This week Webbmedia Group held a chat for journo-entrepreneurs, providing business models and use cases for journalists hoping to launch media start-ups.

Here are eight tips and a few examples of entrepreneurial journalism projects you can launch or replicate in your community. You can also find these and more tips on twitter: #kwchat.

Tip #1: Don't be a generalist. Create highly-specialized content that you're  an expert on.

Tip #2: Content producers must syndicate across platforms, but the RIGHT platforms.

Tip #3: Try to fund your new entrepreneurial jurno venture alone. Projects have launched for less than $10k.

Tip #4: You must create a business and marketing plan, regardless of how small your new venture is.

Tip #5: Find a few people whose opinions your trust to serve as advisers as you start your new venture.

Tip #6: "If you are passionate about your idea, find some people you trust and then go talk to people you don't know."

Tip #7: Remember, if you're going to record a demo of your product, make it good. Bad demos can doom great projects.

Tip# 8: Remember, most ideas fail. A vast majority of ideas fail. But, get to that point quickly.

Patch.com is an example of an entrepreneurial model that can be run with a low budget in any community.

Spot.us is another innovative model that includes crowdfunding and most recently a new sustainability model based on advertising through surveys.

Other journo-entrepreneur efforts include projects like WindyCitizen.com and its NowSpots advertising model and Front Porch Forum among other Knight Foundation grantees in this field.

If you are a journo-entrepreneur the Knight News Challenge, the Knight Community Information Challenge and J-Lab’s New Voices are great opportunities to launch your start-up to inform and engage communities.

For grant application tips and and other resources for freelance and entrepreneur journalists visit: knightchallenge.net. And to learn about Knight funded innovations that are ready for you to use, please visit Knight Apps.

Jose Zamora is a journalism program associate at Knight Foundation

Four journalists from the University of Maryland completed a month long study of racial and ethnic trends. The study was done by interviewing multiracial Americans who shared stories on what it means to identify as a mixed race in America.

These four reporters were part of News21, a national journalism program funded by the Knight Foundation and the Carnegie Corp.

See the interviews here.

--Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

How great would it be for web sites to let us know when news stories we’ve been following have been updated or corrected? How about also seeing a box of information explaining the type of sourcing used within the story, as well as a link to the organization’s editorial standards?

According to an article released by the Columbia Journalism Review, hNews is trying to make all of these features possible.

hNews is a microformat for news being developed by the Media Standards Trust and the Web Science Research Initiative. It is also a winner of last year’s Knight News Challenge grant.

For an example of how this would work, take a look at this article. Scroll down to the bottom of the text and place the cursor over the blue box labeled “Value Added.” A small box of text will pop up that lists the article title, author, date, published and the last date the article was updated. This information is automatically generated, thanks to hNews. 

The goal of hNews is to:

Design a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interview with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Filters would then use this data – the “story behind the story” – to help find high-quality articles. A reader searching the phrase “Pakistan riots” for example, might find 9,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list.

Currently, the Associated Press and AOL are encoding articles using hNews.

hNews is hoping to bring more transparency to news. Its features will provide people with the back story of an article they’re reading.

Visit the CJR Web site to read the complete story on hNews.

-- Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger

From Marly Falcon, Knight Foundation contributing blogger:

The Federal Trade Commission released the agenda and speakers for its Dec. 1-2 workshop, “From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?”

Up for discussion: how news economics are playing out on the Internet and in print; the wide variety of new business and non-profit models for journalism online; behavioral and other targeted online advertising, online news aggregators, and bloggers; and the variety of governmental policies – including antitrust, copyright, and tax policy.

Panelists at the workshop will include leaders from Google, Yahoo!, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post and News Corp. Eric Newton, VP of Journalism Program at the Knight Foundation, will also join the workshop. For more, visit the FTC  Web site.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

2007 Knight News Challenge winner, Citizen Media Law Project, announced today the public launch of its Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help.

OMLN is accepting applications for legal assistance from online publishers and media creators who meet the network's criteria of viability, adherence to journalistic standards, innovation, independence, original reporting, and public interest. For details on these criteria, see the OMLN FAQ.

You can also read a post about the new network at the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Never mind the big words. “Computational journalism” is all about using modern tools to do news in the public interest. The “computation” part refers to the use of computers to create, understand and display the news. Sarah Cohen is a Knight journalism chair focused on this new form of watchdog reporting. The “computational journalism” initiative is organized by Duke’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy.

