decided, would be a place where individuals and organizations can gather under one tent, to talk about who we are and why we love the city. About what’s going on here, and what we think about it. We wouldn’t create sections devoted specifically to cuisine or music or theater, but rather we’d start conversations about whatever captured our fancy on a particular day.

Visit NolaVie here.

Congrats to everyone involved! We look forward to watching this site grow.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Exciting news: NolaVie, an arts and culture site for New Orleans, will premiere online Feb. 21.  It’s amazing how many meetings, lunches, coffee dates and decisions go into connecting the dots in a project like this. 

As site creators, we have been meeting almost daily with possible contributors and potential partners - everyone from the editor of the local paper to a mover-and-shaker in the marketing world, to a host of 20-somethings who have moved in after Katrina determined to make an impact. We’re even working with fellow New Media Women Entrepreneur awardee Retha Hill on providing content for her black history mobile application. More on that in a moment. 

Pulling together all of these loose threads and weaving them into a compelling tapestry is proving to be part juggling act and part the power of persuasion.

As the site launch approaches, we are collecting names and email addresses at nolavie.com so users can receive word as soon as the site is up and running.  Meanwhile, we have a number of concrete achievements to report behind the scenes.

Partnership with NOLA.com

We are close to finalizing a deal with the Times-Picayune’s website, NOLA.com. A formal letter of intent has been sent from NOLA.com to its parent company, Advance Publications, outlining our agreed-upon partnership with a clear indication of responsibilities and contributions by both NOLA.com and NolaVie. We are awaiting the return of a signed copy.

NOLA.com Director of Content James O’Byrne has agreed to our launch date and is committed to getting our content online giving us blog protocols and limited access to the backend of NOLA.com.

In the meantime, we can start posting and polishing content now, including creative stories, photos, and videos. With this prototype, we can build splash pages to show to potential partners and contributors. The page conforms to the NOLA.com style but we have the latitude to put whatever we find appropriate in the columns. 

We have also been working on our category structures and agree they will refer to format rather than subject matter.  That is, People will contain profiles of New Orleans characters or interviews with musicians, while Happenings will spotlight events, and Viewpoints will offer essays and opinions.

Other Content Partners

In general, we are using a sort of museum model for our content: We envision curated sections, pulled from a variety of sources, overseen by people who serve as “content liaisons” rather than traditional editors.

In addition to the assistant editors, three content liaison positions representing three “constituencies” have been identified:

• NOLA Art House Music, a group of accomplished young contemporary jazz musicians, will produce a section of the site devoted to contemporary jazz music and the local jazz scene.
• Pelican Bomb, a group of contemporary visual arts critics and writers, will provide essays and criticism dealing with the local arts scene.
• The Arts Council of New Orleans, a not-for-profit group devoted to local arts, will oversee local arts events for the site.

Each entity will name a person to be the content liaison responsible for ongoing information within that constituency.

We have also approached and have received commitments of partner support from six cultural organizations.  So far, the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation; the New Orleans African American Museum, National World War II Museum, Audubon Aquarium and New Orleans Ballet Association have pledged to be partners.  After we build a page with sample content in the next few weeks, we’ll continue to invite more groups to participate.

After hearing our fellow New Media Women Entrepreneur, Retha Hill, speak at the summit J-Lab organized in Washington in November, we were convinced we had to partner on a project together.  She is launching a mobile black history application that uses geo-location and augmented reality to display nearby points of interest to smart-phone users.  Two Dartmouth College interns spending winter terms in New Orleans will work on compiling our city’s data.  This way, we can help Retha launch a New Orleans version of her app in this city rich with black history.

Staffing

A content editor has been hired and two assistant editors have been interviewed and will be hired by the middle of January.

As Director of Content, Blake Bertuccelli (a web developer and filmmaker who moved to New Orleans from Los Angeles) will be responsible for the day-to-day web development and content. He has almost completed the coding for our submission page, which will be a way for people to contribute content for our consideration. We want both cultural organizations and individuals to send us potential content, and this will allow them to submit articles, photos, photo galleries and videos using a simple fill-in-the-blank form.

