Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with Tim Hood the founder of Yoosk.com which is in full startup mode. I’m confident I had come across the site before, although I’m not sure where. Perhaps this Center for Citizen Media post? Either way - Yoosk looks to have some real potential. We all remember CNN’s YouTube debate. Well, why does it have to be a special occasion to let readers ask questions of public figures? It shouldn’t be a herculian effort? All that’s needed is a CMS that has a workflow built into it - so journalists can ask the questions that are important to their readers. That’s what Yoosk hopes to find out. Explaining the idea in greater detail is Tim Hood.

Yoosk is a crowd sourced interview magazine site- it has been referred to by one blogger as ‘Digg- the inquisition’. Alternatively, those familiar with the show will understand what I mean when I say it is a DIY variation of BBC’s Question Time. Users not only put questions to public figures but they also vote on which they most want to see answered and get to rate the answers when they come in. It also acts as a fascinating database of questions people want to put to a wide range of public figures.

As well as the belief that in a democratic globalized economy anyone, anywhere should have the right to put a question to those who have power and influence over their lives, Yoosk was also born of a frustration with the media’s response to interactive technology and what can sometimes come across as a rather patronizing and simplistic tone. For example, ‘Have Your Say’ is a common label used for comment sections in online news media. It sounds so indulgent somehow - ‘go on..have your say’ - and for me reflects something of the futility of contributing to comment threads on major news sites.

We also felt interactive media should be setting the bar a bit higher than the current offer of features such as online polls, which are rarely acknowledged as having any validity and tend to give black and white choices which encourage simplistic thinking.

So Yoosk was our response to this- we wanted to develop a range of interactive news features that broke away from the standard polemic of comment sections and try to create dialogue and follow up. We’re calling it news interplay, although the ‘play’ part of that term is not meant to suggest any degree of triviality.

Our story so far is one of constant adaptation in the face of a series of challenges- some foreseen, some unforeseen. Here is a brief run down of what we have learnt in our first months and how our business model has evolved as a result. We still haven’t cracked all the nuts however, and there is one area where we’d like to start a genuine debate- perhaps this post will help kick it off.

Getting questions

We naturally anticipated the difficulties a small start up publication would face in getting answers from high profile leaders and celebrities but what we hadn’t anticipated was the initial difficulty in getting questions from users. Feedback quickly established that visitors need some kind of stimulus to get their ‘questioning juices’ flowing. Often they come to the site, like the idea, but can’t come up with a question straight off. You can’t just say to someone, “hey, think of a question to ask a famous person”. They need to be focused first on a specific issue or person and the question needs to be asked soon after it is raised in a user’s mind.

We’ve addressed this in a number of ways. We started with the creation of Yoosk Features, where site contributors can submit introductory pieces that outline the issues around a particular theme and identify the key players, their position and their influence. These create a focus and have demonstrably helped us get questions on a whole range of issues.

A new feature that has just been launched, the You Ask widget, helps to direct people from news sites to Yoosk while the questions are fresh in their minds. Placed at the bottom of a news article on any site that features or refers to a particular public figure (PF), it links readers directly to that PF’s profile page on Yoosk, where they can put a question to him or her. This widget sits alongside a news site’s comment section and allows a reader to react to a story by asking a follow up question instead of leaving a comment -and all while the topic is still fresh.

We are now talking to major news groups in the UK about placing this widget on their pages- since they have the journalistic resources to get the answers, this kind of partnership makes a lot of sense to us.

Another major initiative to get more questions flowing from visitors is soon to be added to the site. We’ll be inviting guest bloggers to review the day’s news and the questions it raises for them- again, with the aim of stimulating questions while they are on the site. These posts will be features both on the front page and in the different news category sections of the site, as well as on the blogger’s own site. We hope that as Yoosk grows and widens its coverage of issues, the site will start to attract a broad range of contributors.

They’ll never answer

Even before we can stimulate users to ask questions, we need to motivate them. A common response when we first conceived of Yoosk was, ‘the public figures will never answer, so why bother asking’. You could, of course, argue the same thing about comment sites- that they’ll never elicit a response from those at the top. But nonetheless, we knew that this was something we had to really work on. We needed to prove the concept, to show that politicians, celebs and experts would in fact deign to answer questions put to them by the public.

So far we have over 200 answers from around 40 UK based public figures, including high profile politicians, journalists and sports stars. It’s early days, but I think it has proven that there is a real interest among those in the public eye in communicating directly with their constituents, clients or fan bases.

