As one of a growing handful of online-only magazines in Canada, Orato was excited when Masthead Magazine announced its first annual Canadian Online Publishing Awards.

(Update Sept 15: finalists have been announced. Congrats to all the nominees!)

The awards, to be presented in Toronto on October 26, will recognize everything from Web design to multimedia features, online community, blogs and e-newsletters—10 categories in total, with separate judging for consumer and trade publications.

It’s a great boon to Canadian magazines that have been doing impressive online work for many years, and particularly valuable recognition for newer online-only magazines that have struggled to carve themselves a piece of the pie in an industry still focused mainly on print (though that is shifting rapidly of late).

With judging taking place this month, Orato Managing Editor Lisa Manfield and Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Joy Gugeler were delighted to be asked to sit on two panels for the Best e-Newsletter and Best Overall Website respectively. Not only were we encouraged by the sheer volume of entries, but we were also inspired by some of the creative and well-executed online strategies from magazines big and small across the country.

And we’re looking forward to the unveiling of winners in Toronto this fall. Good luck to all who entered!

Orato is honoured to be among the first-round of selected panellists for the 2010 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference, which takes place March 12-16, 2010 in Austin, Texas.

But with 2,212 other panel proposals up for consideration, we’re going to need your help to make the final cut.

Cast a Vote for Orato at SXSW

SXSW has invited the public to help it narrow down potential panellists for this world-renowned event. Public votes will count toward 30% of the final decision, with staff votes counting for 30% and the SXSW advisory board counting for 40%.

SXSW’s interactive panel picker lists all the panels up for consideration, with expandable description boxes and options to sort by company and category among others.

Make Friends with Cannibals Partners Print and Pixels

Orato’s panel, entitled Make Friends with Cannibals: Linking Print & Online Publishers, details the opportunities that exist for partnerships between online magazines and book publishers with limited online profile.

“Book publishers have titles and expert writers, but lose to discounts, returns, a short shelf life, fewer booksellers and poor search results. Online sites have good software, SEO and design, but lack high-quality content to draw readers and advertisers. This business model revives both industries by sharing content but preserving format, brand, and sales for a win-win second revenue stream for publishers and writers.”

Orato’s Editor-in-Chief Joy Gugeler, with 12 years’ experience in book publishing and 4 with online magazines, has a vision to marry paper and pixels, and unite readers of books and magazines online, all the while increasing profile for publisher partners.

With your vote, we’re hoping she can share this vision in Texas next spring. Simply set up an account on the site (a simple two-minute process) and click the thumbs up sign next to the panel title. The interactive panel picker closes September 4.

Thanks for your vote, and we hope to see you in Texas!

Orato is pleased to be working with Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University (SFU) this summer to provide training for publishing professionals in editing, marketing and publishing in today’s ever-changing publishing landscape.

In addition to teaching a 2-day workshop on Developmental Editing and being a panelist on a 1-day workshop on Writing the Memoir, Orato Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Joy Gugeler will offer guest presentations in a unique three-day Web Content Management course covering everything from e-books to print-on-demand publications to systems used by sites like Orato that publish large amounts of content by multitudes of writers.

Meanwhile, Managing Editor Lisa Manfield led a one-day workshop on strategies for Marketing a Magazine online, highlighting low-cost social media promotions tactics to boost your online readership.

Both editors also work as instructors in SFU’s Continuing Education Writing and Publishing program, and will have writing and editing courses on offer this fall and next spring.

Also, if you’re in the Vancouver area and want to talk Web publishing, you can catch Manfield at the Magazine Writers’ Craft Fair on August 15 leading a panel on Web writing. The event is hosted by the BC Association of Magazine Publishers.

And this fall, both Gugeler and Manfield will discuss the fine art of writing for the Web at the Word on the Street festival September 27 at Library Square. We hope to see you there!

Including an image with your Orato article not only gives it more visual appeal, it also offers you an opportunity to enhance your keyword density with an optimized photo caption.

But finding a suitable photo can sometimes be a challenge, particularly if you’re reporting from afar and need images you can’t take yourself.

Photos enhance articles with visual appeal and keyword density. Photo by Mike Baird.

Free Photo Sources

Before using a photo you find on someone else’s blog, news site or company Web site, keep in mind that while it’s easy to copy and paste, you can’t legally republish photos from any other Web site without first getting permission (unless it’s a creative commons image). If you can get permission, please state that the photo is reprinted with permission from the source.

