via Sam Smith

I have a love of all things zombie-related.

Zombie movies. Zombie video games. And don’t even get me started on World War Z.

Best. Zombie. Book. Ever.

That’s why I couldn’t help but click on a Facebook link from a friend of mine with a headline that read, “Fla. college ready for flesh-eating zombie attack.”

In addition, Yahoo News, which offered up this journalism gem, gave me a thrilling option I couldn’t help but take advantage of: instant notification of zombie attack.

I hope the college student who famously said, “If the news is that important, it will find me,” meant exactly this.

If you insist.

A note to the AP and Yahoo News: You just made my day.

For reporters, there’s something irresistible about offbeat stories. They’re often crazy fun to write, but even more than that, people read them.

I experienced this early.

As a freshmen writing for the college newspaper, I was almost immediately assigned the tuition and fees beat. I was actually excited at the time, thinking I was getting the opportunity to write about really important things that affected the people around me. I thought people would rush to read my copy.

I was only half right.

About six months into the job, I was assigned one of those irresistible brights.

A man on campus was apparently approaching women and asking them if they would mind participating in a survey about their feet. If they agreed, he would proceed to rub their unwilling appendages on his crotch.

Campus newspaper gold.

I logged more reads with that single piece than all the stories I’d been churning out weekly combined.

A dormmate of mine even passed me in the hall later that day.

“Don’t you write for the Technician?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied, half expecting a rant about how unfair it is that he might have to pay another $300+ in tuition next year.

“Dude, I read your foot fondler story. Hilarious!”

“Thanks.”

It’s easy to get bogged down in the serious stuff — especially given the self-righteousness many journalists cling to in lieu of good pay, appreciation, decent working hours, robust personal lives and healthy lifestyles.

When the “hard news” is as fun to write as it is to read, it often shows. But when it’s not, readers don’t want to slog through it any more than reporters do.

It’s necessary I guess. But in the midst of economic crisis, the oinks and the rapid deterioration of the journalism industry, it’s easy for even the most jaded reporters to perk their ears up when they hear about a good bright.

Because sometimes, you just have to laugh.

Now it’s time to do something about it.

I just submitted an application for the Knight News Challenge, a grant program that awards start-up money to organizations with new ideas on community journalism.

I’ve posted that application below. This is an open application period, which means anyone can view and comment on the idea, and I can make changes based on those comments until Oct. 15. Feel free to comment here or on our application’s page on the Knight Web site. I would sincerely appreciate any feedback.

Project title (100 characters)

PublickHouse Media

Describe your project (1,800 characters)

PublickHouse Media pairs a new platform of online advertising with a model of community journalism that fills gaps in the existing news ecosystem. The result is a sustainable model based on selling and trading info about the community, its members and its businesses.

The core belief is that quality community news should be free and that the audience’s time and loyalty are valuable.

Basic content would require no registration or payment. Registered users, however, get access to advanced features, like mobile apps and interactive options. In exchange for their demographic data, users receive loyalty cards to use at advertising businesses that grant them exclusive promotions.

For local businesses, the product is twofold. They get regular reports on the aggregate demographic data of customers using the loyalty card on an in-store scanning system. In addition, traditional display ads on the site are targeted to each user based on their buying activity.

The result is a link between online ads and the real-world behavior of each user.

Advertising will support multimedia storytelling about the community. With the same inexpensive tools citizen journalists use to share information, Pub reporters will produce stories other media outlets aren’t covering.

That means no breaking news. No stories on house fires or wrecks. No wire reports. When other reporters run in one direction, we will walk the other way.

The Pub will feature exclusive, extremely localized stories about issues impacting the area, told in a way that emphasizes how readers will be affected.

The method for obtaining these stories is simple – boots-on-the-ground reporting. The Pub’s journalists will live, work and play in this community and will be as committed to its welfare as their readers.

How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities? (750 characters)

The enterprise stories produced by the Pub will be limited to a predefined community and will combine traditional reporting with the process-oriented techniques of bloggers and citizen journalists. Our advertising model will support this hyperlocal coverage in a time when larger organizations are pulling back.

There’s no longer any reason to waste resources on duplicating the content of other news organizations. Social media has replaced the expensive news echo chamber – and it has done it for free.

By fully integrating existing social media into our registration system, users will be able to link the profiles they already use every day with our content, allowing the news to find the community efficiently.

How is your idea innovative, new or different from what already exists? (750 characters)

PublickHouse Media’s advertising platform is innovative because it establishes a real-life connection between the community and its businesses.

By providing loyalty cards to users and card readers to businesses, PublickHouse will create a physical link to our targeted advertising that evolves over time.

This loyalty card concept has been proven effective by countless corporations. Now, we’re giving small business owners right down the street the same kind of valuable aggregated demographic data. They pay for information that can grow their businesses, and at the same time, they’re funding quality journalism that resonates with their neighbors and customers.