 The center has released a 22-page report. “Accountability through Algorithm: Developing the Field of Computational Journalism” will go out to 800 opinion leaders, editors, scholars, deans, officials and software developers. Not to mention the journalists who mine today’s data for tomorrow’s news. The bottom line: Using computers for journalism is not an arcane specialty. It’s something all journalists, including nonprofit and citizen journalists, should know how to do.  Comments are welcome at jayth@duke.edu.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

The first Knight funded Drupal project to release its open-source code, Managing News, launched last week. You can read about it here: Media Innovation with Drupal.

This week, on the fifth day of being publicly available, the project has been downloaded more than 1,000 times.

Here are 50 examples of what people are doing with it.

* rowingnews.org.uk
* pulse.buzzr.us United Nations World Food Programme
* climap.net
* news.freejacksonvillenews.com
* news.1qk.com
* mn.newslogs.com
* managingnewstest.tiger-dev.co.uk
* catholicnewslive.com
* noticies.consultes.cat
* mn.forest.linnovate.net
* www.cafepresse.ch
* mn.mwu.dk
* news.kultur-online.net
* beta.metaboone.com
* news.twodogsdigital.com
* mnews.webandfinearts.com
* augmentions5.omega8.us
* http://planete.magento.fr
* news.nguyentiensi.com
* zensci.com
* earthfeeds.com
* managingnews.peopleatwork.fr
* news.positivechoices.com
* managingnews.rhizom.nl
* news.krongnang.com
* news.fen.net
* news.freejacksonvillenews.com
* managingnewstest.tiger-dev.co.uk
* skateboarding.com
* earthfeeds.com
* jaunum.iem.lv
* news.soniccat.com
* news.investic.net
* pg.galaxy.esn.org
* www.wotcher.co.uk
* rowing.magnity.co.uk
* www.freshfail.com
* gamemakerstream.com
* news.sotak.cz
* menanews.org
* managingnews.aegir.erdfisch.de

How are you using it? Please let us know or send us your ideas on how it could be used to inform local communities.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

Here's evidence that the Knight News Challenge projects, experiments we hoped will speed media innovation, are having impact: The Transparency Initiative announced this week that AOL and TownNews have adopted the Knight funded microformat - hNews - to mark up their news stories. They also announced that the Associated Press will start publicly using it by the end of the year.

Background: In 2008 Martin Moore from the Media Standards Trust and Tim Berners-Lee from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) received a Knight News Challenge grant to develop a project to help news providers "mark up" their news stories by providing additional information about the sources of the facts in their stories.

To do that they designed hNews, a way for content creators to add information on their sources to their reports, as a form of “source tagging.” For instance, a reporter could note that an article was based on personal observations, interviews with eyewitnesses or specific, original documents. Additional information could describe the credentials of the reporter or the ethics of the news organization.

Search engines would then use this additional data -- the “story behind the story” -- to help people find news that is higher quality as they define it. A reader searching the phrase “balloon boy” for example, might find 12,000 articles. But filtering by “eyewitness accounts” would yield a more selective list. Or filtering by the type of news provider.

Moore and Berners-Lee have been working with media organizations on how to best integrate the tagging into journalists’ normal workflow. You can read more about the project and the adoption of hNews by AOL and TownNews on Martin Moore's recent post on the MediaShift Idea Lab blog.

Marly Falcon is a contributing blogger at Knight Foundation

Journalists are anxious to shift from print-only responsibilities in the newsroom to multimedia responsibilities, according to the survey  “Life beyond print: Newspaper journalists’ digital appetite”. The survey is part of a report issued by the Media Management Center.

Out of almost 3,800 journalists in print, online or hybrid jobs at 79 U.S. newspapers surveyed, most were found to be involved in digital activities within their personal lives and wanting the same digital involvement at the workplace.

The typical newspaper newsroom in 2009, according to Life beyond print, has six types of journalists ranging from the “Digitals” who spend a great deal of time online, to the “Turn Back the Clock” type, who wish print was still the ultimate ruler. As the chart shows, there also is the extreme “Major Shift” group, which would give five times its effort to online if it could. And the "Moderately More" group, which would like its digital and print efforts to be equal within the newsroom.

Jose Zamora is a Journalism Program Associate at Knight Foundation

NPR continues to put in place its digital makeover, which started with a Knight Foundation grant to train its staff on digital media and transform the radio news organization into a digital media organization.

Today NPR launched a new site that allows more public participation and it is easier to navigate than ever before. The new listening, reading, commenting and sharing features are simple and inviting.

The beginning of the editors welcoming note reads: "We hope that you find it brighter, lighter, faster, easier to use, easier to search and more fun to surf."

Since the beginning of the grant NPR has become more and more a news organization of the web instead than a news organization on the web.

To read and learn more about the new NPR.org you can read today's article on The New York Times or visit the site and take a video tour.