If you can’t get permission, there are many online sources of photos that are available to use license-free.

Our favourite here is Flickr Creative Commons. Use the Advanced Search feature to select photos under the “Creative Commons” and “for commercial use” licenses, and post away.

Other sources of royalty-free photos include:

• Morguefile
• Stock Exchange
• Wikimedia Commons

Uploading and Crediting Your Images

Use the upload bar to load your images. Then, add a photo caption that reinforces your primary and/or secondary keywords – the ones you’ve used in your title and subtitle. Your caption should ideally be a short sentence, formatted in sentence case and ending with a period.

This is also the place to credit your photographer. Add “Photo by [photographer’s name].” after the caption.

In the photo source box, paste the link to the site where you got the photo, unless that is not possible. If the photo is your own, you can include a link to its online home, or simply leave this field blank.

You can add up to five images to an article, each with its own caption. Keep in mind that articles without images won’t display on the Orato home page, and won’t be nearly as attractive as those with pretty pictures.

Orato writers and readers can now add us to their Facebook and Twitter networks.

Our Twitter feed includes daily links to featured articles, Web writing tips, calls for writers, and other news about the site.

Our Facebook group allows you to connect with other Orato readers and writers, discuss current issues in citizen journalism and get periodic news updates from us (but not too frequently, don’t worry – we all get too much e-mail).

In addition to connecting with Orato’s social networks, we encourage all of our site visitors – writers and readers alike – to share Orato content with your own social networks.

Orato contributors can add their article links to personal blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds.

And, to help you spread the word even further afield, we’ve added a social media toolbar at the bottom of every article page, linking you to sites like Delicious, Technorati, Stumbleupon, LinkedIn and dozens of other social networking and bookmarking sites that allow you to share links to your work and to the works of your favourite Orato contributors.

So share and share alike, and we’ll see you in the social media sphere!

CBC - Vancouver based website Orato.com was considered a bold experiment in citizen journalism when it was launched three years ago and recently some big changes have taken place. Orato.com now has a new sleek look and features professional journalists and that’s got one expert lamenting the loss of the original Orato. Alfred Hermida is a professor of journalism at UBC who joins us on the line from Toronto and here in the studio with us is the new Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Orato.com Joy Gugeler. Good morning and welcome to you both. Joy, let me start with you. Orato.com was seen as a place to get a different kind of news reporting because it was directly from untrained amateurs telling their stories. Now you’re turning to professional and changing the look of it. Why?

Joy - We are actually still reliant on the majority of our material from citizen journalists - people who wouldn’t have gone to professional journalism programs or have been trained in the field and have a professional portfolio - but we actually have a pro-am model, ie professional and amateurs.  So, we rely on the writers to self-define to a certain extent and instead of offering unedited content to the reader, which is less valuable to them to a certain extent, given the pressures on search these days to deliver the answers quickly, concisely and correctly. I think we’re working with writers one-on-one as editors, with their permission of course and involvement, and that’s something that they’ve actually asked for and consider valuable in this media era in which job retraining is so important.

CBC -And Alfred why is it so important for you to have untrained recorders share news-worthy stories?

Alfred - I think one of the issues here is that citizen journalism is really a bit of a myth. The idea is that there is this army of untrained amateurs who are willing to go out and report the news and in a sense do the job of professional journalists. In fact that doesn’t happen. It takes training to be a professional journalist like it does for you to be a radio presenter or an athlete who competes in the marathon versus an amateur who takes part in say the Vancouver Sun Run. So what we would get from members of the public is very very different and not necessarily the type of reporting you’d expect from a professional that has everything you need to know in the story. It may instead offer their personal perspective, their take on it with all the flaws that might come with that. It could be very personal, there might be facts wrong, but it doesn’t matter because it comes from one individual person. You can judge it on the basis of what you’re getting from that person.

CBC - Joy, when this first happened this was seen as edgy and new. Do you think now that you’ve had to change it a bit that it’s a sign of a failed experiment?