Of the two assistant editors interviewed, one is a pro bono position; the other will be paid an honorarium for the work. One of these women is working with the vast New Orleans creative writing community - an audience pretty much untapped by local websites.

We are planning to sponsor a creative writing contest, pulling from local workshops, writing groups and universities, to cull short stories, poems, essays and character pieces about the city and its unique offerings.

The other woman we’ve interviewed as an assistant editor is already working on aggregated content - she’s canvassing local blogs, websites, calendars, YouTube and the like to find both site items for highlights and potential contributors.

Moving Forward

We feel like we’ve done a good job of creating the infrastructure for this website. Now we are busy building our universe atop it, in the form of content providers and partners.

Please visit www.nolavie.com and leave us your email, so that you will be among the first to view our fabulous new community website when it sets sail in February.

Friday, September 10, 2010

THE BEGINNING: PART I

I’m the type who plans a dinner party, and then obsesses over whether anyone will come. So when a good friend and former colleague, Sharon Litwin, asked me if I would help her start a new web site, my first worry wasn’t the obvious one - My God! Start a WEB SITE? Are you KIDDING? Do you know how much WORK that will be? Rather, it was one based on my own particular neuroses: If we threw a web party, would anyone come?

It’s not, it turns out, a bad thing to ponder. One problem with the Internet is that there is too much of it. Anyone can pitch a tent, and, Google and Yahoo aside, it takes luck and perseverance to find a particular address in the wilderness. At last count, there were more than 650,000 individual art blogs on the Web.

We did not need to start another one.

But the concept of a community cultural web site resonated. New Orleans is a quirky place, where people embrace eccentricity and live their after-work hours with exuberance. There is much to revel in here, much to explore, and the idea took root of an online community peopled by the many and varied voices of the city. We’d offer a sort of digital salon, focusing not only on the arts, but also on local culture (with a lower-case c), a place where New Orleanians could meet, discuss, share ideas, be entertained, exchange views, find out about happenings. Besides, with print journalism becoming an endangered species, the move was on to save investigative reporting through online outlets such as Pro Publica, but a similar trend had not emerged for soft news. Having spent three decades covering TV, food, entertainment, home and garden and other under-appreciated but excessively popular feature subjects, I know their impact and importance. Call me the Queen of Fluff.

Still, the best way to start a web site, we agreed, was to begin with an established audience. And the New Orleans Web site with the strongest audience is Nola.com. The site is by far the dominant e-presence in the city, built around the articles, photos and videos from its print partner The Times-Picayune, but also offering an array of interactive features of its own, from user input to Saints updates to hurricane tracking maps. So we approached Nola.com Director of Content James O’Byrne with a proposal for a partnership: We would build a community web site, and Nola.com would serve as the portal to it.

He was intrigued, agreed to consider the idea ... and NolaVie was born.

THE BEGINNING: PART II

Fast forward a year. Rush past all the brainstorming, the late-night idea sessions, the bottles of wine and platters of Brie and pate.  NolaVie took shape.

About the name: We wanted to identify our community and potential partner, thus the inclusion of NOLA (for New Orleans, Louisiana, in case you live in Finland). We wanted to convey lifestyle, community and culture, too, and thus “Vie” - that’s not VI (as in strive), but VEE as in French for “life.” The site is about our life here, and the French pays homage to our past.  (Of course, that past includes more time as a Spanish colony than a French one, and lots of input from Africa, the Caribbean and Central America, but hey, people think we’re French. Also, we toyed with LaVidaNola, which was a clever suggestion from a TP colleague, but it makes us sound like we’re catering only to the sizable local Hispanic population. The nice thing about the French accent is that French is actually pretty much a dead language around here.)

Last week, Sharon and I met again with Nola.com’s O’Byrne, who outlined a suggested content agreement between his web site and ours. It is only that: a suggested partnership. It is yet to be reviewed or approved by Nola.com’s parent organization, Advance Publications, and it likely will have to go through many readings and permutations before any potential partnership is created.