How did we do this? Well, it has been hard work getting these answers. Freelance and student journalists have used up a lot of time and energy on selling the concept. We were lucky to get the help of Neil Thurman, Senior Lecturer in Electronic Publishing at London’s
City University”[http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/news/citizen.html]. Neil quickly saw the value of having his students work with us to develop Yoosk Features. The work the students did was very valuable to us and I think provides a good model for how digital media start ups and universities can work together for mutual benefit.

Go local

We realized very quickly what seems obvious in retrospect- that the more local (and therefore lower profile) the public figure, the more they are accessible and hungry for publicity of any kind. So we are now concentrating on building Yoosk from the bottom up, positioning it as a grass roots local media tool, as well as looking to use partnerships with major media companies to get answers at the national level. We have already had interest from a number of local news organizations to white label Yoosk, using their own journalists to get the answers, while we maintain the database and add new features. This will also help keep the content relevant to the site’s readers. Ultimately, we hope to see hundreds of local Yoosk’s, working in partnership with local news media to make a real difference to the dialogue within a community.

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Placing Yoosk at the heart of new media networks

Our experiences in selling and proving the concept have illustrated more than anything to us that the real future of participatory media lies in a complex five way relationship- between the public, citizen (or pro-am) journalists, professional journalists, media publishers and the people in the news (or those who speak for them).

We see Yoosk as being in the middle of that network.

First of all, we need the established media brands to drive traffic and content to Yoosk. Our main strategy now is to enter partnerships with other media organizations, adding value to their interactive news services. Yoosk is actually a news interplay format rather than a stand alone publication, so as I described in the first half of this post [link to part 1 if applicable], there are different ways of integrating its crowd-sourcing and question database into other news sites- from white-labelling to targeted use of the widget.

The hard work involved in getting answers has also led us to conclude that we need to forge strong relationships with multipliers in the PR sector, persuading them that Yoosk can also bring benefits to their clients. So, at the same time as our approaches to the media, we are reaching out to publicists and spokespeople, showing them the benefit of the widget. For example, they can go to news sites and ask them to place it underneath articles that refer to them, enabling them to research and analyse what follow up questions readers from a certain site have. They can use RSS to track questions as they are put to them, and they can choose when and in what manner to answer them, using their own content admin rights.

The pro-am or citizen journalists are vital to our model, naturally enough- they drive the questions and the Yoosk features, and they will drive the blogging and video elements of the site too. We hope that in time, a few major partnerships with news organizations will bring the kind of traffic that will make ad revenue sharing a viable proposition for this group.

Then of course, there are the professional journalists- and we have always viewed their collaborative relationship with the audience as key to Yoosk, and indeed all participatory media. But getting the model right, as I mentioned earlier, is proving a tough nut to crack. It is not only that there are few apparent precedents for compensation models for journalists applicable to a business like ours (it doesn’t make sense to pay per word when what we need is a steady stream of answers from PFs, rather than top notch copy). It is also that what many regard as one of the most rewarding parts of a journalists job- getting in front of someone and asking them your questions, following your agenda- is not at all what Yoosk is about. Finding the right way to compensate journalists is something we are still working on and we are open to advice and opinions on this issue

Finally, there’s the public. Not everyone will want to ask a question, vote on other people’s submissions or rate the answers that are received- in the same way that not everyone leaves comments on forums or discussion threads. But we hope and believe that in time and with the right partnerships with media at local level, people will be asking local councilors, business leaders and celebrities questions- as naturally as if they were in front of them at a town hall meeting.

Barriers to entry- how low is low?

Another lesson was that the apparently low barriers to entry that are often mentioned in connection to digital media are somewhat illusory. We are quite sure we have an innovative concept and in many ways, a unique one (at least until the CNN/YouTube debate and 10questions.com came along). But despite some initial successes, we weren’t able to get the kind of coverage and links necessary to build up serious traffic. You need to give up your job, forgo your income, get around the conferences and network face to face intensively, as well as invest in SEO. Late last year I took the plunge and went full time- but doing the conference circuit in the States is still a pretty serious investment for us. We are making headway on traffic now, but while citizen journalism may have low barriers, citizen publishing certainly doesn’t!

The key lessons here? We’ve managed to keep costs down and experiment with the site, even though neither of the two owners are developers, primarily because of our low costs base. Our development work is outsourced to Vietnam and we are already seeing huge benefits to this model, allowing us to quickly set up pilot models for potential clients.

The future

We still have many lessons to learn and we hope that with the introduction of video this month, we’ll find new ways to build on our vision of collaborative interviews and other news interplay features.

The coming year will see if Yoosk’s vision of direct dialogue between the public and newsmakers is something that will be embraced by the mainstream media, or whether it is destined to remain a niche media activity.