Joy -  It’s an experiment that has evolved just as the Internet has over the last ten years and if you stand still in this environment  - like a house in New York, you get renovated essentially. You have to evolve and if you don’t stay fleet-footed then you don’t become a viable business model. While we’re responsible to our writers and readers primarily, we are also a privately-owned business responsable to our owner. The bottom line is that experiment wasn’t paying writers and it wasn’t paying its owner and we would have had to close our doors and then the experimented would have been over. So I think what we’ve done is try to find a way to reward writers for their efforts, to reward readers with stronger content that’s easier to find, and we’ve also preserved something that I think is rarer and rarer, which is edited content on the Net. I’m interested that Alfred is so concerned about the loss of citizen journalism when in fact that’s the majority of what you find online. It’s all blogger.com and Wordpress and YouTube and there’s no shortage of it. I understand that you preserve something in an era of scarcity, something that’s rare. In fact what’s rare is the ability to work one-on-one with an editor and to get that experience.

Alfred - I’m not lamenting the loss of citizen journalism per se because I don’t believe citizen journalism exists. What we are tring to do with the idea of citizen journalism is take what journalists have done and say, well, this is what members of the public should be doing. We’re taking existing ways of working and saying this is what you as a member of the public should be doing, but rather when it comes to getting the input of people. If somebody sees an accident on the Port Mann Bridge, they might ring in, they might send a photo, but it’s the journalist who’s going to write the piece explaining not only what happened, but why it happened. The other thing here is that maybe the value of getting involved with the audience isn’t getting them to write a story the way we’ve traditionally defined it, but instead to involve them in a conversation where the discussion around a story makes it a new form of journalism by people involved in that story. So it’s not that I lament the fact that there is not this raw unfiltered, unedited content, but rather that when we think about how we can have more voices in the news, story format is only one way of doing it. Instead, maybe we should explore some different ways, like engaging conversations, engaging in discussions online where all these voices together create a new form of journalism.

Joy - I agree and I don’t think that were really on opposite ends of the spectrum; I think it’s a question of nuance. I agree with Alfred that the term citizen journalism is somewhat passe and needs to be redefined at best. Our tagline is “speak from experience” and certainly that intimate, personal, “I was there. I know about it. I want to share my knowledge.” is relevant, but also  he’s talking about things in the sphere of current affairs and hard news. World Affairs is only one of ten sections on Orato, so there’s a lot of soft news where the way in which the story is told does involve video and audio.

CBC - When  I hear the word “journalist,” and having a degree in journalism myself, is there an expectation of truth and fact involved here? When you have citizens reporting and calling themselves citizen journalists, who is responsible for the accuracy of the report?

Alfred -  Well in a sense what we are seeing with the rise of so many sources online is that it puts the emphasis more on us as the readers to make sense of it. In the past we may have had our news from one of only a few sources  - the morning newspaper, the radio show, the evening newscast on TV - but now we have news all around us and in essence that’s a really good thing, but it also puts an emphasis on us as the reader to say, “Well, I’m going to trust this and going to read this maybe with a bit of skepticism” or “I’m going to look at this, which has been done by an amateur writer on a Website and I will see whether there might be something there that’s valuable to me, but I have to check it against other sources.” So in a sense it’s a far more complicated news ecosphere and it puts a lot more pressure on us as the reader, as the audience, to in a sense navigate and make sense of all this information .

CBC - Joy, what makes Orato unique now?

Joy - I think what makes it unique is that it is a platform on which writers can instantly come to the site, post their story and within twenty-four hours work with an editor to make sure that that story can be found. That the title is transparent, that it is clear and easy to read, and that the article is going to instantly get traffic and a share of ad revenue. It is a multimedia site offering video and audio and comments and interactivity with our audience and that’s something that writers really want, but they want something that looks good enough to put in a portfolio too and they want an opportunity to work with professionals because they self-define as somebody who has the aspiration not only to report one event and then never to be seen from again, but to actually do it on an ongoing basis, which of course is what we need for our business model. It has to be evergreen content.

Listen to the entire interview: CBC-Orato.mp3

Citizens are still the source  of 95% of Orato’s content. What has changed between Orato 1.0 and 2.0 is our business model and editorial mandate in that now, instead of paying some of the writers some of the time, we pay all of the writers all of the time, offer them free 1-on-1 editorial and Web training and, as a result of higher quality and better optimized content, we deliver them larger audiences. It’s an exchange 800+ writers have accepted and with which few quibble. This affords the leverage Orato needs to compete in a tough marketplace and grow organically.