What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project? (1,600 characters)

This new model would require the creation of a lean, aggressive community journalism outfit with few resources and a lot of hurdles to overcome.

Both partners in this endeavor have had extensive experience with similar obstacles at the daily student newspaper of N.C. State University.

M. Tyler Dukes was editor-in-chief of the publication, controlling a budget of $500,000 completely supported by advertising. He crafted the newspaper’s vision and was responsible for several long-term multimedia initiatives.

Dukes also completed a Dow Jones Newspaper Fund internship at The Wall Street Journal in the Summer of 2007. For more than a year, he has worked as a Web producer for News 14 Carolina, a local 24-hour news station in North Carolina. During that time, he led the station’s embrace of social media.

For two and a half years, Dukes studied electrical and computer engineering before eventually receiving his B.S. in science, technology and society from N.C. State, which does not have a journalism program.

As the systems administrator for NCSU Student Media, Fred Eaker has worked since August 2007 to maintain the computing infrastructure for six Web sites, two newspapers, a radio station and an advertising department. During that time, he has put his eight years as an information systems analyst to work for student journalists, improving the way they deliver information to their community.

Since receiving a B.S. in information systems in 2001, Eaker has acquired extensive experience in IT implementation, Web development as well as database design.

via Chris Copins

It may not have been by fancy hologram, but CNN anchor Rick Sanchez Skyped in to a technology education class at N.C. State last week to talk social media and its impact on journalism (Watch the video or read the rough transcript).

Thanks to his show’s use of MySpace, Twitter and Facebook, Sanchez said his viewership is up almost 100 percent since he began hosting the time slot about a year ago. That’s shocking, especially as CNN continues to get dominated by the more partisan MSNBC and Fox News.

While Sanchez said he can directly attribute his show’s success with its use of social media, he said how he uses it is more important.

“There’s no question that when you go into every single newscast, you feel like you’re connected to people and that means that you’ve got to pull yourself into it,” Sanchez told the class. “It can’t be fake. It can’t be a gimmick.”

Other social media mavens have proselytized about the importance of authenticity in social media, but Sanchez said he’s taking that message to the “big suits at CNN” — along with results. He had qualms, for example, about the competition with Ashton Kutcher to reach 1 million Twitter followers.

“The problem was, all along I felt like it was a gimmick. Social media is not a gimmick,” he said. “Social media’s a wonderful opportunity for people to share ideas in a place where for the first time in our lives, we’re able to have conversations with each other using mass media.”

A lot of times, those conversations go beyond mere opinions and lead to an expansion of reporting itself.

News organizations have always been limited by the technology they have on-hand. He gave an example of two murders that occur 20 minutes before a broadcast — one across the street and another several miles away. News organizations will cover the one across the street not because it’s more important, but because it’s more accessible.

“In many ways, we all think that we’re these great scholars that sit around with great ideas and we write all this cool stuff and that makes us really smarty pants. In actuality, much of what we do has very little to do with that. It has more to do with what we can get to so we can bring it to you,” he said. “Social media is transforming what we can get to.”

In Iran, CNN was prohibited from getting on the ground. The regime disabled communication networks and was closely monitoring communications (with the help of Western technology, no less). But social media — especially Twitter — changed that.

“What the Iran elections showed us was that social media can conquer, break down barriers that in the past, we wouldn’t have been able to break down,” Sanchez said.

But using social media doesn’t mean the rules of journalism don’t apply. Days before CNN reported suspicious Coast Guard activity in the Potomac, a student asked Sanchez about the failsafes in place to ensure accuracy in the network’s reporting, especially dealing with so many sources at once.

“It’s the same rules that we’ve followed all along. We vet things in journalism. We vetted before we had social media and we vet them now that we have social media. You don’t put something on the air unless you get two sources that can verify it,” Sanchez said.

For all its strengths, Sanchez warned that social media can also effectively cloister communities, preventing the flow of information. We’ve already seen this happen, whether it’s the nonsense about illegal immigrants’ access to free health care or the nonsense about Barack Obama’s fake birth certificate.

“The danger being that a whole lot of people can be collected and mislead and erroneously given information,” Sanchez said. “If all you do is live in this world where you only read what your friends and the people who think like you are thinking in social media and in blogs, there’s the possibility that many Americans are going to be underserved.”

Despite the risks, Sanchez said the bottom line is that social media isn’t going anywhere.

“The way are people communicating now is changing. We used to really be what we felt like were the ultimate arbiters — we were the ones who made the decisions based on what we wanted to do, what the stories were, how we were going to gather them. And things are now becoming much more democratic. There’s no question of that.”

Thanks to TED graduate teaching assistant Matt Walton for the heads up on this story.