Charles Apple

This is a bit of a stunning move by Ning which has, for years, offered free hosting of social networking sites.

Mathew Ingram of Gigaom today quotes new ning CEO Jason Rosenthal as having…

…“taken a hard look at our business in the 30 days since I became CEO, and I’ve decided to focus the company 100 percent on our paid networks business.” Rosenthal said that the free part of Ning would be phased out “soon,” and that existing networks would either have to convert to paying for the premium service or “transition off Ning.”

Here are four Ning-based sites visual journalists might frequent:

1. The NewsPageDesigner portfolio site:

NewsPageDesigner was created in 2002 by Tim Frank, now of the Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. It was shut down by its host paper in Maine and then reborn as a Ning site and partnered with the Society of News Design in February 2009. It currently has 1,799 members.

Tim replies to our query tonight:

Although it’s a good idea to prepare for the worst, I’m not inclined to panic until I learn more. Will keep you posted as soon as I get more details.

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2. Newspaper Designing, a site open to all visual journalists but one that aims at news designers in India:

Newspaper Designing was launched in January 2009 by Iam Sajeevkumar T.K. of Kaumudi in Kerala, India. It currently has 246 members.

T.K. Sajeev tells us:

This is bad news this morning. I am a free client of Ning. Everything is free in my site. And, as you know, the international competition itself is free.

We are in a growing stage. This will be a big blow.

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3. Most likely not affected by this change is VisualEditors.com. [Full disclosure: This very blog, of course, lies under the VizEds umbrella.]

VizEds was created in 2004 by Robb Montgomery of Naperville, Ill., as a bulletin-board-type site. It converted to a Ning social networking site in January 2008. VizEds currently has 3,565 members.

Robb replies tonight:

Visual Editors has always been a premium customer of Ning, so I doubt our board will recommend any sudden moves. However, Ning’s sudden shift to a paid focus does open the discussion for members about how the non-profit should respond.

How can the Visual Editors charity best serve you with online resources? Is there a better alternative that we can offer the community of visual journalists than Ning?

The charity is always looking to improve the environment where where it can serve members with effective peer-to-peer training resources. Please feel free to contact me if you have something to contribute to the evaluation process.

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4. Another popular site that will likely not be affected: Wired Journalists, devoted to collaborative study of the evolving field of online journalism:

Wired Journalists was created in January 2008 by Ryan Sholin, Howard Owens, and Zac Echola. It was acquired by Publish2 last August and currently has more than 3,800 members.

Ryan writes:

Thanks for tracking me down. I’ve been following this closely, and every hour or so, someone seems to tweet “Oh, what’s going to happen to Wired Journalists?”

The bottom line is that we’ll be fine, and we’ll keep the network running.

We’ve been using Ning’s “premium services” on and off, so it’s really just a question of where they draw the “premium” line under new management. If it’s reasonable, we’ll certainly stick with them.

Ning’s staff have been supportive of Wired Journalists in the past. We’ve been featured on their blog and on the Ning.com homepage as well, regardless of the small amounts of revenue the company has pulled in from our network.

If the definition of “premium” becomes something a bit more shiny and Hollywood-budget friendly, then yes, Wired Journalists will find a new home. When Ning launched, they were certainly the quickest, easiest way to start a social network of your own without a shred of coding knowledge of your own, and they’ve done a great job of keeping their offerings current, adding Twitter and Facebook integration lately.

But there are few reasons why an enterprising journalist with a little bit of Web development experience couldn’t migrate their user data over to a new network, built, for example, on the Django-powered Pinax Project.

In all honesty, Ning’s growth seemed like it would be hard to maintain — it’s always felt like a bargain. We’ll see if the pricing structure changes and make a decision when there’s a bit more information publicly available.

Find the Gigoam story here.

Read about possible alternatives here and here.

Last week, a number of us old-timers — those of us who used to frequent the old VisualEditors.com chatroom, back in the days when VizEds was a bulletin board — attempted to hold a chat using Twitter.

It was a strange experience, to be sure. But a large — and, perhaps, growing — number of us are on Twitter every day. It only makes sense to take VizEds to where its audience is.

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WHEN AND WHAT WE’LL CHAT ABOUT

If you’d like to join us, tonight, look for the chat hashtag:

#vizedschat

Make sure to include that in anything you say tonight. If you don’t, most of the chatters won’t see it.

Our moderator is Jim McBee, who says the theme of tonight’s chat will be visual ethics. Certainly a topic of interest to us all.

