The 2014 LION Summit will bring together the independent online news industry’s leaders for training, networking and conversations about the future of news. Speakers will include successful online publishers and journalism professors. Plenty of time for networking and discussion will be built in to this fall’s conference.

The conference will kick off with a reception Thursday, Oct. 16, and end on Saturday, Oct. 18.

Register now at https://www.lionpublishers.com/conference

Join your fellow Local Independent Online News Publishers at the inaugural LION Summit: Innovation for Digital Media Entrepreneurs, Oct. 3-5 in Chicago.

Conference sessions will include LION Publisher members sharing their hard-won experience, with guidelines on how to replicate their success. Also, experts from J-Lab, the Reynolds Journalism Institute, the Knight Lab at Northwestern University and more will help examine trends in online news reporting and publishing.

Register now!

Conference highlights:

• Steven Waldman, lead author of FCC report “The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age,” advisor to the FCC and Pew Research Center, founder of TheBrooklynGame.com (2012) and Beliefnet.com (1998).
• John Bracken, director of media innovation for the Knight Foundation, will speak on the Knight News Challenge and prototype fund.
• Joe Michaud, consultant at Local Interactive Strategies and CJET, will moderate as publishers share "60 Lessons in 60 Minutes,“ and offer one-on-one publisher coaching.
• Jan Schaffer, executive director of J-Lab, part of American University’s School of Communication. Schaffer, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose work at J-Lab incubates news entrepreneurs and innovators, will detail news collaborations and offer one-on-one mentoring.
• Rich Gordon, director of Digital Innovation at the Medill School of Journalism, will speak on "Measuring Digital Success with Web and Social Analytics.”
• Michele McLellan, the founder of the Block by Block conferences, will share the results of her continuing study of local news sites.
• Randy Picht, executive director of the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, will discuss an in-depth industry survey being undertaken in conjunction with LION.
• Travis Smith of Hop Studios will give his advice on commenting systems and other online technology issues. Smith helped launch the LA Times website in 1995, worked for Online Journalism Review and was the editor of Variety.com before launching Hop Studios in 2004.
• You. Fulfilling LION’s mission of faciliating the exchange of best practices in local online news, many sessions will center on members trading tips and in-depth explanations of what’s working (and what’s not).

The LION Summit builds on the Block by Block conferences, bringing together the independent online news industry’s leaders and innovators from across the country for training, networking and conversations about the future of news.

https://www.lionpublishers.com/conference/home/

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, 1961

The crew behind a campaign called Eat Your Sidewalk has brought an entirely new meaning to the word local. Forget the vast Agricultural Industrial Complex. Eat Your Sidewalk is about finding breakfast, lunch, dinner in your own front yard. Literally. The project, which failed to reach its $23,000 Kickstarter goal, is nonetheless in the midst of a seven-day challenge to get at least some of the people in Sherbrooke Quebec to subsist for an entire week on what they can find right under their feet.

Watch the Kickstarter video to get a full sense of the Eat Your Sidewalk philosophy, but here’s a snippet.

When you begin to eat what’s under your feet, you and your environment share the same history and the same future. When we eat this dandelion, we share what’s happened to it.

And I liked this.

So often we talk about local but we skip over our actual place to get to the parts of our environment we more easily recognize because they are more like products or have been defined for us as important. But this means we are not addressing our actual environment fully. How do we do this? Begin with where you are – your sidewalks, yards, neighborhoods, and the systems that they are part of – and pay attention to everything. When this really happens a place comes alive.

The blog is pretty charming too.

Our bartering was limited. Cole bartered removing some poison ivy for a bottle of wine. We were quite content with this. Needing little else.

Not sure how much sustenance I’d get from my little, ahem, patch, but thanks to a story I heard on WNYC the other day, I was able to identify a burdock plant growing on my lawn. 

– Debbie Galant

Most places claim to be authentic and original. Austin, Texas really is. From its famous bat bridge to its Segway tours to its food-courts-on-wheels to the wonderful Drafthouse cinemas, Austin lives up to its slogan, “Keep Austin Weird.” There is a store on South Congress called Uncommon Objects, which features salvaged antiques, bric-a-brac and high-caliber kitsch. In all of New York City and Brooklyn, I have never seen a store to match this one. Kudos, Austin, for keeping it real, and keeping it real interesting.

– Debbie Galant

On September 30, 2011, during the Block by Block conference at Loyola University Chicago, 21 local, independent online publishers from across the United States voted to form a tradeassociation.
A steering committee was appointed to further organize the association.
Questions should be directed to Executive Secretary, Mike Fourcher at (773) 328-8451 or mike@brownlinemedia.com

Schadenfreude, or gloating over another’s misfortune, is not a pretty thing. By definition. 

And though I’m used to being scolded by readers, my upbraiding by some of the Patch rank-and-file over my last post here has left me unexpectedly chastened.

I meant my rant for AOL’s corporate overlords, for Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington in particular, but I managed to offend and hurt other local journalists who, just like me, spent the last week bailing basements and working furiously to keep up with the news.

That’s bad, and that’s not pretty, and I apologize. 

We live in a time of great economic disruption and everything in the world of media – everything in the world – is up for grabs. My local newspaper got sore when a new kid came to town (that would be me) and I didn’t like it any better when Patch moved in. 

The two Patch editors whose work I know best – Shelley Emling and Mary Mann – do excellent work. I’d hire either of them in a minute if I could afford them. 