Still, the idea of a public/private online partnership to bring New Orleans culture and community to the web is an exciting one. And O’Byrne’s willingness to think outside the box, to see the potential in hosting a digital repository of local cultural commentary and conversation, indicates just why Nola.com is the pre-eminent online New Orleans destination.

For now, the proposal for Nola.com/NolaVie cooperation is a simple one: They give us some space on their server, access to their pagination software/templates and a couple of pages, and we fill them with enticing local content (although not content that simply copycats what the feature writers at the Times-Picayune already are doing so well - but that’s a blog for another day). Our content would be branded with the NolaVie logo, but could float through other parts of Nola.com. Our content will be accessed primarily from the Nola.com home page, although we also have secured the nolavie.com URL.

There are lots more bottles of wine and wedges of Brie in our future. Business plans, content sessions, funding issues ... well, you know the drill.

But for now, we toast our success at coming up with an innovative approach to delivering cultural and community content in a digital world. We have lots of ideas about shape and content, contributors and new media. About partnerships with local organizations, input from local groups and sponsorships from those who care about the city and its offerings. We can’t wait to get all the conversations started.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Putting a new website together and ensuring its content and financial sustainability is no small challenge. NolaVie founders and early supporters, having been honored with a grant from J-Lab, have met several times over the past weeks to discuss aspects of website design and content subject matter, as well as to put together a realistic business plan.

Receiving a grant has definitely pushed us “off the cliff” and into concerted action which, for us, means really establishing some “rules of the road” for content providers. Recent discussion have included a number of key questions: who are the key providers; how are they to be presented; how often can they be presented; how do we design a benefit package for organizational members; what are the intellectual property issues to be considered, what would be the most attractive benefits for organizational members, among many other issues.

On Thursday, July 15, 2010, a meeting was held of the trustees and members of Partnership for Action, the umbrella not-for-profit agency of NolaVie. While a number were out of town on vacation or business, more than 20 members appeared to hear and discuss the NolaVie project. After a thoughtful and exciting discussion, they endorsed the project and approved the new slate of officers nominated: Sharon Litwin, President (and co-founder of NolaVie); Renee Peck, Vice President (and co-founder of NolaVie); Jackie Sullivan, CPA, recently retired Deputy Director of the New Orleans Museum of Art, Treasurer; and Constance Charles Willems, attorney and honorary consul of the Netherlands in Louisiana, Secretary.

The next step for PFA is to institute three ad hoc committees until such time as an advisory structure is created to oversee NolaVie. They are: Governance Committee, Content Committee and Development Committee, all of which will meet between August and late September, 2010.

Governance Committee will meet to discuss the relationship of NolaVie and its leadership structure to PFA. Should a member of the NolaVie leadership have a seat on the PFA board? What, if any, oversight should PFA have of the NolaVie leadership? Should NolaVie be run by an Advisory Committee or a Board and what is the difference?

Content Committee will meet to determine a core list of providers to be included in an upcoming small group meeting which, having met, will then notify interested others who will be invited to a community-wide “town hall” meeting to introduce the NolaVie project to the widest possible group of potential constituent providers.

Development Committee will meet to identify potential organizational members and discuss benefit packages for them. Having identified potential members, this group of PFA trustees/members will accompany NolaVie personnel on fundraising and membership calls.

Since notification of the J-Lab grant, NolaVie has obtained free office space, the pro-bono services of an attorney specializing in the area of Intellectual Property, a free bank checking account, and a Post Office Box for incoming mail.

Sharon Litwin and Renee Peck have met and are working with a group of outstanding, talented young New Orleans professional jazz musicians for whom NolaVie will be both a marketing and promotion site. Their emerging New Orleans Jazz Works organization is being designed to harness the energy and creativity of the area’s younger jazz performers and composers. NolaVie will provide the first-ever interactive site available for communication and dialogue for this constituency.

Similar discussions have taken place with the leadership of the area’s growing theatre community and also with the active Arts Council of New Orleans. Discussion will continue with other constituent groups both to encourage participation and avoid duplication of effort.