Jim writes:

Next #vizedschat will be less me asking questions, more you. Overall topic: Right vs. wrong: visual news ethics. Think up an example of something questionable you’ve seen a graphic artist, photographer, illustrator or news designer do. New York Post headlines do not count.

Bring with you a link to said design cockup/gray area. (You know us design types; we wanna see what you’re talkin’ ’bout.)

We’ll crank up around…

• 9 p.m. Eastern time
• 8 p.m. Central time
• 7 p.m. Mountain time
• 6 p.m. Pacific time

…and, like last week, we’ll go for about an hour or 90 minutes. Or until our fingers cramp up.

You’re all welcome to attend — you and anyone else interested in news presentation. This ain’t no clique, folks. We’ll see you there tonight.

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TWEET CHAT TIP NO. 1

Be advised that when you chat on Twitter, you’re broadcasting your chat to not just the folks in our virtual “chatroom,” but to all your Twitter followers. If you post a lot, you could swamp your tweeps with messages that they find awfully baffling.

Therefore, allow me to suggest: Open up a second account on Twitter. Use your regular Twitter account every day. Use the new account just for chatting.

One caveat: Did you know Twitter caps a new account to just 130 tweets on your first day? I didn’t until last week. I opened a new account Tuesday afternoon, started chatting that night and when I hit my 130th post — Smack! — Twitter lowered the boom on me.

So either open your account earlier than I did. Or don’t talk as much as I do.

Actually, that second one should be pretty easy for most normal human beings…

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TWEET CHAT TIP NO. 1

Another suggestion: Don’t try to chat in the usual Twitter window. Instead, go to TweetChat — a site that’s very easy to use:

Not only will this site update your window automatically — no more hitting “refresh” every 20 seconds — it’ll also add that hashtag automatically.

You’ll be amazed — as I was last week — how smoothly this works and how much like an old-fashioned chatroom it seems.

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Find an unedited transcript of last week’s chat here.

I hear it all the time: “I miss the old VizEds chatroom.”

I do, too. We had a chatroom — back in the old days, when VisualEditors.com was still a bulletin board — that became quite lively in the evenings after shifts ended and between editions.

A few of the old chatroom regulars want to give it a try on Twitter. If you’re a Twitter user — of if you can get up to speed on time — join us Tuesday night at:

• 9 p.m. Eastern
• 8 p.m. Central
• 7 p.m. Mountain
• 6 p.m. Pacific

It’s quite easy, I’m told. Just fire up Twitter and use this hashtag on everything:

#vizedschat

Francie Williamson of the Gazette of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, suggests using Tweetchat, a web-based filter that makes following a hashtag chat in Twitter much easier.

We shall see.

Jim McBee writes:

If you’ve never participated in a Twitter chat, here are simple instructions:

1. Sign up with Twitter if you don’t have an account. Log in to Twitter. Twitter is a real-time information network powered by people all around the world that lets you share and discover what’s happening now. It’s extremely democratic, and famously limits you to 140 characters per post.

2. Go to tweetchat.com (Tweetchat is just what I use; if you prefer a different chat provider, go for it.) When you log in, it will authenticate your Twitter account.

3. Tweetchat will ask you for a hashtag to follow. Hashtags are tags that add context to your tweets and make them searchable. Our hashtag is #vizedschat

When you use Tweetchat, you only have to type in #vizedschat the one time; it will append #vizedschat to every post during the discussion.

Once you get logged in, you’ll soon see how it works. It’s very much like the old Internet relay chats of the ’90s. Megan, Ernie and I will provide a little structure by posing open-ended questions; your job, should you choose to accept it, is to jump in and say whatever you want. Be as serious or as silly as you choose.

On either Twitter or Tweetchat, check out #journchat or #blogchat to get a feel for how it goes. You’ll be reading conversations in reverse chronological order, but it’ll give you a sense of what a Twitter chat is all about.

If Tuesday goes well, we’ll do this weekly. My hope is to catch a spark of the camaraderie we had in the old visualeditors.com chatbox, and just generally pull news designers, graphic artists, photographers — and those
who love/tolerate us — together. It’s a rough time. We need each other.

And the price is right. All of this is free.

Got questions? Just ask Ernie, Megan and me. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert; this is an invent-as-we-go thing. I participated in some #editorchat chats before that went kaput, so I know the basics. The rest is up to all of us. But I don’t think it’ll be a big deal to get something rolling.

Again, the folks to contact are:

• Jim McBee
• Megan Lavey
• Ernie Smith