About the Daily One Sheet

BY ALAN O'HASHI
PUBLISHER and PRODUCER
DAILY ONE SHEET

In this age of changing media, I know of plenty of people who are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to maintain journalistic integrity and high standards, but at the same time monetize reporting of the news without advertising money, in the traditional sense.

The Daily One Sheet is a prototype. We'll be gathering information and news from the BIFF, vetting and then releasing it. The idea is to use backpack journalists to report about the events and activities happening around them - hyper local.

Seems to me that there's been a trend toward newspapers that try to have an internet presence or internet news aggregators that don't use any hard copy.

Newspapers are still having trouble and the internet is still a bit esoteric. In a place like Boulder, hard copy is still king.

I continue to believe in the "two step flow" communication theory. You know what it is. Agenda setters read newspapers and watch TV to inform themselves and then influence others through interpersonal communication. That's the theory behind the DOS.

The Daily One Sheet is an internet news source that will tease with hard copy. It's heavy on the internet to store information and uses hard copy to drive people to find out more.

For events and activities, the DOS will have coverage online at http://www.dailyonesheet.com/
and a summary of the stories of the previous day and advance stories about the current day's events. Story teases will be pushed out on Twitter and Facebook.

I wanted to use "off the shelf" technology as much as possible and settled on a blogger page to post content. Nothing fancy for the hard copy one sheet - Word docs and a copy machine.

I come from a community media background having first written for my elementary school paper, then in jr. high, high school and college. I wrote for a twice-weekly and was out of the traditional news business. A few years ago, i plied my hand at video media production and haven't looked back, accept that my journalism streak runs deep and I've had this idea that I've wanted to test.

What's been the most interesting is the language - melding both broadcast and print news terminology.

For events like the Boulder International Film Festival, people step forward to help. I've mostly recruited volunteers from the BIFF itself and some J-students to gather information and three more seasoned journalists to edit and control the information release to be sure it is accurate. Time will tell if the model will translate to general hyper local news.

So here it is. The beta test of my journalism experiment.
Contact Alan O'Hashi at 303-910-5782 or send email to bvet22@yahoo.com