Orato’s first incarnation, in essence a collective, unedited multi-author blog,  incurred significant debt and would have ended in demise - a sadder state surely than what Hermida is lamenting now. Instead, we’ve moved to a model that is viable in the long term and mutually lucrative– we share the risk and the revenue with the writer and amass evergreen content that will earn both parties long tail dividends. If that means citizen journalist purists think we’ve lost our edge, then they’re welcome to find a better fit elsewhere or post for free on Wordpress or Blogger or YouTube and become publishers themselves in the time it takes to log on, interference free.

I would fear for the freedom of speech citizen journalism has come to stand for if, in fact, showcases for it were scarce or costly, but we are not living in an era of scarcity in this regard. Quite the contrary, the vast majority of the Web is made up of these venues sans gatekeeper; more haystack than needles. What is rare is professionally-edited but unsolicited, unassigned paid work for amateur and self-defined journalists-in-training. Orato offers this unique combination to both amateur writers as well as veteran journalists new to the Web and is alive and innovating today because it tries to be all needles no hay.

We respect the fact that impatient but discerning readers don’t have time to indulge the rough cut of most unedited citizen journalism posts. Orato edits to insure titles are transparent and articles are found by searchers at Google. We edit to focus content, to attribute facts and quotes, to squash slander, racism and sexism, to improve accompanying visuals, to add helpful links, and to make the page easily scanable by browsers in a hurry who won’t sift through multi-page rants or meandering naval-gazing. We don’t surgically remove the soul of the article - changes are largely cosmetic and done in concert with writers who sign off on the final version even as it’s live on the site.

It’s a truism to say the Internet has evolved faster than traditional media ownership, as the current sea change and print and broadcast layoffs indicate - you have to be fleet-footed to stay alive. Orato chose to survive by adopting a pro-am model, allowing both professionals and amateurs, ie citizens, working side by side on the same site rather than separate sites co-mingling on the Web. We’re a hybrid, the 2009 iteration of a phenomenon that had its start at the turn of the millennium.

Orato is one of several venues that offers a level playing field and an open door (no application and post live), but once writers post they need to be responsible for their material and adhere to the conventions of the craft.  Credibility isn’t won just by being there first, it means being right. Readers value reliability and trustworthiness, which doesn’t only come in the guise of a multinational chain of papers or a nationally-owned broadcaster – we are attempting to supplement that very valuable reporting with increasingly valuable and in-demand material that speaks from experience, Orato’s tagline.

Orato’s articles are still rooted in intimate experience, still manifest the ways in which the news plays out in the lives of citizens, more feature or column material than breaking news or current affairs yet journalism all the same, but we reserve the right to edit these articles in exchange for professional advice, pay and publication. We haven’t turned our back on citizen journalism, we’ve reinvented it.

Orato Media Corp.
525 Seymour St, Vancouver, BC
V6B 3H7, Canada
Phone: +1-604.331.7468
Fax: +1-604.689.3009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Orato.com Hiring and Training Journalists in Wake of Media Layoffs

May 25, 2009 Vancouver’s Orato.com, a forward-thinking online magazine with the tagline “speak from experience” written by both professional and amateur “Correspondents,” officially re-launched its press and recruitment ad campaign today with an eye to attracting both novice (students and recent graduates) and veteran journalists looking to expand their employment options in the current economic environment.

According to Paper Cuts, nearly 25,000 jobs have been lost in the print sector since 2008, leaving a considerable number of talented and trained personnel looking to extend reporting skills to cyberspace for pay. While newspapers and magazines consider survival strategies in the wake of media attrition, Orato’s owner Sam Yehia says, “We are positioning ourselves as a competitive and attractive client for reporters who want to add Search Engine Optimization and Web writing to their arsenal of skills as freelancers looking for income online.”

