When a news website says it's interactive, what does it mean? It must be more than adding the ability to comment on articles, or pumping RSS feeds out via Twitter or a Facebook page.

Getting readers to react to news articles and content on the site and to speak to each other is the goal, and news organisations need a strategy that goes beyond token gestures. NewsCloud, an open source technology developed in the US, aims to do just that.

Backed by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in December 2009, NewsCloud offers news organisations a range of applications to build a community among their readers, viewers or listeners and links up with social networks, Facebook in particular.

Features include a Facebook application and web application using Facebook Connect that allows users to take part in the website using their real profiles. It is a stepping stone towards more civilised interaction, says Jeff Reifman, founder. The technology can also be used to build different widgets and tools for websites, including a news aggregation feed and push notifications to let readers know when they've received a response to a comment and simple forums.

NewsCloud can also be used by journalists to brainstorm stories using idea pages, or to create a crowdsourced events calendar or a space for readers to pose questions and get responses from the newsroom and other audience members.

The startup has plans to work with 12 news organisations and some of its features are already in action on news sites in the US for the Charlotte Observer and local public radio station KPCC in southern California.

"They've been really active in giving us good feedback. The organisations that we work with have to be flexible to working with new technology," says Reifman.

Partnerships with three or four more news organisations, including some larger players, will be announced later this year, he told Journalism.co.uk. Interest in Facebook has lead news organisations to NewsCloud, but not all of them realise the challenges involved in developing a successful strategy for social media, he says.

"I think we had a lot of early interest in our project because Facebook has a lot of both real and qualitative hype around it. There are half a billion people using it and news organisations are struggling with business models and they think 'I have to be on Facebook'. But trying to bridge from that point to actually working technology that organisations can internalise and build into their processes and educate their staff to use has been the most challengeing part of our grant," he says.

"Those that have been successful have a track record of experimenting with new technology, especially public radio."

The Knight grant for NewsCloud will run out in April 2011, by which time the startup hopes to have more partnerships in place and to have presented a model for generating revenue from online communities and tools for better engagement of readers. Money-making elements include integrating advertising through the Facebook applications and embedding sponsored links, as well as relevant links, in content served via an app.

"It is an experiment. Our take on this experiment is that there are different approaches to facing the challenge of the business model in journalism. Our approach is to complement the culture of news reporting that they've built their business on. We're trying to add a technology that's tightly integrated with Facebook and Twitter to allow them to host their community space. It allows their readers to interact with the article, the organisation and each other," says Reifman.

"News organisations do a great job of reporting and build their businesses on that, but there's also revenue to be built by giving a place for readers to interact with content and with each other, going beyond comments. We don't know if it will work but the signs that we see are good."

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