There is a war in the world of local, as the existence of publication StreetFight attests to, and I’m a bit player in that war. I enjoyed seeing my adversary stumble. I gloated. And the one who looked bad in the end wasn’t my enemy; it was me.

I have a lot to learn from the indie bookstores and small town retailers who have been fighting this fight for years. There are classier ways to fight wars, and I vow to learn them.

Debbie Galant, Baristanet

Those of us who are the proprietors of small, independent hyperlocal news blogs have been watching the headlines with glee.

Tim Armstrong’s AoL dream may be ending

What Happens When AOL Finally Decides to Go Private

What an AOL Garage Sale Would Look Like

AOL Needs to Break Up Now

“Patch is worthless,” wrote Dana Blackenhorn in Seeking Alpha. "Close it. Think a company like Gannett (GCI) or The New York Times (NYT) or News Corp. (NWS) might want it? If you find a sucker like that, call me. I have a bridge to sell.“ Music to our ears.

Mark Kamine was the original location director of The Sopranos and, since the show ended, he’s moved on to become a production director of movies like “The Fighter” and “Limitless.” A 16-year-resident of Montclair, Kamine himself departs for a new location today, when moving vans come to move him and his family to New York City. We sat down to talk to Kamine about the iconic locations of the Sopranos and about the concept of place in general. This story originally appeared on Baristanet.

How did you come to the Sopranos job and how long did you do it?

I was a location manager and I started as a scout. I was working for about eight or 10 years at that before Sopranos started. I knew the producer from other jobs.

Who was that?

Ilene Landress. She called me when they were doing the pilot. I was on another job. And then when the show got picked up, I started. Which was maybe a year after. And I remember I met David Chase as part of the process in a hotel in New York. It was sort of unheard of at the time for a cable network to be doing a TV series. It was very early in the process – ‘97, '98 – and the test for the show was that it might appeal to housewives and professors, academics. Which didn’t sound too promising. But we had some scripts and we started to scout for some of the things that the pilot had shot, but to do in a more permanent way, like the pork store. They started to build the Soprano house in North Caldwell. That started to get reproduced on the stage. And it was just a general figuring out how to continue the look of the pilot.

It seems to me that show was so much about location.

David Chase grew up in New Jersey, I think he was born in Newark, and then Verona and the Caldwell area after that. He often had specific ideas about where to find things. And then I also grew up in New Jersey. Born in Jersey City, grew up in Wayne. And spent a lot of time all over the place and then lived in Montclair for a long time. The whole time I was doing that show. And then my main assistant, Regina Heyman, who took over the location managing for me after three years, she grew up in Montclair. She had a lot of New Jersey knowledge too. And then the scouts who worked with us. They’re New York scouts they tend to spend time all over the New York area. And certainly over the course of Sopranos, when we would read a script, everyone had ideas of where to find it, what town. That sounds like Little Falls. Or that sounds like North Caldwell. You started to get the rhythm of how to find certain things.

God bless Watchung Booksellers, my local indie bookstore. My third novel, “Cars from a Marriage” just came out in paperback today. But according to Amazon, there is only one copy left in stock. Watchung, which knows me as the editor of Baristanet as well as a locally-bestselling novelist, has 10 copies, prominently displayed on its summer reading table. And the bookstore owner is going to add a note telling local book groups that I’m happy to come talk to them if they read my book.

Now that’s service. And context. Another reason why relationships matter.

– Debbie Galant, Baristanet

Let’s hoist a glass to Frank Bruni of The New York Times for his 3,200-word paean to the authentically local food scene of Seattle in Sunday’s Travel section. Best quote: “To eat in and around Seattle, which I did recently and recommend heartily, isn’t merely to eat well. It is to experience something that even many larger, more gastronomically celebrated cities and regions can’t offer, not to this degree: a profound and exhilarating sense of place." 

But I also liked, "You want a closer relationship with what you eat? At the Willows Inn You can practically bed down with it.”

Take that, Red Lobster.

– Debbie Galant, Baristanet

Authentically Local, a set by johnleesandiego on Flickr.

One of Baristanet’s favorite readers, John Lee, felt so connected to the Authentically Local campaign that he assembled an “Authentically Local” Flickr set and an Authentically Local Flickr group. Please contribute to the group. Pictures of the places we love tell the story of why local is important.

 John has promised me a short essay on why Authentically Local speaks to him, and I will publish it when he writes it. Meanwhile, if a picture is worth a thousand words, this set is worth 50,000. Good thing I’m not paying him by the word!

– Debbie Galant, Baristanet

Today they are standing on every corner in one town outside New York City. They are blonde, female and clearly under 25. They wear bright green T-shirts and visors that say “Patch,” and they hand out pens and stickers and leaflets by the gross. They do not live here.

“Have you read Patch?” they croon to the commuters and shoppers and mommies with strollers, many of whom stare straight ahead without stopping.

These are the New Journalists. At least they say they are.

The sites are parachuting down so fast they can’t even keep up with the list of “coming” sites on the Patch homepage; the town where we spotted the lovelies today isn’t even on the list yet, but they are advertising for writers on Craigslist.

In Southern Westchester New York, as well as in other affluent suburban areas in eight other states, Patch has let loose (what they say are) 75 young reporters, bloggers, marketers and sales people to cover an area that we do with two to four, depending on the day.

Even though they are pretty much the same from town to town, there is nothing more authentically local than a small-town Memorial Day parade. 

Photo by S.J.Streeter for Baristanet.