The site has been online since June 2006, but with a new management team as of January it completely re-imagined its editorial vision, design and business model. The new iteration puts journalists first and offers a potent combination of features its competition does not:

• All articles are thoroughly edited by Orato’s professional staff within 24 hours of posting.
• There is no application system – a journalist’s first article speaks for itself.  Content goes live and earns immediately.
• Editors do not impose a monthly or quarterly quota or deadline.
• Orato does not demand exclusive rights. Copyright is retained by the journalist who can repurpose work if he/she owns electronic rights.
• Journalists are automatically promoted after 25 articles (if 3 are Editor’s Choice) and receive an extra 10% of ad revenue.
• Writers receive 20-30% of all ad revenue on their work forever (including video), paid out monthly by PayPal.
• Reporters can upload a professional profile page with a full resume, links to other work and recommendations from staff.
• The site offers a design layout tastefully balancing ads and text rather than a “link farm” on which content is buried or interrupted.
• Journalists work from a  virtual office and telecommute, posting their work from anywhere in the field.

Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Joy Gugeler says, “Orato today launched an aggressive Google Adwords campaign to build upong its existing roster of 750 writers. We will grow content and traffic to reward Correspondents with both pay and profile. They post video, audio, photos and articles live; our editors review the material in 24 hours; readers learn at a glance, and our writers earn from the first ad click. We hope those in search of a value-added training will consider us a vital new client in the freelance marketplace.” For a glance at Orato’s FAQ or Content Guidelines, visit the site.

About Orato.com

Orato means “I speak” in Latin, a moniker that aptly describes how Correspondents tell audiences about newsworthy experiences and offer trustworthy information and verifiable sources for those in search of reliable reporting. Orato is hiring writers who are participating in, as well as observing, the activities they cover, making them genuine experts with knowledge to share. The Vancouver-based magazine has been online since June 2006 and is privately owned by Sam Yehia. Staff profiles are available online.

Contact Publisher/Editor-in-Chief Joy Gugeler, at editor@orato.com or 604.608.1070 for more information.

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• further professionalize the site
• focus its newsworthy content
• create and enforce a viable business model
• and keep pace with Web 2.0 standards.

In May we will actively advertise for and recruit veteran, amateur and citizen journalists alike in addition to reaching out to the thousands of contributors who have already registered.

Joy Gugeler as Publisher/Editor-in-Chief, with 15 years experience in the industry, was hired in January to execute the above mandate, and has assembled a new professional team with Lisa Manfield as Managing Editor, Mike Small as Multimedia Editor, Jason Hendry as our Technical Director and Francois Renaud as our Creative Director. I am thrilled to see Orato reinvent itself according to this plan and look forward to watching our rise to fame and fortune.

As with any commercial entity that evolves to suit a constantly innovating format, we invite our new and loyal writers alike to embrace recent changes to our guidelines that follow typical publishing practice. Most importantly these revisions are specifically designed to garner more readers for their articles, pay all our valued contributors a share of their ad revenues, and to follow industry standards long-documented by tech media.

As we are committed to empowering and enriching writers’ experiences, we are confident that this evolution will allow Orato to establish itself as an ideal platform for showcasing writers’ work. Orato remains true to my original vision of a place where you can read stories from those closest to the experience of an event, and citizens can exchange knowledge of value to all.

We are also newly committed to compensating our talent while offering larger audiences trustworthy and reliable articles that answer questions, share the most relevant information, and stand the test of time.

The blogosphere allows individuals to post material that is more personal, opinionated, or narrow in appeal, but Orato now needs to serve a larger purpose and to be exemplary in its ability to supplement the offerings of traditional media. We are set to rise to that challenge and look forward to having you on the journey.

Sam Yehia, Owner and Founder

Regardless of your political leanings, its use in reference to Obama’s rousing powers as a rhetorician begs further exploration, for the word invokes other slightly more nuanced synonyms that equally apply: pontificator, witness, testifier, beholder, observer, spectator.

All imply an immediacy combined with sober second thought, a presence that appreciates an event through the filter of our own experience, expertise, and reason. No description could be a more apt approximation of Orato’s mandate, a post-millennial extension of that meaning forged hundreds of years earlier and epitomized in Obama’s address.

In the face of accusations that the Web is the playground of the illiterate, a space in which the well-chosen phrase, the thrill of an articulate argument perfectly espoused, and the rising tide of a dramatic build to an emotional climax is all but extinct, the media’s adoption of an old-fashioned word to define a man who’s new fashion was to harness the Internet is a timely reminder that the medium has changed, but the message can still bear the signs of true craftsmanship. Even McLuhan would have liked this post-modern spin on his famous quotation, and as for us, well Orato would happily be the home to 2009’s orators in this tradition.