And the winner is ...

Friday, October 17, 2008

After lots of agonizing, I finally picked a logo. I received lots of great submissions from designers at crowdSPRING, but in the end I went with the idea that really conveyed what my site is all about: Navy families. It’s friendly, welcoming and very Web 2.0.

I’ll be showing it off for the first time this weekend at the Kitsap Military Fall Festival. The event is organized by the Silverdale Chamber of Commerce and draws hundreds of military families, as well as local businesses and service groups. I look forward to talking to more people about my project and enlisting their help in refining and testing some of the site’s features when they’re ready.

Help choose a logo for Northwest Navy News

Thursday, October 02, 2008

I decided to try something a little different as I started to think about establishing a visual identity for my project. So I turned to crowdSPRING, an interactive marketplace for designers and buyers.

It works like this: A company or individual looking for a logo, Web site, stationary or other design concept submits the request, along with a price they’re willing to pay, a deadline and specifications about their needs. Designers—the site calls them creatives—submit their ideas. Then it gets interesting. Buyers and anyone else visiting the site can rate the entries. Buyers can also leave feedback and suggest changes. Creatives read and respond to the feedback, then update their designs. After the deadline passes, the buyer picks a winner and that winner gets paid.

I was intrigued by the idea of a social design process after a Twitter friend, marketing professional Kim Dushinski, posted a few tweets about her experience with crowdSPRING. You can see the logo she chose at MobileMarketingProfits.com and read her blog post about the experience.

With just a few days left before the self-imposed deadline on my logo project, I’d love to hear what you think about some of the entries. Go to my project page on crowdSPRING to rate the offerings or feel free to post your thoughts as comments here.

Soaking up ideas

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

I recently spent a week in Washington, D.C., hanging out and learning from lots of smart journalists and Web geeks. I’m still trying to process everything I saw and heard, but here are some efforts that inspired me:

• Knight-Batten Award winners JDLand.com and Ushahidi.com each demonstrate in different ways how powerful community journalism can be and how technology can be harnessed to tell stories. JDLand.com is the effort of one woman, who has a separate full-time job, to chronicle the changes going on in one D.C. neighborhood. Ushahidi.com, on the other hand, provides the tools for people in the midst of a crisis to report what is going on around them.
   
• NowPublic.com takes stories reported by people around the world and gives them a place to grow, change and reach a wider audience. I’m fascinated by the idea that the original story, whether it’s a few paragraphs or a long-form narrative, is just the beginning. People who read it take time to add their own observations, links to traditional news coverage, photos, videos, ratings and comments to create something that becomes more meaningful over time.
   
• Similar to NowPublic.com and also recognized by the Knight-Batten Awards, CNN’s iReport allows people around the world to tell stories, using their own definitions of what makes news. It’s encouraging to see a mainstream media outlet taking these stories seriously and using them to inform their professional reporting.

Ideas and inspiration from Navy wives

Thursday, August 28, 2008

A group of women that meets at the sprawling Navy support complex in Marysville, Wash., once a month while their husbands are deployed prepare for when their ship returns. The group’s leaders invited me to join them last Friday evening to get ideas for my project. I talked with the women while they worked on their own project—a surprise for the day their husbands return.

“I didn’t even know where to start,“ one woman told me when I asked if she used any social networking sites to find support in the Puget Sound area. Another woman said she used Meetup.com to find activities and meet people, and several others said they connected with Navy wives on MySpace.

Several women said they used Web sites like GreatSchools.net, checked sex offender registries and called local police departments before they moved to the area to decide where they should live. Some relied on family or friends for advice. Others got suggestions from a Navy housing office and then did more research on their own.

One thing they mentioned that hadn’t occurred to me was that it would be helpful to list laws that vary from state to state, governing things like drivers licensing, car insurance, gun ownership and landlord-tenant responsibilities.

These women were inspiring and full of great ideas based on their experiences. I’m grateful they invited me to their gathering. I hope to meet with more groups like this and continue to learn from them as I move forward with my project.

Friends and allies are keys to getting started

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

A steady trickle of phone calls, e-mails, Tweets and Facebook messages have arrived from colleagues since the announcement of this award. And as I would expect from journalists, they have questions. “Are you leaving The Herald?“ No, I’m doing this as a side project. “Have you considered Ning as a platform?“ I haven’t thought too much about platforms yet, until I determine what information and features the site will have. “Do you need help with copy editing/Web development/writing?“ Yes, yes and yes, thank you. “When you get rich, will you hire me.“ We’ll see about that.

All of these questions are good ones—well, I’m pretty sure the last one was a joke. I’m lucky to have such smart friends and coworkers. But my first steps for this project involve a basic skill in journalism and business: networking. Beginning this week, I’m meeting with sources for some of the in-depth information about the Navy community that I hope to collect. I’m also meeting with members of the community I hope to serve. I want to tell them about my ideas and find out what they think would be most useful.

Networking for this project poses several challenges. Time and geography are the most basic. I’m squeezing in meetings and phone calls around my day job in Everett, and Puget Sound is a huge body of water, which makes travel tricky. The trip from Everett to Bremerton, for example, is 28 miles of driving and an hour-long ferry ride. Add in ferry waiting time and it can take more than two hours in one direction. The other major challenge is building on my existing relationships with official Navy sources and forging new relationships with people I hope to serve with the Northwest Navy News site. The approach to these relationships from both sides will change a little because I’m not working on behalf of an established news organization. It’s new territory for everyone involved, which makes it as exciting as it is challenging.

If you’re reading this post and you have a connection to the Puget Sound area’s military community, I’d love to hear from you. You can leave your comments here, send me an e-mail, @ me on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn or find me on Facebook. I need as many allies as possible.

Predeployment jitters

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

When friends ask how work is going, my standard reply is “busy.“ Anyone who knows me well understands I’m not happy unless I’m stretching myself. That’s why I’m excited to tackle the challenge of founding Northwest Navy News, a news and community site for Navy families, veterans and retirees in the Pacific Northwest.

Some of the most rewarding stories I wrote as a reporter touched the daily lives of military families. Deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan matter, but so do childcare, schools, housing and other fundamental issues people encounter everywhere. Journalists, in general, don’t pay enough attention to the perspectives of spouses, children, parents and others with loved ones serving in the military when it comes to these issues.

I’m not naive enough to think I know everything about what matters to military families. I hope to empower people in the community to connect with each other and fill in the gaps. Call it a collaborative effort.

I also have a lot to learn about starting up a Web site. I’m a journalist, not a techie. The learning curve is steep, so I’ll need to tap my own social network of experienced online journalists for their expertise. The prospect is thrilling and just a little bit terrifying. But I did say I like a challenge, didn’t I?