The Public Press, a new daily newspaper for the San Francisco Bay Area

The Public Press www.public-press.org is a concept for the next-generation daily newspaper. We're organizing a group of journalists, technologist and nonprofit managers to organize a new newsroom for the San Francisco Bay Area that would produce a Web site, daily print newspaper and collaborations with nonprofit news-gathering organizations locally and nationally. We've built a simple Drupal 6 site that we will be growing in the coming weeks and months, and we plan to start publishing on the Web using this platform. Our current target date for the first-phase content roll-out is September 2008.

The basic concept is to reintroduce competition to local journalism, and do it on the noncommercial model, much like a local public broadcast station. Revenues will come from a combination of print subscriptions, street sales, public-broadcast-style "pledges," foundations and individual philanthropy. The current plan is not to take any advertising at all -- a format that will allow a radically restructured print product that is, among other things, more userfriendly and ecologically sensible.

We're developing the organizing Web site in Drupal, and would like to stick with it. We'd also like to adopt some of the development mechanisms and community tools that Drupal.org itself utilizes to coordinate volunteer efforts from many community members. This open, accountable, collaborative approach dovetails nicely with the way the Public Press continues to be built.

So we're looking for collaborators and local contributors who can help us brainstorm new ways of doing things, but on the Web and as a backend system to manage the print-side production. Designing this system from scratch will enable a whole lot of exciting possibilities, creating, for example, a truly Web-first publishing environment in which Web-news organization principles are back-translated into print.

Join us for Drupal Day, May 2, at the NewsTools 2008 conference at Yahoo. Or Flag me down at the event. If you can't make it and are interested in participating, I'd love to hear from you! E-mail mstoll [AT symbol] public-press.org.

Thanks!

Michael Stoll
San Francisco