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Innovative Business Models: How custom 'shoe-leather' content can be affordable for any station, newspaper or website

How Capitol News Connection could 'scale up' to provide custom 'localized' coverage of Congress on multiple platforms - and how it could be a model for others

I want to talk about how the Capitol News Connection business model could be scaled up or applied elsewhere to ensure all media (newspapers, TV, web etc) have access to high quality local journalism. CNC reports on Congress from a Localized perspective - the local impacts of national decisions and how individual lawmakers and delegations are representing voters back home.

Essentially CNC is an extension of a station's local newsroom: the model ensures every subscriber has a team of their own correspondents on Capitol Hill - producing original, exclusive and highly customized content - for a fraction of the price they would have to pay to create and maintain their own Bureaus or stringers. The model is unique, it is highly efficient, it's nonprofit (but doesn't necessarily have to be), and has promise with potential applications elsewhere.

I am also interested in ways old / new media can collaborate to create custom content...and how new technologies are allowing the creation of true hybrids between citizen-generated content and professional 'shoe-leather' and investigative journalism. CNC is in the forefront of that effort too, with www.AskYourLawmaker.org a first step in content collaboration between citizen and professional journalist. We are moving forward in a way that will enable real collaboration, indeed social networking, around stories and issues over time.